Monthly Archives: July 2018

They Would, Indeed

Posted on by
Reply

Commenting on the upcoming nomination for Supreme Court Justice and the Progressive-Democrats’ hysteria over President Donald trump’s choice—long before he makes it—former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said

If he put Moses up for the possibility of being Supreme Court Justice—the ultimate lawgiver, the Ten Commandments—they would still be against it[.]

He’s right.  Recall Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D, CA) objection to Judge Amy Coney Barrett during the latter’s 7th Appellate Court confirmation hearing:

When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you[.]

Never mind that at the outset of that hearing—preceding Feinstein’s slur (of course one’s religious beliefs (or atheism) should live loudly, but Feinstein meant it as a slur)—in response to a question from Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Barrett had said

It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they derive from faith or anywhere else, on the law.

Never mind, either, that Barrett and her then-law professor John Garvey had written in a 1998 paper that

in certain circumstances a Catholic judge (like many Quakers, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and the member communions in the National Council of Churches) might be compelled to recuse herself or himself under 28 USC § 455, a federal statute that suggests a federal judge should step aside in the face of conscientious scruples.

The Left and their representative Party are very much anti-Christian, anti-Judaism, anti-religion or even the whiff of any.

Remember this in the fall, and don’t be a stay-at-home.

Independence Day

Posted on by
Reply

I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, immigration, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

Business Models Don’t Create Business Rights

Posted on by
Reply

There’s a lot about which to criticize California, but in one case, early though it is, the State appears to be on the right track.  California passed a consumer privacy law, and businesses everywhere are in an uproar over it.  The bill

requires [businesses] to offer consumers options to opt out of sharing personal information, and it gives Californians the right to prohibit the sale of their personal data.

Business’ objections center on their premise that it

risked far-reaching damage to everything from retailers’ customer-loyalty programs to data gathering by Silicon Valley tech giants.

This is that business model granting rights to business foolishness.  The claimed damage to customer-loyalty programs is especially rich.  If the business earned customers’ loyalty with actual quality goods and services and actual customer service in response to the inevitable problems that arise, the need for loyalty programs would be lessened.  The still-useful loyalty programs would be easier to sell from that demonstrated quality performance.  Beyond that, businesses could make the perks of joining the program more visible, more actually usable—and do better at tailoring them to individual, or small groups of, customers.  Of course, that last would require collecting customer data, but they might be pleasantly surprised by the outcome of a customer-customizable set of personal data to give access to—and by saying “pretty please” instead of demanding broad-ranging data as a condition of doing business.

The tech companies are being disingenuous, too.  They have yet to demonstrate a need for the wide-ranging data they take without permission; they just say “we need it” without discriminating their claimed need from their obvious “we want.”  And they demand it as a condition of doing business, again refusing the simple courtesy of “pretty please” and the tailoring of the data they want as well as legitimately need.

David French, National Retail Federation Senior Vice President of Government Relations worried, with a straight face, about customers and personalized marketing campaigns.

The consumer will actually be the big loser.

Not this customer.  I object to personalized marketing campaigns aimed at me.  These folks don’t know what I’m in the market for; my past buys are no indication of my current or future needs.  Nor do I want my browsing circumscribed by what offers of what I bought yesterday.  I want the full range of what’s available.  I especially don’t need my time wasted with efforts to create a need or a want where none exists.  I won’t be losing anything by not being inundated with personalized “advertising.”

It’s early, but the law looks like a good start.

Playing Politics with the Constitution

Posted on by
Reply

What kind of judge do we want as a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy?

Folks are talking about a President Donald Trump nominee being a shoo-in because Republicans have a majority in the Senate, and there’s no filibustering of judicial nominations.  I’m not so sure.

The Left, of course, are crying the End of Times and the end of Roe v Wade, but that’s less a factor than a more pernicious conflict in the offing.

Late Thursday, the president met with a bipartisan group of six senators who will play a pivotal role in selecting Mr Kennedy’s successor because they have deviated from their party on key votes in the past. The lawmakers signaled they want an ideological centrist….

