“it’s the FDA’s unnecessary and protectionist rules that effectively ban foreign-made baby formula from being imported into the United States. On Wednesday, the agency announced plans to tweak those rules so foreign formula manufacturers can permanently import their goods into the U.S., giving American consumers greater choice in the marketplace and ensuring more robust supply chains.”
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” When the Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan was forced to close temporarily due to an FDA investigation into possible contamination, it created a supply shock that left store shelves empty and parents scrambling to find formula. Because of the FDA’s protectionist rules (and high tariffs levied on foreign-made formula), markets could not adapt quickly to the shortage here in America”
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“In testimony to Congress, FDA officials admitted to botching the response to the contamination at the Abbott plant. But the real culprit of the recent shortage was a deeper and more pervasive one. No matter what nationalists like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) might suggest, closing off the country to international trade is not a recipe for resilience. The baby formula crisis demonstrated that it is quite the opposite.
So it’s good to see the FDA admit those mistakes and crack open the door to allowing foreign formula into the U.S. on a permanent basis.
Unfortunately, the list of policy changes the FDA announced..mostly amounts to providing technical assistance to foreign firms that want to sell formula here. That is, offering help in navigating the complex approval process, rather than sweeping aside those regulations entirely. If a formula maker has passed muster under E.U. regulations, that should be good enough for the FDA.
There’s also the matter of tariffs on imported formula, which are so high that they effectively make any imported formula uncompetitive in the American market. Why would a foreign manufacturer like Holle or HiPP go through the complicated FDA approval process (even after the announced changes) if it knows in advance that its goods won’t be able to compete on a level playing field in America?”
“Two Philadelphia-area churches have come under fire from local zoning officials, who say their free meal services, mental health counseling, and monthly pantries aren’t allowed on their properties and will have to stop or else they risk fines.
In early June, Pottstown staff sent letters to Christ Episcopal Church and Mission First, saying that this charitable work went beyond the allowable activities for churches in the borough’s Downtown zoning district.”
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“The two churches can either apply for a zoning variance—which requires going before the borough’s Zoning Hearing Board—or stop the disallowed charitable work. Failure to do either of those things could result in the churches being hit with $500 fines for every day they’re out of compliance.
“It was an absolute surprise when we got this letter,” says Dennis Coleman, the deacon of Christ Episcopal Church. He says that his church has been providing meals and an “essentials” pantry for years without incident.”
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“Even when charitable activities are allowed by the zoning code, the process for getting them approved is long and discretionary. Frequently, it will involve public hearings where opponents have the opportunity to urge zoning officials to deny permits for a new soup kitchen or shelter.”
“The Second Amendment states that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Thus, it is the rare constitutional provision that not only declares the existence of a right, but also states the reason why this right exists. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect “a well regulated Militia.” That’s what the plain text of the Constitution provides.
But Thomas’s opinion in Bruen, much like the Court’s earlier decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), thumbs its nose at the text of the Constitution.”
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“The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — are likely to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”
The case involves a 109-year-old New York state law which requires anyone who wishes to carry a handgun in public, whether openly or concealed, to demonstrate “proper cause” before they can obtain a license to do so. An applicant must show “a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.”
Similar laws exist in five other states — California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey — plus the District of Columbia. Together, these jurisdictions make up about a quarter of the US population, and a much higher percentage of the country’s urban population. In effect, that has meant very few residents of those states have been able to legally carry a handgun in public.
Writing solely for the Court’s Republican appointees, Justice Clarence Thomas strikes down New York’s century-old law. He also establishes a whole new (confusing) framework for evaluating gun control laws. Bruen establishes a “text, history, and tradition test” that purports to be rooted in, well, the text of the Constitution, and the history of English and early American gun laws.
In reality, however, Thomas’s new test takes extraordinary liberties with the text of the Second Amendment, which explicitly states that the purpose of the right to bear arms is to protect service in a militia.
And when it comes to “history,” “the Court’s near-exclusive reliance on history is not only unnecessary, it is deeply impractical,” as Breyer chastises Thomas in dissent. That’s because judges are ill-equipped to conduct the kind of multi-century historical survey that Thomas’s new framework demands.
Worse, Thomas announces that the government bears the burden of showing that any gun law “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” But if “tradition” is so important, why must New York’s 100-year-old law fall? As a practical matter, moreover, that Thomas places the burden of proof on the government means many gun laws are likely to fall because, when the historical record is unclear, the government loses.”
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“As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias, and the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.”
But Heller upended that. And quoting from Heller, Thomas writes that “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.” And therefore gun regulations should be judged according to whether they undermine this atextual purpose invented by Republican appointees to the Supreme Court.
Similarly, Thomas writes that courts should determine whether a modern-day gun regulation fits within the nation’s historical traditions by drawing “historical analogies” to early American gun laws.
