In 2017, the Federal Aviation Administration revoked James M. Fejes Jr.’s pilot’s license, after he had been flying cannabis products to shops around Alaska with Flying High Investments, his company that was dissolved in 2020.
Fejes challenged the revocation in federal district court, saying the federal government does not regulate commerce within the state of Alaska. He was not crossing state lines with his bundles of weed, so interstate commerce laws didn’t apply. His arguments failed the Ninth Circuit.
“Although many states have legalized recreational marijuana, it continues to be a controlled substance federally,” Judge Ryan D. Nelson wrote in the ruling.
Fejes, who held a pilot certificate issued by the FAA, came under scrutiny after Alaska’s Alcohol and Marijuana Control Office (AMCO) reported him for violating regulations pertaining to the transportation of marijuana. Despite marijuana being legalized for most uses under Alaska state law, Fejes’s activities were deemed illegal under federal statutes.
The FAA invoked § 44710(b)(2), a provision that mandates the revocation of a pilot certificate when the individual knowingly engages in an activity related to controlled substances punishable by imprisonment for more than one year. Fejes’s use of aircraft for the distribution of marijuana fell squarely within this provision, leading to the revocation of his pilot certificate.
Fejes contested the revocation, arguing that the FAA lacked jurisdiction to regulate purely intrastate commerce such as marijuana delivery within Alaska. However, the panel rejected this argument, citing the constitutional authority of Congress to regulate interstate commerce, including the use of airspace.
Furthermore, Fejes attempted to invoke an exemption under FAA regulation 14 C.F.R. § 91.19, which allows for the transportation of controlled substances authorized by federal or state statutes. However, the FAA maintained that this exemption did not apply to Fejes’s case, as it relied on a different provision in law.
Finally, Fejes challenged the interpretation of § 44710(b)(2) by the FAA, arguing that his conduct did not align with enforcement priorities outlined in a memorandum on marijuana-related prosecutions. However, the panel dismissed this argument, emphasizing that a criminal conviction is not a prerequisite for the revocation of a pilot certificate under the statute.
The ruling fortifies the FAA’s authority to regulate aviation activities, even in the context of state laws that conflict with federal statutes.
While the U.S. Department of Justice has directed prosecutors to use discretion in spending resources to pursue marijuana crimes in states where pot is legal, the court opinion noted: That “does not alter marijuana’s status — it remains illegal under federal law.”
The Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule Tuesday to ban noncompete contracts that prevent employees from joining rival companies in a move that immediately drew a legal challenge.
U.S. Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Suzanne Clark said the measure was illegal and would hurt businesses and workers.
“The Federal Trade Commission’s decision to ban employer noncompete agreements across the economy is not only unlawful but also a blatant power grab that will undermine American businesses’ ability to remain competitive,” she said in a statement. “This decision sets a dangerous precedent for government micromanagement of business and can harm employers, workers, and our economy.”
Clark said the chamber would file suit as soon as possible.
“Since its inception over 100 years ago, the FTC has never been granted the constitutional and statutory authority to write its own competition rules,” Clark said. “Noncompete agreements are either upheld or dismissed under well-established state laws governing their use. Yet, today, three unelected commissioners have unilaterally decided they have the authority to declare what’s a legitimate business decision and what’s not by moving to ban noncompete agreements in all sectors of the economy.”
Federal officials said banning noncompete contracts would help employees and prevent employers from using exploitative practices. The FTC said the final rule is expected to result in higher earnings for workers and lower health care costs by up to $194 billion over the next decade. The agency also said it would lead to more patents.
“Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once noncompetes are banned,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “The FTC’s final rule to ban noncompetes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”
Noncompete contracts are used widely in the U.S. An estimated 30 million workers – about 20% – are subject to a noncompete contract, according to the FTC.
Under the FTC’s new rule, existing noncompetes for the vast majority of workers will no longer be enforceable after the rule’s effective date.
Existing noncompetes for senior executives – who represent less than 0.75% of workers – can remain in force under the final rule, but employers are banned from entering into or attempting to enforce any new noncompetes, even if they involve senior executives.
FTC officials said employers will be required to provide notice to workers bound by an existing noncompete that they will not be enforcing any noncompetes.
The Alaska education industry is trying to avoid changing the Alaska Constitution that would give parents more choices for their children.
It also wants to avoid the court system deciding the issue of whether parents have the right to choose the best education fit for their children. That’s because the education industry may lose in the courts.
On April 12, Alaska Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman basically shut down Alaska’s correspondence school program. He ruled as unconstitutional the allotments which parents use to purchase educational services and materials from various vendors (AS 14.03.310).
Judge Zeman also ruled the individual learning plans (ILP) were unconstitutional (AS 14.03.300).
