Intolerance and Frivolous Lawsuits

Jack Phillips, owner/operator of Masterpiece Cakeshop, had yet another lawsuit against him dismissed, this one by the Colorado Supreme Court. Unfortunately, it was dismissed on the trivial technicality that it wasn’t filed correctly.

The Wall Street Journal editors ask the question

[W]hen will the progressive cultural police finally leave him alone?

As long as the courts—which includes our Supreme Court, whose ruling in Phillips’ favor in an earlier lawsuit was based narrowly on the animus of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission—continue rule to timidly, the intolerant progressives will continue to persecute Phillips and the rest of us Americans who won’t bow and scrape at their intolerant feet.

What’s necessary to put an end to progressive bigotry, at least in our courts, is to sanction such legally frivolous, but morally bigoted, lawsuits. The plaintiffs in such cases should be required to pay their persecution target all legal costs, which often is already the case, and they should be required to pay the damages identified by the plaintiff. Further, the lawyers and their employing law firms—which do not have to be a party to such…frivolity—need themselves to be heavily sanctioned: the lawyer(s) fined steeply, beginning with 10% of their top line income and moving up for each subsequent frivolous suit in which they might participate, and the law firms employing them fined similarly steeply.

Courts are justifiably reluctant to find against plaintiffs and plaintiff lawyers on the basis of their frivolous cases, but it’s been made crystalline by the persecution of Phillips that courts are being too timid here.

“My Values Haven’t Changed”

Recall that that’s what Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris said when she was asked how she explained her changed rhetoric regarding her positions on our border, taxes, and spending.

She made that claim concrete with this exchange when she guested on The View:

The View: If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
Harris: There is not a thing that comes to mind[.]

She’s sticking to her prior policies of wanting to raise taxes, increase government spending, and decriminalizing coming across borders illegally. Her values have been concretized by the actions and attempted actions of her and her titular boss, Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s, administration. She’s sticking to her values that increases in taxes are good, increases in government spending are good, and leaving our borders wide open is good.

Always Someone Else’s Fault

Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party President candidate Kamala Harris is blaming Congress for her and Biden’s administration’s failure to control our border. 60 Minutes interviewer Bill Whitaker asked a question of Harris:

You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers, and that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?

Harris’ answer, in part:

Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with a border security bill.

She omitted to mention that for all that Senator James Lankford (R, OK), the “most conservative” Senator in question, was part of that deal, it would have codified the entry of more than 1.4 million unvetted illegal aliens into our nation. Lankford was hoodwinked in that deal.

Harris also omitted to say, and Whitaker chose not to note in his question, that the right answer now was Joe Biden’s Executive Order, that he could have issued years ago.

Whitaker followed up:

“[T]here was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration,” and that “arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump.”
He then asked her: “Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”

Harris’ answer, in part:

It’s a long-standing problem, and solutions are at hand, and from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.

She omitted to mention, and Whitaker omitted to ask, how then-President Donald Trump (R) was able to implement the restrictions that so thoroughly limited illegal alien influx, restrictions that were so thoroughly loosened. Trump inveighed Congress to act on immigration law, but he didn’t wait—he delivered Executive Orders that achieved the tight restrictions. It’s true enough that Congress is needed to codify those EOs, or something like them, but the EOs, for their duration, worked.

Nothing kept Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden from issuing the EO that he did, or issuing other EOs, to tighten the border as long ago as January 2021 (or leave the Trump EOs in place), and nothing kept his Vice President from pushing him to do any of that. Instead, Harris actively supported the the rescission of the Trump EOs and the resultant loosening of our border control.

But all that is Congress’ fault. With Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, it’s always somebody else’s fault; Party is never the cause of any failure.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

This time centered on their support for terrorists in the Middle East. An all-too-typical example is given by Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Instead of securing the release of the hostages, however, Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has unleashed unthinkable violence on innocent civilians in Gaza. More than a million Palestinians are facing starvation. We see videos of dead children held in the arms of their parents. Violence is escalating throughout the region, including most recently in Lebanon, threatening even more human suffering.

No, Netanyahu and the Israeli Defense Force have been at pains to minimize civilian deaths to the point of broadcasting their next target area and encouraging civilians to leave before an attack goes in—an advance warning that runs up IDF casualties as terrorists who don’t leave with the civilians dig in and are better prepared to resist the attack.

Those civilian deaths, contra Warren, are caused by the terrorists, who work to prevent civilians from leaving the targeted areas so as to use them as shields for the terrorists remaining to fight; caused by the terrorists who use, as a matter of course, civilians as shields as whenever and wherever they fight; caused by terrorists who use civilian churches, mosques, schools, and hospitals for weapons storage and command/control centers; caused by terrorists who use those facilities and civilian residences as sites from which to launch their rockets, which are targeted against Israeli civilians.

Far from naïve, as the Wall Street Journal editors close their piece with, Warren most certainly knows better; she’s lying about the responsibility for the civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon as Israel fights for its survival.

Lies of Progressive-Democrats

This time, centered on the question of abortion.

Progressive-Democrat Minnesota governor and Party Vice President candidate Tim Walz:

…in the recent vice-presidential debate said that Republicans support “a registry of pregnancies.” This followed Mr Walz’s claim last month that “[Donald] Trump is trying to create this new government entity that will monitor all pregnancies to enforce their abortion bans.”

No one is pushing for such a registry—the closest to that is by the Leftist Guttmacher Institute, which collects data on the incidence of abortion and related issues, and that’s no registry, either.

Walz’ claim comes on the heels of other of his lies, like how he was in Tiananmen Square the day of that mass government killing of protestors when he actually was in Nebraska, and how he bailed on his unit to go do politics rather than deploy to a combat zone and subsequently lying about his retirement rank.

Rudy Salas, Party candidate for the House of Representatives:

Washington Republicans want to criminalize abortion, even when a woman has been raped or is facing a medical emergency[.]

Never mind that his opponent Congressman David Valadao is on record as both opposing a national ban on abortion (it’s another Progressive-Democrat widespread lie that Republicans will enact such a ban next year) and insisting on exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother’s life risk.

Progressive-Democrat Mondaire Jones, in his desperation to get back into Congress (he lost his 2022 primary campaign when he was the incumbent),

says Congressman Mike Lawler “would ban abortions in New York.” Mr Jones says…that the Republican platform “would ban abortions even here in New York.”

He can’t point to the claim in the Republican platform that does that because it isn’t there. Further, Lawler says he wants abortion exceptions for rape, incest, and the mother’s health, and that he’ll respect the will of the state’s voters whom the Supreme Court have given exclusive jurisdiction over the abortion issue. In other words, he says he works for his constituents, not the other way around.

The list goes on, far past the short list of examples (abridged further by me) in the Wall Street Journal editorial.

Do we really want anyone this dishonest, or this incapable of dealing with simple facts, representing any of us, or having any role at all in our government?