´6.
Hydrology and water quality:
Miles of new roads, blasting, Soil
compaction, Hundreds of tons of concrete and other
materials, transformer oils, herbicides usage. Likely to
affect local springs and waterways.
´7.
Biological Resources (wildlife):
Threatens local Bald eagles, spotted
owls, raptors, migratory birds (located in “Globally
Significant Avian Area”). Likely to affect various
mammals due to ability to hear and use infrasound and
other noise affects shadow flicker, etc.
´8.
Public Health:
Shadow Flicker, Noise, Infrasound,
Increased stress. Shadow flicker already observed across
Hwy 299 from Hatchet Ridge Wind Turbines.
´9.
Not as Green as Advertised:
Only produces 20-25% of advertised
capacity, clears 2250 acres of carbon sequestering
forest, requires fossil fuel backup when winds not
blowing, curtails existing green hydropower when winds
blowing implies 0% green benefit.
´10.
Energy:
Round Mountain substation already has
voltage stability issues, already producing more power
than we need (CA ISO paid Arizona to take power in
2018), PG&E requested permission to Curtail Hatchet
Ridge power during negative pricing events (i.e. too
much power on grid). PG&E has enough Renewable Energy to
meet requirements to 2030 according to PG&E 2018 letter
to CPUC.
´The
construction of industrial wind farms cannot be
justified in the rural and wild places that developers
usually target!
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About Myron Magnet
Myron Magnet is
a prizewinning author and journalist, editor-at-large of City
Journal, and author of the new book, Clarence
Thomas and the Lost Constitution. He previously served
as editor of City Journal and a member of the board
of editors of Fortune magazine. He is one of
America’s leading public intellectuals and a recipient of
the National Humanities Medal in 2008. Magnet is a frequent
media guest who has appeared on major radio and television
programs nationwide. He has written extensively for some of
our nation’s leading publications such as The Wall
Street Journal, National Review, Commentary, The American
Spectator, and The New York Times. His work
has covered a wide range of topics from American society and
social policy to history, economics, literature, and the
American founding. He previously authored The Founders
at Home, The Dream and the Nightmare, and
other titles. Magnet holds bachelor’s degrees from Columbia
University and the University of Cambridge. He earned an
M.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Columbia, where he
taught for several years. He lives in New York City.
"Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution"
By Myron Magnet
Washington, DC—When Clarence
Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he found with
dismay that it was interpreting a very different
Constitution from the one the Framers had written—the one
that had established a federal government manned by the
people’s own elected representatives, charged with
protecting citizens’ inborn rights while leaving them free
to work out their individual happiness themselves, in their
families, communities, and states. How did we lose the
republic of the Framers’ imagination and how can we restore
their magnificent self-governing nation of liberty?
In CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION (Encounter
Books, May 7, 2019), renowned author and City Journal editor-at-large
Myron Magnet contends that Clarence Thomas’s radical
originalist jurisprudence presents a path forward for
recovering our nation’s “Lost Constitution” and restoring
America as a free, self-governing nation made up of
independent-minded, self-reliant citizens. And the book
reveals how the mortal combat between the original
Constitution of Liberty and the evolved “Living
Constitution” lies at the heart of the animosity that
divides Americans today.
Magnet recounts the gripping tale of how the Constitution
got twisted beyond recognition from the 1787 document, the
1789 Bill of Rights that the Founders had framed, and the
Reconstruction-Era Amendments ratified to fulfill Lincoln’s
dream of a new birth of freedom. Woodrow Wilson, who
despised the Framers’ checks and balances as obsolete and
inefficient, purposely began that distortion, aiming to
replace the Founders’ government of separated, enumerated,
and limited powers with government by unelected,
“scientific” experts in executive-branch agencies,
dispassionately making binding rules like a legislature,
carrying them out like a president, and adjudicating and
punishing infractions of them like a court.
Seeking to bypass cumbersome congressional lawmaking, Wilson
saw the Supreme Court as a permanent constitutional
convention, the soul of a “Living Constitution” that would
evolve continually, in Darwinian fashion, with the Bench
legislating to meet modernity’s ever-new needs. What Wilson
set going, Franklin Roosevelt supersized, creating in the
alphabet soup of New Deal agencies what he acknowledged was
a fourth branch of government with no constitutional basis.
Then, under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1950s and
1960s, the Nine set about realizing Wilson’s dream of a
Supreme Court sitting as a permanent constitutional
convention, conjuring up laws out of smoke and mirrors and
justifying them as expressions of the spirit of the age.
