Courts – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

November 19, 2024November 20, 2024

Message to Biased “Experts”: If You Want to be Taken Seriously, Stop Being So Left Wing

May be an image of 1 person — Prof. Claire Finkelstein of Penn Law School

Case in point: Penn law professor Claire Finkelstein. In an opinion piece on The Hill news site, she lays out an excuse for left wing prosecutors to go after public figures who disagree with her and them (see #1). Ignoring all prior precedence and guidance, she’s four-square behind arming the justice system against her ideological opponents. Let’s face it, she’s another one of these tenured types in a silo of habitual left-wing partisans.

She opines that a Trump firing of Jack Smith is obstruction of justice. She writes,

“If the sole purpose of the removal of a federal employee is to immunize the president against investigations into his own wrongdoing, that is a misuse of presidential authority, and one that is unrelated to the protections that the presidency is meant to afford.”

Borrowing a Biden word, this is “malarky”. It’s tantamount to open season for the left to target the right. I don’t think that she means for the same logic to be applied against anyone on the left – hint: Joe Biden, the entire Biden clan, Hillary and her home brew server and blatant obstructions, Stacy Abrams and the original “stop-the-steal” campaign. What about the retinue of New York and Atlanta prosecutors? Partisan use of prosecutorial powers is a form of obstruction of justice, also called “abuse of power”.

Hillary Clinton using a personal server was a genius idea-IndiaTV News | World News – India TV — Hillary Clinton from around 2015

Finkelstein advocates a freebooting expedition into an elected official’s intentions, his motives, as they exercise their constitutional powers, something clearly deemed constitutionally off-limits by the Supreme Court in Trump v. US earlier this year. How else can she prove “wrongdoing” or “misuse of presidential authority”? Do intentions and motivations bedevil left-wingers? It’s odd that this kind of rationalization only seems to crop up when Trump, or anyone on the right for that matter, wins office.

Where were they on Clinton’s perjury, obstruction, and impeachment, or Obama’s autocratic use of his “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”, or the sweetheart deals that paved Obama’s way from activist/provocateur to Senator to the White House? Not a peep. No investigations, thus no indictments, thus no trials, thus no “convictions”, all of it buried deep, deep. Her legal inquisitiveness begins and ends with Trump. For all practical purposes, the difference between the D’s and R’s in her analysis is who won the election. If the D’s win, move on. If it’s the R’s, all guns ablaze. Finkelstein is just another political hack with tenure, another reason to question the rectitude of the faculty lounge.

She can’t wrap her head around the fact that the policies of the Left aren’t popular, especially when they’re given the chance to roll out. Even that deep blue bastion, California, can only stomach so much of the consequences of its left-wing prejudices. They tossed out the criminal permissiveness of Prop 46 (in Prop 36). That mecca of the counterculture, San Francisco, previously jettisoned some of the school board and sent its social-justice-warrior DA packing (Chesa Boudin). This time, it’s mayor London Breed seeking new employment. Across the Bay in Oakland, its mayor, radical lefty Sheng Thao, and Alameda County DA Pamela Price were sent to the exits.

All About Smash And Grab Robberies - TAL Global — Screenshot of a smash-and-grab in San Francisco

Los Angeles finally had enough of DA George Gascon. Apparently, serial assault and battery, smash-and-grabs, stabbings, shootings, and overall mayhem on the streets aren’t popular, even among a left-wing electorate. Of course, the usual suspects in power gaslighted us behind deceptive stats, such as the FBI’s crime report which relies on reported crime. Who reports crime if nothing will be done about it? Think George Gascon. Rather, honestly, trust your lyin’ eyes and vote the rascals out. They did.

As a result, Donald Trump’s showing in 2024 improved everywhere. I’m reminded of the scene on the MSNBC set on election night when asked to show the precincts or counties where Harris bested Biden’s 2020 showing. It was a blank map and startled the hosts. It was no less true in California. Eight counties flipped to Trump this time around. But the state is the Marianas Trench deepest of blue so there’s ample electoral breathing room to keep alive the leftist vision of life.

Nearly everywhere else, it’s appalling. Freezing parents out of parenting is a losing strategy for adults still in touch with reality. Tinkering with sensitive, impressionable young minds with trans ideology and treatments behind the backs of parents are flat-out losers. Recommending, pushing the ingestion of chemicals to interfere with a child’s natural development, and eventual surgeries, which are irreversible, are proving that barbaric teenage genital mutilation is alive and well in a hypothetically civilized society. Is it still civilized? I kinda doubt it, so any campaign running on it shouldn’t expect election-night celebrations.

Thus, boys-turned-girls – er, trans-girls, “girls”, XY “girls”, whatever – invade chromosomal girls’ spaces and battle them in competitions. It’s a replay of the Christians versus the lions in the Coliseum. I’m confused – and understandably so – because boy/girl is now relegated to a state of mind and having no relationship to procreation. It’s social suicide. They’re crazy. Any parent ushering their child down this path is practicing child abuse. Don’t expect a ride to victory on the back of this buffoonery.

May be a doodle of 1 person and text

May be pop art of text

May be an illustration of welcome mat and text

It’s as if the Democrats are card sharks and knowingly dealt themselves a losing hand. The wild spending and its wild debt aren’t winners. Climate-change ideology (or actually theology) as a cover for bankrupting utility bills and the shaming for the purchase of practical and affordable family transportation doesn’t help. Inflation was met with a Salem-witch-trail pogrom against “price gouging”.

A housing crisis didn’t just magically pop into existence. It’s been building for decades thanks to the Democrats’ fealty to mammoth environmental regulation and empowered NIMBYs. California is home to the worst of it. Is Elon Musk’s embrace of Trump a consequence of the regulatory crazies in the one-party state who nixed an increase in Space X launches at Vandenberg? That’s the tip of the iceberg: try to build a Levittown in the state. It’s a nightmare. And you wonder why your young adult children are living in your basement.

Do I need to mention the Biden administration’s open invitation for the Third World to move to the United States en masse? What a goat rope.

The Democrats love what ails us. Barack Obama’s beloved Rev. Jeremiah Wright once crowed that “The chickens have come home to roost.” Well, the chickens are roosting as GOP victories. No amount of legal scheming by partisans in the ivory tower will give the Democrats what they dearly desire: power. Power is gained through elections and, right now, they’re not fit to be elected – except in bicoastal, metropolitan, and academic pits of despair.