The correspondence school program provides more opportunities for parents to select the best education for their children. All correspondence schools are administered by the school districts. These school districts give a financial allotment to parents and parents select educational services/materials from both private and religious vendors.
The religious vendors can only provide non-sectarian services/materials to the parents. For example, a parent could buy a Latin course from Holy Rosary Academy. But that parent could not purchase a Bible or Catholic catechism course using their state allotment money.
The statute is very clear—only nonsectarian services/materials may be purchased.
Here is the specific wording: “A parent or guardian may purchase nonsectarian services and materials from a public, private, or religious organization with a student allotment provided…”.
The statute also says these materials and services “are approved by the school district.” The responsibility for ensuring that only nonsectarian purchases are made is on the school districts.
The school districts have the final say regarding whether a course is nonsectarian or not. They also have the final say if a course or material should be funded.
The school districts “own” the failure if they do not follow the law.
So, why did the National Education-Alaska file the lawsuit?
The NEA-AK and the education industry see hundreds of students leaving the brick-and-mortar schools and enrolling in these correspondence schools. That means less money and fewer NEA-AK union members are needed.
That is why the NEA-AK filed the lawsuit in the first place, using several individuals as the plaintiffs. One of the plaintiffs was the campaign manager for Anchorage School Board member Kelly Lessens.
Without allotments and ILPs, parents were left hanging. The Anchorage School District suspended paying the allotments to correspondence parents. But the ASD was still purchasing services/materials from private vendors, which Judge Zeman ruled unconstitutional.
The education industry is trying an end run to a constitutional amendment by telling the State Board of Education to issue an “emergency regulation”. They don’t want the people to vote on a constitutional amendment. Because they may well lose.
But the education industry may run into a brick wall because the Alaska Administrative Procedures Act controls the issuance of “emergency regulations”.
Alaska statute AS 44.62.250 defines the conditions of an emergency regulation. It states, ”a regulation or order of repeal may be adopted as an emergency regulation or order of repeal if a state agency makes a written finding, including a statement of the facts that constitute the emergency, that the adoption of the regulation or order of repeal is necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health, safety, or general welfare.”
The correspondence program issue does not meet the definition of “public peace, health, safety, or general welfare.
Emergency regulations are meant for natural disasters, national emergencies, and pandemics.
The Anchorage School District is taking the lead on this effort to demand that the State Board of Education & Early Development issue an emergency regulation.
The Anchorage Board of Education passed a resolution, Memo 151, at its April 23 meeting. It concludes that “The Anchorage School Board urges the State Board of Education and Early Development to meet as soon as possible and exercise the authority conferred on it by the Alaska Legislature to promulgate regulations that provide for constitutional correspondence study programs for the 2024-2025 school year and beyond.”
The important part of the resolution is the district wants the State to issue this “emergency regulation” forever. And thus, take it out of the courts to resolve.
Senators Bill Wielechowski and Loki Tobin also support this “emergency regulation” change to avoid the court system in an April 17 Facebook conversation.
The Alaska Senate is depending on Sen. Tobin, chair of the Senate Education Committee, to take the lead.
Interestingly, both Senators Tobin and Wielechowski have the lowest performing schools in the district. Why would they not want their district parents to choose the best education for their children? Don’t they want children in their districts to be able to read? To be able to achieve their maximum potential?
The education industry is aware that it might lose in the Alaska Supreme Court. And it will surely lose if/when the question goes to the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s because the SCOTUS has already decided this issue in its Espinoza v. Montanaruling.
The NEA-AK and its education industry supporters fear a constitutional amendment because they will lose in the court of public opinion.
Let parents choose. Let the people vote on a constitutional amendment.
The Alaska House is holding hearings on HJR028 in the House Judiciary Committee. This bill would amend the Alaska Constitution to provide more opportunities for Alaska’s children.
You can have a say. Will parents win or will the education industry win?
Election integrity hawks — myself among them— have spilled gallons of ink since 2020 exposing ballot drop boxes, “Zuckbucks,” and voting machine vulnerabilities, and conservatives are all the better prepared to face the 2024 election for those efforts. But there’s a massive front in this fight we can’t afford to overlook because we’re losing: voter registration.
If getting out the vote (GOTV) is the key to winning elections, registering voters is the key to effective GOTV. But doing it at scale takes money and coordination, something Republican strategists and donors have almost totally ignored.
As it stands, the left is more than a decade ahead in that race.
Beginning around 2008, “progressive” operatives discovered they could weaponize 501(c)(3) charities — the same part of the tax code as your local church or The Salvation Army — to identify and register tens of millions of new Democrat voters across the country purely by using demographics. Take it from the far-left Brennan Center, which birthed this scheme: To build a permanent Democrat majority, we must bring “millions of new voters onto the rolls through a modernized registration system — starting in 2010.”