Thomas’s opinion suggests that these analogies may need to be drawn to laws that existed in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified; or that they may need to be drawn to laws that existed in 1865 — when the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires states to comply with the Second Amendment, was ratified. It declines to resolve questions about which date matters, however, adding another layer of confusion for judges forced to apply Bruen.
In any event, there are fairly obvious reasons why it is hard to draw reliable analogies between modern-day regulations and laws from earlier centuries. Federal law, for example, prohibits civilian ownership of machine guns. But the machine gun was invented in 1884. So a judge searching for early American laws regulating automatic weapons will come up empty, because machine guns did not exist during either the Founding Era or the Reconstruction Era. Does this mean that a ban on machine guns is unconstitutional?
Thomas also writes that “when a challenged regulation addresses a general societal problem that has persisted since the 18th century, the lack of a distinctly similar historical regulation addressing that problem is relevant evidence that the challenged regulation is inconsistent with the Second Amendment.” In other words, modern gun laws that address problems that existed in the 1700s are likely to fall, unless similar laws existed in the 18th century.
For this reason, Thomas concludes that a handgun ban like the one struck down in Heller is unconstitutional because the framers did not ban handguns in order to combat the problem of “firearm violence in densely populated communities.”
But this reasoning is anachronistic. According to the 1790 census, New York City had only 33,131 residents around the time when the Second Amendment was ratified. The second-largest city, Philadelphia, had fewer than 29,000 residents.
Eighteenth-century Americans, in other words, simply did not confront the problem of “firearm violence in densely populated communities.” The most densely populated communities in the 18th-century United States had roughly the same number of people as a small town in modern-day America.”
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“this litany of long-forgotten laws does little to clarify the question of what the framing generation (or perhaps people during Reconstruction) thought about the right to carry a firearm without a permit on city streets. The bottom line is that the six Republican appointees surveyed many centuries worth of gun laws and concluded that they support the Republican Party’s preferred stance on firearms; while the three Democratic appointees surveyed the same laws and concluded that they support the Democratic Party’s preferred stance on firearms.
In fairness, Thomas does offer a workaround for the problem that many modern weapons — from machine guns to intercontinental ballistic missiles — did not exist until very recently and therefore were not regulated by early American lawmakers.
The lesson of history, Thomas claims, is that the Second Amendment protects the right of civilians to carry weapons that “are ‘in common use at the time.’” So an amendment that may have protected the right to own a musket in 1790 now protects the right to own a handgun, because handguns are now commonly used by civilians. Similarly, even Thomas would likely concede that the Second Amendment does not permit civilians to own tanks, nuclear warheads, or other weapons that are not commonly possessed by civilians in 2022.
Judges will no doubt have an easier time determining what kinds of guns are in common use in 2022 than they will determining what 18th-century gun laws have to say about the B-2 stealth bomber. But Thomas’s need to rely on such a workaround from his “text, history, and tradition” framework only emphasizes the uselessness of that framework.”
“The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which passed the Senate 65-33 after weeks of negotiations, doesn’t go as far as many Democrats wanted. But it introduces tailored reforms meant to incentivize states to keep guns out of dangerous people’s hands, provide new protections for domestic violence victims, enhance screening for gun buyers under the age of 21, and crack down on illegal gun purchases and trafficking.
The bill also provides billions of dollars in additional funding for school safety and mental health resources. Democrats have stressed they don’t believe that America’s gun violence epidemic can be solved by investments in mental health resources, as Republicans have argued, but have said that they won’t pass up the opportunity to put more money toward mental health.”
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“Ultimately, 15 Republicans and 50 members of the Democratic caucus ended up joining them in voting for the bill. The vote was bipartisan on the House side too, with 14 GOP lawmakers — including Rep. Tony Gonzales, whose district includes Uvalde — voting yes.”
“the decision means that agencies like the EPA can’t create regulations that have expansive social and economic impacts on their own, despite decades of precedent doing exactly that. Such rules would now require Congress to specifically create laws to implement them, and given the difficulty of passing any federal legislation, it would drastically impair the EPA’s ability to regulate the pollution that’s heating up the planet.”
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“Many of these other cases are still underway, but depending on how they’re decided, they could further erode the government’s tools for addressing the most urgent environmental problems.”
“West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency strikes down a federal environmental regulation of power plants that never took effect, that the Biden administration has no intention of reinstating, and that would have accomplished absolutely nothing even if it had be enforced.
Nevertheless, the Court voted along ideological lines to strike down this regulation that the EPA drafted under authority granted by the Clean Air Act, claiming that it amounts to an “extraordinary” overreach by the EPA. And their decision has enormous implications both for the environment and for the federal government more broadly.
At the very least, the West Virginia decision strips the EPA of its authority to shift energy production away from dirty coal-fired plants and toward cleaner methods of energy production — although market forces have thus far accomplished much of this shift on their own, because coal-fired plants are often more expensive to operate than cleaner plants. The decision could also lead to additional limits on the EPA’s ability to regulate that industry going forward.
