A Third Reason

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined at length on the need for Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection. Among other things, they described one of Party’s rationalizations for Biden’s staying the course:

Ignoring the ballots that voters have already cast for Mr Biden in primaries across the US would undermine democratic decision-making and anger the party’s core supporters.

The editors offered two reasons for why that rationalization is erroneous.

[T]he estimated 4,672 delegates to the Democratic national convention—most of whom were selected in primaries, caucuses, or local party conventions—are a microcosm of the party, not a self-appointed cabal of insiders.

And

[Delegates] aren’t robots. Although delegates pledged to a particular presidential candidate are expected to vote for that candidate, the official party selection rules leave room for judgment, saying that pledged delegates “shall in all good conscience reflect the sentiments of those who elected them.” Delegates pledged to Mr Biden could conscientiously claim that new information has induced them to change their minds[.]

There’s a third reason, too, and this does directly address Party’s claimed concern for “democratic decision-making.”

Party went to great pains to limit primary voters’ choices to just one: Biden himself. Party pressured potential competitors against competing at all, and took active steps even to deprecate serious consideration for folks like Cornel West and Jill Stein, folks that most “democratic decision-makers” would have had no trouble assessing on their own. One potential candidate who was gaining traction, Robert F Kennedy, Jr, was interfered with and subverted so much that he felt driven to leave the Progressive-Democratic Party altogether and mount a separate, third-party campaign—where he’s getting anywhere from 8%-15% support in the polls. The one alternative candidate who was allowed into the primary campaign, Congressman Dean Phillips (D, MN), was sufficiently timid that he chose not to enter until it obviously was too late for him to have any sort of impact.

A MAGA Supreme Court?

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Who says the current Supreme Court is a MAGA court? Relatedly, who objects to Making America Great Again?  The Wall Street Journal‘s editors provided some insight to the Court’s rulings for last year and this.

First, an aggregate statistic: of all the cases decided in 2023, nearly 46% were decided unanimously, the second highest percentage of unanimity of the prior four years—second only to 2022’s unanimity rate. And both of those years had those evil Trump appointees Justices Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. That court also had the Progressive-Democratic Party’s darlings, Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Some 2024 cases decided unanimously:

  • Colorado can’t remove Donald Trump’s name from its ballot as an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment
  • pro-life doctors lack standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over the abortion pill mifepristone
  • the National Rifle Association can sue a New York regulator for coercing insurers to stop doing business with gun-rights groups

Among the 8-1 and 7-2 cases:

  • Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the Court to uphold Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (MA) CFPB funding scheme
  • a refusal to close the constitutional door to a wealth tax
  • government can, indeed, disarm an alleged—not convicted at trial—domestic abuser via a civil restraining order

Of 22 cases decided by 6-3 votes, 11 had “mixed” majorities. Among these:

  • three conservative and three liberal Justices ruled that the federal government had unconstitutionally pressured social-media websites to delete user posts
  • six Justices, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, ruled that prosecutors had stretched the law too far in charging a number of January 6 rioters with obstructing Congress

Who says, and who objects? The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians dishonestly proclaim this Supreme Court, which adheres to the text of our Constitution and the statute(s) before it, an extremist and MAGA court, using the latter adjective as though it were a pejorative. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians object to Making America Great Again—here demonstrated by their sneering at the concept of MAGA.

Independence Day

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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 many 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, viruses, our role in the world, a Presidential election, 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 and other meats in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

Lawlessness and Instability

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Much is being made of the situation that will obtain in the Gaza Strip when Hamas’ war is ended and (ideally) with Hamas utterly destroyed. Worries about Gazan civilian lawlessness and general instability throughout the Strip abound, should there be a lack of governance in that aftermath.

It’s certainly true that an effective governing body, or bodies should the Strip be subdivided as some are proposing, but there’s another factor that’s not addressed.

That’s the behaviors of the civilians involved. Desperation and privation are harsh task masters, but they needn’t be controlling slavers. There’s nothing preventing the Gazan civilians from supporting each other rather than spending their meager resources supporting surviving Hamas terrorists in the latter’s attacks on Israel. There’s nothing preventing Gaza’s civilians from supporting each other rather than lethally competing with each other for those meager resources.

It’s even likely that foreign aid would flow more freely were the Strip’s civilians to move to support that flow rather than ransacking and looting it, or allowing surviving Hamas terrorists to steal it.

But that would require those Gazan civilians to behave like a worthy and virtuous people—not by Western standards, even, but by their own Quran requirements.

Count me naïve for pointing that out, but there it is.

Mostly Immune

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The Supreme Court, last Monday, issued its ruling on former President Donald Trump’s (R) Presidential immunity case. In a 6-3 ruling, the Court held that he has that for official acts committed while in office. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, in part:

Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of presidential power entitles a former president to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.

The necessity of a strong measure of (criminal prosecution) immunity is absolutely essential. Roberts made this point early on [citations omitted]:

The President “occupies a unique position in the constitutional scheme,” … as “the only person who alone composes a branch of government,”[.] The Framers “sought to encourage energetic, vigorous, decisive, and speedy execution of the laws by placing in the hands of a single, constitutionally indispensable, individual the ultimate authority that, in respect to the other branches, the Constitution divides among many.”  They “deemed an energetic executive essential to ‘the protection of the community against foreign attacks,’ ‘the steady administration of the laws,’ ‘the protection of property,’ and ‘the security of liberty.'” The purpose of a “vigorous” and “energetic” Executive, they thought, was to ensure “good government,” for a “feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.”
…
Appreciating the “unique risks to the effective functioning of government” that arise when the President’s energies are diverted by proceedings that might render him “unduly cautious in the discharge of his official duties,” we have recognized Presidential immunities and privileges “rooted in the constitutional tradition of the separation of powers and supported by our history.”

It’s necessary to keep in mind, too, that the Framers wrote President as an energetic, vigorous, decisive, and speedy executer of the laws and as one whose ability to act decisively and speedily is necessary to the protection of the community against foreign attacks in an environment of a failing Articles of Confederation. That treaty didn’t even have a feeble executive, rather it was devoid of any sort of Executive or executive power altogether. The treaty itself was so feeble that it was powerless to fund itself; and it was (soon to be) fatally unable to act against the steady drumbeat of British violations of the Treaty of Paris that codified our independence and against British incursions into our nascent nation’s western territories.

I have a problem, though, with absolute immunity for anyone for criminal acts, whenever they may have been conducted. A line does need to be drawn—and I don’t have any ideas on where, yet—between prosecuting a President for his criminal acts and making up crimes, à la Jack Smith, in order to prosecute a President that some don’t like.

Maybe a line drawn on consequences: the prosecutor and “senior” members of his team who go after a President or former President on some alleged criminality, on that President’s/former President’s acquittal, go straight to jail to serve, without parole, the mid-range sentence that the alleged crime calls for. Consecutively, if multiple crimes are charged and acquitted.

One of the questions that follow this ruling will hinge on the circle: is a criminal act an official act? Can it be? There is some case law that bars things done “under color of law;” that principle would seem to apply to “under cover of official act.”

It’s not going to be an easy question to resolve.

The Court’s ruling can be read here.