Claire Finkelstein, Trump will fire Jack Smith if he’s still around, and you have no legal standing to stop it. Jack Smith was on the ballot only as a Trump campaign issue. Trump won and you and Jack Smith lost. Next time, try making your side more palatable instead of inventing new ways to obstruct the voters’ desire to be protected from you.

As a side note, how do you spend a billion dollars, end the race with a $20 million debt, and still lose? $1.02 billion wasn’t enough to sell this turkey.

Update: Harris collected over $2 billion, and her campaign contests any contention of leftover debt.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Jack Smith must not drop the government’s charges against Donald Trump — here’s why”, Claire Finkelstein, The Hill, 11/12/2024, at https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4986125-doj-trump-indictments-jack-smith/
2. “No, Firing Jack Smith Would Not Be an Obstruction of Justice”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 11/16/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/no-firing-jack-smith-would-not-be-an-obstruction-of-justice/

July 10, 2024

“The Science” Places Homeschoolers in the Crosshairs

What Is Homeschooling? A Guide for Parents and Students | Homeschool SuperCenter

Homeschoolers be warned that a politicized science in politicized journals like Scientific American is gunning for you.

If you believe that science hasn’t been corrupted by a political ideology, that it is value-neutral, you are naïve and grossly ill-informed. I invite anyone to go over to the Scientific American website (www.scientificamerican.com) and peruse their links to “Pressroom” for editor bios and “The Editors” for their stories (see #1 and #2 below). The bios read like missionaries of the progressive blob. The editors’ stories aren’t pure science but a monotonous drumbeat for greater central government power, the poker tell of progressivism. These are people who are impertinent enough to claim to represent science in America. Whew, what a mess.

Managing editor Jeanne Bryner encapsulates progressivism’s pretensions in her bio which includes the line “. . . just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.” “Just about everything” might be the escape hatch from her half-witted flight of fancy. It should be clear to anyone with an ounce of adult-level awareness that moral judgments frequently evade the calculus of the lab. Science could devise an effective means to terminate unborn life, and has (for instance, the abortion pill of mifepristone and misoprostol), but it can’t say squat about whether we ought to. These people hitch “science” to their ideological commitments, such as the charge that we have too many people, and even add numbers, but that’s just quantifying an unquantifiable belief and calling it science.

May be an image of ‎text that says '‎SPECIAL COLLECTOR'S EDITION ላኪ INSIDE SCIENTIFIC AMER Underpinnings of injustice Health threats of finequity Power imbalances that harm the environment Protecting voting rights Better economic opportunities for women EおbVT ထထ VOT SCIENCE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE Research shows the sources and costs of bias and how to make more equitable world Empowering community resilience لسييبد ထီ8 SPRING/SUMMER2022 2022‎'‎ — Politicized science in Scientific American, June 2022 issue

The editors of Scientific American exude progressive conceit. Read their backgrounds; it’s something that they’ve been imbibing since their formative years, whose lifestyle reinforces. Degrees in fields that are hotbeds of left-wing activism are common. Environmentalism appears to be a substitute religion. Many have degreed specialties in journalism. Typical of ideological zealots, no serious consideration of trade-offs plays a prominent role in their thinking. How much of their production is real science, and how much of their “science” is curated through experiences in certain ideologically infected college disciplines, lifestyle preferences, and the prevalent proclivities of their demography (female, college, many single, urban white collar)? Mull over that for awhile.

Editor in Chief Laura Helmuth is straight from liberal-left central casting. Rummaging through her background discloses a propensity for hijacking “the science” for progressive, left-wing causes. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 in a decision that was “both unanimous and quick”, citing the sins of the Trump administration to her brand of “science”.

May be an image of 3 people and text that says 'LauraHelmuth Laura Helmuth Jo' — Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief

Her “science” is the science of the progressive zealot. Her mind is as closed as a steel trap. I doubt that the writings of researchers in design theory (evidence of a Designer in the cosmos and nature), like the work of the Discovery Institute, would ever be allowed to grace the pages of the magazine. If you’re cool to climate-change jeremiads, don’t expect a call to be a contributor. Under her leadership, Scientific American is in competition with Mother Jones for the same audience. See Helmuth’s Wikipedia page.

Progressivism lies at the foundation of editorial decisions. So, what is it? Progressivism is a ticket to power for people like Helmuth. Going back to the late 19th century, progressives fell in love with “experts”, people like them, people of the appropriate cultural accoutrements like years spent inside classrooms. They worship at the altar of credentials, degrees, and what not. And these college matriculants are said to be deserving of power to lead the population to the promised land. Little things like the Constitution, separation of powers, federalism, the subsidiary principle (localism), rule of law, and popular sovereignty shouldn’t be allowed to spoil the march to the rule of the administrative state.

That’s where we find the editors of Scientific American in their progressive jihad against homeschooling (see #3 below). They complain about the absence of uniform standards for such independent practitioners (parents) and their charges (their children), who are the rebels to their leadership. Of course, the “expert’s” uniform standards will be those that emanate out of the left-infected schools of education and the vile teachers’ unions and into the commissariat of the federal Department of Education and its policies and regulations. Once announced, they become the excuse for a power grab away from parents.

Nothing is worse for the progressive than a bunch of parents making their own choices independent of the “expert’s” set of coercible rules. They treat the population as cattle to be herded.

For example, these “experts” in the editors’ piece lamented the “pushback” of parents in Michigan against the experts’ much-loved registry of homeschooling parents and their children. Sounds like the registry of Jews of a bygone era. Their contempt for the “pushback” is actually a disdain for citizen involvement, something de Tocqueville praised but upsetting to the gurus of Scientific American. They stooped so low as to resort to child abuse to rationalize a diminishment of parental rights. It’s disgusting. If abuse occurred in one home, it is assumed to be characteristic of all parents who teach their own children, or why else bring it up?

Holocaust Remembrance Day,: Replace Numbers With Names – The Forward — Jews in Nazi concentration camps were tattooed with serial numbers for registration.

Here we have “experts” wallowing in the logical fallacy of composition – “if something is true for the part then that is true for the whole or the group too” (see #7 below). An abusing parent who isolates their kid is transformed into being a defining characteristic of homeschooling. This isn’t “science”. It’s something out of the Joseph Goebbels playbook.

The same stance of this we-know-what’s-best-for-your-kids crowd is the pretext for sidelining parents regarding “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming” children as soon as the kids are dropped into the clutches of school employees. California is the Valhalla of this political sect masquerading behind a mask of “science”.