The West Virginia decision confirms something that has been implicit in the Supreme Court’s recent decisions governing federal agencies’ power to issue binding regulations under authority granted by Congress: When a majority of the Supreme Court disagrees with a regulation pushed out by a federal agency, the Court has given itself the power to veto that regulation — and it will do so by invoking something known as the “major questions doctrine.”
Under this doctrine, the Court explained in a 2014 opinion, “we expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” Thus, if a majority of the Court deems a regulation to be too significant, it will strike it down unless Congress very explicitly authorized that particular regulation.
This doctrine comes from nowhere. Last week, the Court said that abortion is unprotected by the Constitution — leaning heavily on the fact that abortion is not mentioned in the Constitution. But the the major questions doctrine is also mentioned nowhere in the Constitution. Nor can it be found in any statute. The justices made it up. And, at least during President Joe Biden’s administration, the Court has wielded it quite aggressively to veto regulations that the Court’s conservative majority finds objectionable.
Roberts’s majority opinion in West Virginia does put some flesh on the fairly bare bones the justices have previously used to describe when they will declare something to be a “major question.” Roberts faults the EPA for issuing a novel kind of regulation pursuant to a “long-extant” statute that had not previously been used to justify similar actions. He claims that the EPA relied on an “ancillary provision” of the Clean Air Act, rather than a more central provision of that law. And he criticizes the EPA for issuing a regulation which resembles bills that Congress previously considered but did not enact.
But these judgments are divorced from the text of the Clean Air Act itself. And Roberts admits that the major questions doctrine can nuke a regulation even when there is a “colorable textual basis” supporting that regulation — that is, when the actual words of a federal law could support the action taken by a federal agency.
The bottom line after the West Virginia decision is that agencies may still exercise regulatory authority, but only subject to a judicial veto. The Supreme Court has effectively placed itself at the head of much of the executive branch of the federal government.”
How Much Of The Gasoline Price Surge Is President Biden’s Fault? Robert Rapier. 2022 3 13. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2022/03/13/how-much-of-the-gasoline-price-surge-is-president-bidens-fault/?sh=31618bce7c8b 4 reasons high gas prices aren’t Joe Biden’s fault—and one critical way he’s adding to the problem Will Daniel. 2022 6 8. Fortune. https://www.yahoo.com/video/4-reasons-high-gas-prices-090000545.html
“as CNN pointed out not long ago, oil companies used to respond like other businesses to rising prices by increasing supply. Burying their industry in red tape and choking off access to capital has been a very effective signal to rethink their entire business strategy. Oil industry insiders may coast along and enjoy the profits from existing capacity, but they’re unlikely to invest in facilities to meet demand for gasoline, and offset soaring prices, until they’re certain their industry will be allowed a future.”
“After ten years of hard work to try and promote innovation and consumer welfare, the European Union has revealed its bold plan: to force device manufacturers to use a single charging standard.
The Eurocrats are now hard at work patting themselves on the back for this glorious outcome of the decade-long “trilogue on the common charger.” By 2024, wired devices sold in the EU must use the USB-C charging port and will not be sold with a charger by default. This is intended to “curb e-waste” and give consumers “more choice.” Can you feel the innovation? Never say the EU does not dream big.
Unless you are one of the 56 million or so Europeans who use iPhones, not much will change. Private companies have converged on common standards for years. Most, if not all, of your devices might already use the nifty USB-C charger, which in addition to being small and symmetrical, allows fast charging to boot.
And some Apple products, like my own MacBook Air, use the USB-C standard too. It is nice to be able to seamlessly charge my phone and my laptop without hassling with extensions.
The problem is the iProducts. Most, but not all, of these famously (or infamously) use Apple’s proprietary Lightning connector, which is incompatible with other companies’ devices. iPhones, iPads, and iPods usually use Lightning connectors, which means people need to have a separate charger for these specific products.
The Lightning charger has few fans today. It’s proprietary, it doesn’t always allow fast charging, and you’ll pay a lot for the privilege. Haters—and there are many—will be tempted to applaud this move by the EU.
But as usual, the EU’s meddling will almost certainly have the opposite effect that it is intending. Instead of “limiting e-waste,” this ban will create millions of useless chargers that will soon head to a landfill.”
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“Although that rat’s nest of old chargers in your bedside table is aesthetically salient (and awful), it’s apparently not a big contributor to this ballyhooed e-waste problem. According to the 2020 Global E-Waste Monitor, chargers represent some 0.1 percent of the 53.6 million metric tons of tech garbage produced each year.
As usual, the EU is spending a lot of time and effort on something that is not that big of a problem in the grand scheme of things.”
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“Apple is not a big fan of the rules, having argued that the prohibition on non-USB-C chargers will limit the kinds of innovations they can offer their customers. This might not convince the well-sized anti-Lightning community, but it is a little rich that professional bureaucrats who have not so much as opened a business in their lives would deign to tell some of the world’s most successful technology companies how to design their products.”