Category: Government

As the hearing are wearing on, I think it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Sonya Sotomayor is in no way, shape or form qualified to sit on the Supreme Court.  If this is not the case, nothing I’ve seen or heard from the hearings is giving me any cause to think otherwise.  But she’s likely going to be confirmed, as the Republicans admit they don’t have the votes to stop her.

I’m not sure she is the worst we could get from Obama.  Given the choice between an intellectually lightweight lefty on the Court, and an intellectually strong lefty, who might be able to persuade other justices, I think I’ll take the former.  Plus, if there’s even a chance we could get her to recuse herself from the incorporation case, that might be something.

But I also think Sotomayor is not as clueless as she’s coming across in the hearings.  I suspect what she’s covering is beliefs that are far outside the mainstream, and views on her role as a judge that are entirely inappropriate for a Supreme Court Justice.  I am honestly torn over what to hope for with her.  Perhaps it’s best to let Obama put his political pick on the Court, and hope that after the midterms, the Republicans might have more numbers to put up a fight when Obama picks his non-political, intellectual ideologue Justice for the Court.

In the Washington Times:

This nation was founded on a set of fundamental freedoms. Our Constitution does not give us those freedoms — it guarantees and protects them. The right to defend ourselves and our loved ones is one of those. The individual right to keep and bear arms is another. These truths are what define us as Americans.

The Supreme Court is compelled to respect the Second and 14th Amendments and to interpret and apply them correctly. The cases in which Judge Sotomayor and her colleagues have mishandled these issues raise serious questions about her fitness to serve on the highest court in the land.

Honestly, after getting the low down on the testimony Bitter watched yesterday, even putting the gun issue aside, I think she has qualification issues.  She was evasive and vague even when asked to articulate basic constitutional issues.  On matters specific, being vague is hardly unique to Sotomayor in a confirmation hearing, but I can remember Roberts being able to cleanly articulate constitutional principles without too much trouble.  She was seemingly incapable of even that.

Volokh reports that Dave Kopel, Steve Halbrook, Sandy Froman, and Ilya Somin will all be testifying at Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings.   At the very least, Sotomayor’s hearing is shaping up to look like some good political theater.

… about bourgeois Bostonians, who wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, terrified at the prospect that there might be people out there having fun.  That, in a nutshell, is northeastern leftism, and for the better part of a century that’s been the predominate philosophy in Washington D.C.

I suppose that’s why the Environmental Protection Agency thinks it’s time to crack down on boaters:

A proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency has boating organizations up in arms. Those organizations are now asking individual boaters for help in letting the EPA know the idea of allowing introduction of a new fuel that has not been independently tested in marine engines isn’t a good one. […]

That was proposed in March after Growth Energy, a pro-ethanol group collected fifty four other groups and petitioned the EPA to allow what is a fifty-percent bump in ethanol and reclassify E-10 fuel as E-15.

The boating industry is highly cyclical. When economic times get tough, people stop buying boats, and start selling them.  It’s devastating to the boating industry.  This is only going to make things worse.  Hope and change, folks.  Hope and change.  This Congress and Administration aren’t about jobs.  It’s about making middle class folks pay for our sins.  A permanently reduced standard of living will be our penance.

Looks like the FDA panel considering regulatory changes to acetominophen has decided that Percoset and Vicodin have to go.  This is going to essentially mean that people who have procedures that cause mild to severe pain, like having wisdom teeth removed, or having a minor surgery, are going to find it very difficult to find pain relief.

Percoset and Vicodin are both combination therapies, combing acetaminophen with oxycodone, in the case of Percoset, and hydrocodone, in the case of Vicodin.  Because of this, they are Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act.  Regulators feel the acetaminophen content makes the drug less likely to be abused, so it is so classified.  That doesn’t stop people from trying, however, and a number of people each year fry their livers either by taking too much, or because they did some failed home chemistry trying to separate the narcotic drug from its codrug.

Oxycodone and hydrocodone, on their own, are both Schedule II drugs, meaning they have a theraputic use, but are likely to cause addiction and be abused.  Doctors are very reluctant to prescribe Schedule II drug, because they attract more heat from regulators.  There are also additional restrictions on Schedule II drugs, such as a doctor’s office not being able to call in a new prescription (it takes a physical, written prescription to make changes to dose, or get a refill).  If this is the only option available, many doctors, oral surgeons, periodontists, and various other medical professionals who often have a need to treat pain, are less likely to prescribe narcotic pain killers.   While this would probably be just fine by regulators, if you’re in pain and can’t find relief, a narcotic is often the only thing that will do the job.

