Justice Stephen Breyer is stepping down. Since the Supreme Court has insinuated itself in all matters of life, there’s much at stake when choosing a juridical potentate for a lifetime appointment. President Biden set down his criteria for filling the seat and, guess what, it has little to do with merit. It has everything to do with melanin count and genitalia. But does it, really?
In a pandering applause line to a radicalized party base in a debate, Biden boasted of a “black” and “women” choice. Do you think for a moment that’s what he’s really after? Do you think the “black” part is encapsulated in a Clarence Thomas? Do you think “black woman” means a Condoleezza Rice (NS advisor to Bush 43, former provost to Stanford University, Dir. of the Hoover Institution, and concert-quality pianist) or Winsome Sears (Lt. Gov. of Virginia)? No, the closest equivalent is Corey Bush, charter member of The Squad. Many of the women that he chooses are lefties, so much so that it’s hard to avoid the descriptor “socialist”.
Take for example his floundered choice for comptroller of the currency, Saul Omarova, a graduate of Moscow State University pre-Soviet collapse. This Cornell University prof favors a Fed takeover of banking, a proposal that would make Lenin’s corpse smile. Get the idea?
In a debate, Biden plaintively cried, “Do I look like a socialist?” I don’t know what a socialist “looks” like since many of them look like they stepped off the pages of style magazines. But I do expect a full-blown lefty of the kind that’ll produce the gibberish of a Sonia Sotomayor. Once installed, the appointee better have an army of clerks to clean up the mess in her opinions.
Get ready for a Supreme Court that looks like America: six sane ones, two Kool-Aid-drinking lefties, and one lefty trying to avoid the scat left by the other two.
Racialism can be easily overlooked if it is so commonplace. When it’s everywhere, it’s easy to become blasé about it. Yet, every now and then, we perk up when radicalism’s inanities poke through life’s hustle and bustle in the form of a Supreme Court justice like Sonia Sotomayor. Leaving aside the radicalism in her abortion views, her interrogations are absolutely nonsensical.
In her questioning of Scott Stewart, solicitor general of Mississippi defending the state’s law, she accused a possible majority of the justices of “politicizing” the Court if they should rule against her preferences. And I quote her highness:
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? . . . . If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?”
It’s all political? Of course, it is. I reference Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. Before progressives expanded the government beyond its competence and forever tarred the word, “politics” was understood to be a community’s activity to decide what to do on matters before it. It’s about decision-making. In our constitutional system, the judiciary participates in quintessential decision-making. Have you noticed? Has she?
Was it only “politics” when the Court dealt a death blow to Jim Crow with Brown v. Board of Education? Was the Court only politicking when it invented a federal constitutional right to end the life of a fetus (abortion), the crux of the matter in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before her Court? Take any case that would fit into her sacred canon of cases. Was the Court politicking in all of them? The Court is doing today what they did back then: make decisions.
Her apparent operating principle is that if the Court majority goes against her, it’s “politics”.
She has no observable ability to distinguish between proper and improper legal reasoning. Furthermore, she implicitly reserves for the Court the power to be a permanent constitutional convention, forever making up rules and rights as fits the fancies of bullying crowds from the campus and gaggle of Democratic Party allies.
Check out this gem of an excuse for the Court to do whatever it wants:
“. . . there’s so much that’s not in the Constitution, including the fact that we have the last word. Marbury versus Madison. There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means. It was totally novel at that time. And yet, what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that’s what was intended.
“They have all [newly minted rights such as abortion, gay marriage, contraception, etc.], like Marbury versus Madison, been discerned from the structure of the Constitution.”
Is there anything that can’t be drawn from “the structure of the Constitution” in the mind of Sotomayor? What’s her limiting principle? The Casey case of the 1990’s supplanted Roe regarding abortion and hung the right on “liberty”. “Liberty” becomes the license to do anything. All she would need is access “penumbras and emanations” (words from Casey) to invent a new constitution. This isn’t the rule of law; it’s the rule of men/women/whatever.
