A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
The following is a commentary to “Sessions: ‘I will recuse myself’ from investigations when appropriate”, Washington Examiner, 3/2/17, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/sessions-i-will-recuse-myself-from-investigations-when-appropriate/article/2616229?fb_action_ids=416334178716129&fb_action_types=og.comments.
Tempest in a teapot: Sessions having 2 short encounters with Russia’s ambassador. If an ambassador doesn’t develop relationships with a country’s policy-makers, what’s the guy to do? As senator and senior member of the Armed Services Committee, is Sessions to run at the mere sight of an approaching Russian diplomat? Nonsense, nonsense.
Andrew Puzder
Tempest in a teapot: Andy Puzder “unacceptable” for Labor Secretary for a messy divorce, disproven accusations of spousal abuse, and hiring an “undocumented” person. Such allegations would automatically exclude anyone with the income to hire domestic help, and that means the Democrat senators pompously grilling Puzder. More nonsense.
Jerry Brown (l) and Meg Whitman (r) shake hands before 2010 debateIllegal immigrant maid and attorney Gloria Allred at press conference, Sept. 29, 2010
Tempest in a teapot: Meg Whitman, California Republican gubernatorial candidate, hiring an “undocumented” person for domestic help. This is smaller than a teapot. Try a thimble. More nonsense.
Kimba Wood, Pres. Clinton’s second nominee for Attorney General
Tempest in a teapot: Kimba Wood, Clinton’s Attorney General nominee, employing an “undocumented” nanny. Proof that dippiness is a bi-partisan sport. More thimble-scale nonsense on parade.
Zoe Baird, Pres. Clinton’s first nominee for Attorney General
Tempest in a teapot: Zoe Baird, Clinton’s first nominee for Attorney General, drug over the coals for similarly employing an “undocumented” nanny. Apparently there was a dragnet for “undocumented” nannies at the time. More partisan dippiness.
Were there other episodes in theatrical grandstanding, and are we likely to experience more? Probably. Our press and partisan inquisitors are more interested in chasing down the employment records of nannies, maids, and gardeners, while culling divorce records and chasing down chance encounters during years of service in the public eye, than a mature examination of a person for their policy preferences. Ideological biases will have a greater impact on whether a citizen can even operate a wedding cake business.
Macbeth murders King Duncan and takes the Scottish throne.
To borrow from Macbeth: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The days when Bill Nye’s Ministry of Truth was led by Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch.
I was fascinated when I realized that 3 seemingly disparate experiences – Tucker Carlson’s interview with Bill Nye, reading CS Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, and Martin Scorsese’s Silence – pointed to a common theme. Life requires us to juggle many things simultaneously. Usually, there’s no common thread. In this case, there is. The contemporary scene has a habit of producing popularizing zealots who then seek to amputate from public discussion any opposing views. Case in point: Bill Nye, The Science Guy.
Occasionally, I channel surf over to Fox News (like I do the other cable news channels). I happened to catch Tucker Carlson in an exchange with Bill Nye over Nye’s desire to prosecute climate change “deniers”.
Tucker Carlson (l) interviews Bill Nye (r).
Here’s Bill Nye calmly explaining the criminalization of alternative opinions in an earlier discussion.
Simultaneously, I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength with one of its early plot threads being a plot among “progressive” faculty to eliminate dissent.
C.S. Lewis
This, in turn, brought to mind Thomas Hibbs’s review of Martin Scorsese’s Silence. The film centers on the attempt of Japan’s powerful in the 17th century to exterminate Christianity from the land.
Liam Neeson in “Silence”.
All three illustrate what Jean Francois Revel identified as the “totalitarian temptation”. Zealots can feel so strong in their “truth” that they seek to extinguish disagreement. It matters not if the temptation is exhibited by the 17th-century Japanese shogunate, or a conspiring faculty member at Lewis’s fictional Bracton College, or an ex- Boeing engineer and comedy script writer masquerading as an expert on all things scientific (Nye).
Jean-Francois Revel, 1924-2006
The quality of Tucker Carlson’s interaction with Nye wasn’t the best. Yet, Nye’s inner totalitarian crept forth. He justified prosecution of dissenters because the evidence for “climate change” is asserted to be indisputable. Further, “deniers” are a threat to his quality of life. Thus, there you have it: he goes from evidence of climate change to its apocalyptic dimensions to filling up the jails with anyone with the temerity to question Al Gore. His logic – or lack thereof – is breathtaking in its sweep.
