Author: Mark Noonan

Out and About on a Wednesday

Mark Noonan46 Comments

Pear Harbor Day. Remember men like Dorie Miller and his skipper, Captain Mervyn Bennion.

In preparation for having a Republican Administration, the MSM is finally noticing that the jobs being created under Obama are often sub-par…no blame will be given to Obama for this, but it is believed by the MSM that this can be used against Trump starting January 20th. Look for the MSM to rediscover the homeless issue, as well. They have learned nothing from 2016 – and they’ll just go further down the Progressive rat-hole during the Trump Administration.

Progressives are reacting to Trump as Time’s Person of the Year about as you’d expect.

Story is that Trump sold his stock portfolio in June…which was a rather presumptuous action by a man who apparently thought he’d win in November.

Hillary is going to throw her big money donors a party…which is nice, except it wasn’t exactly the payoff they were expecting. I’m betting that somewhere in the back of her mind is a desire to try again in 2020. It will depend on the circumstances in late 2018, but I don’t think her ambition has been lessened by two humiliating losses.

Obama gets an underwhelming response from the troops.

Maybe Einstein was wrong? My take: who the heck knows. But anyone talking about “settled science” is probably talking nonsense.

Obama’s Defense Department – wasting $125 billion per year. That’s enough to build about 10 Ford-class aircraft carriers. Big defense budgets don’t equal military strength – if we properly used our resources, we could have a much more powerful military force at a much lower cost. The concept that eliminating waste and fraud for reducing spending is always ridiculed…but ridiculed by those who profit off the current way of doing business. My guess is that at least 1 in 3 federal dollars is wasted. I bet we could cut spending by 20% and provide better for our needs than we do now…if we just had the will to make the government do the right thing. That would be about a $700 billion reduction in spending. The 2016 deficit was just about $600 billion.

Yes, Trump can cut off funding for sanctuary cities.

Precious snowflakes are so upset about Trump winning that they cancelled their Christmas Holiday party. No, seriously – they really did.

Why are our Progressives such wimps? Andrew Klaven explains:

I mean, really, why are they such pansies?

Here’s my guess. A right-winger turns on his favorite television show and has his favorite character tell him his favorite candidate is demonic. He turns on the news and hears “journalists” edit out stories of Democrat malfeasance while emphasizing Republican corruption. He goes to the movies and has his political beliefs insulted and derided. His favorite singer hates him. His professor excoriates him. His employer would fire him if he knew what he thought…

…A leftist? He floats in a candy-cane cloud of self-congratulating self-reinforcement. Hollywood, the news media, academia, they all tell him: “You’re smart. You’re good. You’re right. You’re nice. You’re going to win the election. Anyone can see that. How could you lose? Anyone who disagrees with you is bad, stupid, mean, wicked.”

No wonder these people whine and cry when things don’t go their way. Spending their days in a pink haze of bias, how could they ever have seen it coming?

A Small Note on Why We Have Stupid People

Mark Noonan16 Comments

If you ever wondered why we have stupid people in the United States, Robert Stacy McCain points out the reason:

…Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) don’t want to admit the real nature of their own irrational prejudices, and Republicans are too polite to call them out on it. Has anyone in the Republican Party asked, for example, how much federal aid to education goes to elite private schools like Swarthmore College (annual tuition $49,104), where students enroll in “Queering God: Feminist and Queer Theology”? Why should the devout Catholic or Baptist be taxed to support such nonsense? Where are the GOP senators and congressmen demanding to know what kind of “education” taxpayers are being required to subsidize?