A huge leap in deplatforming California parents in the upbringing of their own children was promulgated in 2017 in the California Department of Education’s notorious Administrative Regulation 5145.3 (see #5 below). Under the guise of “Nondiscrimination/Harassment”, the young “gender-nonconforming” are accorded unique privacy rights not granted to any other student. The policy puts the child in the parental seat. If the child wishes it so, school employees are obligated to lie or withhold information from parents on their child’s condition. The kid may be transitioning with the assistance of school employees and the parents are kept in the dark. Needless to say, some locally elected school boards are resisting (Chino and Rocklin for instance) while the jackbooted California AG, Rob Bonta, responds with lawsuits to compel compliance.

Up to now, Bonta has succeeded. He even managed to sideline a parent initiative to codify the right of parents to be informed by using his power to title and summarize the proposition as “anti-gay” (all described in a prior post). A California judge bowed to Bonta when the parents sued. That put a stop to signature gathering. Parents of California, this, combined with the strangulation of other educational avenues in the state (charters, private and religious schools, homeschooling) may leave you with no other option but to leave the state to save your kids from permanent mental and physical scarring.

Detransitioner. Charlie Evans has set-up a charity to help people in the transgender community who want to stop or reverse their decision (photo: Stuart Nicol)

Helena Kerschner, now 23, is part of a growing number of “detransitioners,” returning to the gender of their birth. She said her male transition (left) was “definitely triggered” by trans activists online. — Helena Kerschner before detransitioning and after

The only child abuse may be choosing to remain in the state.

It is heartening to know that the Supreme Court is putting a break on this stampede to the rule of the unelected “expert” – the kind of person utterly adored by the editors of Scientific American. At the federal level, the decision of the Court majority in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo put to rest the power grab of administrative agencies in areas not supported by law. See, such agencies can only operate within the clear parameters of an underwriting law, if one still considers the Constitution operative. If the law is silent or vague, they can’t freewheel it. Congress must clarify or not. If not, regulators aren’t free to legislate. They’re stuck, not us.

Since the 1920s, the Court has upheld parental rights under the 14th Amendment (with a muddled modification in Troxel v. Granville of 2000, see #6 below). Loper Bright drew a bold line for federal authorities, but has little impact on states whose electorates are infatuated with regulators, even if it means making the kids the sovereigns of their own upbringing under the guidance of empowered “experts”, even if it results in a compelled recognition of your daughter as now your son.

The people running Scientific American are typical of the educated “idle hands” class (in the words of philosopher Roger Scruton). In other words, people imprisoned in the Disneyland of their own mind. Don’t trouble them with reality. They have idled away their time in fantasizing about the many ways to be ludicrous.

As with children, so it is true with many of the college educated: idle hands are the devil’s playthings (Benjamin Franklin). The devil is playing around in the “science” of Scientific American.

May be an illustration of 1 person and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. The Editors of Scientific American in “Pressroom” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/pressroom/
2. Scientific American editors’ stories in “Stories of the Editors” at https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/the-editors/
3. “Children Deserve Uniform Standards in Homeschooling”, The Editors, Scientific American, 5/14/2024, at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/children-deserve-uniform-standards-in-homeschooling/
4. Thanks to James Mason of the Home School Legal Defense Association in “Why Is Scientific American Going After Homeschooling?”, National Review, 7/5/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/07/why-is-scientific-american-going-after-homeschooling/
5. California AR 5145.3, imposed on all school districts in the state, can be read at https://simivalley.granicus.com/MetaViewer.php?view_id=7&clip_id=1953&meta_id=123825. This is Simi Valley USD’s version of it. Scroll down to page 8 and the section “Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming”.
6. “The Supreme Court’s Parental Rights Doctrine”, parentalrigts.org, at https://parentalrights.org/understand_the_issue/supreme-court/
7. “Fallacy of Composition – Definition and Examples” in Logical Fallacy at https://www.logical-fallacy.com/articles/fallacy-of-composition/

June 19, 2024June 20, 2024

The Cultural Revolution Produces More “Counter-Revolutionaries”

May be an image of 2 people and people smiling — Bryan and Rebecca Gantt have adopted three children through Vermont’s system. (photo: Alliance Defending Freedom)

This is a revolution, a “gender” mutiny, make no mistake about it. It’s a revolution into our brain, in how we think and on our elemental outlook on the world. “Men” and “women”, “male” and “female” no longer make sense in this fantasy world. Any distinction has been turned into a floating oil slick at the mercy of the unstable currents of a person’s emotional state. This is a completely new and radical notion. Biology is relegated to a secondary circumstance. People who can’t accept the rootlessness of this rebellion are now deemed “unfit”. A recent series of lawsuits puts a spotlight on this latest phase in our ongoing cultural revolution.

At issue is whether a traditional Christian can help rescue children from situations of despair and abandonment. You see, the revolution is at war with the faith of generations and millennia for its refusal to bend a knee to the idol of gender fluidity. However, if you’re of an approved version of the faith, one that follows the fickle winds of fashion, you will be accorded full membership in the civil order. And you too might be granted the opportunity to adopt or be a foster parent.

Blue states are the Paris Commune of this revolution. From Vermont to the west coast, an additional criterion was put into the list of qualities to be eligible for adoption or provide foster care. In a recent email from Vermont’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) to foster-care applicants:

“[a foster-care license] is dependent on foster parents and applicants being able to support youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, or another diverse identity (LGBTQI+) even if the foster parents hold divergent personal opinions or beliefs.” (see #1 below)

Cutting to the chase, traditional Bible-believing Christians must promise to check their beliefs at the door, in their own home, before the state will allow them to touch a kid. A faithful Christian joins the ranks of pedophile and spouse-abuser in the eyes of the state.

It happened to Bryan and Rebecca Gantt of Vermont (see #1 and #2 below). He’s a pastor of a nondenominational church and the Gantts have been prior foster-parents and adoptive parents multiple times, and called “amazing” by child-welfare agents in previous foster and adoption situations. The only difference now is the mandatory acceptance of the ideology of gender fluidity to qualify. For them, where’s that in the Bible?

It isn’t. It’s contra-biblical. But one doesn’t have to be a fundamentalist to reach a similar conclusion. Pop-psyche can’t explain away biology, or chromosomes. Fashionable ideologies try to carve out a niche in the foggy bottom of psychology, but the whole scheme is reliant on the certitude of an adolescent’s emotional state. Talk about building a house – er, ideology – on sand.