The “For the People Act” would make wide-open absentee voting the new norm.
H1/S1, the “For the People Act”, is actually the “For the Democrats Act”. It would codify the Democrats’ enthusiasm for mass producing votes, real or imagined. But regardless, the thing is unconstitutional. It would make a shambles of the US Constitution’s Article 1, Sec. 4, Cl. 1. The Clause reads:
“The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of chusing [sic] Senators.”
According to the Democrats’ wild reading of the Constitution, the clause behind the semi-colon eliminates the one in front. But why would Madison and company bother writing “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature” if Pelosi and Schumer could erase it with the “make or alter” in the secondary part of the sentence? That’s certainly what H1/S1 does. It’s a federal takeover of all elections in the country. Here’s how:
It effectually repeals a state’s voter ID laws.
It lacerates a state’s registration requirements. It commands same-day registration for all states which would make it impossible to validate a voter before they vote as the thing is then allowed to untraceably flow into the river of votes to the counting center. It decrees automatic registration from government databases (DMV) which ropes in the eligible with the ineligible. States would be required to allow the registration of 16 and 17-year-olds. What would stop them from voting since the ID laws were emasculated? If that isn’t enough, a state’s laws to clean up the registration lists would be repealed through a variety of petty and self-serving legalisms.
The act of voting according to a state’s laws would be altered beyond recognition. Mail-in voting with ballots shot-gunned to the wind would be the new norm coast to coast, all of it with no validation of a signature or anything else for that matter. Ballots can be dropped off anywhere, any precinct, and by anyone. Combined with the rest of the loosey-goosey provisions, who know who’s voting and from where? To boot, party activists are empowered to sweep the area to collect the things (ballot harvesting). No potential for fraud there?
Election Day becomes a minimum of Election Two Weeks+1 by federal edict. People get a chance to vote before they know all the issues, like a presidential candidate’s son engaging in influence-peddling that also implicates the presidential candidate. The idea is to get votes in the bank before the digging can expose the candidate as a scoundrel.
The First Amendment would be under permanent siege with provisions criminalizing political speech. George Soros’s and Biden’s lefty DA’s would have a field day going after anyone who dared to stand athwart their vision of the “right side of history” – reminiscent of Lenin’s “ground down by the wheels of history”.
Congressional redistricting, a clear power of the states (Art. 1, Sec.2), would be rendered moot by the bill’s order for every state to have unelected redistricting commissions. Once again, another slice of the Constitution is made silent by narrowly partisan congressional gamesmanship.
Now this is real chutzpah: the bill would restrict the power of the Court to hear suits against the bill. They aren’t happy with silencing opposition. They desire to muzzle the Court.
Simply put, this rotten fish wouldn’t pass legal muster. In today’s Court, judicial review can’t be repealed when fundamental federalism and personal rights are being flattened. Here’s a list of Court precedents that are steamrolled by the monstrosity:
NAACP v. Alabama: The concomitant intimidation against opposition political groups in the bill’s disclosure requirements violates NAACP’s key finding that a group’s associational rights are protected by the 14th Amendment.
Citizens United v. FEC: Political groups have First Amendment protections to shield them harassment.
Allen v. Cooper, Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, City of Boerne v. Flores, Cutter v. Wilkinson: All concern the “congruence and proportionality” standard. The rule sates that a federal statute can’t be overly broad when it crosses into the states’ constitutional powers and must be tailored to specific ends that are validated by heavy evidentiary findings. By any stretch of the imagination, H1/S1 doesn’t cut it. Pelosi rushed this thing through without much of a hearing back in 2019, only to bring the thing back again in 2021 now that Schumer, at least nominally, is calling the shots in the Senate. The atrocity is ripe for the Court’s guillotine in spite of their best efforts at garroting the Court.
Senate Republicans stepped into the breach. They aborted the thing before the Court would have to do a later-term version of the act, to borrow the lingo from the long-simmering abortion debate.
RogerG *Source: https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/report/the-facts-about-hr-1-the-the-people-act-2021 *Source: https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/07/even-if-congress-pretends-h-r-1-is-constitutional-the-supreme-court-cant/ *Also on my Facebook page.
