Fire Hydrant of Freedom

I don’t disagree with this plan, and would add to the list, like telling all Executive Office agencies that they can no longer enforce any regulation that wasn’t specifically authorized by Congress and signed by the president:

Trump Wins. What Next? (Part 2)
Kurt Schlichter

May 30, 2024

When Donald Trump beats Grandpa Badfinger in November, he better hit the ground ready to fight. In my Monday column, we discussed how the Democrats will completely freak out and attempt to disrupt the peaceful transition of government – an act that’s going to be absolutely fine and necessary to maintain Our Democracy even though last week it was the worst thing ever. This second columns talks about what must happen right after Trump is re-inaugurated, God-willing, and what he must do immediately upon taking office. Momentum and inertia are vital. Trump must take his objectives quickly. He must put points on the board immediately on Day One.

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Speed is not just of the essence – it is everything. Look at what happened with Israel in Gaza. It should have destroyed Hamas immediately. No waiting. No screwing around. Get in there and get it done. Nothing wins like winning. There’s no victory like victory. You’ve got to get in there and make it happen fast. When you hesitate, it gives the enemy the time to rebuild, re-orient, and counterattack. The IDF should’ve been hanging scumbags from what few lampposts that remain standing in Gaza within the first month, well before all the little keffiyeh-clad scumbags started occupying campus quads and President Gumby started showing his spinelessness.

Audacity, audacity, audacity.

The same is true with Trump taking power again. Take power and use power ruthlessly and without hesitation or lose – those are the choices. He’s got to get wins quickly and needs to pile wins upon wins so fast that the regime media and the institutions can’t decide what to react to. You’ve got to overwhelm the left, and you can only do that with proper planning. You have to plan the transition out so that on Day One, right after he takes his hand off the Bible and goes back to the White House, Trump starts signing things. Orders. Pardons. Regulations. They need to be waiting for him to sign. You take the initiative and you get inside the enemy’s decision cycle. You hit them with so many things so fast that they can’t pick out what to focus on. Overwhelm them with conservatism.

Not only does this tactic neutralize the ability of the regime media to create fake media firestorms, but it also has a morale effect by cheering up us voters when we see our priorities finally put into action. And, of course, it achieves substantive results. In other words, we not only want to do things that are going to help us, but we also want to be seen as doing things that are to help us so that our voters know they are winning and the damn communists know they are losing.

Day One is when we end the two-track justice system. Just recently, some Palesimpian scumbag knocked over a cop in Washington, DC. He’s getting probation. The guys who allegedly did that on January 6 are getting ten years. That can’t be tolerated. The left can’t be allowed to win. It’s not a matter of whether pushing cops is a good or bad thing. It’s a matter of allowing the Democrats to create and perpetuate a dual-track justice system. Allowing conservative-linked people to rot in jail while leftist–linked people run free perpetuates the unfairness. The lawfare by the left must end.

The President has the power to pardon. He should use it. Day One, Trump must pardon every single J6 defendant. Every one of them for everything. No exceptions, no hesitation. Pardon every single one of them, and not just J6 defendants. How about those abortion protesters held in jail for years? How about Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro – prosecuted for contempt of Congress while Democrats get away uncharged (we’ll fix that too). How about that guy who is sitting in prison because he made a mean meme about Hillary Clinton? Pardon him. Pardon everybody who’s been treated unfairly by the Democrats. Then Trump needs to pardon everybody associated with his prior administration. And he needs to pardon himself.

Will the Democrats freak out? Well, yes, though if Trump does it right, they’ll be a lot more things to be freaking out about on Day One. But who cares if they freak out? Caring is the only thing that stops us from using our legitimate power. They’ll say that we don’t care about the rule of law. Who cares what they say? Ensuring that the law has been applied equally – which these pardons would do because Democrats don’t get prosecuted – supports the rule of law. But this isn’t about clichés. This isn’t about pleasing the Democrat elite. They’re never going to be happy. It’s foolish to try. It's about neutralizing the Democrat’s misuse of power. You cannot let them win.

