“”Federal law is clear: patients have the right to stabilizing hospital emergency room care no matter where they live,” said Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. “Women should not have to be near death to get care.”
In July, HHS issued new guidance stating that EMTALA’s provision for stabilizing treatment includes a right to an abortion in some circumstances. “If a state law prohibits abortion and does not include an exception for the health or life of the pregnant person—or draws the exception more narrowly than EMTALA’s emergency medical condition definition—that state law is preempted,” the agency said.
No existing abortion ban lacks an exception for a mother’s life, but some do omit exceptions for women’s health. And determining whether something counts as a life-threatening emergency—as opposed to a mere health-threatening emergency—isn’t so clear-cut. Many pregnancy complications could become life-threatening while not being necessarily or immediately so. The HHS guidance attempts to provide clarity, stating that regardless of what a state law says, physicians must provide an abortion if one is necessary to address an emergency medical condition (including, but not limited to, ectopic pregnancy or severely high blood pressure).
Texas sued over the HHS directive. Joined by the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and the Christian Medical and Dental Association (CMDA), the state sought to have the HHS “abortion mandate” declared “unlawful, unconstitutional and unenforceable” and for the court to issue a preliminary injunction on its enforcement.”
“These “get off my lawn” conservatives claim to be upholding the principle of local control by arguing that local government officials rather than bureaucrats in far-off Sacramento get to make development decisions. It sounds good in theory given the Jeffersonian concept that the government closest to the people governs best.
The better quotation (actually used by Henry David Thoreau but often misattributed to Thomas Jefferson) is “that government is best which governs the least.” The goal—for those of us who value freedom—isn’t to allow the right government functionary to control us, but to have less government control overall.
Local officials are easier to kick out of office than officials in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., but the locals can be extremely abusive. They know where we live, after all. I’ve reported extensively on California’s defunct redevelopment agencies, and local tyrants would routinely abuse eminent domain under the guise of local control.
“Under S.B. 9, cities are required to approve these lot splits ‘ministerially,’ without any reviews, hearings, conditions, fees or environmental impact reports,” complains my Southern California News Group colleague, Susan Shelley.
Oh, please.
Conservatives have for decades complained about the subjective nature of bureaucratic and public reviews, the evils of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and excessive fees. Now there’s a law that fixes that, albeit in a limited manner, and they are grabbing their pitchforks.
S.B. 9 and S.B. 10 do not put Sacramento bureaucrats in charge of the locals. Instead, they deregulate certain development decisions, by requiring officials to approve a project “by right” provided it meets all the normal regulations. It eliminates subjectivity and defangs CEQA. Yet this greatly upsets them.”
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“If conservatives seriously believe local control is the trump card, then they should lobby for the repeal of Proposition 13, which is a state-imposed restriction on local governments’ authority to raise property taxes. I find Prop. 13 to be one of the best laws ever passed in this state. They should also oppose Republican efforts at the federal level to limit the ability of blue states to regulate the heck out of us.”
“A recent study of the program’s effects from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) finds that the majority of the funds spent by the program went to business owners and shareholders rather than to workers themselves. Ultimately, “only 23 to 34 percent of the program’s funds went directly to workers who would have otherwise lost their jobs.” The jobs it did keep in place were preserved at very high cost—somewhere between $170,000 and $257,000 a year, far more than the typical earnings of affected workers, which are closer to $58,000 per year.
While the PPP was able to save some jobs, albeit, at a very high cost, the overall result of the program was precisely the opposite of what was intended. The purpose of the program was to preserve the jobs of wage workers, not to funnel money to business owners. As David Autor, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and the lead researcher behind the paper, told The New York Times recently, “it turns out [the money] didn’t primarily go to workers who would have lost jobs. It went to business owners and their shareholders and their creditors.” The program, he added, was “highly regressive.””
“Contrary to what the Times reported, that policy is not “legally shaky.” It relies on the well-established anti-commandeering doctrine, which says the federal government cannot compel state and local officials to enforce its criminal laws or regulatory schemes.