The whole thing reminds me of the 19th century’s shallow understanding of genetic inheritance and subsequent calls for euthanasia and the selective breeding of humans. The zealots didn’t stop at voluntary measures. They wanted to recruit the state into their fixation. It all didn’t work out so well for Carry Buck. The question of her forced sterilization reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. In a grotesque display of legal pretzel-logic unhinged from morality, writing for the majority of the Court, Oliver Wendell
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Holmes declared Carry Buck to be persona non grata and subject to forced sterilization by the state of Virginia. He announced, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough”. Maybe Holmes proved that a smidgen of science can indeed be dangerous.
Nye isn’t a scientist, as in a scholarly researcher of theoretical science. He’s got just enough exposure to the discipline to be dangerous, like Holmes. He’s most threatening as he mimics power-hungry adademics. They are an element all-too-familiar to C.S. Lewis as he walked the corridors of Oxford and Cambridge for almost 40 years. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis has a character with Nye’s predilections in the person of Lord Feverstone. Feverstone explains to his younger protege, Mark,
“Man has got to take charge of man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest – which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of.”
Nye seems to be “cashing in” as his notoriety climbs. He also exemplifies the Feverstone complex of “man taking charge of man”. For Nye, and for the rest of us, that means a secular Inquisition of state attorney generals, civil forfeiture, and the placement of skeptics on the list for elimination with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS fame.
Leader of ISIS, Abu al-Baghdadi
As for Scorsese’s Silence, how much does Nye parallel the 17th century Shogunate in its persecution of Christians? Only a matter of degree. Nye, it appears, would not sanction the water-boarding of “deniers”, but might be assuaged by confiscation of their personal wealth. But such is only speculation on my part.
Doubt, caution, humility, and modesty are not words to describe Nye. I suggest arrogant, self-anointed, and totalitarian is closer to the truth. He’s an example of the new man of public affairs, particularly of the Left. He’s got the minimal amount of scientific knowledge to take on the airs of a scientist, but not enough to avoid being reckless and imprudent.
RogerG
Sources:
“Religious Speech and Action Silenced”, Thomas Hibbs,
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445194/silence-movie-martin-scorsese-shusaku-endo-novel-christianity-japan-statism-review
The Totalitarian Temptation, Jean Francois Revel, 1978, https://www.amazon.com/Totalitarian-Temptation-Jean-Francois-Revel/dp/0140048413
“Attorney General Lynch Looks Into Prosecuting ‘Climate Change Deniers”, Hans von Spakovsky, The Daily Signal (a publication of the Heritage Foundation), 3/10/16, http://dailysignal.com/2016/03/10/attorney-general-lynch-looking-into-prosecuting-climate-change-deniers/
“Bill Nye, the science guy, is open to criminal charges and jail time for climate change dissenters”, Washington Times, 4/14/2016, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/14/bill-nye-open-criminal-charges-jail-time-climate-c/
“Buck V. Bell”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell
That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis, 2003 ed., p. 40.
The following is reply to a Charlotte Observer column by Isaac J. Bailey, “Franklin Graham’s God isn’t mine; is he yours?” (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article134819004.htmlfb_comment_id=fbc_1288950587859919_1289747547780223_1289747547780223#f35461721bd9bd)
I’m bowled over by Isaac Bailey’s remarkable incoherence. Is he presenting himself as an expert on Christian exegetics, or the purveyor of trendy pronouncements of Hollywood celebrities? Maybe both? Quoting a study-of-the-moment as scripture, while attempting to morph the Bible into the preface for the Democratic Party platform, is folly on steroids.
Mr. Bailey apparently doesn’t want a Christian to be a Christian. This may come as a surprise to Bailey but being Christian means acceptance of the deep truth of the Gospel, not the Koran or Bhagavad Gita. To be an adherent of a particular faith is by nature to be exclusive. A person gets baptized as a Christian, not as a proselyte of a fashionably amorphous and undemanding spirituality common in west LA.
Mr. Bailey wants to obliterate the doctrines that define Christianity in the same manner as progressivism’s desire to interpret the Constitution out of existence. Remember, they claim, it’s a “living thing”, like the Constitution, waiting to be shaped by the boundless imagination. In his mind, we can have a new Jesus, like a new Constitution, every time a thought becomes fashionable among the beautiful people. It’s all so ludicrous.