Because the Republicans are too polite (or too stupid) to call attention to what’s going on in our taxpayer-funded schools, a generation of young people has been indoctrinated in the anti-American prejudices of the Democrats who control university campuses…

Its not just that stupid people teach stupid things to youngsters but, also, because we refuse to stop the stupidity! If we want to stop the stupid, the first step is to stop paying for it…or, if that seems unfair, then at least insist that right next to Queering God there be a course on the works of C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton. I’m all for kids being challenged in their views…and I think that Lewis is far more challenging than anything you’re likely to find in a major college these days (and let’s not even get into St. Thomas, or even Martin Luther, for our Protestant friends…). With the massive amounts of federal dollars pouring into education year after year, we do have a great deal of leverage…because regardless of ideology, the most important thing College Administrators serve is the dollar. We’re paying the piper, we should call the tune. Start making the dollars dependent upon intellectual diversity (ie, hiring even just a couple of moderately conservative professors every now and again) will start to break the stranglehold the left holds on higher education. And as an added benefit, the kids will actually learn something. You know, not just get a credential, but some education to go along with it.

Ending the Age of Lies

Mark Noonan31 Comments

Ace has a great article about how the left lies about everything – it is mostly about the Scopes Monkey Trial, which has gone down in Progressive History as the decisive conflict between Ignorant, Anti-Science Christians and Enlightened Progressives. Ace points out that this Narrative is presented in it’s most strongest form in the movie, Inherit the Wind; which is a great movie…but, also, a false story. It is, though, the story that most people know – to a large degree, the movie based on the trial is the “history” that most people believe. This is similar to how the movie The Manchurian Candidate is how most people think of the McCarthy Era. The bottom line, however, about Inherit the Wind is that it leaves out the fact that Science wasn’t cross-examined, only the Bible was…just as in The Manchurian Candidate the reality of Communist infiltration of the American government was left out (and, indeed, was turned into Right Wing infiltration…as being far more real and dangerous than those silly, old Commies). As Progressive propaganda, both movies are great – but as a way to see what happened, the gaps in their Narrative turn them into Progressive lies…and only two of ten thousand Progressive lies which have taken hold in the United States.

Lies, believed, can have a very terrible effect on a nation’s fortunes. Take a look at France – in 1914, the French simply didn’t know how to quit. No matter how bad it got (and the French defeats of the first few weeks contained the very worst losses in war suffered by any nation in a comparable period) the French just kept on fighting. In 1940, after a brief resistance (in which, to be fair, some – but not many – French forces fought with sublime courage) 1,900,000 French soldiers – still in possession of their arms and the ability to resist – voluntarily went into German captivity. What happened? Mostly it is explained by France being exhausted from WWI…but the Germans had suffered quite a bit in that war, too. Why were they so willing to have at it, again? Lost in most stories of France during the inter-war years is that French government policy was to instruct, via the public schools, the youth of France in the pointlessness of war…pacifism was the reigning orthodoxy. Prior to WWI, there wasn’t that – and, also, it was only just prior to WWI that the French government took control of education away from the Catholic Church. The 1914 generation was imbued with faith and patriotism…the 1940 generation was imbued with pacifism. That pretty much is all one needs to know – especially if you look at a situation map on May 13th, 1940 and realize that France had the forces in place to stop the German attack…and just didn’t have the spirit to launch the necessary counter-attack. People were taught a lie – that war is always bad and pointless – and they responded to that lie; by refusing to fight in what they viewed as a bad and pointless war. The truth is that war is bad, but not at all pointless…especially when you’re being invaded by a foe who wishes to reduce you to slavery.

There are plenty of lies believed in the United States. It is impossible to list them all in a blog post. Suffice it for our purposes to note that Progressives believe that the hostility of the Iranian regime towards us stems from the coup of 1953 – and President Obama is, by all appearances, one who so believes. It really isn’t hard to see – he was educated at Progressive institutions of higher education and the orthodoxy they teach is just that: we were the bad guys vis a vis Iran and anything they do against us isn’t an act of evil, but an act of self-defense. Because this lie is believed – and acted upon – we’ve now got Obama’s “Iran Deal” which will assist greatly in building up Iran’s economic and military power, including in the area of nuclear weapons. This will, in turn, put us (and the world) in an ever more dangerous situation; and a situation which may have to be paid for in blood, ours and theirs. Meanwhile, the simple fact of not having that lie (that the Coup is the key) would have led us to a rational policy regarding Iran…and, by this time, no Iranian mullah-regime (Obama really had a chance in 2009 when Iran was simmering with revolution to put an end to the whole problem).

