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Court: NRC In Violation For Not Ruling On Yucca Mountain
schwit1 sends this quote from an AP report: "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] to complete the licensing process and approve or reject the Energy Department's application for a never-completed waste storage site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. In a sharply worded opinion, the court said the nuclear agency was 'simply flouting the law' when it allowed the Obama administration to continue plans to close the proposed waste site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The action goes against a federal law designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository. 'The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,' Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion (PDF), which was joined Judge A. Raymond Randolph. Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland dissented. The appeals court said the case has important implications for the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government. 'It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,' Kavanaugh wrote. 'The commission is simply defying a law enacted by Congress ... without any legal basis.'"
The checks and balances in our government are what stands between a successful government of the people and a dictatorship. What powers you give Obama today, or gave Bush yesterday, may be in the hands of a form of Hitler tomorrow.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
'The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,' Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion (PDF), which was joined Judge A. Raymond Randolph.
That's all this president has been doing since he's been in office. He ignores the parts of the law he doesn't agree with and rigorously enforces the parts he does agree with. That's why nobody will trust him on comprehensive immigration reform -- he'll just waive the parts of the law he doesn't like. You can't deal with a man like that. Imagine that! An un-American, law-breaking, lying president. Ah, ye fools!
It always surprises me that people forget - if you allow the president a power grab, you're giving that power to a future President Palin or whoever. Don't want Palin making your healthcare choices, including contraceptives? Keep the federal government out of health care.
...and why are you giving the NRC and Obama bravo's? They are CLOSING Yucca mountain, not getting it completed and therefore usable.
Umm, maybe this is a bit of an obvious thing to say, but given that you're at a +5 informative and I've been modded troll, perhaps not obvious enough...
Why are they closing Yucca mountain?
Is it perhaps because all the money was witheld due to pressure from the NIMBYs, thus leaving closure the only option? The NRC pushed for years to get this operational and failed time and time again... because they couldn't ride roughshod over the courts. They tried. They failed. I admire that effort, though it failed.
Obama had no choice but to mothball it; It was even part of his 2008 election campaign -- the NIMBYs, led by their commander Senator Harry Reid, vigorously campaigned to kill it. They won. Before Obama even took office, funding was cut, cut, and then gutted, cut some more, and roasted over a fire. Obama is now riding roughshod over the courts to get the money invested in the program back out, because he can't overcome NIMBY.
So you've got the NRC on one side, trying to get past the endless appeals of the court system to get it done. You've got The NIMBYs on the other side, trying to keep it in court forever so it'll never get done... and you've got Obama in the middle saying "Fuck this -- Appeals court; GTFO." All he's trying to do is get some traction one way or another -- he picked pulling out because pressure was too great, not because the project isn't necessary. And yeah, I support that -- politically it's his only option. Just as the NRCs only option was to try to get around the courts before lobbyists got to Congress and killed it. It was a race... they lost. And the whole nation loses too.
All of this because our goddamned court system is a giant monkey wrench in the guts of anything that society needs, but individuals don't want near them: Like prisons, sewage processing plants, nuclear reactors, etc. I bravo both Obama and the NRC because they recognize it's the court system that's fucking things up and they tried to do and end run-around them. They both failed. They were both on opposite sides of the problem... but ultimately, they both agreed on where the problem was: The goddamned courts.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Yes, practically the entirety, otherwise the Republic would have fallen long ago. I can not name any other time of SYSTEMIC lawlessness by the executive, not even Watergate. The only thing that come close was Jackson and Indian removal (trail of tears).
Funny, just from my recent memory things like selling drugs to arm terrorists, backing and conducting assassinations, jailing people without charging or trialing them, coups and fabricating evidence to start a war with a neutral nation spring to mind.
Or are you saying those people were trialed and served justice for their crimes against humanity and whatnot as per according to your own constitution, Nuremberg principles, international treaties and basic human decency while I blinked?
To me the fact that these people were not punished is a sign that the whole thing is(and has been) rotten to the core and the insects infesting it are covering for eachother, this is merely just the most recent set of faces.
Let me turn the question around; can you name a century during which no systemic corruption, disregard for human rights and life, or unjust violation of national sovereignty of a foreign nation condoned by US government did not happen?
In theory, Gitmo is for enemy combatants, not terrorists. Or at least that's how it started.
You really don't want to go down the path of civil trials for enemy combatants. Being an enemy soldier and firing at US troops is not illegal, nor is flying a bomber over a US city and dropping bombs on civilians. Doing so without being in uniform violates every treaty governing war for the past 400 year or so, but it's only the "not in uniform" part that's illegal. A downed enemy bomber pilot should be released at the end of the war, not executed for mass murder.
But in 2011 yet another incremental power grab (Obama's in this case, but it's not like the pattern is new) extended "covered persons" (those for which military justice is appropriate) to members of terrorist groups and people giving assistance to them. That crosses the bright line separation between "enemy soldier (in uniform or otherwise)" and "just some guy opposed to the US". For the former to apply to a US citizen, he has to fly to Afghanistan and point a rifle at a US uniform - really hard to abuse to go after local political opponents. The later can be stretched to apply to just about anyone, by submitting "evidence" to the secret courts where there's no defense present.
I have no problem with having P.O.W. camps when we're fighting, whether or not war was officially declared. But to effectively convict someone who clearly isn't an enemy soldier of treason without a trial? That's Star Chamber nonsense right there, the exact sort of thing we had a revolution to get away from.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
and he decided
-he could selectively enforce immigration with no real legal backing
-he could create extensions and exemptions for NCLB requirements when the law has no such provisions
-he could simply not determine if a coup had taken place in Egypt so that he could continue sending your tax dollars to them in the form of tanks and planes they can't even use.
And those are just the big clear ones. This president makes a joke of law on a routine basis.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html