The President's Daily Brief - July 1st, 2022. SCOTUS Issues Major Ruling Over Climate Change Regulations. China Tries to Stop US From Sourcing Rare Earth Metals.

Episode Date: July 1, 2022

It’s July 1st. You’re listening to the President’s Daily Brief. Your morning intel starts now. ------ First, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that environmental regulators are not allowed to issue sweeping regulations due to climate change. Only Congress, they said, has that authority. We’re going to talk about that case, and why it’s really about who controls our lives. As always, I’m keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put these two on your radar. First, Monkeypox is spreading in the Congo. But not where it’s normally… found. And that is causing alarm. I’ve got the latest.  Finally, China is trying to stop America from developing our own sources of rare earth metals. We’ll talk about what they’re up to and why.  Plus, a quick word on Monday’s 4th of July podcast. It’s going to be pretty special. All up next on the President's Daily Brief. ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's July 1st. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. The brief you're about to hear is in the same spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical events in the past 24 hours, all delivered to the president each day by the nation's spymasters. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy and this is your brief. Here's what we're going to be talking about this morning. First up, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that environmental regulators are not allowed to issue sweeping regulations due to climate change. Only Congress, they said, has that authority. We're going to talk about that case and why it's really about who controls our lives. As always, I'm keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put these two on your radar.

First, monkeypox is spreading in the Congo, but not where it's normally found. And that is causing alarm. I've got the latest. Finally, China is trying to stop America from developing our own sources of rare earth metals. We're going to talk about what they're up to and why. Plus, a quick word on Monday's Fourth of July podcast. It's going to be pretty special. All up next on the president's daily brief.

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Heads nod, feet tap, one person dances than everyone does. Awkward becomes electric. When Bose sound fills the room, you don't just hear the music. You feel it. Your life deserves music. Your music deserves Bose. Find your perfect product at Bose.com. First up this morning on the PDB, in the past couple of weeks, the Supreme Court has issued a number of big opinions. But one ruling issued yesterday, it's the West Virginia versus the Environmental Protection Agency. Well, that one is uniquely important because it addresses the fundamental question of who controls the function of government? Is it ultimately you and your elected representatives? Or is it employees of government agencies? So we're going to dive into the background of this case, how the court ruled, plus why Joe Biden is calling it another devastating decision that aims to take our country backwards. And when we're finished, you can decide if he's right. So here's the case. The Environmental Protection Agency

or EPA issues all sorts of rules and regulations. And they were planning to issue new ones this fall about how much carbon dioxide that power plants can put into the air. Carbon dioxide is regarded by the EPA as a greenhouse gas that is believed to heat the atmosphere and cause climate change. What most people expected is that the EPA under Joe Biden would issue very strict regulations that would shut down most, if not all coal-fired power plants and probably most natural gas plants too. But keep in mind, Congress doesn't vote on the rules that the EPA issues. They don't write them. They don't agree to them.

And that's despite the fact that some of those rules have profound impacts on the country and on voters like you. Well, West Virginia didn't think that that was right. So they sued the EPA saying that the agency doesn't have the authority to issue those kinds of sweeping regulations, specifically on carbon emissions from power plants. but the principle that West Virginia was really advocating was that federal agencies and their employees should never be able to issue those kinds of rules and regulations,

the ones with broad national importance. That authority, West Virginia argued, belongs to Congress. The Biden administration, however, very much disagreed. They argued, in short, that Congress can't possibly come up with those rules because they don't have enough smart people to write them, and by that, I mean, that the government employs experts at the EPA and other federal agencies, and Congress should defer to those experts because that's why they're hired. In other words, Congress should pass laws, yes, but only with general intent or guidance,

and then let the agencies and those smart people work out the details, the actual rules. The Supreme Court heard both sides of this argument, and they decided six to three that West Virginia was right. It's Congress that must write those big rules and regulations, not the federal agencies, no matter how many smart people work there. Here's what Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, paraphrased. It might be sensible to cap carbon emissions at power plants such that it forces a transition to renewable energy, but it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt

such an expansive regulatory scheme all on its own. And that was the ruling. that is now the law of the land. The question is, what are the implications of this, and why should you care? On an immediate basis, the EPA is going to be very limited in what it can do regarding the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions, and shutting down those power plants. They'll now have to wait for Congress to pass a bill that tells them what those new rules are, if any. But beyond that, most observers see a much broader implication for this ruling,

because, again, the principle was fundamentally about who gets to decide how the government bureaucracy functions. And the law is now that Congress gets to decide, you and your representatives, not a bunch of unelected bureaucrats. Practically speaking, that could mean that our House and Senate and their staff are probably going to have to pass a lot more specific bills with very specific guidance on how agencies should run the country. And if Congress doesn't have the smart people to write those bills, they're going to have to hire them, or possibly, they'll lean on lobbying groups who I'm sure will have lots of smart people on their payroll. The reactions to this ruling, as you might be able to guess, were pretty divided. Most conservatives were absolutely thrilled. Democrats were not.

