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US Supreme Court significantly reduces power of government bureaucracy

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From The Center Square

Lawmakers put federal agencies on notice after end to Chevron deference

A coalition of lawmakers are putting federal agencies on notice after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned “Chevron deference” and as a result, significantly limited their power.

House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., has helped lead the effort, but the relevant committee chairs with oversight of the federal government, have signed on to similar letters.

“This long-needed reversal should stem the vast tide of federal agencies’ overreach,” Comer said in his letters to the federal government. “Given the Biden administration’s track record, however, I am compelled to underscore the implications of Loper Bright and remind you of the limitations it has set on your authority.”

The push comes on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning part of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and thereby putting an end to “Chevron deference,” a previous legal policy that gave broad license to federal bureaucrats to interpret and enforce laws passed by Congress as they saw fit.

In that vein, House lawmakers held a hearing Wednesday for oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency, the first in what is likely a new era of EPA oversight after the major Supreme Court ruling.

President Joe Biden’s EPA has pushed out a few particularly aggressive regulations that have drawn pushback.

Among those are WOTUS, an Obama-era rule that classified even tiny bodies of water as under federal jurisdiction.

More recently, the EPA’s tailpipe emissions standards are under fire, mainly because they will likely force a nationwide transition from gas to hybrid or electric vehicles in just a few years.

“EPA’s largest regulations, such as the tailpipe emissions rules for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, have been estimated to cost nearly $900 billion to implement,” Comer said at the hearing Wednesday. “Those rules require automakers to completely redesign their operations to produce more electric vehicles – regardless of what consumers are demanding in the actual marketplace.”

Now, that era has likely come to an end.

“The Supreme Court decision has put policy making back into the hands of the Congress where it belongs, and unelected bureaucrats can no longer weaponize their authority to enact their own personal agenda,” Daniel Turner, executive director of the energy workers advocacy group, Power the Future, told The Center Square. “Industry for decades has been chocked by ever-changing regulations with penalties and fines and even criminal prosecution, all whims of the bureaucrat in charge. The American people are sick and tired of big government, and agencies like the EPA are back under the purview of the Congress and not some green billionaire whose think tank feeds the Administrator’s team with propaganda and lies.”

But the EPA is just one of many agencies facing a Congressional effort to undo years of federal rulemaking.

Comer noted that he has also joined lawmakers in sending letters to an array of agencies that face a similar review, including:

  • AmeriCorps
  • Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
  • Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
  • Council on Environmental Quality
  • Department of Agriculture
  • Department of Commerce
  • Department of Education
  • Department of Energy
  • Department of the Interior
  • Department of Health and Human Services
  • Department of Homeland Security
  • Department of Labor
  • Department of State
  • Department of Transportation
  • Department of the Treasury
  • Department of Veterans Affairs
  • Environmental Protection Agency
  • Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
  • Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
  • National Credit Union Administration
  • National Labor Relations Board
  • Office of the Comptroller of the Currency
  • Office of the United States Trade Representative
  • Securities and Exchange Commission
  • Small Business Administration
  • Social Security Administration

D.C. Bureau Reporter

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COVID-19

Trump DOJ seeks to quash Pfizer whistleblower’s lawsuit over COVID shots

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The Justice Department attorney did not mention the Trump FDA’s recent admission linking the COVID shots to at least 10 child deaths so far.

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) is attempting to dismiss a whistleblower case against Pfizer over its COVID-19 shots, even as the Trump Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is beginning to admit their culpability in children’ s deaths.

As previously covered by LifeSiteNews, in 2021 the BMJ published a report on insider information from a former regional director of the medical research company Ventavia, which Pfizer hired in 2020 to conduct research for the company’s mRNA-based COVID-19 shot.

The regional director, Brook Jackson, sent BMJ “dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails,” which “revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety […] We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.”

According to the report, Ventavia “falsified data, unblinded patients, employed inadequately trained vaccinators, and was slow to follow up on adverse events reported in Pfizer’s pivotal phase III trial.” Overwhelmed by numerous problems with the trial data, Jackson filed an official complaint with the FDA.