Kanye West
Really, people like Bailey have movie-land visions running around in their heads of snake-handlers and fulminating sermons when they think of traditional Christianity. It’s a fictional script implanted in the mind that has little room for a devout, fundamentalist, and evangelical Christian being also caring, considerate, compassionate, and tolerant.
To put it bluntly, prejudice among “progressive” types is as common as anywhere else.
Political discourse has turned into tirades, much like the roaming cliques on college campuses who scream for “safe spaces”, like the one below. Watch the whole thing to get the sense of the collapse of decorum.
Slate’s Isaac Chotiner, in his rant on Alan Colmes (www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/02/23/alan_colmes_was_fox_news_original_liberal_patsy.html), is digital media’s version of the same kind of verbal gang-tackling. Check this out: Chotiner’s hostility to Colmes is rooted in Colmes’s tendency to be affable and “nice”. Quoting Chotiner, “Colmes was the most absurd, useless, and mocked television personality in America for many years, precisely because he was nice …. being a nice guy — and a ‘liberal’ nice guy at that — meant being a buffoon, and a patsy.”
Isaac Chotiner of Slate.
“Nice” was a virtue in the not-too-distant past. Apparently, not anymore. Primal scream has replaced civil discourse. Anyone approaching an issue from a different viewpoint is no longer a person adding to a discussion. He or she is deserving of character assassination. And for those on your side willing to be considerate reserve your worst rhetoric.
Randomly asking a person at a mall on a Saturday afternoon about healthcare will be met with blank stares, bumbling utterances, and the mall’s background noise. Maybe not everyone, but a good number.
Why? Well, people don’t care about it till they need it; there’s a nearly complete disconnect about costs; people won’t read anything longer than the 3 lines of a Facebook post or Tweet; our politicans have been allowed to demagogue the issue; and self-serving special interests (AARP, and the list found here: https://votesmart.org/interest-groups/NA/38#.WLMbF_nyuUk) pettifog the issue. It’s scandalous … and all so confusing to a largely inattentive and ill-informed public.
Here’s some points of confusion. First, “healthcare” and “health insurance” have been jumbled together. The reality is that a person can have healthcare without health insurance, and health insurance without healthcare. Unless we enslave medical practitioners, we are learning that we can possess insurance that few with a medical license will honor. Conversely, healthcare can exist as a form of “welfare” without purchasing a premium.
Secondly, somebody else paying the bills creates childlike fantasies. It’s called the third-party-payer problem in economics. A barrier exists between seller and buyer called the insurance middle-man. Bottom line, particularly for the consumer: Who cares? The result is a chronic escalation of prices.
Thirdly, government can’t give you anything without taking from somebody else first. A Robin Hood society isn’t a healthy one, if we can project beyond our nose. Eventually healthcare will resemble a combination of the DMV and Saturday night in the emergency room at the public hospital.
Where does this leave us? Block grant Medicaid to the states; phase-in Medicare reforms; expand Health Savings Accounts; allow stripped-down policies; restrict sign-ups to one deadline per year; treat health insurance like car insurance; and grandfather existing policies. If some states love Obamacare, they can keep it … and foot the bill. How’s that for starters?
California’s Oroville Dam poses a threat. Here’s the dam’s layout.
Oroville Dam layout
Last week, northern California residents awoke to the dangers of major flooding in areas downstream from Oroville Dam. The concern was over the possible failure of the dam’s main and emergency spillways. Spillways help regulate the volume of water behind the dams during periods of heavy incoming stream flows. Look below at what has recently happened.
Oroville Dam with releases down the main splillwayOroville Dam’s main spillway rupturesOroville Dam’s main spillway at point of ruptureOroville Dam’s adjacent emergency spillway releases cause serious erosion
If the spillways fail, uncontrolled amounts of water flow through the breach till the water behind the dam falls below the level of the spillways. The rush of water could last some time if high volumes from the Feather River persistently flows into the lake.
How could this happen? Was it poor foresight? Was it due to a policy of the deferral of monitoring and maintenance of critical infrastructure, like dams? It is true, at a 2005 FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) re-licensing hearing, that a proposal to concrete-line the slope below the emergency spillway (last photo from above) was rejected by the state’s Department of Water Resources as too expensive. Since the dam is owned and controlled by the state, it owns full responsibility for this and all other decisions.
