Archives for May 2015

Just before the Memorial Day weekend, the Obama administration released 2,300 new regulations, and a new proposed water rule that has states howling mad, but a prominent Washington author and scholar is offering a blueprint to rein in the federal regulatory state through organized civil disobedience.

Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  He is also the author of several high-profile and controversial books, including “Losing Ground,” “The Bell Curve,” and “Coming Apart.”  His latest work is “By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.”

The book concludes that civil disobedience on a grand but peaceful scale is needed to shake the government off the backs of Americans because our political and legal systems and even our Constitution are insufficient to bring the government back under control.

“The system is paralyzed in ways that are not going to be fixed by electing the right Congress, by getting the right five people on the Supreme Court or by electing the right president,” said Murray.

“The regulatory state, which is my target for this, is largely beyond the reach of any of those branches of government.  That’s not a wild-eyed statement.  That’s pretty much mater-of-fact statement of the way the regulatory state functions,” he said.

While the growth of government spans over many decades, Murray says much of the unchecked power of federal regulators can be traced to a brief span in the Franklin Roosevelt administration.

“It all happened in a period of about five years, from 1937-1943, where you had half a dozen key Supreme Court cases which very explicitly said, ‘We are now going to adopt a new interpretation of what the text of the Constitution says and this new interpretation unleashes the government from the strict limits that the Constitution previously put on them, said Murray.

He says a 1943 case changed the regulatory course of America forever.

“The Supreme Court said it’s okay for Congress to write legislation that has a high-minded purpose and vague words for saying what that purpose is and then leave it up to the regulatory agency  to develop regulations independently of any further legislative guidance on how to implement this high-minded objective,” said Murray.

“That was the moment at which the regulatory state basically got its declaration of independence.  It took a couple of decades to take off, but that’s where it started,” he said.

And that is why Murray believes Americans should aim organized civil disobedience at the federal regulatory state, but he says it has to be done intelligently because some oversight is needed in society.

“Some regulation is appropriate and necessary.  I’m happy to see regulations of coal mines so that the tunnels that miners go into re safe and are not going to collapse.  There are a variety of other regulations I have no intention of asking people to ignore,” said Murray.

However, Murray says there are plenty of other regulations which serve no constructive purpose other than to erode the freedom of honest, hard-working Americans.

“I’m really focused on the regulations that get in the way of ordinary Americans, small business people, homeowners, community groups – which get in the way of them living their lives as they see fit, providing goods and services, solving community problems in ways that are essential to our civic culture,” said Murray.

Many on the right believe the recent Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule proposed by Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency fits into what Murray just described.  The administration says the rule is designed to protect wetlands and waterways, but critics say it will amount to a “regulatory and economic hell” for farmers and business owners because it gives the government authority over virtually any collection of water, from rivers to small streams and possibly even puddles.

One of the most controversial regulations among the 2,300 unveiled before Memorial Day would require reductions in ozone emissions.  Again, the administration cites environmental concerns, while the National Association of Manufacturers claims it could be the costliest in U.S. history.  It estimates businesses could lose up to $140 billion per year if the regulation goes through.

While those rules bother Murray, he offered examples of much simpler regulations that infringe on small numbers of people but that he says are just as offensive.

“People doing these things are suddenly told, ‘Oh, you can’t do that.  You’re breaking the law.  You owe us a fine.  You cannot organize this little playground you want in your neighborhood.  You can’t provide the service that your business provides in the way you want to provide it,'” he said.

Enter Murray’s weapon to fight back on a large scale.

“I’m not worried about big corporations.  I’m not worried about grand themes.  I want to lift the burden of these pointless, picayune regulations from ordinary Americans,” said Murray.  “To do that, I think what we need it a large legal defense fund that comes to their aid.”

Murray would call it the Madison Fund and believes it would need to be staked with about $200 million to be truly effective.  He says the strategy is to stand up for harassed Americans and take overreaching bureaucrats to court.

“They are technically guilty of a regulations.  The regulation’s really silly, but they’re technically guilty.  The Madison Fund says to the bureaucracy, ‘We are taking this person’s case.  We are going to litigate it to the max even though this person technically violated the regulation.  We’re going to make your life miserable.  We are going to drag out the litigation as long as we can.  When you finally find the person guilty and levy a fine, we’re going to reimburse the fine,” said Murray.

The goal, he says, is not to gum up the courts but to make regulators think long and hard before trying to enforce ridiculous regulations.