But Clarence Thomas—who joined the Court after eight years
running one of the myriad administrative agencies that the
Great Society had piled on top of FDR’s batch—had deep
misgivings about the new governmental order. He shared the
Framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging
their own fate. And from his own experience growing up in
hyper-segregated Savannah under the vigilant eye of his
ferociously self-reliant grandfather, flirting with and
rejecting black radicalism at college, and running an agency
that supposedly advanced equality, he doubted that unelected
experts and justices really did understand the moral arc of
the universe better than the people themselves, or that the
rules and rulings they issued made lives better rather than
worse.
More painful to Clarence Thomas, his predecessors on his own
Court had helped kill Reconstruction in its cradle through
grotesque 1870s decisions that neutered the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments and ensured decades of Jim Crow black
subservience in the South. Even worse, the Court still
cites those decisions as precedents for its rulings to this
very day. But such racist judgments surely don’t merit the
status of Constitutional law, Clarence Thomas concluded. In
the Justice’s radical originalism, clearly explained in
these pages in engaging, non-lawyerly prose, the only
legitimate Constitutional law is the Constitution.
So in the hundreds of opinions he has written in more than a
quarter century on the Court, Clarence Thomas has questioned
the constitutional underpinnings of the new order and tried
to restore the limited, self-governing original one, as more
legitimate, more just, and more free than the one that grew
up in its stead. The Court now seems set to move down the
trail he blazed. So far, few of Clarence Thomas’s searching
opinions have served as the Court’s majority ruling. But he
is laying down, within the Court’s official record, a
blueprint for future Justices to restore the authentic U.S.
Constitution, just as his own character embodies the old
ideal of American citizenship, with liberty at its heart.
To arrange an
interview with Clarence
Thomas and the Lost Constitution author Myron Magnet,
please contact Stephen Manfredi at 202.222.8028 or smanfredi@ManfrediStrategyGroup.com.
10 Interview Questions
for Clarence Thomas and the Lost Constitution Author
Myron Magnet
To Learn More About Clarence
Thomas and the Lost Constitution,
visit www.EncounterBooks.com or www.MyronMagnet.com
1. Why
did you write CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION?
2. In CLARENCE
THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION, you contend that upon
his ascension to the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas was
dismayed to discover that the Court was interpreting a very
different Constitution from the one the Framers had
written. How was this Constitution fundamentally different?
3. What
is the “Lost Constitution”? How did we lose the republic of
the Framers’ imagination?
4. What
impact did Clarence Thomas’s own life experiences—growing up
in segregated Savannah under the vigilant eye of his
fiercely self-reliant grandfather, running an agency that
supposedly advanced equality, and encountering race and sex
politics at his confirmation hearings—have on his judicial
philosophy and quarter century of service on the Supreme
Court?
5. How
did Woodrow Wilson’s notion of a “Living Constitution” and
dream of a permanent Constitutional convention develop from
the Progressive Era and FDR’s New Deal to the Warren Court
and beyond?
6. Why
has the new constitutional order based on a permanent
Constitutional convention undermined American freedom and
the Framers’ vision of free, self-governing citizens forging
their own fate? To what extent is this new constitutional
order based on judicial policy-making directly responsible
for the creation of our undemocratic “Administrative State”
in which unelected bureaucrats rule? To what extent does
the battle between the original Constitution of Liberty and
the “Living Constitution” lie at the heart of the animosity
that divides Americans today? Does our constitutional order
face a crisis of legitimacy?
7. How
did the Supreme Court actually undercut Reconstruction
efforts after the Civil War, weakening the Fourteen and
Fifteenth Amendments to ensure decades of Jim Crow black
subservience in the South? Why does the Court continue to
cite these decisions as precedent for its modern rulings?
8. What
is “originalism”? You note that Clarence Thomas holds
firmly that the only legitimate Constitutional law is the
Constitution itself. Does this mean that legal precedent is
irrelevant? Why is the Court so wedded to the doctrine of stare
decisis? Please explain Clarence Thomas’s originalist
judicial philosophy.
9. You
contend that in the hundreds of opinions he has written in
more than a quarter century on the Court, Clarence Thomas
has questioned the constitutional underpinnings of the new
order and tried to restore the limited, self-governing
original one, as more legitimate, just, and free than the
one that grew up in its stead. What are a couple of the
most important opinions Clarence Thomas has written? How do
Clarence Thomas’s legal rationales generally differ from his
fellow justices, even those with whom he usually agrees?
-
CLARENCE
THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION argues
that the Court now seems set to move down the trail
Clarence Thomas has blazed—that he is laying down within
the Court’s official record a blueprint for future
justices to restore the authentic U.S. Constitution. Do
you think that Clarence Thomas’s “radical originalism”
will ultimately prevail? Are Neil Gorsuch and Brett
Kavanaugh in the same mold as Clarence Thomas?
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