A Misc. Sunday Roundup

Some loose ends and follow ups from previous items here

• On this week’s 3WHH podcast “Lucretia” and I couldn’t resist taunting John for fully embracing our Lincolnian point of view on the limits of judicial power, and he has a terrific piece up right now at Fox News making the case fully. He sends this additional note to PQ this morning:

Listeners to the 3WHH podcast will be familiar with the tension between the Presidency and the Judiciary. We have argued over whether Presidents have any obligation to apply Supreme Court opinions beyond the parties to the case. I make the case here, taking off from our discussion in the latest episode, that the Court’s decision in Trump v. Casa — ending nationwide injunctions — adopts the Lincolnian view. Key excerpt:

"Casa honors Lincoln’s understanding of the balance of power between the president and the Court. Under Lincoln’s view, the president has the right to advance his reading of the Constitution even if a court has enjoined it elsewhere. While Lincoln conceded that he would obey judicial decisions, he argued that he could continue to enforce his policies against individuals outside the parties in Dred Scott. And Lincoln believed he had no constitutional obligation to apply Dred Scott to new cases. Judges would have to issue orders in each future case ordering him to return free blacks to slavery under Dred Scott. Casa rejects the notion that a single district court could force a president to obey its reading of the Constitution throughout the nation, even in cases not yet brought."

Read the whole thing.

IYKYK. . .

• A few days ago over at Civitas I take my swipes at the smartypants progressives I am calling the “Abundanauts,” that is, the progressives who have suddenly discovered that excessive government regulations and process is throttling growth and hurting the very people progressives say they want to help: working class and low-income people. So they want progressives to become “abundance liberals.” In other words, they have discovered what conservatives have been saying since 1970 or so. Moreover, the leading Abundanauts shrink from the practical implications of their argument, which I put thus:

To achieve the new economy of abundance they seek requires saying a firm "No!" to the entire apparatus of Democratic Party constituency groups, especially the environmentalists, who derive their power from the ability to use lawsuits and bureaucratic process to say no. To be serious, it would involve mass layoffs of environmental attorneys and bureaucrats, the contraction of private consultancies that make big bucks producing 3,000-page environmental impact reports that no one reads all the way through, and the marginalization of obstruction. . .

The progressive Abundanauts deserve one and maybe two cheers for pointing out the dead end of "everything bagel liberalism," but until some Democratic political leaders decide to take the risk of saying No to their activist base, it will be a flash in the pan.

Along the way in that article I recall a neglected classic book published in 1979, The Environmental Protection Hustle by Bernard Frieden, a professor of urban studies at MIT at the time. It was one of the first serious criticisms of the no-growth mentality of environmentalism that exploded in the 1970s, especially in California. Because of space limitations I could only include a few quotes from this great book, but here are a few more:

The controversies reported in the following chapters alone eliminated housing units equal to half a year’s normal building volume in the San Francisco region. Other housing disputes not reported here bring the probable total to the equivalent of a full year’s normal homebuilding wiped out by local opposition between 1970 and 1977. This regulatory squeeze was serious enough to show some of the ways no-growth politics affects housing consumers. . .

Environmental opposition to homebuilding has almost no connection to mainstream conservation issues, such as reducing pollution and eliminating environmental health hazards. . . Stopping homebuilding usually accomplishes nothing for the public environment. It protects certain tightly regulated communities against change, but shifts development to other places where there is less resistance. The net environmental gain for the metropolitan area is zero, and sometimes less than zero.

The California madness spread to most of the country in the 45 years since then, with the conspicuous exceptions of sensible red states like Texas and Florida where it is still possible to build relatively affordable housing.