Remember the Supreme Court’s decision in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo in November of last year. It slapped down Cuomo’s near lockdown of church in his state. The Court ruled that he couldn’t have more severe restrictions on places of worship than for other organizations. Soon after, Harvest Rock Church and Ministry in California filed suit to challenge Newsom’s assault on faith. Their case reached the Court and it referred the matter back to the 9th Circuit with the stipulation to follow the decision in Brooklyn. Meaning, California was slapped down again.
Harvest Rock Church in Pasadena, Ca.
But wait, there’s more. The governor will be forced to pay the $1.35 million legal tab in a settlement on file with the 9th Circuit. But wait, there’s more. Newsom will be the first governor in history to be under a federal injunction to protect houses of worship. According to one source, “the state of California is now under a permanent injunction from imposing restrictions on churches and houses of worship that are not equally applied to other critical infrastructure or essential services.”
The Court has had enough of California’s extremist state government. But what of the state’s electorate who keeps sending these Maduro-loving clowns to Sacramento in super majorities? Recent opinion polls indicate that Newsom is set to survive the recall. Maybe it’s not surprising. The guy is buying votes by flooding the state with millions of checks. Apparently, that’s all it takes to keep the state in its current morass of blackouts, punishing taxes, rampaging wildfires, bad roads, cities that look like homeless Woodstocks, water shortages, empty prisons/rising crime, and a permanent condition of lockdown.
California voters, after all, it was always up to you.
Florida authorities serving a search warrant on her apartment for her theft of confidential data and equipment.Rebekah Jones booking photo, January 2021. She was booked for hacking the state’s computer system and stealing the confidential files of thousands of Floridians.
If our debate over criminal justice reform centers on a cessation of prisons being prep schools for more violent hoodlums and the reintegration of convicts back into society, I am in whole-hearted agreement. However, the argument frequently strays into the dark territory of repealing three strikes or decriminalization. The Rebekah Jones story illustrates the problem in taking this path.
To put it succinctly, the overwhelming mass of suspects had many run-ins with the criminal justice system before they actually landed their first felony conviction on the scoreboard. Take for instance the aforementioned Rebekah Jones, the person at the center of efforts to defame Florida Governor DeSantis’s COVID-response record. She’s a real piece of work.
Let’s start with a couple of things that she kept out of her application for employment with the Florida Department of Health. In Louisiana in 2018, she agreed to a pre-trial intervention program to avoid conviction for “battery of a police officer”. Prior to that, she evaded a 2017 conviction in Florida for “criminal mischief” by entering into a deferred-prosecution agreement. And that’s not all.
The public record on Rebekah Jones is chock-full of other nefarious stunts. An ex-boyfriend acquired a restraining order on her for damaging his car and the harassment of his mother. She was fired from a position with Florida State University for having sex with a student and lying about her criminal record. A stalking case against her in Florida is currently under investigation. She couldn’t restrain herself from texting pics of her ex-boyfriend’s genitals. This girl has a track record of little self-restraint, and it shows. Boy does it show.
Right now, Rebekah Jones is the darling of the left. They see her as their avatar to bring down their Dark Lord, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. This episode only proves the degree that politics poisons the well. She’s given a free pass for a long trail of abusive behavior right up to her being canned on May 12, 2020. How many others on the dock are actually facing DA’s and judges who are fed up with having the same person appear before them over and over again, like Rebekah Jones?
The Left ought to choose their friends more wisely. And reform activists should be careful before they succeed in unleashing troubled people back into our neighborhoods before we know the whole story. We, and they, will get more than what we bargained for.
You can read about Rebekah Jones in Charles C. W. Cooke’s excellent piece in National Review.
Defense attorney Eric Nelson, left, and defendant former Minneapolis police Officer Derek Chauvin listen as Assistant Minnesota Attorney General Matthew Frank, questions witness Christopher Martin during the Chauvin trial.
If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.
This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.
