mandate Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

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VIDEO: Biden Isn’t Joe-King with Mandate

September 18, 2021/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, Healthcare, News, Policy, Politics, Science/by Family Research Council

Attorneys general in 24 states sent a letter to President Biden yesterday, threatening legal action if he follows through on his threat to mandate private companies with more than 100 employees to require their employees either take the coronavirus vaccine, submit to weekly testing, or be fired. One of those attorneys general, Dave Yost of Ohio, explained further on “Washington Watch.”

“What the president said he wanted to do,” said Yost, “seems clearly beyond his authority.” President Biden plans to define coronavirus as an occupational safety hazard to be enforced by the Department of Labor, a step clearly outside the intended purpose of the law, the letter argued.

“Congress writes the laws, not the president. He doesn’t get to govern by dictate,” said Yost. “The difference between a democracy and a monarchy or a dictatorship is that in a democracy laws have to be written by a representative body, a congress or a parliament. In a monarchy or a dictatorship, one executive decides what the rules are and they enforce them. That is just fundamentally opposite our constitutional order.”

Not only is President Biden circumventing Congress’ authority to write laws, said Yost, but he is interfering with health issues which are properly considered “part of the police power that belongs to the states.” (Thus, to date, the CDC has issued only recommended guidelines, which state health departments have adopted, modified, or rejected. Mask mandates and lockdowns were widely issued by state governors, but the federal government only issued a mask mandate covering areas of federal jurisdiction, like federal property and air travel.)

Everyone, even the Biden administration, understands the president lacks the authority for such a mandate. “They know they don’t have the legal authority,” Yost explained, “but they do it knowing it’ll be in the courts forever.” President Biden’s strategy seems strikingly similar to one he employed only weeks ago, when he unilaterally extended an illegal moratorium on evictions, in direct violation of a Supreme Court ruling. Then, Biden admitted his action was illegal, but he was simply buying time for his policies. He said he sought the “ability to, if we have to appeal, to keep this going for a month at least. I hope longer.”

In striking down Biden’s eviction moratorium, the Supreme Court stated clearly that the Constitution “does not permit agencies to act unlawfully even in pursuit of desirable ends.” They added, “we expect Congress to speak clearly when authorizing an agency to exercise powers of ‘vast economic and political significance.'” It seems President Biden is simply calculating he can force many businesses to comply with his diktat before the Supreme Court obliterates it.

Yost said the attorneys general would likely ask for a temporary restraining order — when the administration actually produces a regulation. “Right now, it’s not in effect.” (Some private companies have begun requiring vaccination as a condition of employment, but that is their own decision.)

The silver lining of President Biden’s brazen lawlessness is that it serves to highlight the checks and balances of America’s federal system. When you don’t live in a monarchy ruled by King Joseph the First. When 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue overreaches, it triggers a reaction across town at the Supreme Court. But it also triggers a larger wave of resistance from those governments outside the Washington beltway that actually listen to the American people.

COLUMN BY

Joshua Arnold

Media Coordinator. As media coordinator, Joshua serves under the Vice President of Communications in a number of ways, including coordinating interview requests, editing op-eds and press releases, and assisting in various capacities with the Washington Watch radio show.

Joshua hails from Clemson, South Carolina, where he was homeschooled with his five siblings. He graduated from Patrick Henry College with a B.A. in Government and a special emphasis in American Politics and Policy. He later attended the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy and graduated as valedictorian with a Master’s in Public Policy, emphasizing Economics and American Policy. Before joining Family Research Council, Joshua also worked for the National Pro-Life Alliance and parentalrights.org, as well as interning in the White House Office of Speechwriting.

Joshua is passionate about policy research and analysis, specifically about developing innovative solutions to the day’s greatest policy challenges from a biblical perspective. He enjoys participating in the life of his local church and exploring a variety of nerdy hobbies ranging from strategy board games to sci-fi television and book series.

GOP Puts a Lid on Bathroom Crisis

May 17, 2016/in Culture War, Education, Featured, Policy, Politics, Religion/by Dr. Rich Swier

The Family Research Council in an email writes:

Conservatives have wanted to eliminate the Department of Education for decades. And Thursday, President Obama gave them the best reason yet. The agency’s outrageous order that public schools ignore the basic biology of their students in the use of bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers may have finally awakened a sleeping giant.

Parents, governors, House and Senate leaders, religious groups, and superintendents are incensed that the White House would threaten to pull funding for children’s education over something as ridiculous and unpopular as gender-free restrooms.

