Source: Wikimedia Commons

Of all the Congress critters in the Democrat section of the zoo that is the House of Representatives, one of the more execrable is Ted Lieu from Zimbabwe on the Pacific, formerly known as the state of California. He’s mostly a backbencher, but he’ll never miss an opportunity to whore himself in front of the TV cameras at any opportune moment where he can distort an issue so it denigrates America and elevates leftism. Lieu has a rather colorful résumé, to say the least:

(1) Considers unrestricted taxpayer-subsidized abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy a right
(2) Government-controlled health care via single-payer health
(3) Mandatory affirmative action in both the private and public sectors
(4) Abolition of the Second Amendment
(5) Opposes voter ID and election integrity
(6) Radical anti-oil “climate change” hoaxer
(7) Favors outright nationalization of banks instead of bailouts

There’s also his thinly veiled anti-Semitism and constant fantasizing about eliminating Donald Trump and the 73 million people who voted for him, and so on and so on and scoobie doobie doobie. Ho hum. Ted Lieu is hardly an outlier in the Democrat Party. These days, he’s run-of-the-mill.

In any case, with a crashing economy, an intentional border invasion displacing Americans with third-world peasants, a fiasco of a foreign policy that has emboldened our enemies while endangering us and our allies, and domestic policies that have turned anything not inherently Democrat or leftist into “an existential threat to our precious democracy” (*vomit*), you’d think Lieu would have his hands full sponsoring legislation that might alleviate those problems. Or, more likely, exacerbate them since Ted Lieu and his party, aided and abetted by the RINOs of the Grand Old Potemkin party, are the ones responsible for the disasters in the first place, but I digress.

So, with everything going up in flames all around us, what is a major legislative priority for Ted Lieu?

The push for glue trap bans is being led by the radical leftist group PETA which claims several large retailers have stopped selling the glue traps as well as companies and institutions that have sworn off using them. Lieu’s main objection is that the glue traps are cruel to rats and mice….

Rodent control is not for the squeamish. It involves killing disease spreading, food eating, property damaging rats and mice that are a threat to human health and safety. Bait traps, glue traps, poisons and electric shock traps all have elements of pain and cruelty. The question is what role, if any, should the federal government have in regulating rodent control and how would it be enforced: Armed FBI raids at dawn on rat-infested apartments or family farms over glue traps for rats and mice?

Emphasis mine, but hold that thought for a moment. As stated, in terms of triage, this is the equivalent of calling for the medics during H-hour on Omaha Beach and demanding to be treated for a hangnail. Yet, when you think about it, as repulsive as Ted Lieu and his leftism are, you have to admit that for once, he’s actually doing his job, or more to the point what his job and the job of the other 434 Reps are, or ought to be: writing and voting on bills.

Whatever image PETA projects about fighting animal cruelty, the useful idiots who fall for that guff are in fact supporting yet another Communist front group whose specific goal in the broader war on free market capitalism is going after food, clothing (especially fur), and animal experimentation, among other things. Of course, like every other radical activist group, they embrace the mantra of “by any means necessary,” with their support for the terrorist group the Animal Liberation Front.

It’s funny how Klaus Schwab and the Bond villains of Davos are pushing for us peons to “eat zee bugz!” in order to save the planet, yet not so long ago PETA insisted that using RAID and Roach Motels was tantamount to committing genocide. To be on the right side of history, they insisted you must trap and release roaches. No, really.

For sure, glue traps are indeed “not for the squeamish” and are, to say the least, not a pleasant way to go for rodents and other small critters. But is it the purview of the federal government to pass legislation that bans them? More to the point, would you prefer that the EPA merely issue a regulation that bans the manufacture and sale of glue traps?

To get to the crux of the biscuit of that highlighted quote above, “What role should the federal government have in regulating rodent control anything?”

For me, it is axiomatic that every piece of legislation that the Democrat Party has ever succeeded in passing has made us poorer, sicker, less free, and either creates or exacerbates whatever societal problem and dislocation it putatively was put forth to solve. Yet I can, for lack of a better word, commend Ted Lieu for at least in this instance respecting the Constitution. Presenting a bill before Congress, getting it passed in both chambers, and ultimately having the president sign it into law is the way our government is supposed to operate, and yet for decades, the legislative branch has ceded its authority in governance to the executive branch; specifically the unelected bureaucracy.

Recall Malig-Nancy Pelosi’s infamous boast during opening salvos of the Obamacare debate, “We’ll go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, we’ll go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in, but we’re going to get health care reform passed for the America people.” In other words, by hook or by crook, figuratively and in her case quite literally. “Going through the gate,” I assume, means attempting to pass a bill through Congress. More often than not, bills, especially of the Democrat-leftist variety that are attempts at wholesale “fundamental transformation” of society, people, and their relationship to the government (which was intended to be the dominant element), are extremely difficult to pass via regular order. Obamacare is kind of a bad example since it passed, but the way in which it was passed via a completely corrupt procedure nevertheless undergirds my assertions.

This is where Pelosi’s allusion of her party as figurative second-story men reveals the game. Remember the Democrats got creamed in the 2010 midterms, but the damage was done. They managed to put fully one-sixth of the American economy under government control. And by government control I mean leftist control. Barring a miracle, forever.

Yet perhaps a miracle is on the horizon, one that could denude the nearly absolute, unchecked power of the administrative state and perhaps devolve power back to local governments and ultimately the individual.

The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two companion cases, Relentless Inc. v. U.S. Dept. of Commerce and Loper Bright v. Raimondo on Wednesday. The bottom-line question before the court concerned whether Congress authorized the Department of Commerce to charge fishing businesses the cost of government-mandated observers on their rigs.

But answering that question requires the Supreme Court to first decide whether to overturn the landmark case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the namesake for the Chevron doctrine, which requires courts to defer to an agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute so long as the agency’s interpretation is “reasonable.” That’s what Wednesday’s arguments were all about—Chevron and whether the Supreme Court should do away with Chevron deference.

A blackletter law definition of Chevron deference is easy to provide. As noted above, it is a legal principle that requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. But Wednesday’s hearing showed the contours of the doctrine are far from clear, with the justices jousting with the solicitor general, who represents the Department of Commerce, over the meaning of “ambiguous.”

A statute is “ambiguous,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said, “when the court has exhausted the tools of interpretation and hasn’t found a single right answer.” But as Justice Gorsuch noted in response, just the prior year, a government attorney claimed he could not define “ambiguous.”

What the Chevron decision from 1984 boils down to was SCOTUS giving the unelected bureaucrats of the EPA the power to issue rules and regulations that had the force of law to essentially regulate the activity of Chevron. Without oversight and without any say from the electorate. By extension, it weaponized every agency in government to have that power. Now it becomes easy to see why the Democrats are always so exercised when a Republican president has the chance to nominate a SCOTUS justice, because a bench populated by Scalias, Thomases and Alitos will effectively shut the window on Pelosi and saw off her pole vault.

As for Ted Lieu and legislating glue traps out of existence and many other inane, trivial bills, they have no place being debated in Congress. Some might argue that life is way too complicated for ordinary people to be trusted to make the right decisions (the horror!). A cursory look at how government has managed our affairs indicates we have very little to lose should we take away Malig-Nancy Pelosi’s giant clown gavel, and crucially the unaccountable apparatchiks of the unofficial fourth branch of government who wield the real power. The final say on glue traps should ultimately be decided by the individual American citizen and the marketplace. The same goes for automobiles to gas stoves to health insurance and everything under the sun.

Now, that’s a radical idea.