“If you have a fund that continually does that and does that with a lot of cases, hundreds or even thousands of cases, it’s not very long if you’re a bureaucrat in a regulatory agency and somebody has violated a regulation that did no harm to anybody and then you’re told the Madison Fund is taking that case, you have to say to yourself, ‘Do we really want to go through with this,'” said Murray.

Another major focal point for the Madison Fund would be to increase public awareness of regulations ruining people’s lives and shifting public opinion toward more freedom.  But to do that, says Murray, cases will have to be chosen very carefully.

“You don’t take a case if you’re the Madison Fund unless you are confident that that publicity will get the overwhelming support of the American people.  So whether they are moderate Democrats or moderate Republicans, when they read about that case, they will say, ‘I’m on the side of the citizen that the government is going after,” said Murray.

But before you start looking for the Madison Fund online, be aware that it does not exist and Murray has no intention of starting it.

“I write books.  I don’t run funds,” said Murray.  “I really hope somebody picks up the ball but I’m old enough to be quite confident that I know what I can do and what I can’t do.  Being the manager of a big fund is one of the things that I can’t do,” he said.

If an organized legal fight against the regulatory state were to achieve some success, Murray says it might pave the way for other avenues to reform government for the better but he also sees emerging technology and communications as the newest weapons in confronting government.  Using the explosion of businesses like Uber, Murray says more power is returning to the individual.

“Uber is just the leading edge of a wide variety of things that are enabled by new technology, that provide superior services, that work around the government.  I have no hope of making our government responsive and trim and flexible.  It’s not going to happen.  I do have a lot of hope that government is going to become increasingly irrelevant to our lives,” said Murray.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review enjoy watching the AFL-CIO threaten not to endorse Hillary Clinton if she doesn’t side with them on trade issues.  They also sigh as the economy officially contracted in the first quarter.  And they discuss the stunning and possibly horrific charges against former House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

The Obama administration is preparing to force every charitable organization receiving federal grants to end their prohibitions on hiring people based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

In its latest “Friday Fax”, the Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-Fam, cites an unnamed but well-placed administration source, who says the administration is definitely headed in that direction.

“Our source told us that the administration is moving very quietly to insert sexual orientation and gender identity language into the application process for grantees. They cannot discriminate based on sexual orientation and gender identity and there is no exemption for religious believers,” said C-Fam President Austin Ruse.

“Quietly” appears to be the key word in this process. Ruse says this revelation comes as news to just about everyone.

“This caught a lot of faith-based groups off guard. When we started calling around to get comments yesterday, two very big groups had heard nothing about this,” said Ruse, who would not divulge which groups he contacted.

“Grantees get grants for carrying out certain tasks that they were doing already. A lot of them are faith-based groups. A lot of them are faith-based groups doing work overseas,” said Ruse.

Last summer, Obama issued an executive order requiring anyone contracting with the federal government to amend hiring policies to welcome homosexuals and transgenders.

“It was really kind of inevitable that the administration would then move on grantees, which are distinct from contractors,” said Ruse, who says the reach of this new policy would be extensive.

“A law professor told me when we were preparing the story yesterday that there is something like 50 grantees to every one contractor. So this effects a large number of organizations,” said Ruse.

Not only will a large number of groups be impacted but some of the largest and most effective charities could face this mandate as well.

“It includes massive organizations like World Vision. It includes organizations run by the Catholic Church, evangelical churches. Look at Samaritan’s Purse run by Franklin Graham. I don’t know if they’re a federal grantee. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were. How can they adhere to this policy?” said Ruse.

For Ruse, this move by Obama is just the latest in a systematic effort to destroy the moral underpinnings of American society.

“I am convinced that certain leftist people would love to eliminate all the mediating institutions between the government and the individual. Those are primarily the family and religious organizations. They’re working very hard to eliminate those organizations,” said Ruse.

Legal action is an option for any group seeking to maintain its own hiring prerogatives. However, Ruse says it will be a tough road.

“In a lot of religious freedom cases, what happens is that some governmental body would move on an organization for doing something and then an affirmative defense of the organization in court would be religious liberty and religious freedom,” said Ruse.

Not in this case.

“In this particular case, the organization would discover that they could not get this grant because they could not go along with this new provision. They would have to take the government to court based on religious freedom,” said Ruse. “That’s a long and costly and it’s not a guarantee that after a very long period of time and spending a lot of money that they would win.”

If the Obama administration presses forward with this policy and the legal efforts are unsuccessful, faith-based organizations will have two primary options. The first is to just say no to government money.