The more that we’ve been forced to live with this thought-fashion, the more problematic it has become. Like master ideologies of the past, when people were judged for their race-fitness or propensity for class exploitation, it too is found to be extremely wanting. On grounds of pure reason, it’s bunk. The zealots attribute suicide and emotional trauma to the ideology’s chief culprit of gender dysphoria, like the rich or the Jews in past frenzies. It never appears to have occurred to the proponents that the dysphoria itself is a symptom of something deeper than disenchantment with genitalia. After removing the offending genitalia and ingesting pharmaceuticals, the thoughts of suicide will probably remain. Then, what have we achieved, nothing but another batch of scarred children who paid a little too much attention to social media?

Delays, rows and legal challenges: inside the stalled new NHS gender identity service | Gender ... — Dr. Hillary Cass of the Cass Report to the NHS England

Other nations are putting the brakes on the institutional malformation of children. On the heels of the UK’s Cass Report (see #3 and #4 below), Europe is pulling back from the brink. Not so in America. We’ve become the loudest advocates of this generation’s version of eugenics and forced sterilizations. From the Biden administration to states like Washington, Massachusetts, Oregon, California, and Vermont, it’s full speed ahead (see #5 – #8 below). These people are making our nation grotesque.

Folks are suing in these bastions of revolution. They are the counter-revolution.

May be an image of 10 people and text — Erin Friday, leader of Our Duty, a group of parents supporting policies protecting the right of parent to be notified of gender issues affecting their children, speaks in Sacramento, 8/28/2023.

For the Bible-believing in these states, you have a choice to make: stay and resist (like Alexei Navalny, now deceased in Putin’s gulag) or leave. Bear in mind that your ability to resist will be effectively curtailed by the ruling politburos. Look at California AG Rob Bonta’s successful effort to kill the Protect Kids Initiative (see #9 below). The State of California can’t bring itself to protect children and the right of parents to parent their children. It’s surprising that they haven’t impeded your right to gather for worship.

May be an image of 1 person and text — California’s radical AG, Rob Bonta

Even more troubling, if you have children or grandchildren, what of them? Remember, the revolutionaries control the schools.

May be an image of the Oval Office and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. Thanks to Ryan Mills in “Blue States Are Barring Americans with Traditional Views on Gender from Adopting. This Christian Couple Is Fighting Back”, in National Review, 6/19/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/vermont-bars-christian-couple-from-adopting-due-to-traditional-beliefs-about-gender/
2. The lawsuit in US District Court in Vermont: Brian Wuoti; Kaitlyn Wuoti; Michael Gantt; and Rebecca Gantt v. Vermont, et al, Case No.: 2:24-cv-614, at https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/WuotiComplaint.pdf
3. “NHS Report Finds ‘Remarkably Weak Evidence’ to Support Medical Gender Transition for Minors”, Abigail Anthony, National Review, 4/10/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/nhs-report-finds-remarkably-weak-evidence-to-support-medical-gender-transition-for-minors/
4. The Final Report of Dr. Hillary Cass on transgender services for children for the NHS England at https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
5. “Oregon Woman Sues State for Rejecting Adoption Application over Opposition to Child Gender Transition”, Ryan M ills, 4/3/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/oregon-woman-sues-state-for-rejecting-adoption-application-over-opposition-to-child-gender-transition/
6. “‘Their Faith Is Not Supportive’: Massachusetts Bars Catholic Couple from Fostering Children”, Ari Blaff, National Review, 8/9/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/their-faith-is-not-supportive-massachusetts-bars-catholic-couple-from-fostering-children/
7. “How ‘Inclusion’ Excludes Christians: WA couple denied foster care license because of religious beliefs”, Family Policy Institute of Washington, 4/15/2024, at https://fpiw.org/how-inclusion-excludes-christians-wa-couple-denied-foster-care-license-because-of-religious-beliefs/
8. “Religious Discrimination Hurts Kids Waiting to Be Adopted”, Johannes Widmalm-Delphonse, Alliance Defending Freedom, 9/13/2023, at https://adflegal.org/article/religious-discrimination-hurts-kids-waiting-be-adopted
9. “Judge tentatively sides with California AG in fight over ballot measure on students’ gender ID”, Sophie Austin, AP, 4/19/2024, at https://apnews.com/article/california-transgender-parental-notification-schools-372ad55c99a17e19ce8f3f66c4963faf

June 18, 2024June 20, 2024

The Progressives’ Modus Operandi: Rule of Law Be Damned

No photo description available. — A bump stock

Progressivism is a totalitarian project. It’s not a rule of law project. It’s an effort to make everyone conform in heart, mind, soul, and behavior to a singular outlook that emanates from a singular social element (bicoastal, urban, white-collar, an academy smothered in radical progressivisms). Ends are all that matters; means are basically irrelevant to them.

It played out again before the Supreme Court. The Left, the home of today’s muscular progressivism, is all aflutter over the Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill (June 14, 2024) to find no legislative warrant to ban bump stocks (see #1 below). It didn’t rule on the propriety of a ban on bump stocks. That’s not the judiciary’s job in our constitutional order. The courts apply the laws in cases before it. It’s simple for the Article III branch: no law, no case. If you want bump stocks prohibited, elect a gung-ho Congress and President to make such a law. It’s a job for legislation. It’s the job of your elected representatives. If not enough of them are elected, don’t act like little caudillos to the rest of us by inventing law where no law exists, playing a pretend game while trampling underfoot the design of our civic order.

The Court’s ruling in Garland v. Cargill hinged on a basic question: Where’s the law to justify Trump’s 2018 order to ban bump stocks? The language of the Federal Firearms Act (1934) and the Gun Control Act (1968) are weak gruel for Trump and the progressive totalitarians among us to magically summon up a legal basis to reach beyond what Congress has authorized. Up until 2018, the ATF repeatedly announced its lack of authority to ban the things. The reason is obvious. The FFA defines an automatic weapon as something integral and internal to the trigger set of the gun, not to the novel and awkward ways a semiautomatic gun is held or shouldered. Sorry, progressives, no law, no case.

One of the progressives’ favorite gambits is to announce a supposedly irrefutable history judgment that is easily refuted. You know, the one that magically transmutes a well-understood individual right into a fashionable government right for a militia. It flies in the face of history. No one up until the rise of 20th century progressivism, and still too few since, viewed grandpa’s shotgun as a part of the National Guard’s armory. 17th century Englishmen were armed to the teeth, and it was codified in the English Bill of Rights of 1688-9. We were founded as transplanted Englishmen in the sense that their culture and norms took root here and were reflected in colonial-state charters/constitutions.

