Is it possible to be dumber than Glenn Harlan Reynolds and still have a nationally syndicated column?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
8 Comments
Recent Posts
- Day 14: Louisiana Senator Approvingly Compares Trump to Stalin
- Day 13: Elon Musk Flexes His Muscles
- Day 12: While Elon Musk Takes Over, We Podcast With Driftglass and Blue Gal
- Day 11: Harm of Fascist Regime’s Foreign Aid Freeze Comes Into View
- Day 10: The Fascist Regime Blames a Plane Crash on Nonwhite People
He’s a law professor. Add this to the Irony obituary.
Not just dumb, also inexcusably & particularly unaware of contemporary American life. To omit any reference to present Jim Crow laws, like Ferguson’s “Manner of Walking on Roadway”, weakens his point considerably and makes the intent of the argument that much more transparent.
Yes, it is really dumb when your rhetoric shows you so very obviously grinding your axe. Reynolds might just as well holler: Ah wants tah deescreeminayut and rip people off and do all sorts of things with impunity, but those secret laws won’t let me.
But the secret law that he pointedly overlooks is that granted absolutely (or so subsequent cases have held) under the “state secrets” doctrine of US. v. Reynolds. (Ironic that.)
Yes, because there has never been a conservative anywhere who has said, “Ignorance of the law is no excuse”.
I guess it’s an interesting kernel of a thought, but the subject isn’t treated with any of the depth that would be required to meaningfully discuss it. I’d wager that the vast majority of federal (and state, for that matter) regulations are directed towards companies or sophisticated players in heavily-regulated industries (banking, securities, healthcare, energy, pharmaceuticals, food safety), and those parties almost certainly have legal counsel that are up to speed on the range of regulations affecting them. In fact, many of those parties lobby federal and state agencies directly for regulations beneficial to their interests (or at least for regulations that don’t harm their interests too much). The idea that John Q. Public is being crushed under a nearly infinite number of federal criminal regulations is absurd, and tellingly Reynolds doesn’t divulge that many such regulations are directed at curbing high-falutin’ crimes like securities fraud or such things as pollution emissions.
Also left unaddressed by the article is the fact that the “administrative state” arose because the challenges facing modern society are too complicated to be resolved by a couple hundred morons in Washington, DC that are incapable of passing more than one or two pieces of legislation a year. It is far better for Congress to delegate the hard work of creating rules and policies to people who have expertise in those fields than for Congress to tackle such projects themselves.
Anyway, Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and he’s promoting an article written by a Tennessee law student. I wonder if he was the student’s advisor on the article and is promoting it for that reason.
Have you ever read Bill Kristol?
That MFer has NEVER been right!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Dr. Kristol represents the limiting case, since he literally couldn’t be a nationally syndicated columnist in the end, and had to be let go after a year, a feat even David Brooks and George Will have been unable to accomplish.
So, the more ignorant you are, the more you can break the law with impunity? That should work well for conservatives.