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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.'"
If the supreme court wants to keep Yucca Mountain running, they can head out to Nevada and run it themselves!
Speaking to State Department personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that "this little thing called the Internet ... makes it much harder to govern."
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.
Yucca Mountain has been the Hot Potato of American politics since it was proposed. If anything was going to be done, it'll be too late.
I didn't even know it was open and processing/storing waste. A friend worked at Hanford and told me how grim things where there and it would need to be relieved of storing any additional waste as it was over capacity and having great difficulty with what it had, something to do with putting leaking vaults into bigger vaults because some old contractor had mixed concrete wrong or the spec was wrong or both (not really too surprising, considering the massive tomes which must be making up 'regulations' these days.)
Effectively this is the SCOTUS telling the NRC to read, rubber-stamp, shuffle, rubber-stamp, collate, file, retrieve, shuffle, rubber-stamp and push pencils much faster. A bureaucrat's nightmare!
"who took my left-handed, Thursday, month-without-an-R-in-it, special issue Red Tape Cutting scissors?!?"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...and why are you giving the NRC and Obama bravo's? They are CLOSING Yucca mountain, not getting it completed and therefore usable.
They're not completing the site, they're shutting it down. They gave the NIMBYs exactly what they wanted...no nuclear waste storage site even though the law says it is to be completed and used for storage.
No,
I think it has broader application.
Such as the potential court rulings in the future regarding certain patriotic network connectivity and the collection of data, which were a result from a flouting of the law by various branches of power.
This is an example to use in order to keep the powers that be, to be beholdened to the powers they were granted.
This is an assertion of an important check, to balance the power as it should be.
It does not matter if it is Obama or someone else -- this can set a precedent that the courts will hold those responsible... responsible.\
Captcha: suckling
What makes you think they were wrong? The choice offered us by the political machine was between an obvious sellout, and an obvious sellout who's also a raving misogynistic looney that's utterly out of touch with what it means to work for a living. I've met very few people who voted for Obama the second time around, but many, many who voted against Romney. When I'm feeling cynical it almost looks like the Republican party intentionally took a dive. And who could blame them - lots of old vultures coming home to roost - it looks much better for the Rs if a D happens to be in the oval office at the time.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
'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!
One thing that people aren't really thinking about when they read this is the bigger picture of certain things like his failure to uphold DoMA, or failure to properly enforce the federal immigration laws by letting illegal aliens out of the jails and back onto the streets instead of shipping them back to their countries of origin, or the most recent debaucle about Obamacare business mandate being delayed a year but individual not.
Obama and his administration does not have the right or the authority to selectively enforce the law. He is the chief executive officer, the top "lawman" of the country, and he is bound by the law as much as anyone else is, he's not above it.
So that means, Obamacare must be enforced AS IT IS WRITTEN, the government cannot ignore laws that are inconvenient to the agenda. The government has laws and regulations they must follow as they are enacted.
Are we a nation of men or are we a nation of laws?
Or the Obama administration could you know, follow the law.
I couldn't believe he unilaterally decided to ignore Obamacare, the law named after him!
In the past couple of years we've seen the administration declare loudly that they'll refuse to enforce other laws, including immigration laws and the Obamacare employer mandate. Meanwhile, any court challenge to a law the administration doesn't particularly like is sure to succeed, since the administration will refuse to defend it.
Unless something turns around, the rule of law and the separation of powers are on their way out in this country, to be supplanted by the decisions of a dictator and of unelected officials he appoints.
Are we a nation of men or are we a nation of laws?
Ford's words said "laws", his actions said "men" and we've been going downhill since.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
> And that means we need storage facilities
Or fuel reprocessing plants - we had such things in the early days of fission energy, but then advances in uranium mining made them unprofitable. Pull out the 90% of the high level "waste" that's still perfectly good fuel and what's left will be reasonably safe in only a couple centuries. It is still kinda hot, but a multi-millenia storage facility is necessary.
So which palms do you suppose were greased to make sure that the admittance facility at Yucca Mountain wasn't also a fuel reprocessing plant?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Here are some laws that the administration has famously ignored, instead of pursuing a repeal through the democratic process. There are probably more.
Again, I'm not saying any one of these laws is a wise law, but they are (or were in the case of DOMA until overturned) duly legislated, therefore the executive had a constitutional duty to enforce them until such time the laws are repealed by the legislature or overturned by the courts. Where is the Republic going when the executive branch no longer feels constrained by the law or the democracy?
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.