Within hours of firing off this letter to every public school, college, and university in America, the blowback was fast and fierce. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick (R) and Governor Greg Abbott (R) called on states to resist, insisting that the Lone Star State would give up all of its federal funding before letting the administration bully them on an ideology that the American College of Pediatricians calls “child abuse.” Together with Abbott, Patrick called on schools to ignore the DOE and Justice Department’s guidance. “This will be the end of public education, if this prevails,” he warned. ‘People will pull their kids out, homeschooling will explode, and private schools will increase.”

In local schools, administrators like Rodney Cavness didn’t need convincing. “I got news for President Barack Obama,”the Port-Neches-Groves superintendent told a local news outlet: “That letter is going straight to the paper shredder. I have five daughters myself, and I have 2,500 girls in my protection. Their moms and dads expect me to protect them. And that is what I am going to do. Now I don’t want them bullied… but there are accommodations that can be made short of this. He is destroying the very fiber of this country. He is not a leader. He is a failure.”

Fresh off of his bid for the GOP presidential nomination, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had strong words for the man occupying the office he sought.

“Having spent many years in law enforcement, I’ve handled far too many cases of child molesters, of pedophiles, of people who abused little kids. The threats of predators are serious, and we should not facilitate allowing grown men or boys to be in bathrooms with little girls… I encourage every school superintendent, school board, and parent across this nation to disregard this barely veiled threat from the White House aimed at overturning the utterly reasonable practice of preventing men and boys from entering girls’ restrooms and changing rooms. As a father of young girls, I wouldn’t want my daughters being forced to change in the same room as men and boys. It’s that simple. And parents across this country shouldn’t have to tolerate it either.”

His Texas and Tennessee colleagues, John Cornyn (R) and Lamar Alexander (R), agreed, insisting that the president’s job “is not to intervene in state and local affairs under our constitutional scheme.” “Frankly,” Cornyn went on, “I think his involvement is unwelcome.” From Arkansas to Ground Zero in North Carolina, leaders were irate over the White House’s power grab.

The Ethanol Mandate Is Literally Impossible by Alan Reynolds

February 5, 2016/in Energy, Policy, Politics, Science, Taxes/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

In recent years, politicians set impossibly high mandates for the amounts of ethanol motorists must buy in 2022, while also setting impossibly high standards for the fuel economy of cars sold in 2025. To accomplish these conflicting goals, motorists are now given tax credits to drive heavily-subsidized electric cars, even as they will supposedly be required to buy more and more ethanol-laced fuel each year.

Why have such blatantly contradictory laws received so little criticism, if not outrage? Probably because ethanol mandates and electric car subsidies are lucrative sources of federal grants, loans, subsidies and tax credits for “alternative fuels” and electric cars. Those on the receiving end lobby hard to keep the gravy train rolling while those paying the bills lack the same motivation to become informed, or to organize and lobby.

With farmers, ethanol producers and oil companies all sharing the bounty, using subsidies and mandates to pour ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into motorists’ gas tanks has been a win-win deal for politicians and the interest groups that support them and a lose-lose deal for consumers and taxpayers.

The political advantage of advocating contradictory future mandates is that the goals usually prove ridiculous only after their promoters are out of office. This is a bipartisan affliction.

In his 2007 State of the Union Address, for example, President Bush called for mandating 35 billion gallons of biofuels by 2017, an incredible target equal to one-fourth of all gasoline consumed in the United States in 2006. Not to be outdone, “President Obama said during the presidential campaign that he favored a 60 billion gallon-a-year target.”

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) did not go quite as far as Bush or Obama, at least in the short run. It required 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol by 2015 (about 2 billion more than were actually sold), but 36 billion gallons of all biofuels by 2022 (which would be more than double last year’s sales). The 2007 energy law also raised corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for new cars to 35 miles per gallon by 2030, which President Obama in 2012 ostensibly raised to 54.5 mpg by 2025 (a comically precise guess, since requirements are based on the size of vehicles we buy).

The 36 billion biofuel mandate for 2022 is the mandate Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (and Donald Trump) now vigorously defend against the rather gutsy opposition of Sen. Ted Cruz. But it is impossible to defend the impossible: Ethanol consumption can’t possibly double as fuel consumption falls.

From 2004 to 2013, cars and light trucks consumed 11% less fuel. The Energy Information Agency likewise predicts that fuel consumption of light vehicles will fall by another 10.1% from 2015 to 2022. So long as ethanol is no more than 10% of a gallon (much higher than Canada or Europe), ethanol use must fall as we use less gasoline rather than rise, as the mandates require. If we ever buy many electric cars or switch from corn to cellulosic sources of ethanol, as other impossible mandates pretend, then corn-based ethanol must fall even faster.