Progressives, admit it, you want to change the Constitution without following the rules, which demands an amendment, or at least a law from the Article I branch and concurrence of the Article II. If the rules are too cumbersome for you, that’s sign that you don’t have enough support. So, don’t try to cram down the people’s throat that for which you don’t have enough support. You’re showing yourselves to be singularly authoritarian, if not totalitarian.

It appears that the ruling denizens of our cities, faculty lounges, and coastal enclaves won’t be happy till everyone eats, dresses, thinks dutifully agnostic, and in all other ways adopts the habits of a Manhattan or Malibu soirée. Sounds pretty totalitarian to me.

But, like the Court majority in Garland v. Cargill, where’s the law? Hopefully, with the exception of someone named Trump being pursued by Alvin Bragg before a Manhattan judge and jury, there’s still enough respect for the rule of law, and the rules, to protect us from the caprice of a small social clique. They still need law, which I pray that we won’t grant them.

May be an image of 1 person and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. Official Supreme Court ruling in Garland v. Cargill at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-976_e29g.pdf
2. Thanks to Charles C. W. Cooke for his piece in National Review, “CNN’s Dominic Erdozain Is Lying about Firearms Law Again”, 6/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cnns-dominic-erdozain-is-lying-about-firearms-law-again/
3. “Supreme Court strikes down Trump-era ban on bump stocks on guns”, John Fritze et al, CNN, 6/14/2024, at https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/14/politics/supreme-court-bump-stocks/index.html

June 6, 2024June 7, 2024

The U.S., A Third-Rate Country? Part II of the Trump Verdict

Trump guilty verdict: What happened in court as judge read decision — Alvin Bragg, Manhattan DA

Who Is Justice Juan Merchan? — Judge Merchan in the so-called Trump hush-money trail

In the old parlance of the Cold War, the world was divided between a First World (the wealthy nations mostly aligned with the West), a Second World (the communist bloc), and a Third World (everyone else, mostly the poor, corrupt, and so-called nonaligned). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR blotted out most of the Second, leaving the First and an amorphous blob of everyone else. As the widely recognized head of the First, the U.S. of today has willfully, not inevitably, decided to make its way down into the blob. No better sign of the descent into the corruption thicket can be found than the recent Trump verdict.

It’s more than the political prosecution of an obscure local politician that occurs from time to time. It’s the chutzpah to target one of highest profile figures in this important decision-making year, the chief opponent of the reigning president, and to do so on alarmingly spurious charges. One is left to only admire the ingeniousness in crafting a malign charade out of a patchwork of legal mumbo-jumbo. In the America of today, there’s no need for a seizure of the presidential compound and barbarous firing squads. Just use our mountainous legal code to accomplish the same end. The gambit is all Third World.

Let’s take a look at the travesty. It begins with a jumbled understanding of a “conspiracy” (see #1 below). In the law, a criminal conspiracy is one or more people coordinating the means to achieve an illegal objective, a crime. Absent a criminal end, there is no conspiracy. Think it through. For a bank robbery, you might have three people: one to buy the masks and gun, one to drive the getaway car, and one to rush into the bank to take the money. There are two crimes: the robbery which makes for the second crime, the conspiracy to do it. Without the criminal objective, the disguises were for a masked ball, the driver is a chauffeur, and the third person is making a savings account withdrawal.

In the Trump saga, where’s the crime? Non-disclosure agreements (NDA) aren’t illegal. The bookkeeping entries for payments in the NDAs may or may not be infractions (misdemeanors), but that’s irrelevant since the 2-year statute of limitations had long since expired. When your paramount goal is not to lose power, just use obscure laws in convoluted ways in an intensely partisan jurisdiction before an intensely partisan judge and jury to hang your opponent; and you too can have your country join the ranks of Burundi-style electioneering (in Africa, the Fund for Peace’s most unstable country).

Rest assured; they won’t let a little thing like a statute of limitations stand in the way any more than a generalissimo would. Just magically turn the misdemeanors into felonies and therefore leap over the time limit. The cabal needs a second crime though. How to manufacture one? Establish a conspiracy using the highly dubious Article 17-152 of New York’s election law which oddly defines conspiracy as the use of unlawful means to “to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office” (see #1 below). Let that sink in. Normally, the means become unlawful because the objective is a crime, but promoting or negatively campaigning against a person for office is not a crime. It can’t be. It’s the stuff of campaigns. Bragg did not even prove an “unlawful means” for the second crime that translates the misdemeanor charges of falsifying business records into felonies.

Instead, Bragg and the judge gave the jury a choice of three unindicted possibilities (whew, think that one through): a Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) violation, hypothetical bookkeeping infractions other than the original 34, or some other tax illegality. The whole thing is rubbish. Bragg and a Manhattan court aren’t empowered to enforce FECA, a federal law forbidding Bragg’s, Judge Merchan’s, and a dimwitted jury’s meddling. Regarding the other two, while keeping them silent in the indictment, Bragg and the trial court stampeded over Trump’s Sixth Amendment right to know the charges.

And then for the legal morass to work, proof of intent is still required – evidence of Trump’s state of mind to commit fraud – which Bragg never established for charges that he never indicted. The trial and the verdict are an absolute disgrace.

Not surprisingly, Biden’s number three at DOJ, Matthew Colangelo, left in December 2022 to join Bragg’s team. Coincidence? Call me . . . skeptical. Who leaves a high-status DC post to be an underling to a local DA unless something else is afoot? This stinks to high heaven.

It’s an embarrassment to the U.S. and us, its citizens. Bragg, Merchan, and the numbskull jury made us a laughingstock to the world. What makes our “justice” any different from the CCP’s “People’s Tribunals” to imprison or execute “enemies of the people”? Some say democracy is messy. No, that’s too nice. This makes us third-rate, all of us.

RogerG

Sources:

1. Andrew C. McCarthy’s work on the trial is invaluable in his “The ‘Other Crime’ in the Trump Trial: Conflating Ends and Means”, National Review, 6/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/06/the-other-crime-in-the-trump-trial-conflating-ends-and-means/

April 26, 2024April 29, 2024

Grandma Is a Lefty

These four climate cases are changing how we can tackle climate change - Greenpeace International — The Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen)

Here’s a story that caught my eye a while back. In March, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) declared that the Swiss government is a human rights abuser on a par with Iran, North Korea, the CCP, et al. How did the ECHR get to this judgment? Do the Swiss possess a pervasive secret police that piles people into dark, dank prisons never to be heard from again, like the CCP does to the Uyghurs? No. Switzerland became a target of opportunity for the usual assemblage of lefties that crops up from time to time to shout and litigate their way to imposing their views on everybody else.