Right now, we do have a chance to start afresh in the United States. The lies are still there – and widely believed – but we don’t have to have policies (domestic and foreign) built upon the lies. In fact, in Donald Trump we might have a vehicle (even if unwitting) to cut through the lies and actually get to rational policy. His phone call with the President of Taiwan more and more speaks to my mind on this. For all I know, they only exchanged pleasantries about the weather…but the fact that we’re no longer basing our Taiwan policy on the lie that the People’s Republic of China has a valid interest in Taiwanese affairs is like a breath of fresh air. If you’re working an equation and you start with “1 plus 1 equals 3” then you’re going to come out wrong, in the end, no matter how much correct math follows later. There is no such thing as a half-truth – there is either truth, or lie. Add a speck of lie to your argument, and you’ve got 100% lie. We’ve been working our China policy based on a lie about Taiwan…and, so, we haven’t been able to fully craft a strategic response to China’s recent aggressiveness in the area. Base our policy on the truth – that for all intents and purposes, Taiwan is an independent nation – then we can quickly put together a military system which would make any Chinese act of aggressive a fool’s errand.

And so it goes all down the line. We don’t have to make our policies based upon absurdities. Think about how nice it will be, for instance, to have education policy based upon reality rather than upon foolish lies? To have energy policy based upon what is most efficient, rather than scare-stories about global warming or some theory that setting up a bird-cuisinart is better than natural gas? Just having military policy based upon the need for the military to be prepared for war rather than proper levels of diversity will be a huge improvement. A little luck and in 10 years or so, we might be a people who go about figuring out what is true and just going with that.

Yes, Trump Can Talk to Taiwan

Mark Noonan19 Comments

Trump spoke to the President of Taiwan and it set off a firestorm of criticism. A lot of people are worried about what effect this will have on US-China relations. I can only think it will work to an improvement. The best relations are maintained when both sides are firm and understand each others position.

First off, a little history lesson:

Over the past 121 years, mainland China has ruled Taiwan for a total of four (4) years. The Island was annexed by Japan after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and then stayed in Japanese hands until 1945. From 1945 to 1949, Taiwan was ruled from the mainland, but in 1949 the government of China was chased out and made itself a home in Taiwan. Officially, the government of Taiwan considers itself the legitimate government of all of China, while the Chinese government considers itself the rightful owner of Taiwan. Both positions are absurd. The writ of the People’s Republic of China has never run to Taiwan and the youngest Taiwanese who could possibly have been a part of a Chinese government would be about 90, now. About 87% of Taiwan’s population is native to Taiwan – wasn’t born in China, nor under the rule of the People’s Republic of China. While plenty of people in Taiwan still desire a theoretical reunification with China, no one wants to come under the rule of the current government in Beijing – and the younger generation is ever more Taiwanese. To say that Taiwan must be considered part of China is as silly as saying that Austria must be part of Germany, simply because for a brief while Germany ruled Austria and the people of Austria are ethnic Germans.

Also, China needs to know that for all their economic advancement and their desire for increased global power, the United States is still far ahead of China and that we much prefer the people of east Asia and the western Pacific rule their own destinies. Trump’s action will cause some shrieks from China’s leaders – but the bottom line is that it lets them know that the days of the United States playing the patsy to China are over. Trump did a good thing – an honest thing; the hypocrisy of our position vis a vis Taiwan has been a nauseating relic of the Cold War and it is past time it as done away with. If Taiwan ever freely decides to unite itself with China, all well and good – but unless and until such time, it is our duty as the premier free nation on Earth to ensure that the free people of Taiwan are not forced into Chinese servitude.