Resentment from many of those in the path of possible destruction is directed at the State of California, a government seen as more beholding to the passions of heavily-populated coastal realms than the needs of the interior. USA Today’s Trevor Hughes sensed the discord when he recently wrote while covering the dam situation, “Here, residents distrust a state government they think is all-too-eager to help undocumented immigrants and build a bullet train to serve the rich coastal elites, leaving them with little.”
California’s interior is so much different from the coast in more than temperament . The area to the east of the Coast Range provides much of California’s water, power, and resource industries. Yet, they bear the full brunt of the policies built around the coast’s lifestyle progressivism, especially the region’s passion for environmentalism in all its guises.
California’s mountain ranges. The Norther and Southern Ranges are the major political divide in the state.
“Progress” for coastal activists is subsidies for solar panels and windmills while ensuring high prices for electricity. As it is, California is 42nd among all states in terms of the average price per kilowatthour. In other words, 41 states are cheaper. The impact is minimal if all you have to do in Monterey to cool down the house is open a window.
Not true in Bakersfield-to-Redding. You’ll take the solar panel subsidies – always paid for by somebody else – and drill into your roof trusses to anchor the things, as well as learn about sweltering during the hottest part of the day. If you want to sleep at night by using air conditioning, be prepared to be labelled an energy “hog” by the state’s commissars as you cool your way to bankruptcy.
The whole scheme is a hammer to anyone living on the sunrise side of the Coast Range. All the while, coastal sophisticates get to indulge their Europhilia and Japanophilia fantasies with bullet trains and light rail. There is a complete disconnect depending on which side of the Coast Range that you reside.
It shows in elections. As the the whole state seemed to go for Hillary-mania in 2016, giving her 4.2 million more votes than Trump, counties in the path of the flooding tacked quite differently. For instance, Butte County, in spite of being home to liberal Chico and Chico State University, went Trump 46% to 42%. Yuba County awarded Trump with 58%. The red/blue divide doesn’t follow state lines. Out west, the line of demarcation follows the ridge of the Coast Range.
2016 California election results by county. The last remaining Republican counties in the state reside east of the Coast Range.
The near calamity of the Oroville Dam is resurrecting the call for secession of the far northern counties and a union with the similarly disaffected southern counties of Oregon to form the long sought-after State of Jefferson. Rallies and signs are reappearing.
The State of Jefferson map.State of Jefferson sign on fence near construction site for repairing the Oroville Dam.State of Jefferson sign near Red Bluff, northern California, between Chico and Redding.State of Jefferson Christmas float, Redding, Ca.State of Jefferson sign in Tuolumme County.Recent rally in Sacramento for the State of Jefferson.
Recently, we’ve been hearing cries from some elements within California’s governing coalition (read “coastal elites”) to secede to get away from Trump. I wonder if it ever crossed the minds of these coastal urbanites that there are people who want to get away from them.
To the east of the coastal divide, there’s a growing realization that the state is no bargain for the hard working taxpayer. Instead of getting well-maintained roads, the folks get ruts, cracks, and potholes. Just rattling off the stats could turn any state resident into a Prozac patient.
* The state ranks 45 for the efficiency of its state highway system (Reason Foundation, Sept. 2014 report).
* 68% of its roads are in poor condition according to a State Senate report.
* The state has $135 billion of unfunded repairs according to state and local officials.
* 5 of the 10 cities with the worst road systems are in California according to TRIPP, a Washington DC research group.
* California’s interstate are the worst in the nation according to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association.
* The state is developing a habit of chronically under-funding its roads by two-thirds.
Not enough money for roads? How’s that possible? The state is tax happy. It should be rolling in the dough. And it is, but the money gets lost somewhere along the way from the motorists’s wallet and paycheck to the pavement underneath his or her tires.
The state’s taxes on fuel are one of the highest in the nation. The Reason Foundation ranks them at #5, meaning there are only 4 states with higher rates.
This dour claim-to-fame doesn’t tell the whole story. Breaking into the molecular structure of the California gas tax reveals a gas excise tax of 39.5¢/gal, state and local sales taxes from 7.5% to 10%, and a “cap-and-trade” fee of 13¢ to 20¢/gal assessed on wholesalers. Of course, the cap-and-trade hustle is passed onto the lowly motorist.
The meandering course of the “cap-and-trade” money has a dubious destination. Its first billion dollars goes to the dream of a bullet train from LA to San Francisco.
