Tag Archives: freedom

Values and Mottoes

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The Freedom from Religion Foundation is at it again.

It seems the Childress, TX, Chief of Police has committed the evil crime of putting the nation’s motto, In God We Trust, on the town’s police cars.

This is some sort of affront to constitutionally mandated freedom of religion, according to the FRFF—whose name gives away the game: freedom from religion, not freedom of religion. I suppose the US as a whole is an affront to freedom, what with that motto, and all.

Gary Parsons, Lee County, VA, sheriff, who did the same thing with his department’s cars, is on the right track.

It’s not only a symbol of moral values but also a symbol of patriotism[.]

Especially that first part: the motto and its presence on cop cars is an espousal of morality, not of religion.

Therein lies FRFF’s dishonesty and hypocrisy. Rather than that particular set of moral values, FRFF is seeking to impose its own moral values on all of us. It’s also seeking to impose its own religion—the religion of atheism—on all of us.

Undoing a Unilateral “Presidency”

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Lahnee Chen closed his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed of a similar title with this:

By revoking Mr Obama’s executive actions, and beginning the arduous task of identifying and addressing his many other unilateral moves, the next president wouldn’t have to jettison the entire Obama legacy.

But our next President should.

On the next president’s first day in office, the president could simply issue an executive order revoking all of his predecessor’s executive actions, except those necessary for national security or the basic functioning of government. This includes Mr Obama’s executive orders, but also a flood of presidential memorandums and directives, as well as informal guidance and orders from federal agencies, that he has used to reshape federal policy.

Not “except for.” Every single one. Don’t waste time sorting through the mess to find the occasional nugget that might be useful. Rescind every single one. The next President should issue his own few Executive Orders regarding those narrow areas of national security and the basic functioning of government. That last, especially, doesn’t need many, since government can, and should be, shrunk drastically by the next President and the next two (at least) Congresses.

In the name of actual transparency, this item, too. Those Presidential Memoranda don’t need to be, and so they’re not, published in the Federal Register, and so the public has very limited access to them. The next President, on day two, should publish those memoranda. Every single one of them.

Keep in mind this, too. It’s not only Obama’s legacy. It’s our nation’s legacy, it’s the legacy of us citizens, it’s your and my legacy. It needs to jettisoned in its entirety, every single syllable. For our national honor.

Another Example of Central Government Intrusion

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…into the States’ internal affairs. This one is via The New York Times and a piece Matt Apuzzo has there [emphasis added].

Burlington, WA, was a small city fighting what seemed like a local lawsuit. Three poor people said that their public lawyers were too overworked to adequately represent them in municipal court cases. The dispute went mostly unnoticed for two years, until the Obama administration became involved.

Unannounced, the Justice Department filed documents in the case and told the [Federal] judge that he had broad authority to demand changes in Burlington and nearby Mount Vernon. The judge quickly agreed and ordered the cities to hire a new public defense supervisor. He also said he would monitor their legal aid program for three years.

That the local case was being heard by a Federal judge isn’t the problem here; it’s that a coequal branch of the central government acceded to the demands of the Executive Branch and let DoJ prejudice the judge’s handling of the case.

That’s had far-reaching consequences:

Recently…the Justice Department has filed statements of interest in cases involving legal aid in New York, transgender students in Michigan, juvenile prisoners in solitary detention in California, and people who take videos of police officers in Baltimore. The government has weighed in on employment discrimination claims brought by transgender plaintiffs and a lawsuit over the right of blind people with service dogs to be able to use Uber, a car-sharing service.

DoJ has even less interest in these matters in what’s supposed to be a federal political structure, emphasized by the 10th Amendment (and in no small degree by the 9th Amendment), than does the Federal judiciary. These all are local matters, legitimately determined by institutions internal to the States involved. That such handling might (likely will) result in 50 different solutions to seemingly similar problems is part of the strength of a federal political arrangement. In the end, these seemingly similar problems are not that similar: they differ critically simply by their existence in widely differing political and social environments: those different States.

The Federal judiciary has lost sight of this. By acceding so blithely to Executive Branch intrusions, both branches are actively satisfying John Jay’s goal: reducing the States to the same relationship to the central government as counties have relative to their States, that of serving merely as districts to facilitate enforcement of the central government’s requirements.

There are Iron Curtains, and there are iron curtains.

Russian Disingenuosity

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Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov blamed the Ukrainian government Monday for an uptick in violence in eastern Ukraine, saying Kiev’s forces were apparently preparing for a fresh offensive, as Ukraine blamed Russia-backed separatists for the escalation.

Never mind that, were it true that Ukraine is readying an offensive, it would only be true because the Ukrainian government has a right—a duty—to drive the Russian troops from Ukrainian soil and to bring the “separatists” to justice.

Another Misunderstanding

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This one is by Patrick O’Connor in Wall Street Journal Washington Wire piece.

Senator and Presidential candidate (R, FL) spoke to the Foreign Policy Initiative in New York City last Friday, and he decried President Barack Obama’s nuclear weapons “deal” with Iran and Obama’s decision to resume ties with Cuba and reopen an embassy there.

Mr Rubio outlined those positions in a Friday speech in New York hosted by the Foreign Policy Initiative, further casting himself as the candidate most eager to reignite tensions with two longtime adversaries.

Reignite? Reignite!? Those tensions remain, in spades; they’ve not at all been abated by Obama’s moves. Aside from Iran still being on a path to getting nuclear weapons, it remains sworn to the extermination of Israel and to the death of America. Cuba, far from relaxing, is demanding millions of dollars from us in “reparations.”

The WSJ should know better.