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Here’s a radical notion for Republicans. Make Republican voters happy. Trump should aggressively use his power to support the interests of the Republican voters who elected him. Serving those who elected him should be his number one priority. The Democrats understand how power works. They violate the law on immigration and on student loan debt transfers to support their constituents. We need to support ours – legally – and we need to do it without apology and without hesitation.

Trump needs to shut down the border on the first day. Summarily reject all asylum applicants. Just turn their butts around. No more flying illegals anywhere except home. We need to keep doing that even if some Hawaiian judge orders us not to enforce the law and kick these bums out. Fight that obstructionism. As Biden’s student loan scam shows, you find a technical argument to ignore it, ignore it, and get the benefits before the lower court can say, “No, we really mean it” – or the SCOTUS says, “Go for it.” He also needs to cut off the cash to the parasitical NGOs that have gotten billions of dollars to facilitate this invasion of Third World peasants. No more money to any of them. Nothing. Starve them.

And as for student loan forgiveness, Trump simply needs to order that the purported forgiveness is unforgiven and that the USA is going to start collecting those monies. Let the deadbeat gender studies majors sue to enforce an executive action that the Supreme Court has already said is unlawful. After all, Trump must enforce the laws, and the laws say that these debts have to be paid back. Biden’s unlawful waiver of these obligations is legally ineffective. Enjoy the cry of a million gender studies graduates screaming in anger!

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We need to start recruiting foot soldiers for the administration. Trump is going to need a lot of conservative bodies to fill the jobs in the myriad federal agencies. Right now, they’re packed with Democrat activists. We need to change that, and we need to not apologize for it. He must fire scores of senior staff at various agencies. Ones he can’t fire need to be transferred to their new place of duty in Ticklebooty Springs, Wyoming.

He needs to fix the military. He needs to fire the joint chiefs. He also needs to fire the heads of all the military academies and war colleges. He must order DEI is completely out of our armed forces. He needs to make clear that our military’s purpose is to destroy our enemies and nothing else. Not screwing around about the climate hoax. Not diversity. Killing our enemies. He’s commander-in-chief, dammit, and he should command. Not ask. Command.

There should be a towering pile of executive orders waiting for him on the Resolute Desk when he gets back from the inauguration, executive orders that will make the Democrats scream. For example, the only reason that federal government employees can unionize is because of an executive order. He should revoke that on Day One and ban government employee unions. Sure, they’ll scream and yell. They’ll sue. Maybe they’ll go on strike, which would be great because when these flunkies disappear and nothing changes, we’ll see that they weren’t necessary to begin with. Obviously, you want to put a hiring freeze in place. Obviously, you want to ban DEI throughout the government.

Federal law enforcement needs new rules to stop the persecution of political opponents, which inevitably means Democrats persecuting Republicans. His first action should be an order that there is no investigation, evidence gathering, prosecution or any other activities directed at any member of the administration without the personal approval and signature of the Attorney General. Yes, Trump should interfere with the operations of the Department of Justice. It’s a corrupt organization full of Democrat activists who have demonstrated that they are unworthy of our trust. He shouldn’t give it to them. He’s the chief executive elected by and accountable to the voters. The unelected Attorney General, and therefore every single other unelected employee of the Department of Justice, works for the President. He should delegate to his Attorney General, and to no one else, the ability to approve an investigation of any kind of the administration or any other political official. No more Russiagates. No more Flynn frames. The Department of Justice has shown that it cannot be trusted not to abuse its power, so it will lose its power. The elite won’t like it – they want a fourth branch of unaccountable government bureaucrats, but that’s not a thing, and we can’t let it continue to be a thing.

