Months ago, I highlighted President Obama's tendency to grab power by ignoring Congress' wishes and expanding the scope of executive branch duties. For example, he can't get net neutrality through Congress, but he can through FCC rulemaking now that his appointees are on the commission (the court case on this a few months ago was only about agency rulings, not rulemaking). He can't get cap & tax through Congress, so his EPA is going to issue its own rules on carbon emissions. He can't get gay rights bills past Congress, so the Labor Department is issuing new rules for businesses.

In March, Obama's Secretary of Energy Steven Chu (Nobel Prize winner) sought to withdraw the DOE's long-standing 8,600 page application to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain. If accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, this would set the nuclear waste project back at square one. Actually, it would be worse than square one because DOE wants to withdraw the application "with prejudice", which means it can never be re-filed. Yucca Mountain would no longer be an option for nuclear waste storage.

Briefly, the facts on Yucca Mountain. Congress designated it the national nuclear waste storage site in 1987. The original deadline for accepting waste was 1998. The current deadline for accepting waste is 2017. $10 billion has been spent on the project so far, and $32 billion has been collected from nuclear utilities surcharges levied to pay for the project.

Congress has been steadfast that this project go forward. So when Obama's DOE moved to end it, some states and nuclear utilities groups filed papers to intervene. The judges could not have been more clear (PDF): more...

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 10:55 AM | Comments (101)
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Via Dan Riehl.

He's an R running in Wexler's old district. He has almost no chance... except maybe if he can ski the K2 and teach his district that we all have the right to dance. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:35 AM | Comments (108)
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BUMP [Gabe]: FoxNews is reporting that the Department of Justice just filed. More info as I get it.

Here's a vague news slug. No more info than Ace had below.

Original Post:
"Later," the WSJ says, quoting anonymous administration officials, suggesting later today or tomorrow (or else why else re-break the news?).

The Obama administration has criticized the law and the Justice Department's challenge is expected to argue that it infringes on federal responsibilities for immigration, the officials said.

Federal responsibilities.

I need to hear from some lawyers on this, because I've been wondering. It is accepted constitutional law (whether you agree or not, it's accepted) that states cannot pass laws which conflict with federal law in areas of federal jurisdiction.

In this case, however, the Arizona law does not conflict with federal law; it in fact restates it. Deliberately, to be as constitutional as possible and to set up a good question:

Yes, a state law cannot conflict with a federal law in an area of federal jurisdiction, but can a state policy conflict with a federal policy if both state the same law?

In other words -- Arizona's law is the same as the feds'. The big difference is not in the law, but in the policy: the feds have a policy of non- or minimal enforcement; they are angry at Arizona not because Arizona has passed fresh law but because Arizona intends a different policy -- a policy of actual enforcement.

So yes, federal law trumps state law, but does mere federal policy trump state policy, especially when federal policy is in fact at odds with its own stated law?

Can the feds basically argue that it's their policy to ignore the law and then demand that Arizona be instructed by the Supreme Court to follow them in their policy of ignoring the law?

What About Discrimination? Good point from Ed Morrissey:

Furthermore, this is weak tea compared to the Obama administration’s rhetoric on the subject. They have spent the last three months declaring this unconstitutional on the basis of discrimination. If that were true, the government would have made that its primary argument. The fact that they’re going with pre-emption means that they’re conceding that the discrimination argument never held water — and that their accusations of bigotry against Arizonans were nothing more than demagoguery.

Posted by: Ace at 10:32 AM | Comments (234)
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The Big Picture:

The picture is the first full-sky image from Europe's Planck telescope which was sent into space last year to survey the "oldest light" in the cosmos.

It took the 600m-euro observatory just over six months to assemble the map.

It shows what is visible beyond the Earth to instruments that are sensitive to light at very long wavelengths - much longer than what we can sense with our eyes.

Researchers say it is a remarkable dataset that will help them understand better how the Universe came to look the way it does now.

"It's a spectacular picture; it's a thing of beauty," Dr Jan Tauber, the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck project scientist, told BBC News.

Video about the telescope below. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:16 AM | Comments (106)
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Already.

President Obama gave Craig Becker a recess appointment to the NLRB at the end of March, after Republicans unanimously opposed his nomination. The Republicans noted that it would be inappropriate to put the Associate General Counsel of the AFL-CIO and the SEIU on the board that oversees union elections and labor practices, since he couldn't be expected to demonstrate impartiality or be free from conflicts of interest.

Roll the clock forward a few months and Becker was already ruling on cases in which the SEIU is a party.

Sure enough, on June 2, Becker joined in on an NLRB decision involving SEIU Local 1957 and denied St. Barnabas Hospital's request to review a union election. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Ranking Member Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked the Inspector General to examiner Becker's conflict of interest in the matter. An investigation is underway.