If raising ethanol’s mandated share above 10% is any politician’s secret plan, nobody dares admit it. Most pre-2007 cars can’t handle more than 10 percent ethanol without damage, and drivers of older cars often lack the income or wealth to buy a new one. Since ethanol is a third less efficient than gasoline, adding more ethanol would also make it even more impossible for car companies to comply with Obama’s wildly-ambitious fuel economy standards (which must also reduce ethanol use, if they work).

The 2007 law also mandated an astonishing 16 billion gallons of nonexistent “cellulosic” ethanol by 2022 from corn husks or whatever. We were already supposed to be using a billion gallons of this marvelous snake oil by 2013. Despite lavish taxpayer subsidies, however, production of cellulosic biofuel was only about 7.8 million barrels a month by April, 2015 (about 94 million a year). The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandate in June 10, 2015 was 230 million billion in 2016, which is more fantasy.

It doesn’t help that the Spanish firm Abenoga – which received $229 million from U.S. taxpayers to produce just 1.7 million gallons of ethanol – is trying to sell its plant in Kansas to avoid the bankruptcy fate of cellulosic producer KiOR. It also doesn’t help that a $500,000 federally-funded study paid finds biofuels made with corn residue release 7% more greenhouse gases than gasoline.

The contradictory, fantastic and often scandalous history of ethanol mandates illustrates the increasing absurdity of mandates from Congress and the EPA.

The 2007 biofuel mandate was not just bad policy. It was and remains an impossible, bizarre policy.

This post first appeared at Cato.org.

Alan Reynolds

Alan Reynolds is one of the original supply-side economists. He is Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and was formerly Director of Economic Research at the Hudson Institute.

VIDEO: It’s Easy Being Green When You Have No Choice

July 2, 2015/in Environment, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Science/by Dr. Rich Swier

This feature film is narrated by Brian Sussman, San Francisco radio host (KSFO) and best-selling author of Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam and Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s green Agenda Will Dismantle America.

Some may say there is only circumstantial evidence and others may say it is just a coincidence, however, the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio that presented Agenda 21 and introduced sustainable development to the world as the solution to save the planet from man made global warming likely would not have happened if the Soviet Union continued to be the main rival to America and Western Civilization.

To learn more visit: www.GreenFlick.com. Watch the trailer:

To purchase a copy of the full length film click here.

Collectivism in SW Florida

June 1, 2015/in Budget and Finance, Culture War, Environment, Featured, News, Taxes/by Dr. Rich Swier

Ayn Rand wrote a short nineteen page paper asking: What is the basic issue facing the world today? Rand, in her paper makes the case that, “The basic issue in the world today is between two principles: Individualism and Collectivism.” Rand defines these two principles as follows:

Individualism – Each man exists by his own right and for his own sake, not for the sake of the group.
Collectivism – Each man exists only by the permission of the group and for the sake of the group.

The idea of collectivism is alive and well not just in Washington, D.C. but also in SW Florida. Specifically, in the Englewood Water District, which has decided to forsake the individual and vote in favor of the collective. Government at every level has a propensity to expand, and with that expansion it takes power from the poor in the name of the “greater good”.

According to the Englewood Water District website:

A small group of members from the Englewood Chamber of Commerce formed a “water committee” in 1955 to look into the water “situation.” During the next 4 years they had the perseverance, determination, and dedication to make the Englewood Water District a reality. They fought the odds, and the obstacles, because they saw the need to develop a high-quality, clean water system that would provide for the present and future Englewood. As they moved forward in their efforts, they learned the water and sanitary system could be owned and managed by the people of Englewood and not an outside source. They realized not only would residents’ health conditions be jeopardized without a water and sanitary system, but also the Lemon Bay environment. [Emphasis added]

So what is it that this “water committee” is proposing that has residents of the V9C District of Englewood, FL and others so agitated? The Englewood Water District has decided that for the “greater good” a group of citizens living in the V9C District of Englewood who currently use septic tanks must now pay (read imposed tax) to hook up to the city sewer system, whether they want to or not. Data shows there is no threat to the existing water quality or health conditions of those living in Englewood.

The bottom line: The 314 families living in Englewood’s V9C District are being forced to do something that they do not want to do, nor need to do.

Kathy Bolam, member of the Board of the South Venice Civic Association and the Governmental Affairs Committee, at a Sarasota Board of County Commission meeting testified:

Government was formed by the people to protect our rights and defend us from enemies whether foreign or domestic. That’s why we are asking your voice to be added to ours, because Englewood Water District in a bill passed by the Florida legislature in 2004, called their Enabling Act took away all property rights from the people living in the V9C district. The people in this district never were told about this bill, didn’t get the chance to read it or respond. As a result the EWD board of Supervisors feel empowered to expand their sewer program whether there is a public health or environmental need and whether the people want it or can afford it.