“A large faith-based organization (that he spoke with recently) has not applied for any new government contracts since the executive order on sexual orientation and gender identity for contractors was instituted last summer. Already, a lot of them are walking away,” said Ruse.

But others will not have that flexibility.

“Look what happened to Catholic Charities in Boston, also in Chicago, when they instituted same-sex marriage. In their adoption business, they were ordered to place children with same-sex couples and they could not in good conscience do it. So they had no choice but to close their doors,” said Ruse.

“So these mediating institutions, that protect individuals from the the government in some cases are now being run out of business by the government,” said Ruse.

 

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review discuss Rick Santorum’s 2016 White House bid and George Pataki’s entry into the race.  They also slam Rand Paul for suggesting that hawkish Republicans are responsible for the rise and growth of ISIS.  And they have fun with Hillary Clinton’s contrived southern accent.

A leading congressional critic of President Obama’s unilateral immigration actions is hailing a federal appeals court decision to uphold the challenge of 26 states to a policy that would grant at least five million illegal immigrants legal residence in the U.S.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel from the Fifth Circuit ruled 2-1 that the challenging states would be overly harmed by Obama’s actions.  It also rejected an administration request to move forward with the program in the states that did join the lawsuit.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas,  is a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and is still a senior member of that panel.  He filed a petition in support of Texas and the other 25 states challenging Obama’s actions.  Despite two long days of evaluating the response to devastating floods in his district, Smith is very upbeat about the courts delivering another blow to what he sees as an Obama overreach.

“This lawsuit could not be more crucial, quite frankly.  It’s our first good win in court in a long, long time.  We were overdue in trying to hold this president accountable for his unlawful actions,” said Smith.  “He took action to give amnesty to as many as five million people in the country illegally.  Clearly that was in violation of current law.”

The congressman not only believes the 26 states have a good chance of winning the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but he believes the court-imposed hold will run out the clock on Obama’s amnesty agenda.

“It was clearly unconstitutional and I’m just gratified that the three judge panel called it for what it was, unlawful and unconstitutional.  I think this has really set the administration back and I think the president will be out of office before it’s resolved,” said Smith.

The White House, of course, vehemently disagreed with the decision.

“Today, two judges of the Fifth Circuit chose to misrepresent the facts and the law,” said White House spokeswoman Brandi Hoffine, who says the president’s actions were designed to improve our immigration system and the economy and were “squarely within the bounds of his authority.”

The crux of the legal debate is how far the president’s discretion over deportations extends.  Smith admits the chief executive does have the power to halt some deportations.

“On an individual basis, he does have an amount of discretion whether to send someone back to their home country or not,” he said.

Obama contends he can defer deportation to the five million people in the nation illegally, because they all fall within a certain category.  Namely, they all allegedly have children who are legal residents of the United States.

Smith says that’s not what the law allows.

“He cannot give amnesty to categories of individuals.  He can, on a hardship basis, make individual exceptions to the general rule,  This is anything but individual,” said Smith.

The Obama administration has not only lost at the district and appellate court levels but has also been admonished by District Judge Andrew Hanen for continuing to implement the policy after Hanen placed an injunction on it.  As a result, more than 108,000 people in the U.S. illegally were granted three-year deportation deferrals.

“The judge was understandably upset by this.  The administration says they don’t know how it happened.  They were wrong.  The apologized, but we have seen time and time again this administration will do whatever they think they can get away with,” said Smith, who says the administration has displayed that attitude since Obama took office.

“Throughout his tenure, President Obama has intentionally undermined immigration laws, not enforced immigration laws and tried to unilaterally change immigration laws,” he said.

The administration claims it is trying to find out who was improperly granted deportation deferrals but Smith says it’s hard to undo it.

“I don’t know whether to believe the administration or not.  I’m glad they apologized but the damage is done,” said Smith.

Smith’s comments come after two days of meeting with residents and local and state leaders after historic flooding in his district.  Over Memorial Day weekend, the Blanco River sent a 44-foot high wall of water into Wimberly, Texas, destroying property in its path and taking several lives.  Others are still missing.  The previous record surge on the river was a 32-foot crest back in 1926.

Smith says he is working to help the Texans in his district get on their feet and rebuild.

“It is tragic.  The devastation is hard to imagine.  At the same time, it was reassuring to see these individuals who had been damaged by this flood already rebuilding.  They’re resourceful.  They’re resilient and I really watched firsthand the American spirit at work,” said Smith, who says many businesses hope to be open again by the end of the week.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer a federal appeals court for ruling against President Obama’s unilateral amnesty.  We also slam Hillary Clinton after new reports that the State Department approved billions of dollars worth of arms sales to nations that donated to the Clinton Foundation.  And we have fun with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders saying it’s terrible that there are 23 different types of underarm spray deodorants while kids are hungry.

