lawsuits

A literacy lawsuit is due to go to trial in October, but little will change if it is successful.

On January 10, the city of New York filed suit against BP, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell.

Last Tuesday, Research Fellow H. Sterling Burnett was a guest on the nationally syndicated radio program An Economy of One broadcast on Radio America Network.

By withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement, President Donald Trump may have avoided myriad legal efforts to force the administration to restrict fossil fuel development and use in the United States.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, H. Sterling Burnett, Research Fellow and Managing Editor of Environment & Climate News, joins Host Isaac Orr to talk about the legal efforts by the Obama administration via Attorney General Loretta Lynch and several democratic state AG’s to prosecute companies, researchers and think tanks under RICO for disagreeing with them on climate science and policy.

If you want more of something, mandate it, subsidize it and exempt it from regulations. If you want less of something, punish it with taxes and regulations. Put more bluntly, the power to tax and regulate is the power to destroy. This is the First Rule of Government.

It is disappointing to see so many people who usually reside on the Right – go screaming Leftward on an issue so fundamental to all-things-free-market as private property protection. In this particular case – patent protection.

The small and dwindling contingent in favor of the terrible, patent-smashing bills being considered in Congress suffer from an obsessive fetish — “patent trolls.” It’s at once a mantra — and a Pavlovian fervor-inducer. Just say “patent troll” in front of any member of this tiny cohort — and watch them freak out.

Twenty-nine states, more than half the stars on the American flag, have filed lawsuits against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for redefining the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, erasing “navigable” and usurping states’ rights by including local seasonal streams, farm irrigation ponds, roadside ditches, and even “connective” dry lands placed under authority of the Clean Water Act.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has in recent years imposed numerous new regulatory rules strangling the freedoms of businesses and property owners. Latching on to every possible excuse for regulating economic activities by citing microscopic effects on air and water, EPA has shown no respect for any boundaries in imposing its draconian mandates. State governments are experiencing the effects and are increasingly taking action to reduce the amount of economic carnage the Obama administration’s EPA inflicts.

The GOP wants the Silicon Valley’s love. And by love we mean the millions of donation dollars that currently go mostly to Democrats. And sadly, it appears some Republicans will go to nearly any length to curry some of that coin.

Joy Pullmann, managing editor at The Federalist and education research fellow at the Heartland Institute discusses some of the top education policy stories of 2014 with Heather Kays, managing editor of School Reform News. Pullmann and Kays also discuss what’s to come in 2015.

Throw enough mud at the wall, and some of it will stick. That seems to be the hope behind the several legal challenges brought against education tax credit scholarship programs. In some cases, choice opponents use the Blaine Amendment as an excuse to extinguish any hint of education freedom. In other cases, they use technicalities, such as a suit saying the statute violates a law requiring each piece of legislation concern only a single subject.