Conception of “high speed rail” hurtling its way through the hills and Central Valley of California.The reality?
Since the revenue haul from the various fuel taxes is hitched to rising fuel prices, keeping them on a upward path is a fiscal necessity to fund the state’s low-carbon schemes. Thankfully, fuel prices in California are like a piece of foam in the water. There are forces keeping prices buoyant (up).
The buoyant effect arises from the powerful environmentalist lobby’s mania for punishing carbon fuels. California demands a very special low-emissions fuel. So special, in fact, no other state requires it. The base ingredient for fuel is called “blendstock”. Certain approved reformulated “blendstocks” are required by the EPA: CBOB and RBOB. RBOB is more expensive to produce. Not only is RBOB mandated by the state, an uncommon form of it, CARBOB, is the only one allowed. It’s even more expensive to make.
The expansion of supply could work to moderate the effect of the state’s fussy gasoline taste buds, if suppliers could expand capacity to produce more. Discouragingly, enlarging an existing refinery or building a new one in the state necessitates the patience of Job and the political muscle of Hercules.
CEQA’s maze for project approval. It rivals the labyrinth of King Minos of Crete.
The California Environmental Quality Act of 1970 creates a daunting maze with bountiful opportunities for eco-activists and NIMBY’s (Not In My Back Yard) to block and delay any project, particularly big ones, inflating its costs. The last refinery built in the state was Valero’s Wilmington plant in 1980, but the state has added 15 million souls since then. Sclerotic production leads to price shocks down to the gas station pump when a single pipe breaks at any one of the few remaining refineries. The state is always living on the edge.
A typical resident of California pays more to gas up the family sedan, as it is driven on cracked and rutted roads, to flee the floods from failing spillways. The state is trying to survive on 30-year-old fuel supply chains and a 50-year-old water and flood control infrastructure. It’s running on the fumes of the past.
Eventually, the fumes dissipate. Before then, either join the the rebel movement in the State of Jefferson or load up the U-haul to escape the clutches of the coastal eco-warriors. Good luck.
An interesting story appeared in Tacoma’s The News Tribune on February 15, 2017. A routine driver’s license check by a Washington State trooper at the scene of a multi-car accident revealed a man, Armando Chavez Corona, who was a deported felon convicted of a drug charge. A trooper then notified ICE and two hours later ICE agents arrived to take the man into custody.
Ironically, the state trooper making the call to ICE may be in as much hot water as Mr. Corona. The Washington State Patrol is investigating the officer for not following department guidelines about not detaining or questioning people based on immigration status.
Mr. Corona presents an intriguing case. According to ICE spokeswoman Rose Richeson, he was a “previously deported criminal with an aggravated felony conviction for possession of a controlled substance and a conviction in the U.S. District Court for illegal re-entry. He was removed to Mexico on four separate occasions between 1996 to 2000.”
What of the state guidelines in question? The so-called protocols pronounce that the agency will not “not stop, detain or interrogate or place an immigration hold on any person solely for the purpose of ascertaining immigration status or in any other way attempt to enforce federal immigration laws.” The troopers at the scene didn’t detain or otherwise question Mr. Corona. Corona had to wait at the crash site for cars to be cleared. While waiting, ICE arrived to take Mr. Corona into custody.
Now, what if Mr. Corona was a citizen? What if a routine driver’s license check revealed an outstanding FBI notification of him to be a person of interest in a federal matter? Local law enforcement would have taken him into custody in a heartbeat.
The only consequential difference in the two scenarios is the real “undocumented” status of Mr. Corona in the first and his hypothetical status as a citizen in the second. In the real story, the “undocumented” Mr. Corona has a halo of protection from federal arrest as a result of Gov. Jay Inslee’s (D) declaration that state and local law enforcement are not to be “mini-immigration agencies”. Mr. Corona has greater legal protections in the state of Washington as an illegal resident than as a citizen.
Certainly, residents of the state of Washington who happen to be citizens wouldn’t evade the federal hammer. How does this comport with our veneration for the constitutional principle of “equal protection”? Equal protection requires the government to guarantee the same rights, protections, and privileges to all citizens. Apparently, the non-citizen designation of “undocumented” by the state of Washington means a greater level of protection, not equal protection. Eschewing the “citizen” label while violating our immigration laws perversely means a higher status than the lowly citizen.