The results of their program will result in several families losing their homes. The area is mostly made up of retirees on fixed incomes and working single mothers, and small families. Those who cannot make the full payment when invoiced of $8,666.94 will then have $834.99 added to their property tax bill for 15 years. If they do not pay those taxes, the tax lien will be sold, and they will lose their home. One lady’s current tax bill is less than $500.00 and she stated that after paying her mortgage, etc. she has barely enough money to eat. Instead of decreasing the amount of homeless people, this action by EWD will increase it. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a speech on Jan 7, 2015 quote “Since 1980, guess how much of the growth in income the 90% got? Nothing. None. Zero. In fact, it’s worse than that. The average family not in the top 10% makes less money than a generation ago.” Close quote. People just cannot afford to pay for something, they don’t need and don’t want just because a government body assumes they have the authority and power.

According to the Florida Constitution at Article 1 Section 1, it states that “All political power is inherent in the people.” Therefore, the voice of the people supercedes the goals of the EWD Board of Supervisors. Therefore, we ask you to send a fax, e-mail to that Board requesting that they be true to their Oath of the U.S. Constitution and the Florida Constitution and not violate the “voice of the people.”

According to Bolam, “Jerry Paul who was the local state representative for this area will be at the meeting talking about funding. He was the state representative in 2004 and was responsible for the Enabling Act. He currently is a lobbyist (Capitol Energy Florida) for EWD and for Key Agency (EWD co-chair Mr. Fogo is financially connected to Key Agency). EWD renewed their insurance coverage with Key Agency.”

The Englewood Water District is moving forward and a final vote on taking the property of these families will occur on Thursday, June 4th, 2015 at 8:00 a.m. Citizens may call the Englewood Water District at 941-474-3217 to voice their opinions on this issue or attend the meeting at 201 Selma Ave, Englewood, FL.

New York Federal Reserve: Higher Health Costs, More Part-Time Workers from Obamacare

August 19, 2014/in Economy, Healthcare, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation/by Sean Hackbarth

Obamacare puts employers in a bind, two New York Federal Reserve surveys show. Employers’ health care costs continue to rise, and the health care law is driving them to hire more part-time labor, CNBC reports:

The median respondent to the N.Y. Fed surveys expects health coverage costs to jump by 10 percent next year, after seeing a similar percentage increase last year.

Not all firms surveyed said the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is to blame for those cost increases to date. But a majority did, and the percentage of businesses that predicted the ACA will hike such costs next year is even higher than those that said it did this year.

Obamacare’s higher costs will cascade down to consumers. The surveys found that “36 percent of manufacturers and 25 percent of service firms said they were hiking prices in response” to Obamacare’s effects.

The Empire State Manufacturing Survey polls New York State manufacturers, and the Business Leaders Survey polls service firms in the New York Federal Reserve District.

A June Gallup poll found that four in ten Americans are spending more on health care in 2014 than in 2013.

Let’s dig into the numbers.

When asked, “How would you say the ACA has affected the amount your firm is paying in health benefit costs per worker this year?” More than 73% of manufacturers and 58% of service firms said the health care law has increased costs this year.

Companies are also more pessimistic about Obamacare next year. Over 80% of manufacturers and 74% of service firms expect health plan costs to increase in 2015.

New York Federal Reserve Empire State Manufacturing and Business Leaders Surveys

Source: New York Federal Reserve. For a larger view click on the image.

Employers were also asked what effects Obamacare is having on their labor forces. Over 21% of manufacturers and nearly 17% of service firms say they reduced the number of employees because of the law, while only about 2% of each have hired more workers. What’s more, nearly 20% of both manufacturers and service firms say that Obamacare has pushed them to increase their proportion of part-time workers, but just under 5% of each type of firm said they have lowered them. Presumably this is due to the perverse incentives from Obamacare’s employer mandate.

This data fits with research from the Atlanta Federal Reserve that found that since the recession, 25% of firms have a greater share of part-time workers, while only 8% have a lower share. This data also fits with anecdotes from around the country of employers saying that they’re hiring more part-time workers because of Obamacare.

Source: New York Federal Reserve. For a larger view click on the image.

The sad truth is the health care law is pushing higher health costs onto employers and incentivizing them to hire more part-time workers. Despite passing a law in 2010 loaded with rules, regulations, mandates, and taxes, health care reform is needed more than ever. For solutions that that will control health care costs, improve quality, and expand access, check out the U.S. Chamber’s Health Care Solutions Council report.

Follow Sean Hackbarth on Twitter at @seanhackbarth and the U.S. Chamber at @uschamber.