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It’s vital that this all happens on Day One because of what will appear on Day Two’s front pages of the New York Times and Washington Post. What will the headline be? He will have done dozens and dozens of things. Do they go with the pardons? Do they go with DEI? Do they go with his other executive orders? We want them pulling out their purple hair, trying to figure out what they will focus on as the biggest outrage in the face of dozens of outrages. They will scream and yell. They will cry. Maybe they will riot – of course, the insurrectionists will feel the full wrath of a Trump Justice Department. The Democrats and Congress will go nuts. Who knows, they may obstruct the Senate from conducting business – we will probably have a majority, but a minority can do that. That’s fine. Let them. We need to remember that it’s the Democrats who mostly benefit from government largesse. Let the Democrats shut down the government. Throw us in that briar patch.

Most of all, Trump must stand firm – something that will not be a problem. He’s tough, and he’s mad. Any other Republican would’ve wilted under the attacks on Kavanaugh, but Trump didn’t. You know, they say that Trump is going to use his second term to get revenge because he’s so vindictive. Good. That’s a strength. We want him vindictive. We want him to seek righteous retribution – since when were Republicans against punishing wrongdoers? We want Trump utterly focused on breaking the stranglehold on, if you pardon the expression, Our Democracy that these leftist jerks have had for the last decade.

He must exercise his constitutional power without apology or hesitation. He must move fast and ruthlessly. The way to do that is to plan the transition in detail. It needs to be comprehensively plotted so that he’s ready to act immediately, Day One. His last administration was largely improvised because, at some level, people didn’t really believe that he was going to win, and they didn’t really prepare for it. Well, there’s no excuse now. There are thousands of Republicans who have had administration experience thanks to Trump, people who can come aboard for Trump 2.0, and this time, they can utterly lay waste to the Swamp.

It will be glorious!

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/29/opinions/robert-de-niro-biden-trump-axelrod/index.html

This went so badly that David Axelrod wrote a column on it and CNN published it.

I don't think the prosecution wants the jury to know that this is all about politics.

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/joe-biden-debate-nonviolent-crime-1493732

09/12/2019 09:27 PM EDT

Former Vice President Joe Biden on Thursday declared that he believes “nobody should be in jail for a nonviolent crime.”

  - [Doug]  Does a New York Courtroom count as a jail?  He was not free to leave during the trial.

Upcoming SCOTUS decision may hobble sundry administrative courts.

Wish there was comprehensible research out there that could be used to measure the efficacy of various federal (and state, for that matter) agencies to measure there ROI. My guess is any metric wouldn’t be kind and hence would serve to suggest we don’t much need many of these agencies, casting their enforcement tactics more as something that justifies their existences, rather than provides measurable benefits beyond creating voting blocks that cast ballots as an act of self-preservation:

Justices may shrink the bureaucracy
“I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution.” -- Harry Browne
MAY 29, 2024

Politico is concerned that the deep state will no longer get to shove people around.

It reported:

A decade-long conservative crusade against financial regulators will come to a head soon with a crucial Supreme Court ruling, part of a legal strategy that has spread across multiple Washington agencies into a broad attack on a core power of the federal government.

The court’s ruling on Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, a case challenging the power of in-house federal judges, could hobble a whole range of agencies in unpredictable ways, cutting the powers of antitrust enforcers, labor regulators and consumer finance watchdogs.

Good. They should be hobbled.

The bureaucracy makes the rules, enforces them and hires the judge-jury-and-executioner to hear the case. The president — or someone else in the administration — appoints them without Senate confirmation.

The abuse of this power by bureaucrats goes way, way back like a Jim Thome homerun. A half-century ago, Donald Trump made the Front Page of the New York Times for the first time — Major Landlord Accused Of Antiblack Bias in City.

HUD thought it had him. Trump and his dad hired Roy Cohn, the prosecutor of the Rosenberg traitors (and lefty icon) who took the case out of the hands of an administrative law judge by suing HUD for $100 million in federal court. Two years later they settled with the Trumps agreeing to be sure to rent to black people. No fine. No admission of guilt. No Front Page story.