Things are Happening Fast Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

If you’re thinking of staffing up your intelligence agency, this kind of guy is probably not your ideal choice.

What will really upset you about this is that we lost to these guys in 2008 and 2012: 42% of Democrats think the recount will result in Hillary winning. That’s why Stein is able to get so much money! Ask anyone with an above-room-temp IQ and they’ll tell you: there is NO WAY the recount will change the result. But there’s 42% of Democrats thinking it will. These are the smart people? These are the people who got degrees? This is the Reality-Based Community? If brains were dynamite, these guys couldn’t blow their noses…

Rumor is that Trump is considering Senators Manchin (D-WV) and Heitkamp (D-ND) for Cabinet positions. Both are centrist Democrats. Both can help build more Trump bridges to a lot of Democrats turned off by the hard-left turn of the Democrat party. Both are up for re-election in 2018 in States where Trump crushed it. Both seats would almost certainly fall to the GOP, should they take positions in Trump’s Administration. This is brilliant politics, folks.

That terrorist in Ohio? He was taking a class in micro-aggressions…but, as it turns out, it’s still your fault that he attacked.

How Trump can create an economic boom:

…The basis of any Trump Revolution would have to be energy. The shale-led revival of America’s energy production was the most important economic development of the Obama administration, and Trump is likely to double down on it. The turnaround in America’s energy fortunes is almost a miracle. Over the last ten years, U.S. oil production has grown by more than 3.6 million barrels per day—an output increase of roughly 75 percent. Natural gas production has seen similar joy, rising nearly 52 percent over the last decade. This hydrocarbon boom has defied the predictions of most analysts, who expected American oil production to plummet alongside falling crude prices over these past two years. Instead, the shale industry has relentlessly pursued innovations that have allowed it to keep the oil and gas flowing, despite unfavorable market conditions…

The follow-on effects of a completely unleashed American energy sector are countless – just in making American energy so cheap that manufacturing becomes competitive in the United States would be a major boon to our economy. Don’t listen to the naysayers who are insisting that we can’t revive manufacturing in America. We can. They’ll use the hook of “those jobs aren’t coming back”…which is true, but only in the very narrow and meaningless sense that the particular manufacturing jobs of 20 years ago aren’t coming back…but a new, automated factory employing 100 workers is still 100 jobs in manufacturing that we didn’t have before. We can set this up so that cheap, consumer goods are made here and exported to China, folks…but also to all manner of nations which are rising out of poverty and demanding the sorts of consumer goods we’ve taken for granted for a half century or more. We can do it.

Democrat Congressman: we have no strategy. Our first clue on that was the re-election of Pelosi as Minority Leader…perhaps to be Much Smaller Minority Leader before too long…

General Mattis is to be Secretary of Defense. The change will be rather night-and-day, I suspect. I don’t think our military will be spending a lot of time on diversity awareness over the next four years…

Out and About on a Tuesday

Mark Noonan35 Comments

Looks like Stein might not be able to recount Pennsylvania – appears that the real deadline for contesting the vote was November 21st…she can take it to court, but even that appears to be a long, tortuous process. In my view, this proves that the whole thing was a scam from start to finish…plus an expression of someone who despises the Constitutional governance of the United States.

Star Wars is a treasured memory of my youth – the three prequels, however, sucked. I haven’t seen the latest sequel and now I never will. Can’t stand mindless Hollywood types thinking they have anything to add to the debate. Don’t these nitwits realize that the golden age of Hollywood is immediately available? We don’t have to watch the utter crap they are producing these days…

Seems even in Canada you should never go Full Social Justice Warrior.

One of the reasons the troops love General Mattis.

That terrorist attack in Ohio? It’s your fault.

Rat Bastardism is always with us – but this is a bit of Rat Bastardism that really needs to be quickly caught and then tarred and feathered.

