US Supreme Court Lifts Limit On President's Ability To Fire Agency Directors In CFPB Case

The court ruled the the limit in the Dodd-Frank Act limiting the president's ability to fire the head of the CFPB was unconstitutional

The court severed the issue from the rest of the law, allowing the agency to continue to operate

Sen. Elizabeth Warren was the agency's first director and hailed Monday's ruling

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned part of a federal law that limited President Trump’s ability to fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without cause, ruling it violated the constitutional separation of powers but determined the agency, itself, is legal.

The justices agreed the issue of the president’s ability to fire the CFPB’s director could be severed from the rest of the case, meaning the agency can continue to operate and its past cases do not need to be revisited.

“The president’s power to remove and thus supervise those who wield executive power on his behalf follows from the text of Article II, was settled by the First Congress, and was confirmed in” a 1926 landmark decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

He added: “We therefore hold that the structure of the CFPB violates the separation of powers. We go on to hold that the CFPB director’s removal protection is severable from the other statutory provisions bearing on the CFPB’s authority. The agency may therefore continue to operate, but its director, in light of our decision, must be removable by the president at will.”

The 5-4 decision, in which Roberts sided with the four more conservative justices on the court, came in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was filed by a California law firm that refused to comply with a civil investigative demand. Seila Law provides debt-related legal services to clients.

The CFPB was the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., in the wake of the Great Recession. It was part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act and was charged with protecting consumers from abuses by financial institutions. The law specifically prohibited firing its director without cause.

Warren hailed the decision on Twitter.

https://www.ibtimes.com/us-supreme-court-lifts-limit-presidents-ability-fire-agency-directors-cfpb-case-3002642

Ocean Voyages Institute Removed 103 Tons Of Plastic From The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Setting Record

The Ocean Voyages Institute returned to Honolulu last week after spending 48-days out at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where they collected a mind-blowing 103 tons of marine debris.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch comprises of two enormous masses of ever-increasing piles of plastic and other trash. The Eastern Garbage Patch is situated between Hawaii and California, while the Western Garbage Patch extends in an easterly direction towards Japan from the Hawaiian Islands.

The oceanic litter patch is up to 1.6 million square kilometres in size, according to the Ocean Cleanup institution, who have also calculated that the weight of all the trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (also known as The Gyre) to be at around 80,000 tons.

And so while The Ocean Voyages Institute should rightly be praised for their remarkable work, it is, unfortunately, literally just a drop in the ocean.

The California-based nonprofit charted a Hawaiian sailing cargo ship called Kwai and departed shore in early May. They returned to land on June 23. GPS-enabled satellite beacons, drones and other technology were used in the operation.

As you can see from the photos and from their YouTube video, it was a mammoth undertaking hauling in all the plastic, fishing nets and other assorted trash.

https://youtu.be/U7Ka0stsTO0

“I am so proud of our hard working crew,” said founder and executive director Mary Crowley in a statement.

“We exceeded our goal of capturing 100 tons of toxic consumer plastics and derelict ‘ghost’ nets. And in these challenging times, we are continuing to help restore the health of our ocean, which influences our own health and the health of the planet.”

In 2019, the Ocean Voyages Institute engaged in a similar, but slightly smaller project, collecting 42 tons of debris after spending 25 days out at sea.

“We feel that our cleanup work in the Gyre really helps address some of this debris before it arrives in the islands,” she said. “The oceans can’t wait for these nets and debris to break down into microplastics which impair the ocean’s ability to store carbon and toxify the fragile ocean food web,” Crowley added.

Much of the ropes, fishing nets and consumer plastics will be recycled into fuel and repurposed into building insulation.

Plans are underway for more expeditions this year and in years ahead.

https://www.naturalblaze.com/2020/06/ocean-voyages-institute-removed-103-tons-of-plastic-from-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-setting-record.html

The War for Free Speech Is Here

While most of us were busy surviving pandemic-fueled civil confinement and Democratic Party–led riots in the street, the shots over Fort Sumter were fired, and the war for freedom of speech began in earnest. Just as the mob outside seeks to control how we think and what we may say, Google, Twitter, and Facebook seek to do the same thing by targeting and discriminating against conservatives for their ideas. That there is now such a strong army of "Americans in name only" who have taken it upon themselves to tell others what they may learn and believe and write without being tormented or threatened by black-clad shock troops breaking windows and fire-bombing businesses or financially ruined by Democrat-aligned corporate oligarchs targeting conservative Americans' livelihoods only serves as jarring proof that we have tolerated these attacks on our freedom and woefully appeased our attackers for entirely too long.

It's not the rise of a charismatic leader in Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here that is hard to imagine. We've read about Julius Caesar and the fall of the Roman Republic, about the French Revolution's Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte, about the post-WWI rise to power of Russia's Lenin and Italy's Mussolini. We've seen the film reels of Adolf Hitler gesticulating before crowds of thousands and Hugo Chávez using the power of television to seduce his countrymen with socialist dreams.

What has always seemed difficult to grasp is how so many millions of ordinary people could become mindless cult followers, all marching together and repeating the same phrases as if part of one unitary organism. How do you teach millions of people to throw a straight arm high into the air as part of a Nazi salute? How do you condition a populace to greet one another with an exclamatory "Heil Hitler!"? How do you teach law-abiding citizens that breaking the windows of Jewish businesses is not only acceptable, but also patriotic? How do you mobilize a nation, as Mao did, to destroy its own glorious history? Or convince a prosperous country, as Chávez did, to trade the wealth of the free market for socialist poverty? How do you so effectively harness the passionate hatred of uneducated children that they turn on their parents and teachers, destroy their churches and religious temples and statues and historical monuments, and violently punish anyone who gets in their way? How can any of the sins of authoritarian dictators, socialist despots, or communist mass murderers ever become reality in America, where freedom and personal liberty reign?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/the_war_for_free_speech_is_here.html