Once again, the Secretary of HHS is threatening insurance companies who say they are raising rates in response to the coming Health Care Reform. This kind of thing is, if nothing else, disturbing because of the assymetry of power between a federal regulatory agency and the industry it regulates. If thre is fraud, prosecute it. Making threats is simply an attempt to suppress speech.
Category: Government
BATF Budget Growth
Dave Hardy at Of Arms and the Law posted a link to a Congressional Research Service analysis of the BATF budget for FY 2011. He notes that their budget has doubled in the past ten years while the number of employees has only increased from about 4,100 to 5,100.
As some have said, the only area of the economy growing seems to be government. Dave adds firearm sales to the mix as well.
Making Assumptions
The old saying about avoiding assumptions because when you assume you make an ass out of you and me is correct. Yesterday, a number of non-gun bloggers saw the notice about hearings to be held by the Senate Judiciary Committe next week. The title of the hearings was “Firearms in Commerce: Assessing the Need for Reform in the Federal Regulatory Processâ€. They immediately thought this was some backdoor effort by Democrats to get back at us bitter clingers now since they might not have a chance after the coming elections.
Gun bloggers, on the other hand, were not so ready to jump to this conclusion. Instead most readily connected these hearings to the BATFE Reform Act when has been working its way through Congress. The House version, HR 2296, has 240 co-sponsors and the Senate bill, S. 941, has 36 co-sponsors including Pat Leahy, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And guess what? The primary focus of the hearings will be on S. 941. I have a “for background purposes” release on No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money that I received this morning from Erica Chabot, the Committe Press Secretary.
The bottom line is the most obvious answer is often the correct answer. It was in this case.
Mayor Daley hangs it up
Mayor Daley has announced that he will not be seeking another term. Wonder if he’s hoping to get away with his bundle before the hue and cry is raised?
A proposed amendment to the US constitution (Updated)
I would like to suggest the following amendment to the US constitution:
No person shall be convicted of a felonious crime or subject to lengthy term of imprisonment or loss of civil rights, or ruinous fine, or a sentence of death, save that either:
1)The intent of the accused to knowingly commit the specific alleged crime be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in open court
OR
2)The felonious actions of the accused be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in open court to have resulted in actual bodily injury, actual physical harm, or death, to another person
The goal here is to require intent for non-injurious crimes; no more strict liability.
(Edited to add the italicized words – the accused must have either meant to commit a crime or the injury must have been serious enough to merit a felony indictment. Please pass the BATFE and Sen Lautenberg some Kleenex)
History of the Sheriff
Under Anglo-Saxon rule it was the duty of the citizens themselves to see that the law was not broken, and if it was, to catch the offenders. All the males in the community between the ages of 12 and 60 were responsible for this duty. They were organized in groups of about ten families, and each group was called a “tything”: At their head was a “tythingman.” Each member of the tything was held responsible for the good behavior of the others. Ten tythings were led by a “reeve.” If one member committed a crime, the others had to catch him and bring him before the court, or the “moot” as the Saxons called it. If they failed to do so they were all punished, usually by paying a fine. If anyone saw a crime he raised a “hue and cry” and all men had to join in the chase to catch the criminal and bring him before the court. Under Alfred the Great, (A.D. 871-901), reeves began to be combined, forming “shires” or counties. Each shire was led by a reeve. For minor offenses, people accused of crimes were brought before the local “folk moot.” More serious cases went to the “Shire Court,” which came under the “shire reeve” (meaning “keeper and chief of his county”), who came to be known as the Sheriff. After the Normans conquered England in A.D. 1066, they adopted many Anglo-Saxon law keeping methods, including the system of tythings, the use of the hue and cry, and the Sheriff’s courts. In A.D. 1085, King William ordered a compilation of all taxable property in a census, and decreed that the Sheriff was to be the official tax collector of the king.
Read the whole thing. I found it to be quite interesting.
UPDATE: If you think about it, this type of system is probably what made English liberty possible. If the King was dependent on the community to enforce the King’s law, then the laws had to largely reflect the values of those communities. You wouldn’t be much interested in catching law breakers over laws that went against the values held in that community, would you? You’d probably spend a lot of time looking the other way. So English law didn’t develop in the same manner as other countries, and when they came here, they brought the law with them. Obviously neither the English nor Americans use this type of system for law enforcement anymore, but the American distrust of centralized police forces is probably rooted in this tradition, and has probably helped keep locally controlled policing, despite the efficiencies that could be gained from centralized police forces. Though most states have State Police, at least in Pennsylvania, they have jurisdiction over our highways, and in any communities that don’t hire local police.
Can You Tell This is a Government Operation?
Only the federal government could screw up printing money. The BBC is noting that the US keep printing billions of dollars worth of coins that no one wants to use:
In hidden vaults across the country, the US government is building a stockpile of $1 coins. The hoard has topped $1.1bn – imagine a stack of coins reaching almost seven times higher than the International Space Station – and the piles have grown so large the US Federal Reserve is running out of storage space.
And it’s apparently going to continue, “because the law requires the US Mint to issue four new presidential coins each year even if most of the previous year’s coins remain in government vaults.” Brilliant. I would not that this Act passed in 2005, meaning this was Republican brilliance. The only way to get Americans to adopt a coin dollar is to stop producing the Greenback. No politician wants to be on the record as voting for that, so we get idiocy instead.
Personally, if it costs the federal government half a billion, to three-quarters of a billion dollars each year to print replacement greenbacks, I’m in favor of switching to coins. But I suspect many Americans are emotionally attached to the Greenback, and my view is a minority one.
The Other Side of the Thin Blue Line
We see regularly on the blogosphere the police getting away with all manner of abuse, in terms of arresting quiet suburban couples who were mistaken for pot growing kingpins, or something like that, but there is also plenty of “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity” out there, and Wyatt’s true detective files are among those:
The officers bring everything up and tell us what happened. To a man, we say, “You can’t lock this guy up for this.†The officers reply that their sergeant told them to lock the man up. Naturally, we asked the officers if the sergeant was coming up here to explain why he did that, the officers replied no. Of course not, because the sergeant knows he was wrong.
Look, in the real world, yeah, this toad probably broke into the vehicle. In the legal world, however, nothing this person did can justify charging him with the theft. Not without a complainant, a witness, or some physical evidence. In the end, we had the toad identified, checked him for active warrants, then released him with no charges.
And because this idiot sergeant ordered his arrest, the toad could have a nice little lawsuit on his hands if he so desired. Only in Philadelphia.
There are plenty of cops out there trying to do the right thing in a world that is decidedly not clearly black or white. I don’t mean to trivialize true abuses of police powers, but quite often the line between the good and the evil is a thin line. That’s something that’s probably lost in this debate.
Texas to EPA: o|oo
Use your imagination, but this is the most satisfying thing I’ve read in quite a while. This document is the State of Texas, in no uncertain terms, telling the EPA and the federal government they can go to hell when it comes to the EPA unilaterally attempting to regulate carbon emissions. More states need to just say no to the feds, on a lot more than just this.
Challenge to Obamacare Survives First Steps
See details over at Volokh. The lawsuit has survived the Government’s motion to dismiss.
UPDATE: More here from Ilya Somin