The Iranians are getting their last licks in before Trump takes office.

Should Conservatism embrace Populism? Andrew McCarthy says, “no”. The reality is that Conservatism, properly understood, would defend Populism…because we do live in a democratic republic and that means the popular will, limited by Constitutional stricture, must rule the political day. Certainly we must preserve the Constitution…but that requires us to preserve the role of the people not just in voting on the issues but in deciding what issues will be voted on. One may not like what the people are on about, but if the people are not able to decide what issues are important, than we live in a tyranny…you may not want to debate free trade and protectionism, but if the people want to debate it, then you darn well have to have a debate over it, or there is no freedom.

Weekend Recount Open Thread

Mark Noonan33 Comments

It’s now Christmas season – a season of love and mercy. But Progressives are making it difficult. Jill Stein managed to sucker enough people into paying for a recount – so far, only in Wisconsin, but it looks like Pennsylvania and Michigan will get the sore-loser treatment, as well. Do note that our Progressives, in their relentless pursuit of electoral purity, aren’t challenging the results in New Hampshire and Minnesota – even though New Hampshire was closer than Wisconsin. It won’t work, Progressives – if anything, it will just increase Trump’s margin in all three States slightly.

According to this article, Obama and his team are the adults in the Democrat room. The allegation is that Obama convinced Hillary to concede – and now some Team Clinton people are bent out of shape over that. The article says that some on her team want to have the multi-State recount; they apparently believe that this election result can be reversed. These are people who nearly became our government, folks – completely divorced from reality. The votes were cast, they have been counted – recounts, at most, move a few votes either way. If Hillary had lost all three States by, say, a couple hundred votes each, that would make it worthwhile to fight it out…but she lost Michigan by more than 10,000 votes, and that’s the closest vote total (to overturn it, it wouldn’t be a matter of just finding 10,000 Hillary votes that were somehow overlooked – given the way it went, any uncounted/miscounted votes are likely to be roughly even between the two candidates; for this to work, Democrats would have to find like 30,000 votes…and with Hillary getting a miraculous percentage of them…and they’d have to do this three times to change the election result). There’s no possible way that any conceivable form of recount can alter that. Taking one thing with another, I’m pretty sure it is Team Clinton people ultimately behind Stein’s recall effort…but as Obama’s former communications director put it, they’d have been wiser to put the money into the Louisiana Senate runoff. The good news in all this: our opponents are monumentally stupid. Trump might be in for a very easy time, after all.

And for all the talk about Russians hacking the vote to give it to Trump, it is Russians who are pushing the recount issue in social media.

There is a gutsy prediction out there of what it’ll look like after the recount is completed.

The European Union has halted talks on making Turkey a member. Good to point out right now that Turkey is a NATO ally…which means if Russia were to attack Turkey, we’d be committed to going to war against Russia; you know, sending our sons and daughters to die in the defense of Turkey’s tyrannical regime. Please explain to me, again, just why we have to retain NATO…

The fires in Israel are quite terrible – and perhaps there is a terrorism angle?

SJW business owner denounces Trump supporters – sister of SJW decides to cut into SJW’s business.

Some people are saying that Trump’s business interests amount to an emolument from foreign princes and potentates, in violation of Constitutional provision. Some people need to get a life. Suppose Trump divested himself of all his properties and holdings…ok, so now he’s got $10 billion in cash – what’s he supposed to do with it? Stuff it under his mattress? No, he’d have to put it somewhere…and anywhere he puts it might (and probably will) have some sort of foreign connection. Demanding Trump divest is to set up an impossible situation – which is probably why some people are bringing it up.

Should Trump deny access to MSMers who were in Clinton’s pocket? I say, “yes”. Why in heck would you want to give access to people who are doing to deliberately lie about you? Who are nothing more than stenographers for the DNC? Deny them access – give access to new, upcoming reporters who will know their access depends on reporting honestly.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan35 Comments

It is said that 2.8 million ballots remain to be counted in California – this is an indication of a government system which is massively incompetent. Suppose California decided the election – suppose we did go to a popular vote system – we’d still be waiting for the results two weeks out.

