Bureaucrats in all of the various agencies that make up the Federal, State, and local governments are getting over their ski tips. No, not all of them. I’ve met a number of government employees who really do consider themselves to be public servants and conduct themselves accordingly.
These are the types of folks who need to be praised and held up as models for others.
Like those who seem to believe that because their paychecks have another government employee signing the front of their paycheck, they can have an elevated sense of themselves. And often, this means that they can go above and beyond what their statutory authority allows them to do. They seem to believe (or have forgotten) that it is their Legislature that has given them whatever Powers they have – and not a smidge more.
Sure, a Governor must sign such legislation that is delegating those Powers under the Constitution(s) (or let it become law by not vetoing it), but just as the Constitution, either at the Federal or State levels, acts as a barrier to what Legislatures and Executive Branches can do, such legislation is also a barrier to agency employees.
Or, as Moses, passing as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings said on the bridge, made clear:
Well, we have no Gandalf nor Moses, but we do have the Judiciary.
Federal Judge Blocks Rule Requiring Employers to Accommodate Employee Abortions
A federal judge in Louisiana has blocked enforcement of a rule in two states that required employers to provide accommodations to employees who want to undergo elective abortions, with the judge siding with plaintiffs who argued that abortions aren’t “medical conditions” that employers must facilitate. U.S. District Judge David Joseph announced the ruling in an order filed on June 17 at the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, granting a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit against the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which he found exceeded its authority in implementing the rule.
The EEOC “exceeded its statutory authority” in issuing the rule and “unlawfully expropriated the authority of Congress and encroached upon the sovereignty of the States Plaintiffs,” wrote Judge Joseph.
There’s more at the post about the injunction, but that last line is the crux of this ongoing “deliberately straying out of your lane” push, push, push. It’s either a case where:
- I work here, and I know what is best – we’ll just do it (the “full of themselves syndrome”)
- I work here, and let’s see if we can sneak this past the rubes.
- I work here, but I don’t WANT to read some old legislation to see if we can do this – we’ll do it and let the lawyers sort it out.
They tried #3 and got caught; the judge jerked their chain. Note this next part – its ruling was made (assumed) to the ideology of the employees of the EEOC plus the comments:
…The EEOC said that its decision to keep the abortion provision was consistent with its own interpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a federal law that prohibits an employer from discriminating against employees based on sex, race, religion, national origin, color, and pregnancy.
The EEOC decided to redefine pregnancy (originally, this was to protect any woman that was pregnant!) to be “making pregnant women be UNpregnant”. Gee, was THAT part of the Legislation? Er, nope, you dopes. But this is what was done – the redefinition of our common language to make something clearer but to forward an ideology (e.g., that babies, as Obama once said, are burdens). And they got caught:
The attorneys general of Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and other groups, sued the EEOC over the rule, which was slated to go into effect on June 18. They argued that inclusion of abortion under the definition of pregnancy-related medical conditions was an attempt to hijack the provisions of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to impose a national abortion exception.