This one, the Senior Women for Climate Protection (KlimaSeniorinnen), made up of lefty oldsters, brought suit against the Swiss government for not capping greenhouse gas emissions. In a story in the NYT (see below) on the Court ruling, it read in part,

“By not acting ‘in good time and in an appropriate and consistent manner,’ the ruling said, the Swiss government had failed to protect its citizens’ rights”.

The Court became a legislature. A legislature is the legitimate place where partisan contests are settled, among the people’s elected representatives, not a court. The “climate change” brouhaha is, most emphatically, a battle of competing viewpoints. There’s much to debate about the issue; there’s much unsettled about the issue. If the people want caps on such emissions, their reps can pass a law. If they want to remove the caps, they can do that also. The Court, instead, took the partisan opinion of a partisan group of lefty old folks and made their opinion a matter of law where there is no law.

May be an image of 4 people — The European Court of Human Rights

Remember that’s the complaint of the lefty grandmas. They want a law even though their elected reps have chosen not to make one. Rather, they have taken their little opinion and wrapped it into a lawsuit that asked the Court to act as if there was one. The tortilla for this partisan burrito was “human rights”. According to the ECHR, the opinion of a narrow group of lefties is to be shoved down the throats of the entire population of Switzerland, just under the guise of “human rights”. Now, it’s a “human right” to handcuff, and impoverish, a people against their will.

Without doubt, the so-called “caps” that have been morphed into a “human right” would turn the people’s lives upside down. Getting real, the “caps”, and its cousin “decarbonization”, would mean more intense electrification – i.e., reliance on a grid made more unstable by greenie generation (wind, solar, tides, you name it). The costs of the “transition” are mammoth. As a result, a lot of somebodies are going to be “ground down by the wheel of history” (a little Bolshevik lingo).

Tractors stop traffic in the Netherlands in protest of enviro rules — Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway, near Rijssen, on June 29, 2022, against the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans. (Photo by Vincent Jannink / ANP / AFP)

If the “caps” are a “human right”, is avoidance of the costs of the caps also a human right? Increasing the financial stress on a beleaguered population must be a threat to human rights. Ipso facto, the Senior Women for Climate Protection are human rights abusers. Should they be incarcerated to join the Uyghurs to protect our right not be subjected to their nonsense? The logic is inescapable.

Lefty grandmas are no different from lefty youngsters shutting down the colleges in an exercise of Hamas-love.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “In Landmark Climate Ruling, European Court Faults Switzerland”, Isabel Kwai and Emma Bubola, New York Times, 4/9/2024, at https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/09/world/europe/climate-human-rights.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap

April 12, 2023April 14, 2023

Our National Decomposition Continues Apace

Union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images) — Teacher union organizer and Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski/Getty Images)

Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz reacts while speaking at her election night watch party in Milwaukee, Wis., on Tuesday, April 4, 2023. Protasiewicz, 60, defeated former Justice Dan Kelly, who previously worked for Republicans and had support from the state's leading anti-abortion groups. (Mike De Sisti /Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel via AP) — Janet Protasiewicz speaks at her election night party in Milwaukee after she defeated former Justice Dan Kelly for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. (Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)

Our national decomposition shows little sign of abating. Elections in Wisconsin and Chicago indicate that there remains an appetite for decay.

Another word for decline or decomposition of a culture, civilization, or nation is degringolade. Whichever word is used, however, we are experiencing it. Nature isn’t doing it to us. We are doing it to ourselves. The precipitating factor is what is bouncing between our ears. A sizeable chunk of the electorate, without even knowing it in many cases, is sold on toxic neo-Marxism in the guise of modern progressivism. Today, progressivism and this updated Marxism are synonymous. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record since I’ve certainly mentioned it often enough but can’t get away from it. It’s constantly resurfacing in many places around the country.

This isn’t the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson. As a refresher, this current edition is a relatively modern refashioning of Karl Marx’s paradigm: the systemic oppression of the oppressed who are defined by an ever-fungible list of outgroups covering everything from XY girls to the poor to anyone with high melanin counts. To the rescue in this blinkered ideological schematic is a complete, top to bottom, inside and out, overhaul of all societal arrangements from the family to property, a thoroughgoing Marxist revolution. Sound familiar? Read BLM’s mission statement before it was scrubbed clean of too much revelatory information (see below). We’ve proven to be quite creative in defining the “oppressed”, or victim groups. For greenies, you might add the mother goddess Gaia (earth) to the list. Anyway, this latest edition fairs no better than the kind that lurked behind the Iron Curtain or Mao’s China or is lurking in North Korea and Cuba. It is a sacking of our heritage and thrusting the country into despair.

The canary passing out in the coal mine in this moment of our evisceration is urban America. Our cities are crumbling, and so are the states dominated by them. The story has been acted out before. We are historically rhyming with 4th and 5th-century AD Rome. The Roman Empire didn’t go out in a boom but a whimper. The cities became unlivable, mired in high taxes, crumbling infrastructure, a deterioration of services, lack of security, and overburdening controls. Who’d want to live there? Apparently, many didn’t by the 5th century. The population of the city nearly emptied from over a million in the 1st century AD to 30,000 by the 5th. Other similarly weakened urban places suffered. People flocked to fortified estates, monasteries, and towns with natural defenses. It’s the beginning of feudalism.

visigoths+%281%29.jpg 1,405×1,005 pixels | Vikings | Pinterest | Roman empire and Roman legion

Feudalism is returning. Today, in the good ‘ol USA, people are rushing to states and places where 3-strikes laws mean something, where taxes and bureaucracies aren’t bleeding producers white, where parking your car on the street in front of your house isn’t an invitation to vandalism. In other words, where neo-Marxism/progressivism is held in disrepute.

Where boys’ and girls’ bathrooms are separated by a wall. Where nature’s chromosomal distinction hasn’t been buried by the linguistic manipulations of pronouns and “birthing person” for “woman”. It’s just the opposite in our urban neo-Marxist silos. Entirely mired in the mindset, many of our cities and urbanized states are busy advancing the revolution by eliminating other distinctions such as the one between criminal and law-abiding. Judges and local potentates treat criminals as victims and their real victims as . . . well . . . .

As if we need any more evidence, Whole Foods announced yesterday (4/10/2023) that it was “temporarily closing” its 65,000 square foot San Francisco outlet at Eighth and Market, the Trinity section, that it just opened last year. According to a company spokesman, “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.” The area has been plagued by brutal beatings, stabbings, killings, and accidents in recent weeks. Too few cops and law-unenforcement is making San Francisco look like 5th-century Rome (see below).

