Susan Monarez Tries To Justify The CDC And Herself

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  • By some strange coincidence, no sooner did I write yesterday’s post about the thoroughly corrupt CDC and its recently-fired Director, Susan Monarez, than there turns up in today’s Wall Street Journal an op-ed by the same Ms. Monarez trying to justify herself and the agency with regard to HHS Secretary RFK, Jr.

  • The headline is “Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the CDC and Me.” The sub-headline (online edition only) is “I was fired after 29 days because I held the line and insisted on rigorous scientific review.” The article is behind the Journal’s paywall, so I will provide some substantial quotes.

  • The theme of the piece, well-summarized in the sub-headline, is that Ms. Monarez, with the help of CDC colleagues, was fired for trying to hold the line against “pressure to compromise science itself.”

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The CDC: Riddled With Metastatic Woke Cancer

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  • Last week the newly-confirmed head of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Susan Monarez, was abruptly fired by President Trump, barely a month after receiving her Senate confirmation in July. Although Monarez was new to CDC as of the second Trump term, her career in high-level government positions runs back to through the Biden, Trump I, and Obama administrations.

  • Upon announcement of Monarez’s firing, the press was immediately filled with reports of “turmoil” at the agency. At least four other high-ranking officials resigned in protest. In addition, large numbers of staffers came forward (anonymously) to complain of the supposedly “anti-science” approach being taken by Trump and his HHS Secretary, RFK, Jr.

  • Do you have the impression that CDC is a useful agency, “following the science” and protecting the public health? If so, you haven’t been paying attention to the news for the past several years (or more).

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Appeals Court Rules That President Trump's Emergency Tariff Gambit Is Unlawful

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  • One of the signature initiatives of President Trump’s second term has been what I have called the “tariff gambit” — the rapid blizzard of tariff actions, including declarations of emergencies, tariff impositions, increases and decreases in rates, postponements, and negotiations of new trade deals with various countries.

  • In several prior posts, including here and here, I have raised a series of concerns with this area of the President’s policies.

  • Putting aside for a moment the question of whether these various tariff initiatives constitute good public policy, a separate question is whether the President has a legal basis to impose, raise and lower tariffs on his own authority, even if he declares a “national emergency.”

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A Mini Scorecard For President Trump's First Seven Months of Term Two

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  • In Federalist Number 70, one of the most often-cited of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton famously made his pitch for a strong unitary executive as provided for in the then-proposed Constitution:

  • Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy. . . .

  • Our current President Trump carries the concept of “energy in the executive” to an extreme level, undertaking a dizzying array of initiatives, with new ones emerging so rapidly that it is difficult to keep up.

  • Many of Trump’s initiatives have corrected disastrous and destructive policies of the Biden and Obama years. But with so many initiatives, perhaps it is inevitable that some will be misfires; or perhaps Trump lacks a capacity for self-criticism to distinguish his good ideas from the bad ones.

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Department Of Energy Report On The Impacts Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

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  • On July 29 — the same day that EPA initiated the process of revoking the absurd “endangerment finding” that demonizes CO2 emissions from energy production (covered at Manhattan Contrarian here) — there was another equally momentous development on the energy front at the federal government.

  • On that day, the Department of Energy released a lengthy Report with the title “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate.” (Although the Report bears a date of July 23, the 29th appears to be the date when it was signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright and officially released.)

  • The Report is attributed to something called the “Climate Working Group,” consisting of five prominent members of the climate skeptic community: John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer.

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The Fate Of The U.S. If The Left Got Control Of The Supreme Court

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  • Currently at the U.S. Supreme Court, the conservatives hold a 6-3 majority. While there are exceptions, most of the politically sensitive cases break along the 6-3 ideological lines.

  • Recent prominent examples of cases breaking in that way include Trump v. CASA (limiting the ability of district judges to issue nationwide injunctions against executive actions); U.S. v. Skrmetti (upholding Tennessee statute banning transgender surgeries on minors); and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (ending the rule that courts should “defer” to administrative agencies as to interpretation of their regulations). In these and numerous other cases, the three liberal justices (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) would have reached the opposite result.

  • But the 6-3 conservative majority is very much a result of happenstance.

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