Category Archives: Law

Business, Economics, Law, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Trump’s Latest EO On Regulations

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I like the idea conceptually, and it may even be legal (but the courts will have to rule on that), but it will be almost impossible to implement. But it’s long past time to dismantle the regulatory state; Congress has delegated far too much of its duties on to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.

[Afternoon update]

What does this mean for FAA’s rules on spaceflight?

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Trump’s Refugee Charlie Foxtrot

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This is the sort of thing that I actually expected, given Trump’s history and statements. He’s never read the Constitution, he doesn’t care about it, and he doesn’t even care about the law. As Jonathan Adler writes, he may have hired “the best people” (and he does have many good picks), but he apparently relied on idiots for this:

Whatever one thinks of the underlying policy, the degree of administrative incompetence in its execution is jaw-dropping. . . .

Under normal circumstances, I believe that the policy embodied in the Trump EO is lawful under existing precedent and would survive judicial review. That is, I believe the executive branch may decide to identify specific countries from which immigrants and others seeking entry into the country must receive “extreme vetting” and that the President may order a suspension of refugees from particular places (as Obama did with Iraq in 2011). Despite some of the President’s comments during the campaign about wanting a “Muslim ban,” this EO does not come anywhere close to effectuating such a ban, as it largely focuses on countries that were previously identified as sources of potential terror threats.

I stress “under normal circumstances” because these are not normal circumstances. The cavalier and reckless manner in which this specific EO was developed and implemented will likely give judges pause — and with good reason. Courts typically give a degree of deference to executive branch actions under the assumption that polices are implemented after serious consideration of relevant legal and policy questions. Indeed, the more serious the government interest allegedly being served, the more serious one expects the government’s internal review to be (unless, of course, there are exigent circumstances necessitating immediate action, but that was not the case here).

I’d like to think that he’ll learn from this, but I doubt it. He completely lacks impulse control. The good news is that, at some point (particularly if he continues to ignore court orders), the real Republicans are likely to decide that Mike Pence will be a better president.

Meanwhile, while it was a huge screw up, it’s driven the Left completely around the bend:

Trump’s order is, in characteristic Trump fashion, both ham-handed and underinclusive, and particularly unfair to allies who risked life and limb to help the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is also not the dangerous and radical departure from U.S. policy that his liberal critics make it out to be. His policy may be terrible public relations for the United States, but it is fairly narrow and well within the recent tradition of immigration actions taken by the Obama administration. . . . Trump isn’t making this up; Obama-administration policy effectively discriminated against persecuted religious-minority Christians from Syria (even while explicitly admitting that ISIS was pursuing a policy of genocide against Syrian Christians), and the response from most of Trump’s liberal critics has been silence.

And this is something I’ve been noting every day on Twitter:

If you are horrified by what you see Trump doing, is it because when Obama did things like that you just didn’t see? Or did everything look different because it was Obama doing them?

And yes, Obama is much more of a Big Brother figure than Trump could ever hope to be. But the Left is blind on this issue.

[Update a while later]

“Scrap this half-baked immigration order and start over“:

This isn’t anywhere close to rational anti-terrorism policy. This is, rather, incompetence and ignorance by a White House inexperienced in government and deliberately insulated from those with experience. If it is additionally tainted with bigotry or cruelty, that would make it worse.

“Half-baked” is too kind. The batter is still in the bowl.

[Update a few minutes later]

“The president tramples innocent people in his rush to fulfill an ill-advised campaign promise.”

[Late-morning update]

Separating fact from hysteria on the immigration order. There’s sure been a lot of hysteria.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Another Amicus Brief

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This one is from Steve McIntyre:

In the end, an objective review of these reports quickly reveals their flaws and omissions. As The Atlantic has noted, competent investigations into these issues could “have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong.” Given this accurate assessment, the reports cannot serve as the basis for a “clear and convincing” finding that the Appellants had serious doubts about the alleged falsity of their statements.

It nicely complements the one from Judith Curry. I’m told to expect one more from the other amici who supported us the last time; they got an extension until Monday.

Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Technology and Society

Lawsuit Update

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Tomorrow is the deadline for filing amicus briefs on our behalf. Judith Curry has filed another one. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be good.

[Update a while later]

Reading through it, it would seem to make a strong case for her own defamation, though she’s above that.

[Update late morning]

Some thoughts on “alternate facts” in the climate debate:

My tweet asked the climate scientists on my feed whether they agreed with the statement specifically the use of the word “all”. My expectation was that a reasonable core of climate scientists would agree that Dr. Mann had overstepped the science. This was not the case. Instead, what I got was overwhelming support for Dr. Mann with not a single non-skeptic initially commenting negatively. It was as if Dr. Mann was the pope and the climate community his congregation. Nothing he said could be considered to be anything less than the truth, even if it took huge convolutions of logic to make it true. In the last couple weeks the term “alternative facts” has entered our lexicon. Well in the next few paragraphs I want to unpack Dr. Mann’s “alternative fact” and see if it is indeed defensible. Then I will go into what I feel this means for the climate change debate.

RTWT.