Meanwhile, Michigan is still not officially called – even though they finished counting on November 10th and Trump leads by 13,107 votes. My guess is that Trump will wind up north of 63 million votes while Hillary will finish somewhere around 65 million. That makes Trump the best vote-getter in GOP history (beating out Bush by about a million votes from 2004), and will make Hillary the second best Democrat vote-getter (getting beat by Obama in both ’08 and ’12).

We GOPers should really press for a revival of the California GOP – first off, because we shouldn’t be just resigning 55 electoral votes to the Democrats, secondly to give us a boost in popular votes so we don’t give our Progressives even the slight satisfaction of their guy getting more popular votes. Back out California’s total, and Trump won the popular vote in the rest of the nation (59.7 million for Trump, 56.5 million for Hillary); let’s move our vote total towards 6 million in CA…even if the Dems win, it would make the difference in the total national vote.

Kellyanne Conway notes that the MSM seems to be suffering from a sort of PTSD about the election.

Don Surber notes that Trump remains expert at trolling the MSM and making them go after things which are trivial.

The main thing about Senator Sessions being made Attorney General is the fact that if we enforce the laws already on the books, a lot of people are going to catch it hot…and that, I think, it what they are afraid of. We’ve kind of done this phony game where we need “Comprehensive immigration reform” in order to figure out what to do about the illegal aliens…thing is, we’ve got it all covered in law, except for any amnesty package. Obama – and, let’s face it, the GOP as well – has refused to enforce the immigration laws because this creates a “crisis” which then requires an amnesty. This is exactly backwards. Sessions, I think, will get it going in the right direction – enforce the laws and once we’ve cleared out the bad guys and got the border secure then we can consider amnesty for those who remain.

Kurt Schlichter, who had his doubts about Trump, is starting to enjoy this:

It’s important to understand why liberals are so angry and so scared. They are angry because they believe they have a moral right to command us, apparently bestowed by Gaia or #Science or having gone to Yale, and we are irredeemably deplorable for not submitting to their benevolent dictatorship.

They are scared because they fear we will wage the same kind of campaign of petty (and not so petty) oppression, intimidation, and bullying that they intended to wage upon us.

And their fear tastes like sunshine puked up by a unicorn.

I was considering being magnanimous in our total victory, but that lasted until a bunch of loving, tolerant, peaceful anti-Trump demonstrators jumped my friend and hurt his dog. So now, their pain is my sugar, and I say let’s spend the next four years having our coffee Sudden Impact-style.

Misunderestimating Trump

Mark Noonan8 Comments

I love to read Allahpundit’s articles over at Hot Air – one of the best writers out there; but this bit is, well, just wrong:

…That’s not the first clue we’ve gotten that Obama intends to run a charm offensive at Trump, at least at first, in hopes of getting a foot in the door for Democrats to influence him on policy. (It’s also not the first time we’ve heard that Trump was blown away upon learning what the job he just spent 16 months competing for actually entails. “He was nervous and jolted … by the 90-minute Oval Office meeting with Mr. Obama,” according to people close to Trump who spoke to the NYT, “and for the first time appeared to take in the enormousness of the job.”)…

First off, I’m astonished at people still lending credence to whatever the New York Times says – they are entirely devolved from a news organization to an arm of the DNC. Might as well believe DNC talking points. But I’m also amazed that anyone can believe the story that Trump was shocked about the job of being President…and that Obama, who came into the White House with zero executive experience, is some how some sort of elder statesman who can help Trump.

