New Civil Liberties Alliance Pushes Back Against Administrative Overreach

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New Civil Liberties Alliance Pushes Back Against Administrative Overreach

  • Last week I had a post titled “A Chink In The Armor Of The Progressive Administrative State.” The post discussed a recent case out of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Jarkesy v. SEC, where the Fifth Circuit ruled that an SEC prosecution of Mr. Jarkesy before its own Administrative Law Judge violated the Constitution for, among other things, denying Mr. Jarkesy his right to a jury trial, and giving the SEC unfettered discretion to decide which of its prosecutions can avoid federal District Court jurisdiction.

  • In the Jarkesy case, a relatively new organization called the New Civil Liberties Alliance played a significant role as amicus. Founded only five years ago (2017) by Philip Hamburger, a constitutional law professor at Columbia Law School, the NCLA has quickly made a big mark for itself in the field of constitutional litigation.

  • Hamburger was the author of the 2014 book Is Administrative Law Unlawful?, which, although perhaps addressed to a somewhat narrow audience of nerds such as myself, nevertheless has created shock waves in the complacent world of federal bureaucrats who had for decades engaged in rampant unconstitutional practices without effective challenge.

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MIT Weighs In On Energy Storage

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MIT Weighs In On Energy Storage

  • As I’ve been pointing out now for a couple of years, the obvious gap in the plans of our betters for a carbon-free “net zero” energy future is the problem of massive-scale energy storage.

  • How exactly is New York City (for example) going to provide its citizens with power for a long and dark full-week period in the winter, with calm winds, long nights, and overcast days, after everyone has been required to change over to electric heat and electric cars — and all the electricity is supposed to come from the wind and sun, which are neither blowing nor shining for these extended periods?

  • Can someone please calculate how much energy storage will be needed to cover a worst-case solar/wind drought, what it will consist of, how long it has to last, how much it will cost, and whether it is economically feasible? Nearly all descriptions by advocates of the supposed path to “net zero” — including the ambitious plans of the states of New York and California — completely gloss over this issue and/or deal with it in a way demonstrating total incompetence and failure to comprehend the problem.

  • And then suddenly appeared in my inbox a couple of weeks ago a large Report with the title “The Future of Energy Storage: An Interdisciplinary MIT Study.”

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A Chink In The Armor Of The Progressive Administrative State

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  • The great mission of the early twentieth century Progressives was to transform our constitutional order without ever amending the Constitution itself. The intellectual leader of the movement was Woodrow Wilson. The fundamental idea was to replace the messy and contentious system of separated powers and slow bi-cameral lawmaking with a cadre of supposedly apolitical administrative “experts” who could run the country smoothly and efficiently.

  • The idea sounded rather benign to most people at the time, and probably still sounds benign to most people today. Who could be against having “experts” to run significant government agencies?

  • But a hundred-plus years into this project, we have seen cancerous growth of vast administrative bureaucracies, outside the constitutional structure, and exercising great powers, but accountable to no one but themselves — the very antithesis of the constitutional structure that our founders attempted to bequeath to us.

  • Last week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans knocked a significant chink in the structure under which many of these agencies operate.

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What Do You Believe About The Sussman/Baker Conversation?

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  • The first week of the Michael Sussman criminal trial has now ended.

  • Sussman stands accused by Special Counsel John Durham of “lying to the FBI.” Lying to the FBI is a crime. (It’s covered by 18 USC Section 1001.). The alleged lie happened at a meeting that occurred on September 19, 2016. That was about a month and a half before the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and thus at the very height of the campaign.

  • At the time, Sussman was a partner at the Perkins Coie law firm, and Perkins Coie was counsel both to the Democratic Party and to the Clinton Presidential campaign.

  • On the September 19 date, Sussman met at his request at FBI headquarters with Bureau General Counsel James Baker. In the meeting, Sussman asserted he had learned of something the Bureau should investigate, namely a supposed secret “back channel” between Russia’s Alfa Bank and the Trump campaign. Special Counsel Durham alleges that both before and at the meeting Sussman represented that he was acting as a private citizen, and not on behalf of any client, in bringing this information to the attention of the Bureau.

  • Just curious: What do you believe was really going on here?

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Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030?

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Can California Really Achieve 85% Carbon-Free Electricity By 2030?

  • In the contest to be the most virtuous of all the states on the “carbon-free” electricity metric, the race is on between California and New York.

  • In 2018 California enacted a bill going by the name “SB100,” which set a mandatory target of 60% of electricity from “renewables” by 2030 (and 100% by 2045). Not to be outdone, New York responded by enacting its “Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act” in 2019, setting its own statutory targets of 70% of electricity from renewables by 2030 (and 100% by 2040).

  • So is any of this real? Or is it just so much posturing to show conformity with current fashions, all of which will be forgotten by the time the now-seemingly-distant deadlines approach? As to New York, I have had multiple posts (for example here and here) explaining how the supposedly mandatory goals are completely unrealistic as to both feasibility and cost, and how the people charged with achieving the goals have no idea what they are doing.

  • Is California any less clueless? The short answer is “no.”

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Harvard Progressives Covering Up For Their Systemic Racist Friends

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Harvard Progressives Covering Up For Their Systemic Racist Friends

  • It has been obvious for quite a while that pandemic-induced school closings and extended remote learning were going to have substantial negative effects on development among K-12 students.

  • Equally obvious has been that Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — which include essentially all of the major cities with high concentrations of poor and minority students in the education system — have indulged in the longest school closures and the most remote learning.

  • Clearly, this would lead to major negative results for the poor and minority students in these jurisdictions, particularly as compared to the students in places where schools mostly remained open for in-person learning.

  • A big new Report out from the Center for Educational and Policy Research at Harvard (and other institutes with similarly long names) now confirms the facts that we all knew were coming. The Report is titled “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic,” and has a date of May 2022. The lead author is Dan Goldhaber. This is a very large and well-funded study. It relies on data collected from some 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states.

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