Fortunately, there are a few alternatives, although they are expensive.  One is Vicoprofen, which is a combination of ibuprofen and vicodin.  For many people, it’s a viable alternative to narcotics in combination with acetaminaphen, but for many people, it is not.  Particularly people with gastrointestinal disorders, people taking blood thinners, or people with inflammatory bowel disease.  Another is good old fashioned Tylenol with Codeine, but unfortunately, for 10% or so of the population, their livers lack the enzyme necessary to convert codeine to morphine, which makes the drug’s narcotic component useless to them.

Don’t think, either, that just because many OTC pain releivers and many narcotics are both GRAS, or Generally Reocnigzed as Safe, that you can just combine them at will, and sell them on the market.  Combination therapies have to go through the FDA approval process as if they were new drugs, which means major costs to do the clinical trials.  No pharmaceutical company is going to do that without patent protection.  In short, if Vicoprofen doesn’t work for you, you’re screwed.  You can suffer in pain.  Hope and Change has come, folks!

It’s pretty clear by now that the federal government is completely out of control.  I’m in agreement with Yoseminite Sam about the new Con & Trade scheme recently passed by the House:

To say that I am angry is an understatement. One of the more outrageous parts of this outrageous bill is a requirement for a home energy audit upon selling a home. If your home fails this audit then the seller would have to pay to fix the problems outlined in the audit. So if you have an older home(like me) that has older appliances(like me), you will have to pay thousands of dollars to get new appliances, air conditioners or water heaters even if those appliances are in perfect working order. So much for the reduce, reuse, recycle encomium that the environmentalists keep prating on about. The landfills will be full of these still functioning appliances.

I’m probably a little less angry at the Amerian people though, because polls show that Obama’s policies are unpopular.  I don’t think it’ll be very long until that causes his approval ratings to take a hit.  I think that most people really had no idea what they were getting with Obama, as much as many of us tried to warn them.

But it’s not just Obama.  It’s pretty clear the federal bureaucracy is completely out of control as well.  Just yesterday, for instance, comes this story about the need to further regulate Tylenol.  And this is just the latest in a long line of insults.  It’s like, with the cat out of the White House, the mice now feel like they have free reign over the place.

What’s even more depressing is I don’t see the Republicans in a position to be able to capitalize on the unpopularity of Obama’s policies.  I don’t think we’re going to see a resurgent 1994 “Contract with America.”   Besides, we’ve been through the Republican Revolution once already, and I don’t know if liberty could afford another.

The only way I think we’re going to fix things is to build a movement to amend the Constitution.  If Republicans are smart, I would capitolize on this by calling for a Constitutional amendment.  First things first, we need a balanced budget amendment.  Second I think Republicans really ought to consider pushing Randy Barnett’s Federalism Amendment.  I think it needs some work to make it feasible, but if we can get a handful of states to pass laws opting out of the federal gun control regime, we ought to be able to get them to pass an amendment that limits the power of the national government.

The best part is, we don’t even need the Federal Government to do it.  We’ve been frightened of the idea of a Constitutional Convention, because it would likely be hijacked by the left, but why do we fear that?  Red states, even in the era of Obama, still greatly outnumber blue states.  I don’t think there’s much danger the country is going to adopt a new socialist constitution.

Given the nature of political life in this country, I don’t think there’s going to be any way to get the federal government under control unless we tie it down through constitutional amendment.  The progressives managed to greatly expeand the power of government through this method in the early part of the 20th century.  Why couldn’t we?

From Billll in the comments:

I view her like the VC in the rice paddy at the end of the runway. We knew he was there, and we knew he was shooting at our planes as they took off, but since he had never hit one, we left him there as his replacement might prove to be a better shot.

Now Mitch McConnell is saying that they need more time before the vote, since they just dug up a whole bunch of new information on Sotomayor.  I think NRA’s caution about what position to take on Sotomayor is prudent, considering we don’t know what else is going to come out.

A lot of conservatives are on board with the idea of term limits.  While in principle it seems like a good idea, it’s one of those things I think is a bit of a double edged sword.  This is one of the reasons why.

Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen never has to face the voters again, so he can freely veto Restaurant Carry, and now Park Carry, without having to fear.  Having gotten what he wanted, his NRA endorsement having helped him get re-elected, he no longer has any need for them, so under the bus they go.  For most of our state governors, they will spend at least half their career as governors being completely unaccountable to voters.

We’ve had to endure that in Pennsylvania, where Ed Rendell was quite happy to run from his gun control record when he ran for Governor the first time, and kept it largely off his agenda during his first term.   It was not until he no longer had to face Pennsylvania voters that he decided to make an issue he’d put political capital behind.

I think too many conservatives see term limits a a panacea, rather than seeing it has significant trade offs.  I am not passionate about imposing them on Congress, and generally think it’s a fight conservatives and libertarians shouldn’t waste their time with.