The great debate. The Supremes take down the administrative state. And the $100 million campaign to legalize all abortion everywhere.
In the first presidential debate, both candidates lived up to expectations. Donald Trump by being his usual forceful, blustering self. Joe Biden by being his old self, literally, fulfilling expectations that he would demonstrate on a huge stage the mental and physical decline of his old age.
Not only did he look and sound frail, his answers were sometimes bizarre or incomprehensible. For example, as reported in an Associated Press story, in trying to explain The Dobbs ruling, he said Roe v. Wade “had three trimesters”: “The first time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between a doctor and an extreme situation. A third time is between the doctor, I mean, between the women and the state.” No, Mr. President, that is not what a trimester is.
When asked about the national debt, President Biden said this:
We have a thousand trillionaires in America – I mean, billionaires in America. And what’s happening? They’re in a situation where they, in fact, pay 8.2 percent in taxes. If they just paid 24 percent or 25 percent, either one of those numbers, they’d raised $500 million – billion dollars, I should say, in a 10-year period.
We’d be able to right wipe out his debt. We’d be able to help make sure that all those things we need to do – childcare, elder care, making sure that we continue to strengthen our healthcare system, making sure that we’re able to make every single solitary person eligible for what I’ve been able to do with the – with – with – with the COVID. Excuse me, with dealing with everything we have to do with – look, if – we finally beat Medicare.
Huh?
Here are reactions from Biden’s supporters, in the words of the headlines in liberal periodicals:
Politico: Democrats really have no way to spin this. We break down Biden’s disastrous debate.
The Atlantic: A Disaster for Joe Biden: Watching the president at the first debate was at times almost physically uncomfortable.
Washington Post: Democrats scramble after Biden’s halting debate performance
New York Times: ‘God Help Us’: 12 Writers Rate Biden’s Performance at the First Presidential Debate
And the reaction to the president’s evident incapacity isn’t just in the U.S. The New York Times had another story: U.S. Allies Watch the Debate With Shaking Heads and a Question: What Now?
The debacle has Democrats wondering how they might replace him, if they could persuade him to step down and what they might do if the nomination is thrown open to the convention.
What do you think would happen if the Democrats took that route? Who might be an alternative candidate? Who would be more likely to (1) get the nomination? (2) win the election? (3) make a better president?
Supremes Take Down the Administrative State
Agencies in the Executive Branch can issue regulations that have the force of law. And those who violate a regulation face a trial in an administrative court run by that agency. The result is a shadow government in which the Executive Branch can take on the functions of both the Legislative and the Judicial Branch.
And that was allowed by the Supreme Court back in 1984 in the case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, establishing the so-called “Chevron deference.” This stated that courts should defer to the interpretations of the law as determined by the bureaucratic agencies.
Now the Supreme Court has issued a monumental ruling overturning Chevron. (For a good explanation of the ruling, which involved two cases, go to the SCOTUS blog.)
The decision seems obvious on the face of it. The formation of an administrative state clearly violates the Constitutional separation of powers. Plus the bureaucratic trials, usually presided over by officials of the agency, clearly violate the Constitutional guarantee of the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers.
Democrats, though, are condemning the ruling because it takes away the power of “experts.”
But I thought a major talking point about Democrats today is the necessity of defending democracy! Surely ceding so much power to “experts”rather than elected officials is anti-democratic!
Their fear is that the ruling will open to litigation all kinds of regulations involving the environment and restricting what businesses can do. This will no doubt open the door to a host of new lawsuits.
But experts in science or economics are not experts in interpreting the law, as judges are. Justice Roberts said that when dealing with technical issues judges can hear from experts and that this is the function of friend of the court briefs. The deeper issue is whether matters of law and punishment should be delegated to an aristocracy of technocrats or whether the people should have a voice in the government that affects them.
The $100 Million Campaign to Legalize All Abortion Everywhere
In other political news, progressives–who, I thought, wanted to keep big money out of politics–are marshaling big money for a concerted effort to legalize all abortion everywhere.
Politico approvingly gives the details in Alice Miranda Ollstein’s article entitled Inside the $100 million plan to restore abortion rights in America: Leaders of the coalition say they want to make the procedure more accessible and affordable than ever before. It begins,
A new coalition of abortion-rights groups is marking the second anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade with a pledge to spend $100 million to restore federal protections for the procedure and make it more accessible than ever before.
In plans shared first with POLITICO, groups including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All are banding together to form Abortion Access Now — a national, 10-year campaign that will both prepare policies for the next time Democrats control the House, Senate and White House, and build support for those policies among lawmakers and the public. At a private event Monday evening in Washington, they will pitch a group of influential progressives on going on offense at a time when abortion is outlawed in a third of the country.
[Keep reading. . .]
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