Volume 266, No. 22; July 15, 2022
July 15, 2022 — To download this issue of our paper, just click on the image at right.
Volume 266 | No. 22
Permanently Endangered
Just when we thought the Supreme Court had done all the damage it could in one session, it decided to kill off more of us. Yes, we know, this is getting monotonous. We Ranted about the Court just last fortnight, and now here we go again. We are so sorry—sorrier than we can say. When the Court rules, though, that the EPA cannot regulate poisonous emissions from coal-fired electrical power plants, we can hardly be expected to remain silent. Air pollution currently causes one out of every six deaths, scientists say. Apparently that’s not enough. Having attended neither Harvard nor Yale, we have no idea …
Privatizer Nominated for Social Security Board
by Jake Johnson Defenders of Social Security on Tuesday urged the U.S. Senate to block President Joe Biden’s little-noticed nomination of Andrew Biggs—an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow with a history of supporting Social Security privatization—to serve on the independent and bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board. Social Security Works, a progressive advocacy group, is leading the charge against Biggs, highlighting his role in the George W. Bush administration’s failed attempt to privatize the New Deal program in 2005. At the time, Biggs worked on Social Security as an associate director of Bush’s National Economic Council. “Andrew Biggs has advocated for Social Security cuts throughout his …
Let’s Talk About Original Intent
by W. D. Ehrhart In a withering, indeed breathtaking, succession of recent decisions rendered by a U.S. Supreme Court now dominated by justices vetted by the Federalist Society and nominated by presidents who did not win the popular national vote, most of the past 120 years of legal progress and precedent have been obliterated. The rationale for this assault on common sense and common decency is a doctrine called “Original Intent,” which states that only those guarantees intended by the framers of the Constitution in 1787 and set forth in the document ratified two years later are valid. This is also sometimes defined as “strict …