BLM protesters in Minneapolis.
After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.
The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.
The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.
The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.
Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.
For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.
In case you haven’t heard, Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski was just decided at the Supreme Court. Wow, in a 8-1 decision, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority, the college woke universe was dealt a blow! In a nutshell, as a result of this decision, these bastions of the left’s ministry of truth are skating on thin ice when they attempt to muzzle free speech. It’s about time!
It all started at Georgia Gwinnett College. The College, a new addition (2006) to the Georgia public university system, is modern in more than its buildings. It’s thoroughly modern in its wokeness.
An evangelical student, Chike Uzuegbunam, tried to disseminate literature and engage with fellow students but was smacked down by the school’s Politburo. Check this out: He was told that he must submit an application for a permit three days in advance and then he is to be penned in one of two “free-speech zones”. These so-called zones have a calendar and geographic dimension. The pens are only open 18 hours a week. On a Friday, the clock starts ticking at 11 a.m. and stops at 1 p.m.
Chike Uzuegbunam before the US Supreme Court
That’s not all. After he got his permit and went to the appointed spot at the appointed time, he was stopped by campus cops. They were enforcing the school’s ban on “disturb[ing] the peace and/or comfort of person(s)”. It seems that hearing about the resurrected Christ is harmful to the school’s Wicca followers and anyone else in full rebellion mode against the most prevalent faith in the country, like the majority in the faculty lounge.
He sued, and the Alliance Defending Freedom took up his cause. Here’s an organization worth contributing to. You can donate here.
My only question at this point concerns the campus cops. How can they in good conscience enforce these obviously horrendous administrative decrees? I’m reminded of the defense at the Nuremberg Tribunals in 1946: We were following orders. Are these uniformed personnel willing to commit disgusting acts for a secure job with good pay and benefits? At least for some, it must have dawned on them that this is wrong, clearly, unmistakably wrong. Yet they still carried it out. Shame on them. Shame on them.
This configuration doesn’t capture the essence of our modern mode of government. The branch on the left is mostly superfluous. The subterranean one and the one on the right hold sway.
Ours is not a limited government founded upon popular sovereignty. It is something unmoored from any sensible reading of the Constitution. Congress, the legislative branch, is a pointless political soap opera, no longer deliberative and relevant for the most part. The real stuff of governance happens in an alliance between government workers in the executive branch and the courts. The same pattern is repeated in the states. The least democratic parts have the greatest effective power.
No better example of this disfigured mode of governance can be found than the actions of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on September 17 to nullify sections of the state’s election law signed by Democratic governor Tom Wolfe last year. The law stipulated that mail-in ballots had to be received by 8 p.m. on election day. The Court supplanted the plain language in the law with its own judgment of 3 days after the election. Why 3 days? Good question. I’m sure that there’s some rationale but I don’t think that it’s far removed from arbitrary.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court: the state’s second legislature.
On what did the narrow majority of four black-robed potentates hang their hat for their edict? Well, it’s the same tack as finding the right to abortion in emanations and penumbras (Griswold v. Conn. /Roe v. Wade). Find some language in the Constitution (state or federal) clearly meant for something else and stretch it to apply as needed. That way, they can legislate but hide it under “interpretation”.
These legal eagles invented an entirely new elastic clause in the state constitution. The relevant passage in the state constitution, now stretched to satisfy judicial whims, reads, “Elections shall be free and equal; and no power, civil or military, shall at any time interfere to prevent the free exercise of the right of suffrage.” Of course, if a deadline can be annulled by such reasoning, so can any standard to ensure a credible election. Shower the state with ballots – which was done – and let them come in by wind and clutches at times made fungible by judicial flights of fancy – which was also done.
The federal Constitution lays the power to establish the “manner” of elections with the state legislatures. If, as part of their “manner”, Pennsylvania’s powers-that-be are willing to tolerate the transfer of the legislative power to judges, we’re stuck with it.