Those Senators included Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Susan Collins (R, ME), Lisa Murkowski (R, AK), Joe Donnelly (D, IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D, ND), and Joe Manchin (D, WV).

Litmus tests and centrism.  Collins and Murkowski look like they’re going to hold out for someone who’ll explicitly protect Roe.  I’d like to see that ruling at least adjusted, but a single, narrow issue should not be a deal maker or breaker.  Litmus tests are out of place here.

Others of that crowd are holding out for a centrist, a middle of the roader, so as not to too badly upset the balance of ideologies on the Supreme Court.  The problem with centrism, though, is that it is committed to finding consensus on a case before the Court and doing so for the sake of consensus not because that would represent the best ruling.

Moreover, consensus-building gives too much opportunity to deviate from the text, to legislate by that deviation from the bench, even to amend the Constitution from the bench.  No.  There can be no compromise here.  The words of the Constitution and of any Constitutional law are fixed, and any alteration of them can only be a political decision, not a judicial one.

Nor is there any place for ideology on the Court or in any court.  The Constitution is written and amended by the People, laws are written and enacted by the political branches of our government.  Our judiciary’s task is to apply the Constitution and laws to particular cases before them.  Ideology has no place in the application; ideology, to the extent it has a role in government, is a political matter alone.

No.  We shouldn’t be playing politics with the Supreme Court picks, naïve as that seems.  The best pick for this Justice, and for all nine Justices in their turn, is someone who will uphold the Constitution and hold laws accountable to the Constitution.  That requires a textualist.  Full stop.

 

Unfortunately, any two of those six Senators are enough to kill a nomination.  Or any one of them, since Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) has said he’ll block all judicial nominations until he gets his way on wholly unrelated matters.  Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) have their work cut out for them.  This is not a slam-dunk matter.

Pick One

Posted on by
Reply

Tony James, Blackstone Executive Vice Chairman, thinks his Progressive-Democratic Party needs to become a party of growth and inclusive prosperity.

The problem is that the Party is a Progressive one and becoming a socialist one.  This is not contradictory; the two ideologies are political allies if not siblings, too, and they’re not far apart economically.  The Party’s embrace of the former is demonstrated by Barack Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY), Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D, MA), Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA), newly ascendant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY), and a host of others’ loud and enthusiastic embrace of progressivism.  The Party’s embrace of the latter is demonstrated by the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) and Ocasio-Cortez’ socialism within Party circles.

But progressivism is inherently exclusionary.  Progressivism insists that ordinary Americans are morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [their] responsibilities as…democrat[s], and so we must be instructed and led by our Betters.  We must be excluded from the heady responsibilities of governance and of economic independence.  More, those proud Progressives have proclaimed us ordinary Americans to be irredeemably deplorable homophobic misogynist racists, and all of us Middle Americans in flyover country are just bitter Bible-clinging gun-toters.  These proud Progressives and their acolytes on the Left openly act on this exclusionary attitude with their constant harassment of those of us who are so impertinent (if not outright dishonest) as to disagree with them, with their overt calls to bar those of us not toeing the Party’s line from public places, and with the violence with which they threaten us and often inflict against us, whom they’ve termed fascists and Nazis.

Socialism is inherently anti-growth.  These adherents demand to set all performance goals, for everyone, from the hallowed halls of government instead of a free market doing so for us as individuals and owners/operators of our private enterprises.  Their demand for equal outcomes necessarily caps growth by sapping the abilities of the best among us because others can’t—or won’t—keep up and by denying the ability of any of us to to show the best that there is in [us] and to maximize our personal prosperity, which of necessity maximizes the prosperity of all of us.  These socialists demand to raise our taxes—to take our money—and to give—give!—Medicare to all, Federally guaranteed jobs to all, thereby reducing growth capacity by taking money away from us.

The Party can have a pro-growth platform, or it can be progressive socialist; the two are mutually contradictory.

For the Progressive-Democratic Party to become an inclusive, pro-growth party, though, it must remake itself 180 degrees away from where it currently, proudly stands: it must recreate itself a party of conservatism.

That’s an impossible task for progressive socialists.