A secret strategy memofrom 2015 asks mega-donors to fund “large-scale, multi-year voter registration programs” focused on “underrepresented” groups to “fundamentally reshape the electorate in as many as 13 states” — by 2020.
One legislator was making the case for deaf children’s needs in school. Another legislator was hearing things.
Rep. Jamie Allard was giving the House Finance Committee reasons to vote in favor of her bill to provide more support for children who are deaf and hard of hearing. She said that those children should not be discriminated against in funding and programs. Allard wears a hearing aid, and has a hearing disability exacerbated by military service.
This was Allard’s second presentation in front of Finance, which is usually limited to closing comments. Instead, it was an interrogation session by the opposition Democrats, including Rep. Andy Josephson and Rep. Sara Hannan, who were trying to kill the bill.
While Allard had used the word “discrimination,” Rep. Hannan took issue with Allard, accused Allard of calling her a “bigot,” and said Allard was impugning the motives of the Democrats who were grilling her. Hannan misquoted Allard, but Allard quickly corrected the record.
“I never said ‘bigot,'” Allard responded, as an at-ease was called by Rep. Will Stapp, who asked everyone to “take about 30 seconds.” Allard had been badgered by the Democrats on the committee in an apparent attempt to bait her.
When the room came back to the record, Allard repeated that she had never called anyone a bigot, which is factual, according to the Gavel Alaska recording.
Watch Allard’s argument for her bill and then the response from Hannan in taking umbrage at the testimony:
House Bill 111 establishes that children who are deaf or hard of hearing have the right to an individualized education program that identifies their primary language, considers their prognosis for hearing loss, provides instruction in their primary language, provides assistive devices and services, and provides appropriate and timely assessments in their primary language.
The bill has cosponsors from both sides of the aisles: Rep. Cliff Groh, Andrew Gray, Kevin McCabe, Sarah Vance, Stanley Wright, Rebecca Himschoot, Jesse Sumner, Ashley Carrick, George Rauscher, Ashley Carrick, George Rauscer, and Bryce Edgmon.
But some House Democrats don’t want the bill to make it to the floor of the House and are trying to kill it in the Finance Committee.
On the Senate side, Sen. Elvi Gray-Jackson, a Democrat from Anchorage, is carrying the companion legislation.
After a successful convention with Alaska Republicans, congressional candidate Nick Begich changed clothes and headed to the airport, destination: Kodiak.
From there, Vertigo Air transported Begich to the Uyak Bay area, where he had a tag to hunt Kodiak brown bear. He was accompanied by friend Pat McCollum of Wasilla, husband of Mat-Su School Board member Kathy McCollum.
The next day, Begich bagged a Kodiak bear, taking the shot at about 100 yards. One shot took the bear down instantly, hitting right at the shoulder.
Nick Begich and the Kodiak brown bear taken this week in a successful hunt.
After having the hide and skull checked by Alaska Department of Fish and Game personnel, who removed a tooth and hair samples for a long-term study, the bear was “sealed” legally and upon returning to Anchorage, Begich took the hide and skull to famed taxidermist Dan Williams in the Mat-Su Valley.
Begich said he used a Kimber Montana .300 Win. Mag., using Nosler 190-grain, AccuBond long-range, trophy-grade ammunition.
He then returned to the campaign trail, preparing for an event at Bell’s Nursery on Tuesday evening in Anchorage.
A Kodiak brown bear hunt is often a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and for many hunters represents the pinnacle of the sport.
“I’m proud to live in a state with such abundant wildlife resources. It’s critical that we maintain our hunting opportunities in the years ahead through proper game management, conservation, and maintaining access to public lands. Alaska truly is The Great Land!” Begich wrote on his Facebook feed.
It happens rarely in Alaska, but on April 20, a land spout tornado was spotted at the 3,500-foot level near Wolverine Peak in Chugach State Park.
Photographs by Geremy Clarion were distributed by the National Weather Service Anchorage and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which verified the atmospheric event. It may be the fifth recorded tornado since statehood, according to some reports.
The World Meteorological Atlas says that snownados are “very rare”, particularly in lowland areas, but are occasionally seen in mountains, which are subject to more complex wind patterns. In Alaska’s vast mountainous landscape and small population, a brief tornado would not be easy to spot, much less capture by camera lens.
A snownado occurred in the Shetland Islands of Scotland last year and was captured on video, seen at The Weather Channel.