You do realize Obama caved in to the NIMBY crowd in 2009 and cut funding to Yucca Mtn and is trying to terminate the project and find another site? His previous secretary of energy declared the site invalid, despite congress passing the law, Bush signing the law, and despite the court ruling it valid. The current executive branch has cited "budget problems", so isn't spending any money to actually run the project, so nothing is happening. Now the court is ruling it a valid site, yet again.
The law (passed in 1983) said that once a location is chosen, the agency is allowed 3 years to make a yes or no determination, with one-year extensions if they become necessary.
All that is required is a simple "Yes" or "No", within three years.
The 3-year clock started ticking in 2002.
Since 2002 over $100M has been spent simply waiting for the yes or no answer.
Both the original court order and this appeals court order are repeating: The law says you must give a yes or no answer within three years. The time is expired, you must give your answer.
The problem is entirely political. They cannot answer either way and still expect to get votes, so they bury their heads in the sand and refuse to do anything other than cash the checks.
In some ways I am jealous; how many jobs can you do nothing for a decade and still collect a tithe of a billion dollars for it? Are they accepting new hires? It seems like a bureaucrat's dream.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
that is what is happening.
over the last dozen or so administrations each has taken a little more power and then a little more. frequently flouting the law and not caring about conseqnuesnces unless it blows up in their faces, and then they do the absolutely least amount to make it go away.
For obama it is the NSA spying program. Obama wants to add checks and balances by letting the NSA monitor themselves monitoring every citizen without warrant or reason.
Bush said torture was not only legal, but expanded Gitmo to house people who he thought didn't deserve the rule of law.
Clinton, created and pushed through the DCMA.
Bush senoir basically covered his tracks while he was VP.
Reagan sold chemical weapons to Saddam. Who used them.
Carter was just a pussy.
Ford was a fill in
Nixon um watergate anyone
Johnson, Vietnam isn't a war it was never declared as such by Congress. Vietnam was a police action.
Kennedy? well he slept with more women(and better looking ones) than clinton did.
Eisnhowser? probably the last decent president we had. it is too bad no bothered listening to his warnings on military industrial complex taking over.
Truman? he nuked a country twice.(for a good reason Japan would not have go down easily)
Roosevelt? he was the first and only president to be elected 3 times breaking the tradition since Washington of only two terms. and he created the Executive office of the Presidency.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
...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
I don't think, either of the major candidates last year were misogynists. Both had lovely families — and full backing of their wives. Romney's wife, in particular, did not even have her own political ambition as an incentive to appear backing her husband.
There was nothing "loony" about either candidate, but Mitt Romney would've followed the law in question — and done a number of other things right by now...
I'm confused here... I thought, your wrath was directed at Romney — who did work for his living before becoming a politician — but now you appear to be angry at Obama, who moved into politics straight out of college and whose biggest Executive position before Presidency was running a (failed) small-time charity...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Here's the real story: Nobody wants to have a nuclear waste disposal site in their backyard.
This is mostly because it hasn't been handled and presented right. If the people of Nevada actually engaged their brains, what they should have done is just demanded money. By adding 1% to the cost of building the facility, they could give every single household in Nevada over $1000 -- and by charging other states to store their waste there, they could continue to pay the citizens back.
Make a proposal like that, and it's guaranteed that the people will vote in someone who will make it happen. No way the NIMBYs would be able to stop it.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
There are only two alternatives to detaining prisoners in Gitmo:
Guess, which of the two Obama has chosen to expedite closing of the camp? All things considered, I prefer Bush's approach — it is far less bloody.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Four times (1932, 1936, 1940, 1944). He died early in his fourth term, leaving Truman (whom he disliked so much that the existence of the A-Bomb came as a surprise to Truman after he became President) in charge.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm pretty sure one could try them in civilian courts, considering 'terrorism' is a criminal act, not an act of war. But that would be hideously inconvenient, considering how many of them ended up there.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
That's only true about Prisoners of War — and we did release all of the captured Iraqi soldiers shortly after the invasion succeeded in 2003, for example. The detainees in Gitmo don't qualify as Prisoners of War however:
.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
"We've never been any further from a representitive government and closer to rule by decree than now."
1863
I have a hard time seeing your logic. If we don't have universal healthcare, somehow you think that will prevent anti-abortion laws? I don't think that's right. You know that all 50 states used to ban contraceptives, right? Way way back before Obama was even born?
The difference between 1863 and now: Obama has actually tried to rule by decree 4 times, and each time was slapped down by the supreme court as in each instance they were "a clear abuse of power."
Om, nomnomnom...
There's a reason Godwin's law exists, a person who cannot construct a thought without referencing Hitler is seriously deficient.