These arbiters of revolutionary justice in places like San Francisco have their own vocabulary to push this cultural revolution. “Decarceration” is the go-to for releasing offenders to reoffend, just call it “low-level crime”, which is another word for “inconsequential” to Soros-backed DA’s – inconsequential to everyone but the person left battered, bruised, and bleeding in the subway. Barbarian invasions aren’t doing it to us, unless barbarian refers to the urban powerful who have drunk the neo-Marxist Kool-Aid. Your progressive DA, judges, city council, mayor, governor, and state legislature are performing the role of the Visigoths and their King Alaric in laying waste to Rome in 410 AD.

May be an image of 1 person and fire — Minneapolis in the 2020 summer of riots.

The only recourse for those not too fond of the mayhem is to vote with their feet. Get out! But these are democracies – surprise! The corruption is democratic. People are voting for mayhem. How’s that possible? It might have something to do with a little cost/benefit analysis on the run: the rewards of group largesse from the public treasury are greater than the costs of possibly losing your little girl in a drive-by. I know, it’s hard to believe. But, on the other hand, it could just be stupid people being stupid, something not unheard of in the annals of democracy.

Or it could be due to the overall social decomposition extending to our schools. People aren’t taught any better; they don’t know any better; and are easily led into believing nonsense. Yet, policy-nonsense still behaves, as it always has, whether popularly chosen or not, like a drunk behind the wheel. It’s a disaster careening down our thoroughfares. And like most drunks, all-too-often they don’t get sober till they hit bottom. Apparently, our urban electorates haven’t hit bottom. Or it could be that the voter pool has been reduced to the drunks, the sober having fled to safer climes (red states).

A sizeable majority – by ten points – of Wisconsin voters recently failed the field sobriety test but still grabbed the car keys. Some attribute the recent election of the Visigothic Janet Protasiewicz to the State Supreme Court to the abortion issue. Probably true, but Wisconsinites have now let the Visigoths through the gates with a new Visigothic majority on the Court and, as a result, will get much more than carte blanche abortion. Protasiewicz promised during the campaign to rewrite the state’s redistricting maps to the advantage of the neo-Marxists who promise more sacking into the foreseeable future. In addition, expect more teacher-union power to dictate your child’s education, backdoor racism in diversity-equity-inclusion, and higher taxes to finance the revolution. The whole litany of policies to promote the revolution against hypothetical systemic “oppressors” are about to be unleashed. And so will a run on exiting U-Hauls, proving once again that the only thing efficiently produced by Marxism is refugees.

Money is the mother’s milk of politics . . . and revolution. The donkey party neo-Marxists, in spite of their dismal record, are well-funded from a network of similarly intoxicated donors. The precedent was established by Lenin in 1917. The Bolsheviks were bankrolled by Imperial Germany. A revolution rides on more than fulminations.

Money and an election system reshaped to the advantage of their base put Protasiewicz in office, and gave Chicago another Alaric-style mayor, Brandon Johnson, to replace the Visigothic Lori Lightfoot. The guy is marinated in neo-Marxism, like his predecessor. San Francisco, Wisconsin, and Chicago are pointing the way to the future, the same future viewed by 5th-century Romans and early 20th-century Petrograd residents.

May be an image of 1 person

If not arrested, our condition will continue to deteriorate . . . until riveting calamities shock us back to our senses. Hopefully, by then, it won’t be too late. Hopefully, we won’t wake up to news of two aircraft carriers sunk in the western Pacific, and our response is crippled by an economy unable to meet the demands of the moment, or a population unwilling to fight after years of anti-western indoctrination in our media and schools. A pool of recruits rattled by gender dysphoria and accusations of white privilege can’t instill much confidence.

The signs of decay aren’t limited to the popularity of chic neo-Marxism among urban sophisticates. Another passed-out canary is plummeting birth rates and closing maternity wards. It’s hard to have a robust generational talent pool to face the threat with a population befuddled by pronouns and fungible sex-identity, all as the population shrinks. We’ve got a lot to worry about. And all the while, neo-Marxism, acting like the Visigoths, is busy hollowing out the nation and its civilization. At this late hour, the odor of national decomposition is beginning to overwhelm the olfactory glands.

No photo description available.

RogerG

Real Institutional Racism in the Boardroom

The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A trial widely perceived to be a referendum on affirmative action is scheduled to begin Monday. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file) — The admissions building at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (HADLEY GREEN / The New York Times, file)

Benjamin Disraeli (19th century British politician, Prime Minister, and writer/philosopher) in his book “Sybil, Or the Two Nations” wrote of the deep split of a people into two camps, almost nations, each completely estranged from the other:

“Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws . . . . THE RICH AND THE POOR.”

See the source image — Benjamin Disraeli

For him, the divide was between the rich and the poor, an artifact of a time of much greater hardship. For us, it is between the blue silos of a radical Left cultural ethos and the red hinterlands of the traditions of standards, faith, the rule of law, equality before the law, and popular sovereignty under constitutional checks. The former wishes to overthrow the latter.

In these isolated little blue enclaves, overwhelmingly inner cities and college campuses, the hyper-wealthy and academics can entertain ideological fancies far afield from the lives of the vast majority of people living outside, people who are actually struggling with the daily realities of living and not secure from them by walls, money, and tenured academic freedom.

How could the corporate boardroom – in the past immune – become so enthralled by this revolutionary ethos? The answer lies in the social realities of living in a narrowly confined space of limited interactions. A homogeneous mind incubates in a scene of intermarriage, secluded social engagements in a protective cocoon, and an upbringing that transmits the same campus cultural revolution in these secluded social petri dishes.

los angeles estate — Security gate at a Beverly Hills estate

Adapting Mao’s Long March mythology, Rudy Dutschke, a leader of the German radical Left of the 1960s, advocated a long march through institutions in that 1967 time of troubles of strikes, riots, and massive protests in the West. Rather than tear the institution down, take them over, he said. Well, it happened. Yesteryear’s student radical is today’s tenured college faculty with matriculated mental offspring littered throughout the Fortune 500.

