Looks like SCOTUS just wrecked it, 5-4. Couldn’t happen to a nicer dictator.
The stay implies that they think the administration is likely to lose on the merits when the case is argued. But this points out the stakes of the election, given that the next president is likely to appoint more than one justice.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Jonathan Adler explains the ruling. (Note: He is more concerned about climate change than I am.)
Alan Boyle has the story. A cut to SLS/Orion, which the Senate can be relied upon to restore.
Can you imagine an astronaut reading Genesis from space today, as they did during Apollo 8?
…and her ode to serfdom.
There is nothing “progressive” or new about collectivism. It’s the oldest game in civilization.
Kathleen Willey is going to fight back this fall if Hillary is the nominee.
I think the Democrats are in deep denial about what a terrible candidate she will be.
…rots on:
“Anything that gets done by Washington must be done by the civil service. These folks are lifers. You can’t fire them. Because of the abovementioned legislative compromises required, you also can’t push a bill through that will let you fire them. And they — not the president, and not the cabinet secretaries — are the folks who do most of what government does. The president can wave his hands like Jean-Luc Picard and say, ‘Make it so.’ But if they don’t wanna, they ain’t gonna.”
This should be infuriating to anyone who actually believes in democratic governance, but on the other hand, since most political ideas are half-baked, anything that slows them down is probably a good idea.
But what happened in the IRS scandal wasn’t a case of bureaucrats slow-walking ideas they think are dumb. It was, instead, a case of bureaucrats targeting people because of their political views.
Yup.
BTW, it’s not totally impossible to rein in the bureaucracy. The next president would end federal public-employee unions wiht the stroke of a pen.
…has rapidly declined under Obama.
Well, that’s what it was all about.
Eric Berger reports on Wednesday’s House hearing.
If NASA is smart, they’ll be putting a plan together for a return to the moon, to present to the next administration, preferably with a lot of public/private partnership.
[Update a few minutes later]
Keith Cowing had a roundup related links yesterday. And here‘s Doug Messier’s summary and Jeff Foust’s story.
What is the right climate?
Why are we defining ‘dangerous climate change’ with respect to the climate of the 18th century, which was the coldest period in the last millennia, with wicked winters? Why not use a reference point of 2000 or 1970? The IPCC doesn’t provide a convincing explanation for the overall warming between 1750 and 1950; according to climate models, human causes contributed only a very small amount to the global warming to during this period (so presumably this overall warming was caused by natural climate variability). Co-opting the period between 1750 and 1950 into the AGW argument muddies the scientific and the policy waters.
It would make much more sense — from a scientific perspective, from the perspective of adaptation and engineering, and in the public communication of climate change — to refer to warming relative to a more recent reference period. Since the emissions reference periods are between 1990 and 2005, this also adds to the argument of citing a more recent reference period for defining ‘dangerous’.
The argument that human caused warming is already ‘dangerous’ — widely made by politicians, the media and some scientists — flies in the face of scientific evidence reported by the IPCC AR5 and SREX. Extreme weather events were worse earlier in the 20th century, and sea level has been rising for millennia, with recent rates of sea level rise comparable to what was observed in the middle 20th century.
It’s almost as though there’s some sort of political agenda at work.
He won’t win, but he’s giving the Republicans the tools they need to win the war against Hillary and the Democrat establishment.