McConnell On The Judicial Bureaucracy And The First Amendment
One interesting aspect of regulation and politics in the United States is that a rule can be favored, or even skewed, to favor one side, but over time, it is used to favor the other side.
A GOP EPA advocated for the Chevron doctrine in an era in which the civil service was captive to industry, only to find the tables turned once the civil service became dominated by the Democrats.
Now, a rule that was used to protect the NAACP is being pressured by Democrats who would use it to chill friends-of-the-court briefs from those sympathetic to the other party.
‘“Two of my colleagues and I recently wrote to the head of the Standing Committee on federal rules to express our opposition to a proposed amendment to the rules governing appellate courts.
‘“The amendment is the result of persistent bullying of Senate Democrats, and it would force parties seeking to be heard as friends of the court to disclose their donors in certain instances.
‘“The forced disclosure of donors is a longstanding offense against the First Amendment. This has been abundantly clear since Justice Harlan eloquently explained it in NAACP v. Alabama. The courts only tolerate forced disclosure in the case of actual candidate electioneering to ensure election integrity.
‘“But court cases aren’t elections, and friends of the court aren’t candidates. And the fact that the Appellate Rules Committee doesn’t understand this and wants to chill free speech by mandating donor disclosure is a shocking reversal of the NAACP v. Alabama.’
What Regulatory Changes Should We Expect to See if Harris Takes Office?
There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about Project 2025 as if it is some key to what a Trump regulatory agenda might look like. These are the musings of an independent think tank. They have to get appointed by Trump first. It’s not clear who would work in a Trump administration and who Trump would admit.
Just as Project 2025 is supposed to suggest an agenda, this note concludes that the Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, a “summary of each executive agency’s projected regulations, existing regulations, and completed regulations,” is itself a look inside what a Harris administration would do.
Maybe. But it’s a start.
‘Any change in a presidential administration can have a substantial impact on the policies and regulations that are put in play — and this is especially true in the contentious context of immigration policy. Because Vice President and presidential candidate Harris has effectively signed off on the Biden administration’s immigration strategy, the Unified Agenda should be viewed as her “Project 2025”. What the Unified Agenda shows is that a potential Harris-Walz administration will likely continue to impose barriers to immigration enforcement and weaken standards of the legal immigration system in favor of increasing the overall number of foreign-born individuals in the United States.
‘Equally important, the Unified Agenda omits common-sense reforms — such as raising the wage rates that employers must pay foreign workers — that would serve the interests of American workers and foreign workers alike, or that would strengthen border and national security.
‘Moreover, the Unified Agenda does not show you the Biden-Harris administration’s unwavering commitment to authorizing the entry of hundreds of thousands of inadmissible aliens annually through an abusive interpretation of the parole statute because the administration has not engaged in the rulemaking process for these major policy changes. Aside from the serious legal concerns imbedded in the substance of the Biden-Harris administration’s numerous new parole programs, these programs have diverted limited resources from the severely backlogged legal immigration system to create a secondary (unauthorized) immigration system compromised of entirely inadmissible aliens. Harris, while campaigning, has not once disavowed any of these programs.’
The Bureaucrat Who Could Make Trump’s Authoritarian Dreams Real
In the movie Old School, Jeremy Piven plays the villainous Dean who wants to get our quirky band of brothers kicked off campus after they set up a fraternity. He uses the rules to get what he wants, only to be confounded time and again by their resourcefulness and good luck.
There’s a scene in which he is talking to one of his henchmen assistants who is relating how our heroes have managed to navigate the bureaucracy.
DEAN PRITCHARD: How are these guys still a fraternity?
ASSISTANT: They’re not a fraternity, sir. They’ve been approved for temporary status by the student council
PRITCHARD: Half these guys don’t even go to the school. You see the one guy. He’s like 90.
ASSISTANT: Technically, that doesn’t matter. They found a loophole.
PRITCHARD: A loophole?
ASSISTANT: Yes. Well, it’s interesting, sir. As stupid as they appear, they’re actually very good at paperwork. It’s quite anomaly.
PRITCHARD: I’m sorry, is that funny? Are you a standup comic? Is that what you do now? This is me leaving. This is me leaving.
This is what scares Mother Jones: the possibility that one of them might actually be good at paperwork.
When political parties find the guy who actually makes things happen while managing to keep a low profile, it’s too much to resist. They have to attack. Anything to get the guy off the card.
He’s probably a nice fellow, too.
‘“What makes Vought especially dangerous is he combines ideological extremism with a familiarity and comfort with Washington’s political processes,” says Katherine Stewart, author of the forthcoming book Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy. “He knows how to undermine agencies, how to create new bureaucratic forces, how to block funding, and how to engage with other practical features of our political system.”’
Bureaumania: A granular look at corporate red tape
CBC Radio on looking at bureaucracy through an artistic lens.
‘In 2013, Graeber wrote a crucial essay, On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs for Strike! magazine. In the essay, he wrote that despite the promise of a shorter work week thanks to automation, "we have seen the ballooning [in the last 100 years] of not even so much of the service sector, as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing … corporate law, human resources and public administration."
‘In other words, BS jobs are those where no one (including the employee) is ever sure what it is they're actually doing every day. ‘
Google Wins Fight to Scrap $1.7 Billion EU Antitrust Fine Over Ads
Good for Google, winning its fight against the EU in court.
I wonder what happens to all the companies that are too small to appeal?
‘Alphabet’s GOOGL 1.46%increase; green up pointing triangle Google scored a win Wednesday after the European Union’s second-highest court overturned a fine of 1.49 billion euros, equivalent to $1.66 billion, that antitrust officials had imposed on the search giant for restricting how some websites could display ads sold by its rivals.
‘The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, levied the fine in 2019, saying Google had abused its dominance as a search engine and an advertising broker by imposing restrictive terms in contracts with third-party websites. Those terms effectively prevented Google’s rivals from placing their own search ads on those websites, regulators said at the time.’
NLRB suffers a loss in Texas at the hands of Jarkesy.
Court decisions have consequences.
‘First, let’s look at Pittman’s decision. The company Findhelp was accused of violating labor law by its employees’ union, the Office and Professional Employees International Union. The NLRB began its internal ALJ process that resembles the SEC process that the Fifth Circuit ruled unconstitutional. So Findhelp requested a preliminary injunction to stop the proceedings.
‘“In this case, the NLRB ALJs are afforded the same two layers of for-cause removal protections that the Fifth Circuit found to be unconstitutional with regard to the SEC ALJs,” Pittman wrote. “In fact, the NLRB has not, and cannot, offer any distinction between the relevant provisions or the protections they confer upon the ALJs.”’
There are more than 120 AI bills in Congress right now
Regulation in haste. What could possibly go wrong?
In fairness, not all of these will pass, of course. It sounds like avoiding mandates is a principle we’ll stick to. We shall see.
‘They’re pretty varied. One aims to improve knowledge of AI in public schools, while another is pushing for model developers to disclose what copyrighted material they use in their training. Three deal with mitigating AI robocalls, while two address biological risks from AI. There’s even a bill that prohibits AI from launching a nuke on its own.
‘The flood of bills is indicative of the desperation Congress feels to keep up with the rapid pace of technological improvements. “There is a sense of urgency. There’s a commitment to addressing this issue, because it is developing so quickly and because it is so crucial to our economy,” says Heather Vaughan, director of communications for the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.’