As I shared at the opening of the brief, Joe Biden said that this Supreme Court is clearly trying to take our countries backwards. I'll defer to you on whether or not you think he's right here, and look, reasonable people can disagree, but I'd offer up this to you for your consideration. Yesterday's ruling to me is all about the administrative state, or as I briefed you on before, the deep state. Do you all remember when I talked to you about Aldrich Ames? He was a CIA officer, but secretly worked for the Soviet Union as a spy. And when he was caught, the FBI asked him, why'd you do it? And he responded with this. I know what's best for the country and its national security, and I'm going to act on that. To paraphrase Mr. Ames,

he was a very smart person, an expert on all things national security, and he didn't care what anyone else thought, including Congress. He knew how to handle the Soviet Union, and he'd act accordingly. He would create his own rules. Now, that's an extreme example, but Aldrich Ames is on the far end of the spectrum of what observers like me called the deep state or the administrative state. These are government workers who fancy themselves as experts. They're unelected, unaccountable to voters, and they do what they want to do because, as they tell us, they're smarter than we are. And maybe that's true that some of them are smarter, but when you anoint those kinds of people with that degree of unaccountable power, the power to shut down energy plants and ruin the lives

and economies of entire regions of the country? Well, that's a little bit scary, because you create a ruling class that can very quickly abuse that authority. So to me, this ruling puts the governance of the EPA and really the nation back more firmly in the hands of your elected representatives, and ultimately you.

Meanwhile, it puts bureaucrats back where the nation's founders intended them to be, as workers subservient to the people. Now, I suspect that we'll have all sorts of new and unexpected challenges from this ruling, like potentially the influence of lobbyists, unfortunately, if we're not careful. But whatever comes next, honestly, it's up to you. Because if you want a voice in creating a rule or a regulation, well, now you've got one. You and your friends can demand that a senator or representative do your bidding.

And if they don't, well, it's your challenge to vote that politician out. that's a messy process and it can be a very lengthy one but if we do this right it gives us a much better chance to make america a more perfect union based on the will of the people not the tyranny of unelected bureaucrats coming up a closer look at what's on my radar yamava resort and casino at san manuel is california's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars catch the jonas brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th.

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As always, I'm watching a few other stories this morning. Put these two on your radar. First, a worrying development to report on the monkeypox outbreak. Researchers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kinshasa say that monkeypox is being found in provinces where it has never been seen before. And that's really strange because the virus has been in Congo since at least 1970, and it is rarely found outside of rainforests of the Congo basin. But now it's infecting people in mountainous regions and in savannas too. Now, you may be wondering why, but unfortunately nobody knows. What's equally strange is that this outbreak is different than what we're seeing in the rest of the world,

where it's primarily affecting gay and bisexual men. That's not true in the Congo. Adding to the concern here is a study published in Nature Medicine a few days ago, and it said that the monkeypox virus is undergoing an accelerated evolution. To explain, researchers studied the current virus found in Europe, and they compared it to cases back in 2018 and 19. And they found 50 differences, which means a mutation rate of six to 12 times higher than what they expected.

Now, that suggests that the virus has found a new way to infect people. How exactly? Nobody knows yet. The good news here is that at present, the virus still has a low lethality rate. It's painful like its cousin of chicken pox, but it doesn't kill you. More good news to report. We have an effective vaccine that's been on the shelf for years, two vaccines actually, and health authorities in the U.S. are still. sending out 300,000 doses now to various states, and then another 1.6 million doses in the

coming months. Regardless, I'll keep you posted as always on this story because it's really odd. Finally this morning, China's propaganda machine is on the march, and it's running right through Texas, all to keep us dependent on some very special metals that they largely control. So, here's the story. Rare earth metals are, as the name suggests, a set of minerals that aren't found very often in the mining process. They're not in large deposits or in veins like other minerals, so they can be hard to find and then mine and then of course separate out from each other. But these metals are really important for a whole bunch of different products. Your TV has them. Your cell phone has them. Your car has a whole bunch of them. And these metals

are also really important for our military. They're critical for producing smart bombs, fighter jets, satellite communications, armor, you name it, and it probably requires some amount of rare metal. In the 1980s, China caught on to how important these metals were and would probably be in the future, so they cornered the market. And now they are the world's largest producer. And that is a position that they would really like to keep. So when an Australian mining firm agreed to set up a rare earth metal separation facility in Texas, China wasn't happy. they turned to the propaganda group Dragon Bridge to stir up some trouble. This outfit flooded Facebook and Twitter with all sorts of negative messages from fake accounts about this new separation facility, saying that it would create health problems, environmental problems like radioactive contamination.

Well, they pumped these messages out, especially to environmental groups who in turn shared them with other like-minded people. But all of it was, in fact, fake news. The Pentagon, the FBI, and others are in very very. investigating this effort by China, but regardless, the Texas facility is still on track to open in 2025. So if you see anything about this on your social media accounts, that this Texas facility is bad or any other rare earth metal facilities in the country are bad and dangerous, well, you should be cautious, because it might just be Chinese propaganda. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes your morning brief. Two quick things before I let you go. First, some good news. The

PDB has been around for just under three months, and I am excited to report that we've been downloaded one million times in total. And that's pretty incredible. We're hitting this milestone because of you. You have subscribed to the podcast. You're coming back every day, and you are telling people about it. I can't say it enough, folks, thank you. Thank you for your faithfulness, for your emails, and for your patience as I've grown these past months. I am so honored and so humbled. sincerely I say thank you. Finally, the Fourth of July is a very important day to so many of us. I'm going to give you a special brief about a CIA officer who wrote a very special letter on July 4th of 1967. It's the last letter that he ever wrote to anyone. I think you'll find

that letter and the man to be as inspiring as I do. He embodies the pride and the sacrifice that we'll all be celebrating during our nation's Independence Day. I do hope you're listen in. As always, we close out the show reminding each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American. It's from John chapter 8 verse 32. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Good day.