 Obama’s Regulation Czar – Cass Sunstein Nov 10, 2009  By Ron Arnold, CDFE Executive Vice PresidentCass R. Sunstein is an old friend of President Barack Obama and head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. That makes him Obama’s “regulation czar,” and he’s a mixed bag on free enterprise, part wise-man, part fruitcake, and a tough nut, in all meanings of the phrase. He’s no dummy that we should dismiss lightly – he taught law for 27 years at the University of Chicago Law School (while Obama also taught law there ), he’s now a Harvard Law School professor on leave while serving in the White House, he’s written 35 books, and he ran Harvard’s highly technical Program on Risk and Regulation. It focused on “how law and policy deal with the central hazards of the 21st century. Areas of study include terrorism, climate change, occupational safety, infectious diseases, natural disasters, and other low-probability, high-consequence events.” In short, he had fingers in a lot of pies at Harvard. He has those same fingers in a lot more consequential pies at the White House – like just about everything in your daily life. Let’s be fair and look for Sunstein’s wisdom first. He once called for changing the Clean Air Act to require balancing costs and benefits in setting national clean air standards. That would require the Environmental Protection Agency to use real-world facts instead of some bureaucrat arbitrarily deciding how much is too much based on political pressure. But more than a dozen big multi-million-dollar environmental groups ganged up on the EPA to prevent the change, calling it “a fundamental weakening long sought by big polluters who believe it would help them resist cleanup.” On the other hand, not-so-wise Sunstein also urged the federal government to devalue senior citizens in calculating the benefits of federal regulations because “A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.” That gave an entirely new meaning to the words, “senior discount.” More wisdom: he had the guts to defy Big Green’s demand to shut down the economy to prevent global warming by arguing that it made more sense to help future generations by “making posterity richer and better able to adapt” than by reducing emissions. He also raised questions about the value of pouring millions more taxpayer dollars into the extravagant cleanup of Love Canal after it turned into a fundraising tool for scare-mongering groups. He also questioned the wisdom of trying to reduce arsenic in drinking water where you couldn’t measure any arsenic, and even wondered why using child restraints in automobiles wasn’t saving lives as advertised. Then there were points where Sunstein seemed delusional: In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sunstein said of Obama, “He’s a University of Chicago Democrat, so he’s very attuned to the virtue of free markets and the risks of free-market regulation. He’s not an old-style Democrat who’s excited about regulations for their own sake.” That’s impossible to swallow after Obama socialized the financial and automotive sectors of the economy – or maybe it’s that Obama’s excited about regulations for a socialist agenda’s sake. Now the fruitcake side of Sunstein. For example, he advocates “the Second Bill of Rights” proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Among these rights are a right to a job that pays a living wage, a right to an education, a right to a home, a right to health care, a right to recreation, and a right to protection against monopolies and unfair competition. We can just imagine the contemporary response: “Let’s see, gimme Warren Buffet’s wages, Hannah Montana’s education, Bill Gates’ home, ownership of the Mayo Clinic and 24-hour access to Nero’s Naughty Playpens – and to protect myself against the federal government’s monopoly on military force, how about my own private army? Oh, yes, and let’s put everybody who’s better looking than me in a concentration camp to protect me from unfair competition.” Seriously, though, Sunstein thinks that can be done without any change to the United States Constitution, but implemented politically. His 2006 book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, argues that the Second Bill of Rights should be enacted to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. His 2001 book, Republic.com, argued that the Internet may weaken democracy because it allows citizens to isolate themselves within groups that share their own views and experiences, and thus cut themselves off from any information that might challenge their beliefs, a phenomenon known as cyber balkanization. You didn’t know you were being cyber balkanized, did you? But Czar Sunstein also harbors quirks considerably more dangerous: his long personal belief in animal rights and his support of gun control – a scary combination. In fact, it has raised fears that he’ll really use his power to become the “gun czar.” There’s enough evidence to justify such fears: for one thing, Sunstein believes in regulating hunting out of existence. He told a Harvard audience in 2007 that “we ought to ban hunting.” And in his book The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer (2002), he said: What “possibilities?” In Sunstein’s world, animals should have just as many rights as people – and they should be able to sue humans in court! “We could even grant animals a right to bring suit without insisting that animals are persons, or that they are not property,” Sunstein said on page 11 of Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions (2004). Okay, let’s say Czar Sunstein manages to actually do that. Picture this absurd hypothetical: you’re returning from a successful hunting trip in doe season, only to find out that Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein has subpoenaed you for killing your prize. You go to court. Can’t you just see Bambi weeping on the witness stand at your trial for murdering his Mom? And how does your lawyer cross-examine a deer? Seriously, what would that do to gun-owner rights? And jurisprudence? Sunstein is a law professor. What does he think about the Second Amendment? In Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America (2005), Sunstein says: “Almost all gun control legislation is constitutionally fine.... [O]n the Constitution’s text, fundamentalists should not be so confident in their enthusiasm for invalidating gun control legislation.” A videotape of a lecture Sunstein gave at the University of Chicago on Oct. 23, 2007, shows him saying: “My coming view is that the individual right to bear arms reflects the success of an extremely aggressive and resourceful social movement and has much less to do with good standard legal arguments than it appears.” What about the handgun ban in the District of Columbia? He ridiculed anyone who would say, a “trigger lock interferes with his efforts at self-defense against criminals. What on Earth does that have to do with the Second Amendment as originally understood? My tentative suggestion is that the individual right to have guns as it’s being conceptualized now is best taken as a contemporary creation and a reflection of current fears – not a reading of civic-centered founding debates.” Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, objected to Sunstein’s nomination and put a hold on it, preventing him from being unanimously confirmed. The senator asked Sunstein for an explanation. In an attempt to get Sen. Chambliss to remove his hold, Sunstein answered him: Based on those no-wiggle-room assurances, Senator Chambliss removed his hold and Sunstein was confirmed by the Senate in a 57-40 vote. Did Sunstein really make such an instant turnaround about gun rights? Maybe so, maybe not. Sunstein has a lot of friends on the far left. He’s a contributing editor to left-wing periodicals The New Republic and the George Soros-funded American Prospect. There’s good reason to doubt him. But the Senate confirmed Sunstein as regulation czar. Now that his personal history has been scrutinized by worried citizens more than the Senate did, we really need to ask whether he’s just a nutty professor with good days and bad days or a real danger to the Republic. Millions of American gun owners are now more than a little concerned about a czar with such an anti-gun mentality who has real authority, murky, undefined authority that could turn a “Regulation Czar” into a “Gun Control Czar.” Ron Arnold is the executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a position he has held for twenty-five years. He is widely known for his mentoring of new advocates for free enterprise and as the author of numerous books. |
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