There is no way that Obama will want to in any way, shape or form help Trump. He will want Trump to fail in a spectacular fashion because only in such failure is there any chance of preserving Obama’s legacy. Also, after eight years in office, there is no indication that Obama has learned even the first clue about how to be a successful executive. He’s been surrounded by yes-men and sycophants, his hideous errors have been covered up by the press and his whole demeanor speaks of an attitude that he didn’t have and never will have anything to learn. If anything, Trump took the measure of Obama and figured, “just do the opposite of what this guy did, and I’m ok”. I can only guess that Allahpundit hasn’t read The Worst President in History (pick up your copy, today!). It details a man who relentlessly failed at every task he set himself. He’s not a mentor for anyone. Ever.

But it isn’t just Allahpundit – I see it all over the place among those who were flat-out Never Trump or at least highly skeptical of him. The idea is that Trump will surround himself with Pence and Romney and such people will “control” Trump and make it all ok. It won’t be like that, I think. Trump is building up a team of people he thinks will be effective at carrying out Trump’s policies. His people, if they are good (and his picks so far are good) will polish and strengthen his policies, but they will be Trump’s policies. And that is for good or ill.

I remember stories like this early on in the Reagan years – how he was really viewed as an amiable dunce whom his handlers had to keep control of. Many years afterwards, the truth emerged – mostly in Reagan’s own writings – that policy was Reagan’s and he pushed it all through and made it all happen. It is a rare genius in leadership to have the ability to make people think they are leading you when you are leading them. Lincoln had it. MacArthur had it. We’ll see if Trump has it. Right now, he’s acting like he does – even the mere consideration of fierce-critic Romney for Secretary of State or other high Cabinet position shows a man who is secure in his abilities. Trump may be deceiving himself, of course – only time will tell on that. But this idea that he’s malleable clay in the hands of his betters should be jettisoned by everyone. This is going to be Trump’s show.

Restoring the Executive/Legislative Balance

Mark Noonan7 Comments

A guy I follow on Twitter (@TheOneSoleShoe) has written a very good article about an easy way to fix the imbalance between Executive and Legislative power. Right now, as we’ve seen with President Pen and Phone, the Executive can pretty much use the regulatory power of the bureaucracy to decree new laws, even if they aren’t called such. This is entirely opposed to the concept of American government. If you don’t like it, you can go through a lengthy court process and you might just wind up having bureaucratic over-reach enshrined in a Supreme Court ruling (as ObamaCare was, twice). The fix goes like this:

…Rather than allow the Courts to have the final and only say on the scope, meaning and intent on legislation as manifested in administrative rulings and rule-making, why not alter the APA (Administrative Procedure Act) to give Congress the power to approve all proposed regulations on an up or down vote? Currently all that is required is a “notice and comment” period to satisfy statutory due process requirements. But the Agency still retains practically plenary power over enacting the regulation, enforcing it, and even interpreting it. c.f. Chevron USA, Inc. vs Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 US 837 (1984)…

…(Congress) can, right now, statutorily amend the APA to grant itself final approval over all proposed agency regulations, any changes in agency policy that amount to a change in regulation, or substantial reinterpretations of the law including administrative case law decisions. If Congress fails to approve the regulations, they would not go into effect. This would provide a major check on Executive power which already, in an era of divided government, enjoys tremendous power through use of the veto. It would realign the federal branches to their original framework and move us from an Executive-led nation to a Congress-led nation as originally intended.

Do read the whole article as it lays out just what the President is supposed to be doing – hint: he isn’t supposed to be using his discretion to decide whether an illegal immigrant can stay.

Getting back to Constitutional governance is crucial to the long-term health and prosperity of the United States. We can’t afford to further drift into Presidential rule until our President is more akin to a Roman Emperor than a George Washington. There is always a danger, as Republics age, that the people, weary of the political fight, will just turn power over to someone who will take charge and make the difficult decisions. That might have some success, of a sort, for a while, but the end of it is the death of the nation. Only the people, continually engaged in the political life of their nation, can ensure that the nation remains vigorous. This idea is a great way to start to restore Constitutional governance and I think we on the right should run with it.