The NLRB told The Washington Examiner Becker isn't commenting on the investigation but did pass along a windy ruling Becker authored on recusal motions. Becker argues it would be appropriate to recuse him from cases involving the national SEIU but not cases involving the local chapters because they are "distinct legal entit[ies]."

Does Becker's hairsplitting seem reasonable? Hardly. The SEIU's own constitution says the national union has "jurisdiction over its affiliated bodies and all Local Unions."

More than that, the national union pools the affiliation fees of the locals and uses the pool to provide funding for locals involved in litigation. The national union is thus inextricably linked to locals, particularly when they get dragged in front of the NLRB or the courts.

How do we know this? Well, Becker -- while Associate General Counsel to the national union -- represented locals in court. Here's a sample:

Guardsmark, LLC v. NLRB, 475 F.3d 369 (D.C. Or. 2007) (SEIU Local 24/7); NLRB v. Local 32B-32J Service Employees Infi Union, 353 F.3d 197 (2d Cir. 2003); First Healthcare Corp. v. NLRB, 344 F.3d 523(6th Cir. 2003) (SEIU Local 399); Stanford Hosp. and Clinics v. NLRB, 325 F.3d 334 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (SEIU Local 715); Beverly Health & Rehab. Serv., Inc. v. NLRB, 317 F.3d 316 (D.C. Cir. 2003) (SEIU District 1199P); Beverly Health & Rehab. Serv., Inc. v. NLRB, 297 F.3d 468 (6th Cir. 2002) (SEIU Local 585); NLRB v. DeBartelo, 241 F.3d 207 (2d Cir. 2001) (SEIU Local 32B-32J); General Service Employees Union, Local 73 v. NLRB, 230 F.3d 909 (7th Cir. 2000) (SEIU Local 73); NLRB v. Hilliard Dev. Corp., 187 F.3d 133 (1st Cir. 1999) (SEIU Local 285); Service Employees Infi Union Local 102 v. County of San Diego, 35 F.3d 483, opinion amended & supplemented, 60 F.3d 1346 (9th Cir. 1994); Beverly Enter., Inc. v. Trump, 1 F. Supp. 2d 489 (W.D. Pa. 1998 ) (SEIU Local 585).

Note how many of those cases involved union claims against hospitals. The case that Becker is getting investigated for also involves a hospital. It seems to be something of a specialty for him.

Becker says that recusal is not required because the locals are "distinct" from the national union. I'm sure it will come as a shock, but it appears that Becker's a lying liar.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 07:27 AM | Comments (97)
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SSDD. Yet another group charged with faking an economy-killing environmental scare investigating global warming has come forward to confess to more errors in the scaremonger's bible. Of course, it protests that this doesn't undermine the global warming consensus.

A leading Dutch environmental agency, taking the blame for one of the glaring errors that undermined the credibility of a seminal U.N. report on climate change, said Monday it has discovered more small mistakes and urged the panel to be more careful.

But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed the none of the errors effected the fundamental conclusion by U.N. panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is happening and is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people.

[...]

But he said the boiled-down version of the full IPCC report, a synthesis meant as a guideline for policymakers, included conclusions drawn from "expert judgments" that were not always clearly sourced or transparent.

With some conclusions, "we can't say it's plainly wrong. We don't know," and can't tell from the supporting text, Hajer said. The IPCC should "be careful making generalizations."

Like I said, SSDD. Global warming alarmists want to set local, national, and international policy based on guesses so long as they can't say the guesses are "plainly wrong." That's an exceptionally lax standard to use when deciding whether to hobble the economies of the developed world. It's downright immoral when applied to the developing world, which the alarmists would send back to the Stone Age.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:49 AM | Comments (102)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 06:24 AM | Comments (47)
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I've been just as guilty as everyone else on the right of making fun of the whitewashing (so to speak) of the history of Senator Robert "Sheets" Byrd (D, Birth of A Nation), and I feel that its time that we give the dearly departed credit for being more than a caricature of racial hatred and discrimination.

Senator Robert Byrd was much more than a Klan Recruiter who fillibustered the Civil Rights Act. more...

Posted by: Russ from Winterset at 06:19 AM | Comments (65)
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The good news in markets yesterday was that the American markets were closed for the Independence Day weekend, and thus gave battered investors a respite.

I've been talking you up to all my friends, bragging on how beautiful you are, and now you do me this way? Why are you so cruel? You're making me look like an idiot! ...but I just can't quit you. The heart wants what it wants. more...

Posted by: Monty at 03:15 AM | Comments (81)
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The second rule of the Dempression is, you do NOT talk about the Dempression!

Since IT can't be talked about or mentioned, one must perform a little kabuki dance around IT when talking about IT.

So what were some of the past strategies people used for surviving IT? Both my parents were IT era children and had many stories to tell, some of which are still relevant today, or will have analogs that could be successfully applied today.

more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:01 PM | Comments (133)
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