But that's not what Goodwin's Law says. As originally formulated, it only said that if a discussion went on long enough, somebody would mention Hitler or the nazis. Now, of course, there's a corollary that says that anybody who makes a gratuitous mention of them or calls their opponent a nazi has lost the argument. However, simply mentioning him, especially in a context where such a mention is relevant as it was here, doesn't invoke Godwin.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Do you think having Palin or Jeb Bush running the healthcare system, making health decisions for you, would be a good idea? How about Chris Christie? Ron Paul? Do you want them tracking your emails and phone calls?
;)
One of them, or someone like them, will be president.
If you decide to give the feds power over your life, you are deciding to let Palin, Christie, or Paul make those decisions.
Ron Paul might issue an executive order that condoms have to have aluminum tips - your little head needs a tinfoil hat too.
Many of them at gitmo were captured in the vicinity of someone who was committing a crime, or cooking food for someone committing a crime, or providing shelter for them. That is not the same thing.
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Only countries can wage wars. Since the alleged terrorists are not part of any state military they are not soldiers.
Enemy combatant is a bullshit term invented by the US. Either they are criminals and should be tried in civilian courts, or they are a prisoners of war and should be treated as such (no torture, negotiation with the country whose military they are part of).
Since the latter option is obviously impossible, since they are not part of any military, only the former is available. The US doesn't want to go that route because it would reveal things about the US in court. Officially it is security related stuff that is supposed to be secret, but in reality it is evidence of torture and other human rights violations. The US is now in an almost impossible situation where if it releases anyone they will take legal action against them and publicize the ill treatment and injustice, so the only option is to detain them forever until they die. Or, in Obama's case, until the election when it becomes somebody else's problem.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
But I can vote a future President Palin out of office.
Right now, a lot of healthcare choices are coerced by health insurance - which doctors I can visit, where I can go, what is covered. The decisions are made by people I don't know, people I have no control over, people I can't remove from their position.
Only countries can wage wars. Since the alleged terrorists are not part of any state military they are not soldiers.
Enemy combatant is a bullshit term invented by the US. Either they are criminals and should be tried in civilian courts, or they are a prisoners of war and should be treated as such (no torture, negotiation with the country whose military they are part of).
Not to sound insulting, but you're simply ignorant of centuries of treaty law, tradition, and general agreement on how to fight wars as morally as it is practical to do.
There are three categories, not two. There have been for many, many centuries. There are soldiers, there are civilians, and there are brigands and pirates. There is no legal tolerance for brigands and pirates: those who wage war without ties to a civil state, current, former, or wannabe, are the worst sort of menace, and it has always been acceptable to kill captured brigands and pirates out of hand, or do whatever you want with them as an object lesson to others.
There is very good reason for this historically. But what really matters here is the single most important military invention is history for the protection of civilians: the uniform. Since the concept of the military uniform became widely accepted a few hundred years ago, it became a key part of not being a brigand. You have to distinguish yourselves from civilians, not hide behind them. You have to have a recognized chain of command up to some civil authority who can stop the violence, either by surrender or by accepting the surrender of his opponents. Heck, there are historical cases of groups that started as brigands or pirates who became accepted as political powers by following those rules.
There's obviously a downside to wearing a uniform, and so there this very strong incentive to do so: if you want to be treated as a P.O. W. when captured, not as a dangerous animal, you follow the most basic rules that protect civilians.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh I have no problem with managers per-se, - I just believe they should have some experience working on the factory floor so they know what they're actually asking of people. I just don't trust someone who has never in their life experienced even a hint of poverty to run a country with consideration for a population where roughly 1 in 4 people is unemployed or underemployed. Romney is modern nobility through and through, and history strongly reinforces the idea that the nobility run things for the benefit of the nobility - "they wouldn't call them human resources if they weren't meant to be strip-mined."
As for abortions - that's great for your daughter. But a massive slice of the population is struggling just to get by, and a trip to Canada will be phenomenally difficult if not impossible for them - but hey, you got yours so who cares about them?. Never mind that it's the same portion of the population that has the least access to other recreational activities, and will be hurt the worst by having an unwanted child. And that those children will mostly grow up to expand the ranks of the next generation of people who are basically a burden upon the social system.
That is exactly the mentality that makes me deeply suspicious of any leader who has never in his life even been friends with people who earn their living by the sweat of their brow and know what it's like to make painful sacrifices on a regular basis for the sake of their future and/or their children.
> By the time he inherited his father's wealth, he was had enough of his own to donate the entire inheritance to charity
Yes, that's nothing to sneeze at, but lets not pretend he didn't leverage his father's wealth and connections to get started. And IIRC he made most of his money by leaving a trail of gutted and collapsing companies behind him - definitely *not* what I want for my nation.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.