That doctrine is rooted in the basic design of our government, which limits Congress to a short list of specifically enumerated powers and leaves the rest to the states or the people, as the 10th Amendment makes clear. That division of powers gives states wide discretion to experiment with different policies, some of which are bound to offend the Times.
The paper suggests that defending state autonomy is disreputable, because that argument was “deployed in the past in the South to resist antislavery and civil rights laws.” But federalism does not give states a license to violate rights guaranteed by the Constitution or to flout laws authorized by it.
Although the Times tries to tar the anti-commandeering principle as racist, the same basic idea was a crucial weapon for Northern states that refused to help the federal government enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Today that principle likewise means that state and local officials have no obligation to participate in the “deportation crackdowns” that the Times decries.
Similarly, the ongoing collapse of marijuana prohibition—a development the Times welcomes—would be impossible if states were obligated to participate in the federal war on weed. While both progressives and conservatives might wish that federalism could be limited to achieving results they like, that is not how constitutional principles work.”
“Establishing new Cabinet departments in the US isn’t that unusual either. In fact, more than half of the government’s 15 active departments have been formed in just the past 75 years. But among these executive-level departments and in all the hundreds of federal agencies, not one has a mission solely dedicated to the climate crisis.”
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“When the US faced grave security threats in the past, it rose to those challenges by reorganizing the executive branch. For instance, after World War II, Congress enacted the National Security Act of 1947 and it was signed by President Truman. The Act reorganized military and intelligence branches, established the National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency, and merged the War and Navy department into what became the Department of Defense.
Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the Department of Homeland Security was established, integrating 22 different federal agencies and offices into one unified Cabinet department. In a message to Congress on June 18, 2002, President George W. Bush wrote: “History teaches us that new challenges require new organizational structures. History also teaches us that critical security challenges require clear lines of responsibility and the unified effort of the US Government.””
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“legion of civil servants, who have devoted their careers to combating climate change, are fragmented and lack that clear line of responsibility President Bush described as necessary to address critical security challenges. These leading experts could be convened under one broad mission, with the potential for producing unified actions and outcomes far greater than the sum of their disaggregated parts.
Just as the Department of Homeland Security promises “relentless resilience” to attacks against the United States, a Department of Climate could deploy this same mindset, ensuring the US has the foundation it needs to take on the threats climate change poses to this nation and to future generations.”
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“federal health agencies’ ability to focus on climate-related health impacts is currently inadequate. This is in part due to leadership that is dismissive of climate change — and in part because their attention is, understandably, on the Covid-19 pandemic. And the 2018 hurricane season before that, and Zika before that, and Ebola before that. While the CDC and other health agencies are full of experts working to mitigate climate-related health threats, their priorities will always be driven by the next new global health crisis — and by each new administration’s political whims.
A new department would not be completely immune to the same geopolitical winds that tug on other federal agencies’ attention; but a dedicated budget and clear language in its mission mandating action on climate change would better position it against such winds. Instead of each new administration interpreting whether work on climate falls within the scope of an agency’s mission, there would be no question that addressing climate change is within the purview of a Department of Climate.
While there are many offices or divisions across numerous agencies engaged in work related to energy or transportation, these cross-cutting topics nevertheless have Cabinet-level leadership and congressionally determined budgets to ensure their missions are met regardless of who sits in the White House. As with education, labor, or agriculture, we should have a Department of Climate so that our nation always has the clear dedication of resources it needs to concentrate on crucial issues.”
“This fiscal year, 2020, the federal government will collect $3.6 trillion in tax revenues. But due to its spending addiction, the government will expend $4.6 trillion. This means that the government will have to borrow $1 trillion this year alone, in order to cover a deficit of 4.6 percent of GDP. This is the first trillion-dollar deficit not due to a global recession.”
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“Thankfully, the economy is doing well for now. This good performance is masking many of the ill effects, not just of the trade war but also of our overall fiscal situation. The reality, however, is that a growing economy during a time of peace should not be accompanied by growing deficits.”