Citizens get hauled away by the feds as the “undocumented” receive sanctuary. We have most certainly entered the pretzel logic world of Alice’s Wonderland of the Sanctuary City.
The following is a response to an article by Charles Krauthammer, “The Cover-up in Search of a Crime”, in National Review Online, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445005/flynn-phone-call-coverup-searching-crime
Vice President Mike Pence with National Security Adviser Mike Flynn
This story is much richer than the matter of a subordinate misleading the Vice President. Be careful, though, the deeper story may not follow the path to a collusion with Russia during the election. The scent may lead to Obama. Andrew McCarthy was astute to mention it.
Obama’s people got a FISA-approved wiretap on Russian operatives prior to the election and in the waning days of Obama’s term after DNC and Podesta’s emails became public. This has “politics” written all over it. Then, the always present partisan operatives, entrenched in the upper reaches of the agencies, still clinging to power during the transition, leaked the edited results to an Obama-pliant press.
Yes, this whole affair may be a cover-up in search of a crime. It may also be an intense version of the long twilight struggle that is politics in modern America.
The following was a response to an article by Kevin D. Williamson in National Review Online, “Abolish President’s Day”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/445013/presidents-day-imperial-cult
KDW, interesting idea about abolishing President’s Day – one that I find intriguing. Electing a president, as popularly viewed, has nearly become an exercise in choosing our next 4-year emperor. Most risible is the infantile incantations about him (or her, but we haven’t had one yet) as the “leader of the economy” and “leader of the people”, a grand vizier, or caliph, of all living souls within the country.
We even have our own Roman Forum in the form of the Washington Mall. The Lincoln Memorial is as close to a functioning temple as one can possibly get, with its gargantuan Athena-like statue. Still missing, though, are the vestial virgins and temple priests.
Artists rendering of the Roman ForumThe National Mall, Washington, D.C., looking west.
Watch that space for raising Obama to the godhead.
Are we morphing from a self-governing citizenry into adolescent dependencies of a father-god? Even more profound, are we now the kind of people who desire persons to worship since the traditional object of veneration is held in disrepute by the fashionable currents of lifestyle progressivism? The gigantic and ostentatious has replaced the humility and modesty more appropriate for a republic.
Trump nominates Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, 1/31/17
Today, nominations to the Supreme Court are the casus belli for apocalyptic struggles. It’s understandable. The courts have achieved a god-like status in our political system. A court’s decision is treated as the thundering voice of Yahweh. As demigods, their judgments intervene into every nook and cranny of creation. It was not always so.
Does our Constitution demand the supremacy of the courts? No. Has the judiciary achieved primacy in our constitutional order? Yes. The former is a hot topic of debate in academic circles. The latter is the current reality.
The primacy of the courts is the inescapable result of the way the subject of our government is taught and discussed. Take for example the ubiquitous, and misleading, definition of “judicial review”. Scholastic’s translation would be at home in any public school textbook.
“Judicial review is the power of courts to decide the validity of acts of the legislative and executive branches of government. If the courts decide that a legislative act is unconstitutional, it is nullified. The decisions of the executive and administrative agencies can also be overruled by the courts as not conforming to the law or the Constitution.”
Is it true? Maybe not. Could it be that determining the constitutionality of an act may not be an exclusive power of the courts? The logic of the primacy of a court’s decision, rising above the powers and acts of the other branches, would leave us at the mercy of an unelected cabal, appointed for life. Really, swearing an oath of loyalty to the Constitution upon taking office would essentially mean swearing an oath of loyalty to the Supreme Court, through the meanings it confers on the document.
The other branches (called departments), the executive and legislative, and states would be forced into the thickets of constitutional amendments and impeachment to reverse the ukases of this grand council. Neither of which are likely avenues for success.
Judicial supremacy as currently construed is not prudent nor in conformance with “separate but equal branches” (Federalist Papers, No. 47). The claims of the courts’ primacy is a hot mess.
Andrew Jackson
History gives us a different picture of the courts’ reach. Andrew Jackson was famous for his blunt ripostes. The Supreme Court had just issued its ruling in Worcester v. Georgia wherein it invalidated a Georgia statute governing non-Native Americans on Indian lands. In a letter to John Coffee, Jackson allegedly wrote, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” Since Chief Justice John Marshall didn’t order U. S. marshals to enforce the decision, he avoided a showdown with the hot-tempered Jackson over the matter. He knew the limits of the Court’s authority and didn’t want to test them against Jackson.
