Not Tired of Winning Yet, LXXXVI
Every now and again President Trump corrects a gross injustice in some area which I had not heard any other candidate even talk about. Is it often something which no one in government, or in the Press, ever brings to public attention.
Also, every now and again, I hear of something which makes me vow that, despite my early hesitation about Trump, despite his current drawbacks (as his carnival barker mien, his locker-room language uttered in public fora, and his notorious adulteries) I wished I would have known about beforehand, for I would have voted for him just for that, regardless of all else, unhesitatingly.
Today, one executive order is both.
This week, President Donald Trump signed Promoting the Rule of Law through Transparency and Fairness in Civil Administrative Enforcement and Adjudication, (APA EO) seeks to bring more transparency to agency enforcement actions and adjudications
President Trump remarked:
For many decades, federal agencies have been issuing thousands of pages of so-called “guidance” documents — a pernicious kind of regulation imposed by unaccountable bureaucrats in the form of commentary on how rules should be interpreted. All too often guidance documents are a backdoor for regulators to effectively change the laws and vastly expand their scope and reach.1
… The APA EO also notes that agencies utilize guidance as a way to put further burdens on contractors without going through the Administrative Procedure Act required notice and comment period.
…The APA EO seeks to reduce “unfair surprise” – defined to mean “a lack of reasonable certainty or fair warning of what a legal standard administered by an agency requires” – by instructing agencies only to apply standards of conduct in administrative enforcement actions that have been publicly announced so as to provide fair warning.
… agencies “have not always complied” with the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how agencies propose and establish rules, or the Freedom of Information Act, which is designed to increase accountability in federal agencies through transparency….
In other news, Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring both state and local governments to consent in writing before accepting refugees, essentially creating a local veto power.
It is horrifying to me that one man, armed with a pen and a phone, in so short time, can do so much good to revive this nation and return her to greatness, and have such a large scale effect on the world economy.
Because this shows the office is far too powerful. A century of Congressional negligence and Executive power-grabs have left us in this mess.
The next Dem President, Peor or Baal or Moloch, upon achieving office, could destroy with much greater swiftness all these gains, and, in effect, reduce the Constitution and rule of law to mere empty words.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