An award-winning documentary filmmaker says science shows that compulsory education is a failed concept and the answer is to dismantle the system and allow “self-directed” learning designed largely by the children themselves.

Cevin Soling is the director of “The War on Kids” and is author of “The Student Resistance Handbook.”  His film won honors as the best educational documentary at the New York Independent Film and Video Festival.  He is speaking up again on the issue after legendary astronaut and former Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, said, as a Christian, that he believes evolution should be taught in schools but intelligent design should not.

Soling says he is no fan of intelligent design, but believes the scientific community lacks any consistency when it comes to education.

“My complaint is that the science community is saying that a component of curriculum of an institution that is wholly unscientific should be changed.  That itself belies any kind of scientific mission and is grossly hypocritical,” said Soling.

In fact, Soling believes an honest appraisal of science confirms that compulsory education, whether public or private or whether religious or secular.

“There’s absolutely nothing science-based to the structure of compulsory schooling.  Compulsory schooling is an experiment.  It’s an intervention that is designed to have some kind of purpose that’s never been adequately defined.  There’s never been any test.  There’s never been any experimentation to show that compulsory schooling is effective at whatever it allegedly is designed to produce,” said Soling.

He says even the generally assumed goals of all organized education are a proven failure.

“If one posits several different things that compulsory schooling could potentially produce – literacy, work skills, democratic values, social skills – one sees that compulsory schooling actually fails in every single one of these categories,” said Soling.

And how exactly does Soling conclude that every type of formal education flops in those categories?

“In 2003, the Department of Education did a study and showed that only 13 percent of american adults were deemed proficient in literacy skills,” said Soling.  “One would imagine when you have a population that’s forced to go to this institution for twelve years, nine months out of the year for five days a week that one would produce better results than that.  And it hasn’t been tested against other approaches to education.”

Apart from academics, Soling says the atmosphere in every school intrinsically teaches lessons antithetical to American principles.

“Schools are run in a fundamentally fascist environment where you have an autocracy, where the population that’s in the school is deprived of almost all of their civil rights,” he said.

According to Soling, every school in America and parents of every student in the nation are trampling students’ civil rights by making them go to school and follow rules while there.

“First you have a population that’s forced to be in a place against their will.  That in itself is a fundamental and gross violation of the most basic civil rights.  Their speech is limited (as is) their capacity to go where they want, be where they want, socialize with who they want.  Their due process is severely limited.  (Their protections against) search and seizure is severely limited,” said Soling.

While the law does require schooling to a certain age, the vast majority of parents would likely enroll their children anyway.  So while Soling does believe parents have a key role to play in educating their children, his answer on who ought to ultimately make educational decisions might come as a surprise.

“It need to be a mediated decision between the parents and the child.  The parents need to listen to and respect the interests of their child, which is something the institutions train them not to do,” said Soling, who shed light on what he sees as the ideal education system.

“The solution is developing self-directed learning.  There are many different approaches to that.  You have to understand and appreciate that all people are different and have different needs.  Some people require more structure than others.  There’s democratic schooling, where intrinsic motivation comes from following the things that you’re interested in,” said Soling.

He says parents do have a key role in that setting.

“They’re in the role of mentors, so the structure can be rather rigid if that’s something that the individual child requires or quite free in the example of unschooling, where the child can have tremendous amounts of liberty,” said Soling.

Without any sort of standard for measuring achievement or gauging preparation for college or the working world, how would anyone know when a student is ready to move on?

“That’s not for other people to judge.  That’s for the individual to judge.  They decide whether their needs are getting met,” said Soling.

 

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad to see federal prosecutors holding General Motors accountable for the deaths caused by faulty ignition switches.  They also slam President Obama for saying Iran’s intense anti-semitism is no reason for him to reconsider a nuclear deal.  And they scold Obama for saying the Afghan war is over.

This Memorial Day weekend, the nation will pause to remember and honor Americans of all generations who lost their lives in service to the United States, and this year’s National Memorial Day Concert will spend time highlighting the children of those recently lost a parent in combat and how their lives are forever changed.

The concert airs live on Sunday, May 24, from 8:00-9:30 Eastern Time on PBS.  One of the focal points will on the work done by American Gold Star Children to reach out to kids devastated by the loss of a parent and connect them with other children going through the same heartache.