Announcement for a meeting to protest the Dred Scott decision
The confrontation wouldn’t happen today because of the expectation of an immediate surrender of the president to the Court, something Lincoln would have found strange. The Dred Scott case is highly instructive in this respect. Theruling created, to put it mildly, an uproar. It led to the rise of the Republican Party, the candidacy of Lincoln, and the first Republican president.
Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s disdain for the monstrosity of the Dred Scott decision was palpable. In his first inaugural address, with Dred Scott in mind, Lincoln laid out the danger posed by the Court’s claim of supremacy on all matters constitutional.
“… the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, … the people will have ceased, to be their own rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government, into the hands of that eminent tribunal.”
Once as president, he used his executive powers to put the kibosh to the thing. He ordered the issuance of passports to free blacks in direct contradiction of the Court’s finding that blacks weren’t citizens under the Constitution. There’s more. He supported and signed legislation to ban slavery in the western territories. In effect, gutting Dred Scott through executive and legislative fiat.
What would be the reaction if George W. Bush treated Roe v. Wade with as much contemptas Lincoln did Dred Scott? The wailing and gnashing of teeth from abortion absolutists would be heard for miles. The media, the partisan bloodhounds in academia, and the satraps in the Democratic Party – the usual haunts of progressivism – would be howling for scalps.
Jackson, Lincoln, the founders, and almost anyone on the scene prior to the progressives’ mangling of our Constitution, would have recognized what is referred to today as “departmentalism”. It holds that each department has the decisive authority to interpret the Constitution regarding its core constitutional functions. The concept flies in the face of the court’s pedestal placement in a high school textbook.
Bringing the concept to the present, President Trump could simply ignore the Ninth Circuit’s decision on his temporary travel ban executive order. To borrow from Jackson, he could announce, “Judges Michelle Friedland, William Canby, and Richard Clifton have made their decision; now let them enforce it.” Directing foreign affairs and national defense are, if anything, integral to the functions of a chief executive. Without these powers, he’d be as ill-equipped as a eunuch in a pagan fertility rite. What would be the point in having the office?
The potential for the courts to emasculate a president or legislature is real. What is the check on their power if the judiciary has the final say on all matters before it? Point of act: there is none!
Forget about departmentalism. The Supreme Court killed it. The judiciary has conferred upon itself supremacy. In Cooper v Aaron in 1958 – and in other near contemporaneous rulings- the Court bellowed that all governing entities must bow to their will. As legal scholar Matthew Franck wrote about Cooper,
“It is quite another thing to say, as Cooper did, that Supreme Court rulings are ‘the supreme law of the land’ owing to an exact identity with the Constitution itself, and thus binding with Article VI force on all rival interpreters of the Constitution. From this it would follow that Congress and the president, no less than the states, are bound by their oaths to accept Supreme Court decisions as binding expositions of the meaning of the Constitution.”
From here on out, the judiciary has an unlimited veto power on the other two branches.
Appointed for life, they can stray into any issue arising from the plethora of interactions in all of creation. No limit on the subject matter or their power to intervene. The situation is eerily like Rome’s shift from republic to empire. Our courts are seated like Augustus in the Roman governmental order, the wise check on an unruly Senate. In effect, Rome had an emperor. In effect, we have black-robed jurists, appointed for life, with power to command anything, as our new emperors. The only thing lacking is the hereditary principle.
Maecenas Presenting the Liberal Arts to Emperor Augustus, Tiepolo Giovanni Battista
Don’t worry, some court in the not-too-distant future will read it into the Constitution. It’s coming.
With so much power in the hands of a judge, an Armageddon erupts over every Supreme Court vacancy – if, as of yet, they haven’t given themselves the power to appoint their own successors. Our only hope is the seating of judges who will exercise self-restraint, because there are no external ones.
The juiced-up political battle over filling Supreme Court vacancies is a sign of our dysfunction. Filling a Supreme Court vacancy has much greater weight than electing a Congress or President. All sides recognize its importance, but few understand that it was never meant to be that way.
Missing in the debate is the realization that we’re now ruled by demigods. Do we really want to go the way of Rome? Is emperor worship next?
“Populist Presidents and ‘Demoralized’ Judges”, Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO, 2/10/17, Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444786/donald-trump-judges-attacks-andrew-jackson-did-much-worse