From the frequency of the attacks, one would think President Joe Biden has a personal vendetta against Alaska. In reality, he’s just trying to do anything he can to live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for another four years. Even if that means continuing to harm the people of my state.
As Earth Day approached, Biden took three substantial actions in the two weeks prior — all targeting Alaska’s resource base. Recent polling shows young, climate-obsessed voters between 18-29 abandoning the president in droves, with the gap between he and President Trump down to 13 points, from a 30-point advantage at this time in 2020.
Those voters’ collective shrills have railed against the very few Biden decisions to allow traditional energy projects to move forward, including the Willow oil and gas development in Alaska. Something had to be done to help bring them back, so Team Biden went into action.
To begin with, in a game of “pass-the-buck,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rejected an appeal from the Pebble Mine’s developers April 15, deciding instead that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2023 veto of the project’s clean water permit was an action they couldn’t overturn.
Pebble is a copper, gold, molybdenum and rhenium asset that is housed completely on Alaskan land. It would bring up to 1,000 full-time jobs to an area of the state that seasonally has unemployment numbers averaging more than 10%. The economics of the mine – worth $350-500 billion in 2008 dollars and market conditions – could approach $1 trillion with today’s increased mineral prices. It has been fought for nearly two decades by environmental organizations, who will now see how the legal battle over Pebble will play out in federal court.
Then, the Department of Interior announced April 19 that it was making permanent the September 2023 temporary ban on all types of development for over 13 million acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), an Indiana-sized part of Alaska’s North Slope, and the home to many of its more recent oil and gas finds.
Even before that announcement, Alaska’s bipartisan Congressional delegation, the Iñupiat Alaska Natives who live across the North Slope and the Alaska Legislature had tried to make their case for removing the protections. Nonetheless, with the decision, the vocal minority opposing NPR-A development won, and Alaskans lost.
That’s a whole lot of canceling for Alaska, especially when you consider much of it is for the components Biden needs for his green transition.
Doubling up on bad news for Alaska, the Interior Department administratively reversed course on a previously-approved 211-mile road to Alaska’s Ambler Access Project, showing they are simply anti-production.
Why else kill access to the Ambler Mining District, a federally authorized area known for decades to hold massive amounts of copper and other minerals needed to”go green?” Talk about a cancel culture.
From the day Biden assumed office, Alaska’s resource industry has been a key target of the his administration, with over 60 administrative and executive orders, or one action less than every three weeks in his term.
The actions have shuttered congressionally-approved projects from Alaska’s North Slope to its Southeast panhandle. They’ve put thousands of existing Alaskan jobs at risk, with thousands more potential ones placed in limbo. In fact, the only thing Joe Biden will mine in Alaska is feeble credibility with his green friends.
Between the NPR-A opportunities, Pebble and Ambler’s proposed projects, well over 5,000 jobs are now lost to Joe Biden’s pandering. But an equal number of climate-centric voters could have been even more disillusioned with the president during a key stretch of his reelection campaign, and right now, they’re more important than jobs, revenues and energy security.
Too bad the president would rather win an election than do what is right for Alaska and America.
Rick Whitbeck is the Alaska State Director for Power The Future, a national nonprofit organization that advocates for American energy jobs and fights back against economy-killing and family-destroying environmental extremism. Contact him at [email protected] and follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @PTFAlaska.This column first appeared in The Daily Caller.
The DC-54 aircraft that crashed on Tuesday seven miles from the Fairbanks International Airport was a Douglas 54-D Skymaster, owned and operated by Alaska Air Fuel, and operating as a bulk fuel cargo plane.
The plane was en route to Kobuk with 3,200 gallons of heating fuel when a wing caught fire and the engine exploded midair, shortly after takeoff. The pilots attempted to return to the airport when the plane crashed and an explosive fire consumed the wreckage and fuel along the banks of the Tanana River, which is still frozen.
Both occupants — pilot and co-pilot — are presumed dead. The names of the souls onboard have not been released; their remains will be sent to the State Medical Examiner’s Office for identification.
The tail number of the plane is N3054V. The aircraft is known to have had Pratt and Whitney R-2000 engines.
The plane crash is seen in a video that was posted online by a farmer at Rosie Creek Farm, who had a security camera mounted in such a way that it that caught the event.
Security camera shows cargo plane crash near Fairbanks, Alaska, killing both pilots pic.twitter.com/8mWUEXd6ws
Listen to the Fairbanks International Airport control tower audio of the takeoff communications and then hear the pilots and air controllers respond as the disaster unfolds at this link, where at minute 1:12, a voice can be heard saying, “Tell ’em I love ’em, man, tell ’em I love ’em.”
The National Transportation Safety Board will release a preliminary report 30 days after the accident, and a final report within one to two years.