“That’s an ultimate sacrifice when a parent has had to give up their life, knowing that they had a child and yet they put themselves in harm’s way so the rest of us in this country could live the good life and live with the freedoms and protections and advantages we have in this country,” said actor Joe Mantegna, co-host of the National Memorial Day Concert.

“Being able to focus on those children will be a very important part and I’m sure a very moving aspect of the program,” said Mantegna, who is co-hosting the event for the thirteenth straight year.  For the past decade, he has partnered with fellow actor Gary Sinise.

The Dostie family was chosen to represent American Gold Star Children at the concert.  U.S. Army Sgt. First Class Shawn Dostie was killed in Baghdad on Dec. 30. 2005.  The 32-year-old Dostie was a 14-year veteran and left behind his wife, Stephanie, an eight-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter.

“Befor Shawn was killed, I didn’t know myself, even as a military wife, what a Gold Star was.  All of a sudden, I became a Gold Star wife and my children became Gold Star children,” said Stephanie Dostie.  “Of course it was devastating.  Your whole family dynamic changes.  The first three years were pretty rough.  It took a lot of adjusting.”

She says part of the reason those early years were so difficult is because often times it didn’t feel as though Shawn had been killed.

“As a military family, we were used to him being deployed or in training somewhere, so we were used to him being gone quite a bit.  For a long time, it felt like he was still on a deployment or he was away at training.  It took a few years to really comprehend that he wasn’t coming home at all,” said Dostie.

Even after that realization, Dostie says adjusting to a new life was very difficult.

“We have spent the last years trying to put everything back together and beginning to be a family of three instead of a family of four.  We take it one day at a time, still to this day we take it one day at a time and I think that’s the best way to get through something like this.  Surround yourself with wonderful people, have a good support system and take it one day at a time,” she said.

Dostie’s children were chosen as the faces of Gold Star children for the National Memorial Day Concert after many were considered.  She says this attention is so meaningful to Gold Star families.

“The only thing harder than losing your hero is feeling like they have been forgotten.  To us, this is a wonderful way to honor Shawn.  We’re very blessed that they were picked  and we’re really looking forward to sharing our story with the nation,” said Dostie, who says her family’s experience with American Gold Star Children has been critical for her kids.

“When they meet another Gold Star child, they have a camaraderie with them.  They’re able to open up to that child because that child knows that they’ve been through,” she said.

While life has resumed some sense of normalcy in since receiving the news of Shawn’s death nearly a decade ago, nothing will ever be the same.

“I think my son had a harder time than my daughter for quite a few years.  He really needed his dad in his life.  There were pivotal points where he just needed his dad there.  He can talk to mom but there are some things he doesn’t want to talk to mom about.  He wanted his dad there,” said Dostie.

That son will soon graduate from high school.

“It’s bittersweet because I want his father there to see him walk across that stage.  It’s going to be a beautiful day for my son.  It’s also going to be a hard day for the family because his dad isn’t there,” said Dostie.

“Once you’re a Gold Star child, this follows you for the rest of your life.  I think down the road when my daughter’s going to get married, she’s not going to have her father there to walk her down the aisle.  I’m not going to be able to sit on a porch with my husband and tell stories to my grandchildren,” she said.

“This isn’t something that ends once the funeral is finished.  This is something that follows these children for the rest of their lives,” added Dostie.

She hopes the family’s participation in the concert will help the American people understand families of those grieving loved ones from wars past and present.

“I just hope the nation realizes the sacrifice these children have made by sacrificing their parent for freedom for this country.  I hope it brings awareness to teach others to educate what a Gold Star child is,” said Dostie.

The National Memorial Day Concert will have a number of other special features, including a salute to World War II heroes 70 years after the war ended.

Mantegna says with the World War II generation slipping away, this is a critical tribute.

“They’re losing thousands and thousands every day.  There’s going to come a time when there’s actually no living person alive from that conflict.  Yet it had such a major impact on world history, so it’s important that we spotlight it,” said Mantegna.

He says the importance of the victory in World War II cannot be overstated.

“Evil could have triumphed but it didn’t.  It was only due to the sacrifices that millions have made throughout the world, not just in this country but throughout the world,” said Mantegna.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review are encouraged by a National Journal piece saying Democrats have big trouble coming because they have very few promising candidates now and in the years to come.  And they discuss the Boy Scouts’ capitulation to progressive culture by banning water pistols and allowing gay scout leaders.