This case is similar.

The American Bar Association’s summary was “This case concerns the Securities and Exchange Commission’s ability to bring enforcement actions for securities fraud before administrative law judges, rather than in federal district court. The target of an enforcement action argues this venue choice stems from an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the SEC and that the proceeding violates the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. In U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the Court has the potential to change the way government agency claims are adjudicated.”

I am not really sure how the agency judges square with the right to a fair trial.

The ABA said, “The proceeding is similar to a trial except that many of the hallmarks of due process are absent: there is no jury, there is no discovery, the evidentiary rules are relaxed, and guilt is determined by a preponderance of evidence. Either side may appeal the ALJ’s decision to the SEC commissioners, and the SEC’s final decision may be appealed to a federal appeals court. The appeals court may only reverse the SEC’s ruling if the findings were unsupported by ‘substantial evidence’ in the record.”

The ALJ’s decision cost Jarkesy (a company) just under a million bucks. The legal fees to bring the case to the highest court in the land likely exceeded that. The federal government has an unlimited supply of money.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Maverick’s NBA team, squared off against the SEC’s rigged system a decade ago — and lost.

He told Politico, “I support the right to a jury trial. Period, end of story. There is no constitutional reason or support for the SEC or any government agency to supersede that.”

Other billionaires are fighting back.

Politico said, “Since Jarkesy was filed, companies including Meta (Zuckerberg), SpaceX (Musk) and Amazon (Bezos) have escalated it into a broader fight against federal power by suing other agencies over their own courts — a way of fighting unfavorable judgments by attacking the system that delivered it.”

The bureaucracy uses the ALJ system for the sake of convenience. But the Constitution’s sole purpose is to make governing as inconvenient as possible.

Politico said, “Others have fretted that the high court’s ruling could even hit the routine in-house courts of agencies like the Social Security Administration, which employs about 1,200 administrative judges. If not properly tailored, they say, the decision could wind up sending a wave of relatively low-dollar Social Security claims into the already bustling federal courts.”

The Constitution says, “In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.”

20 bucks is 20 bucks.

If the actual judiciary cannot deal with all these cases that is a sign that you have too many laws and too many bureaucratic regulators.

Why do we need an EPA? The air and water have never been cleaner. Why do we have a Department of Education? We flooded the schools with trillions of dollars over the years and the results are worse. Why do we have a Department of Transportation? We built an interstate system before it came along. Under the gay guy, we are destroying parts of it in the name of fighting a racism that no longer exists.

The agency judicial system is corruptible. Nationally, about 54% of appeals of Social Security disability claims denials are reversed in the system.

However, in the early 21st century, in Huntington, West Virginia, if you hired Kentucky attorney Eric C. Conn to appeal, you had a 100% chance of winning. That’s because he kicked back more than $600,000 to ALJ David B. Daugherty. The feds eventually prosecuted and Daugherty got 4 years in prison while Conn received 12 years with another 15 years tacked on for fleeing to Honduras. The story is here.

But David Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor and former head of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission in the Obama administration, ominously warned that doing away with the ALJs will spell doom.

Politico reported:

In practice, though, a jury trial might not always be the best option strategically for defendants, said Vladeck — especially those like Jarkesy facing claims of securities fraud.

“Juries hate scam artists,” Vladeck said. “Be careful what you wish for.”

The Constitution hates tyranny and you had best believe the bureaucracy is tyrannical. The USA has so many laws that bureaucrats can pick and choose which laws they want to pick against whom.

If ridding us of this ALJ system overloads the courts and makes enforcement of all these rules impossible, so be it.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

He and 55 other patriots signed off on that — as part of the Declaration of Independence.

When Harry Browne said, “I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution,” he spoke for every single patriot in the country alive today — and all of the dead ones.

https://donsurber.substack.com/p/justices-may-shrink-the-bureaucracy?r=1qo1e&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true