What brings this to mind? Eighty-two American companies expressed their official support for race-based college admissions, loosely referred to as affirmative action, in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the University of North Carolina and Harvard (see their briefs below). Big corporate players such as Google, Apple, JetBlue, and General Electric produced briefs utilizing the same old neo-Marxist rhetoric of group-conscious oppression. Rhetorically, the table is set for the talisman of “diversity”. Merit is redefined as being a member of the proper race or possessing the proper genitalia and calling it “diversity”. No, this isn’t diversity of opinion. It’s the diversity of immutable characteristics. Competence and a special gnosis, it is assumed, emanates from melanin count and genitalia, not from observable qualifications. It’s preposterous.

The pretzel logic required to make this scheme marketable boggles the mind. In Monday’s hearing before the Supreme Court, defense counsel emphasized the gambit of race as one among many factors but couldn’t escape withering cross examination from Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito and Barrett. The inescapable fact is that at least some admissions will be based on race, and thusly a violation of statute and the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection. Trying to hide race among the weeds doesn’t eliminate the fact that race will be determinative to award advantages to some to the detriment of others not so privileged with the right skin color and genital comportment.

How could they get away with this after a Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment, Brown v. Board of Education, and the various Civil Rights Acts in the long campaign to end the award of benefits and/or disabilities based on race or other immutable factors? The whole enterprise relies on rhetorical legerdemain and a mountain of verbiage in bastardized “studies” to the point that “studies have shown” has gained the reputation as a tipoff for ideological skullduggery. It’s a new Jim Crow favoring the radical Left’s “oppressed”.

And an afront to most people’s practical sense of fairness. There’s a reason why lady justice wears a blindfold.

Not surprisingly given their backgrounds, corporate titans have bought into it. Read the briefs and you’ll find the ritual abuse of “diversity” and “qualified”, as in “Classroom diversity is crucial to producing employable, productive, value-adding citizens in business.” Or, how about the claim that the favoritism produces “a pipeline of highly qualified future workers and business leaders”? “Highly qualified” just became an oxymoron. “Qualification” now means the right melanin count and genitalia.

The whole thing is a legal, moral, and rational trainwreck. To borrow a movie line, “Yes, Virginia, there is institutional racism”, but it’s coming from the folks who brought you The 1619 Project, CRT, the 2020 summer of BLM riots, home appliances, and annual college admission letters. Amazing, the campaign against institution racism was always about furthering institutional racism.

May be a cartoon of text

RogerG

We Are Stuck with the Democracy that We Have. The Result of Kansas Amendment 2 is Proof.

I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.

We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.

Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!

That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.

Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.

As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.

No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.

The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?

For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.

No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.

It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .

If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.

RogerG

Source:

Kansas rejects Amendment 2, which would have eliminated a right to abortion from the state constitution (msn.com)

June 10, 2022

A Lawless Party

Early morning Wednesday (6/8/22), a California man was arrested with weaponry and break-in tools to assault Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his home. Surprised?

Tuesday (6/7/22), San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin was recalled (i.e., removed from office) by a vote of the people in the city. Much of the city’s disorder, filth, and crime wave was attributed to him and his platform of “restorative justice” and “ending the carceral state”, which meant that he claimed the power to pick the laws that he was going to enforce and not enforce, and how.

What do these two incidents have in common? Both of them are indications of the lawlessness of the Left and its institutional avatar, the Democratic Party.

Lawlessness doesn’t stop at Boudin or a failed assassin. We’ve known for quite some time that public tirades by public figures purposefully instigate the unhinged. They’re invitations to lawlessness. Maxine Waters, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and others of the donkey party’s hierarchy have incited campaigns of intimidation of those who disagree with them. No wonder that in 2017 a Bernie Sanders supporter, James T. Hodgkinson, marched onto an Alexandria, Va., baseball field and shot five Republican congressmen. No wonder that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mitch McConnell, and Ted Cruz couldn’t enjoy a family meal at a DC area restaurant without facing a mob’s verbal fulminations. No wonder that 2020 would be known as The Year of Living Dangerously when America’s urban centers were turned into stage sets for Escape from New York or Escape from Los Angeles (to continue the movie metaphor). And Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an assassin for daring to think that abortion is a matter for the states and not DC potentates.

Ironically, and quite a hoot as well, it’s the Democrats who are blindly wedded to the idea of law as cure-all. Think about it: have poverty, pass a law to spend money. Have school problems, pass a law to spray more money their way. Have “gun violence”, pass a law. And problem solved, or so they think. Though, it must be admitted, they’re great about spending money but not so great about enforcement. So, we end up with inflation, bloated budgets, and a breakdown of civilization.

Take their response to the Uvalde shooting. They trot out their prepackaged, 30-year-old talking points. It’s chock full of the same gun bans, regulations, and onslaughts on business. For them, it’s a simple matter of passing a law and then meeting after work for libations. Their great for “universal background checks”, for instance, but violations of the existing checks are rarely prosecuted. I suspect that it’s because either prosecutions would create more serious injustices – which says a lot about the inherent wisdom of the law – or a good chunk of the perps don’t fit the preferred profile: too many “people of color”, too few people without color.

A 2017 GAO report on the status of the federal government’s background check system found massive non-enforcement. Of the 112,000 documented cases of prohibited buyers stopped by the system, only 12,700 were even investigated, and of that number, 12 were prosecuted. Pass a law, spend money to set up the system, hire the personnel, and then don’t bring the miscreants to court. Surely, there must be more than 12 of the 112,000 deserving of a date before a judge.

Law without enforcement is no law at all. There exists a law that bans intimidation in the administration of justice, like what is happening on the sidewalks and streets outside the homes of six Supreme Court justices. The use of anything but the law in the provision of justice is expressly banned in 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507. Unlike most of the 1,000-plus-page gibberish that frequently emanates out of the Democratic caucus, this law is unmistakably clear:

“Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”

For the constitutionally dense, 1507 is the statutory means to implement the Constitution’s equal protection and due process clauses. Look them up. Nowhere do public demonstrations have a role in their application.

Why does AG Garland refuse to enforce 1507? Simple, it’s politics. The Dems demand a particular result in an abortion case before the Court and are willing to turn a blind eye to the law. In effect, 18 U.S. Code, Section 1507 just disappeared from the federal code. It’s been relegated to the same purgatory where you’ll find many federal, state, and local provisions on rioting, public indecency, theft, burglary, assault and battery, sentencing guidelines and laws, etc., etc. Garland and local DA’s like George Gascon and Chesa Boudin see themselves as mini-legislatures to make and unmake statute as they please. It’s grotesque, and so are our streets and public spaces.

Lawlessness appears to be a key Democratic Party doctrine.

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RogerG

*Read Kevin D. Williamson’s excellent piece on the federal background check system.