A Hiatus in Soft-Power Administrative Law: The Case of Medicaid Eligibility Waivers

Administrative law is fundamentally a regime of soft power. Congress, the President, administrative agencies, civil servants, and the courts all operate within a broad consensus for rational, good-faith decisionmaking. Congress grants agencies discretion, and courts and civil servants defer to agencies’ political leadership based largely on the expectation that the latter are seeking to honor statutes’ purposes. That expectation of prudential restraint also allays concerns about delegations of legislative power. When the executive systematically disregards that expectation and seeks single-mindedly to maximize achievement of its policy objectives, deference’s justification breaks down. Across agencies, the Trump administration has disregarded the assumptions on which administrative law’s soft power consensus depends. Its waivers allowing states to deny Medicaid to otherwise eligible low-income people unable to find employment exemplifies this disregard. Exploiting a sweeping delegation of authority to test new ways to achieve Medicaid’s goal of providing health care coverage, this administration has instead sought to achieve very different goals, from legislation that Congress has rejected. The waiver applications themselves estimate substantial increases in the numbers of uninsured people. Ignoring the administration’s disregard of the longstanding administrative law consensus could deter future Congresses from valuable delegations of discretion. Permanently abandoning the deferential soft-power model would seriously undermine future governance. Instead, courts and civil servants should treat this period as a hiatus in consensus for good-faith decisionmaking. Courts should suspend deference and other aspects of soft-power jurisprudence. And civil servants should comply with political officials’ lawful directions but should remain steadfastly truthful in their words and actions

On Neutrinos and Fermionic Mass Patterns

Recent data on neutrino mass differences are consistent with a hierarchical neutrino mass structure strikingly similar to what is observed for the other fermionic masses.Comment: 8pages, 2figure

A Dangerous Adventure: No Safeguards Would Protect Basic Liberties from an Article V Convention

Despite their support for all kinds of constitutional amendments, many advocates on both the left and the right oppose the calling of a constitutional convention. This issue brief examines the main reason for this: namely that once an Article V convention convened, it could pursue any agenda it chose regardless of the original intent

Constructing Dirac linear fermions in terms of non-linear Heisenberg spinors

We show that the massive (or massless) neutrinos can be described as special states of Heisenberg nonlinear spinors. As a by-product of this decomposition a particularly attractive consequence appears: the possibility of relating the existence of only three species of mass-less neutrinos to such internal non-linear structure. At the same time it allows the possibility that neutrino oscillation can occurs even for massless neutrinos

Prediction of Ue3U_{e3} in Neutrino Mass Matrix with Two Zeros

We have discussed predictions of $|U_{e3}|$ and $J_{CP}$ in the framework of the neutrino mass matrix with two zeros. In the case of the best fit values of $\tan^2\theta_{12}$, $\tan^2\theta_{23}$, $\Delta m^2_{\rm sun}$ and $\Delta m_{\rm atm}^2$, the prediction of $|U_{e3}|$ is $0.11\sim 0.14$. The lower bound of $|U_{e3}|$ is 0.05, which depends on $\tan\theta_{12}$ and $\tan\theta_{23}$. We have investigated the stability of these predictions taking account of small corrections to zeros, which may come from radiative corrections or off-diagonal elements of the charged lepton massmatrix. The lower bound of $|U_{e3}|$ comes down considerably due to the small corrections to zeros.Comment: Figures and discussions are adde

Neutrino mixing and CP violation from Dirac-Majorana bimaximal mixture and quark-lepton unification

We demonstrate that only two ansatz can produce the features of the neutrino mixing angles. The first ansatz comes from the quark-lepton grand unification; $\nu_{Di} = V_{CKM} \nu_{\alpha}$ is satisfied for left-handed neutrinos, where $\nu_{Di}$ are the Dirac mass eigenstates and $\nu_{\alpha}$ are the flavour eigenstates. The second ansatz comes from the assumption; $\nu_{Di} = U_{bimaximal} \nu_{i}$ is satisfied between the Dirac mass eigenstates $\nu_{Di}$ and the light Majorana neutrino mass eigenstates $\nu_{i}$, where $U_{bimaximal}$ is the bimaximal mixing matrix. By these two ansatz, the Maki-Nakagawa-Sakata matrix is given by $U_{MNS} = V_{CKM}^\dagger U_{bimaximal}$. We find that in this model the novel relation $\theta_{sol} + \theta_{13} = \pi/4$ is satisfied, where $\theta_{sol}$ and $\theta_{13}$ are solar and CHOOZ angle respectively. This "Solar-CHOOZ Complementarity" relation indicates that only if the CHOOZ angle $\theta_{13}$ is sizable, the solar angle $\theta_{sol}$ can deviate from the maximal mixing. We also infer the CP violation in neutrino oscillations. The leptonic Dirac CP phase $\delta_{MNS}$ is predicted as $\sin \delta_{MNS} \simeq A \lambda^2 \eta$, where $A, \lambda, \eta$ are the CKM parameters in Wolfenstein parametrization. Furthermore, we remark that the ratio of the Jarlskog CP violation factor for quarks and leptons is important, because the large uncertainty on $\eta$ is cancelled out in the ratio, $R_J \equiv J_{CKM}/J_{MNS} \simeq 4\sqrt{2} A \lambda^3 \simeq 5 \times 10^{-2}$.Comment: 9 pages, no figures; v2 references added, v3 references adde

Neutrino Masses and Lepton-flavor-violating τ\tau Decays in the Supersymmetric Left-right Model

In the supersymmetric left-right model, the light neutrino masses are given by the Type-II seesaw mechanism. A duality property about this mechanism indicates that there exist eight possible Higgs triplet Yukawa couplings which result in the same neutrino mass matrix. In this paper, We work out the one-loop renormalization group equations for the effective neutrino mass matrix in the supersymmetric left-right model. The stability of the Type-II seesaw scenario is briefly discussed. We also study the lepton-flavor-violating processes ($\tau\to \mu\gamma$ and $\tau\to e\gamma$) by using the reconstructed Higgs triplet Yukawa couplings