What a sorry state of affairs. Legislatures legislate, courts legislate over them, and everyone who likes the result yawns “ho-hum”. No constitutional provision can prevent the reality of sorry governments producing sorry elections. What do you expect from a corrupt oligarchy?
USA. Erie. 3th November. Inside the Courthouse opening mailed votes.
“Beyond the margin of fraud” is a cliché but one more true today than ever. Let me be perfectly frank in saying that, in order to limit the “margin”, not every vote should count nor should every potential voter vote. It’s stupendously ridiculous to claim otherwise.
I am one with Andrew C. McCarthy on this in his piece on National Review online. The Supreme Court muddied the waters in a recent 4-4 vote in allowing the Pennsylvania Court to rewrite its election laws but SCOTUS ordered any affected ballots to be held in abeyance till a final determination. This election won’t stop in SCOTUS. Think of the whole range of state and federal courts that’ll have a say on this monstrous flub of an election before we can put “finis” on it. Even then, the final vote will have the lingering smell of a septic tank.
How did we get here? And no, you can’t blame the virus. We can lay fault with the fact that we have forgotten the sole purpose of elections: to register the voice of the people. But how do we know that the tally reflects the “voice”? We don’t, and that’s because of the Democratic Party harangues to “count every vote” while they engage in a full frontal assault on ballot integrity.
The virus has a role . . . as an excuse, a pretext for Castro-style plebiscites. Mail-in voting has always been scandalous since it destroys the secret ballot and no-one knows what happens behind the closed doors of an address. Now we’ve put the gambit on meth. Obstacles in attempts to match signatures, screams of horror against voter ID, and the demand to count everything no matter how mangled underscore the Democrats’ fixation on the need to pile up the pieces of paper as their route to power. At the end of the day, though, did we have an election or merely a greasy slide to power?
Where’s the “voice”? Is it the “voice” of the profoundly uninterested and ignorant? Is it the “voice” of ballot harvesters? Is it the “voice” of the ineligible? No doubt, invalid votes cancel valid ones. So, we have an election that will satisfy few and has a stink rising from it.
Thank you Democrats for ruining a once good thing. In your zeal for power, you’ll only have made your opponents apoplectic. This election will have produced two types of winners: the kind who won in spite of the fraud and those who won with it. For those who rode the current of pungent malfeasance to office, they could be rightly referred to as “your fraudulency”, with no more validity than that.
Will half the country accept a corrupted tally? I kind of doubt it. The Democrats are responsible for this sorry state of affairs. Here’s an interesting question: What happens when elections lose their integrity? Elections have often been referred to as peaceful revolutions. The peaceful part is only possible if they are popularly accepted as credible. If the process lacks credibility, forget about the “peaceful” kind. Opposition will be left with no recourse but the violent other type.
The Democrats are playing with fire and an end to civility.
Some logos lose their currency after a history of clownishness and/or misbehavior. Some examples might be “lawyer”, “college-educated”, “journalist”, “systemic racism”, and “fact checker”.
USAToday’s indomitable fact checker, Chelsey Cox, on her editor’s insistence, looked into a story on the website Babylon Bee, a satirizing website in the mold of SNL down to its marrow, on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision to vacate the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Really, I kid you not (on the media’s gullibility, that is).
Here’s a part of Babylon Bee’s story. It’s a hoot.
[Headline] “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death Of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” “SAN FRANCISCO, CA—In a landmark ruling, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. . . .’ Death, at its core, is a construct designed to subvert the rule of law by taking pro-choice liberal judges away from us too soon . . . We hereby rule any attempt by President Trump to appoint a replacement to be unconstitutional. We will block any attempt until we figure out a way to resurrect her or maybe clone her and restore her to her already ‘legally alive’ state. We’re still figuring that part out.”
Nicole Carroll, USAToday editor-in-chief
Our fearless fact checker, after a week of inquiry, concluded that it was “satire”. Without a hint of self-awareness, Cox writes,
“We rate this claim SATIRE, based on our research. A satirical article about the 9th Circuit “overturning” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has no basis in fact. It is true that the 9th Circuit has ruled against many Trump-era policies.”