Jackson was fired the same day, and Ventavia later claimed that Jackson did not work on the Pfizer COVID-19 shot trial; but Jackson produced documents proving she had been invited to the Pfizer trial team and given access codes to software relating to the trial. Jackson filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for violating the federal False Claims Act and other regulations in January 2021, which was sealed until February 2022. That case has been ongoing ever since.

Last August, U.S. District Judge Michael Truncale dismissed most of Jackson’s claims with prejudice, meaning they could not be refiled. Jackson challenged the decision, but the Trump DOJ has argued in court to uphold it, Just the News reports, with DOJ attorney Nicole Smith arguing that the case concerns preserving the government’s unfettered power to dismiss whistleblower cases.

The rationale echoes a recurring trend in DOJ strategy that Politico described in May as “preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions,” even in cases that involve “backing policies favored by Democrats.”

Jackson’s attorney Warner Mendenhall responded that the administration “really sort of made our case for us” in effectively admitting that DOJ is taking the Fair Claims Act’s “good cause” standard for state intervention to mean “mere desire to dismiss,” which infringes on his client’s “First Amendment right to access the courts, to vindicate what she learned.”

Mendenhall added that in a refiled case, Jackson “may be able to bring a very different case along the same lines, but with the additional information” to prove fraud, whereas rejection would send the message that “if fraud involves government complicity, don’t bother reporting it.”

“The truth is we do not know if we saved lives on balance,” admitted FDA Chief Medical Officer Vinay Prasad in a recent leaked email. “It is horrifying to consider that the U.S. vaccine regulation, including our actions, may have harmed more children than we saved. This requires humility and introspection.”

The COVID shots have been highly controversial ever since the first Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative prepared and released them in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a large body of evidence has steadily accumulated over the past five years indicating that the COVID jabs failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own.

Ever since, many have intently watched and hotly debated what President Donald Trump would do about the situation upon his return to office. Though he never backed mandates like former President Joe Biden did, for years Trump refused to disavow the shots to the chagrin of his base, seeing Operation Warp Speed as one of his crowning achievements. At the same time, during his latest run he embraced the “Make America Healthy Again” movement and its suspicion of the medical establishment more broadly.

So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine advocate, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current jabs optional but not supporting work to develop successors.

In a July interview, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary asked for patience from those unsatisfied by the administration’s handling of the shots, insisting more time was needed for comprehensive trials to get more definitive data.

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International

Trump admin wants to help Canadian woman rethink euthanasia, Glenn Beck says

Published on

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Jolene Van Alstine, approved for state-sanctioned euthanasia after enduring long wait times to receive care for a rare parathyroid disease, is in need of a passport to enter the U.S.

Well-known American media personality Glenn Beck says he has been in touch with the U.S. State Department to help a Canadian woman in Saskatchewan reconsider euthanasia after she sought assisted suicide due to long medical wait times to address her health problems.

As reported by LifeSiteNews on Tuesday, Canadian woman Jolene Van Alstine was approved to die by state-sanctioned euthanasia because she has had to endure long wait times to get what she considers to be proper care for a rare parathyroid disease.

Van Alstine’s condition, normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism (nPHPT), causes her to experience vomiting, nausea, and bone pain.

Her cause caught the attention of Beck and many other prominent Americans and Canadians on X.

In an update today on X, Beck said, “Jolene does not have a passport to gain legal entry into the U.S., but my team has been in touch with President (Donald) Trump’s State Department.”

“All I can say for now is they are aware of the urgent life-saving need, and we had a very positive call,” he added.

Beck had said before that he was in “contact with Jolene and her husband” and that he had “surgeons who emailed us standing by to help her.”

As of press time, neither the State Department nor other officials have not yet confirmed Beck’s claim that he has been in touch with them.

As a result of Van Alstine’s frustrations with the healthcare system, she applied for Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) and was approved for January 7.

A new Euthanasia Prevention Coalition report revealed that Canada has euthanized 90,000 people since 2016, the year it was legalized.

As reported by LifeSiteNews recently, a Conservative MP’s private member’s bill that, if passed, would ban euthanasia for people with mental illness received the full support of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition.

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