Get well, David. And by David there is no need to further identify him, for the whole state has been on a first-name basis with David Pryor--young Turk, then governor and U. S. senator, and now a hospital patient. But this much hasn't changed: He still has the best manners in Arkansas, even in an era when manners may be derided as just a quaint holdover from a long outdated past.
Yet there is still a South and an understanding that ladies and gentlemen are something more than just signs on a restroom door. Even at a time when unisex restrooms are the latest demand of the politically advanced, or rather retarded. Oops, are we still allowed to use that word, retarded, or has it been declared verboten too? It's not easy keeping up with the ever-changing verbal dictates of our in crowd.
There she goes again: Just when her party is proclaiming a desperate (if imaginary) need to fill the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court, her honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been heard from again, this time denouncing the Republican candidate for president's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country. When a justice of the country's highest court takes part in that popular sport, she lays the perfect groundwork for any petitioner before her court to ask that she recuse herself from cases involving presidential elections, partisan politics and . . . well, you name it. Talk about self-defeating bombast, there are times when Justice Ginsburg outdoes even The Donald.
But one federal appellate court still respects the Constitution's balance of powers: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, where constitutional questions are often argued in a kind of preview for the topics that will soon arise before the Supreme Court itself. And this time its ruling is a heartening one. The court has just denounced a power grab by still another tentacle of the current administration as a "gross departure" from settled historical practice.
"This is a good day for democracy, economic freedom, due process and the Constitution," exulted a congressman from Texas, Jeb Hensarling, who is one of the top Republican lawmakers in the House. Naturally enough, Democratic firebrands like U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in fashioning this CFPB, formally the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, have tried to minimize the importance of the decision. For it's typical of this administration's mislabeled products, in this case a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that doesn't protect consumers. Any more than Obamacare protects people from higher premiums and worse health care.
Onward and downward goes the course of those who would substitute their own dubious judgment for the Constitution's system of checks and balances. In this case, they've put together a federal agency that is a law unto itself--unlike, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission or Federal Reserve system, which are composed of presidential appointees drawn from both parties and subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate and its members. But unlike those agencies, the CFPB isn't subject to congressional oversight. It could be the very definition of unaccountability. It doesn't even have its own independent inspector general whom whistle-blowers could appeal to.
Just as the news isn't new some days, neither are this administration's tired old tricks.
Editorial on 10/15/2016