A State Appellate Court

One in Michigan got one right. The Michigan Court of Appeals has reversed a State Court of Claims decision that would have counted ballots postmarked by Election Day but received up to two weeks later.

The appellate court held that

[D]esigning adjustments to our election integrity laws is the responsibility of our elected policy makers, not the judiciary….

The court also held that

the state constitution requires all votes to be turned in by 8 pm of Election Day to be counted, and could not be changed by a judicial order.
“The Constitution is not suspended or transformed even in times of a pandemic, and judges do not somehow become authorized in a pandemic to rewrite statutes or to displace the decisions made by the policymaking branches of government,” Judge Mark Boonstra in one of the opinions.

Political decisions must be made by the political branches of government and not by the judicial branch.

Imagine that.

Here, for good or ill, the political branches have made their decision: only votes received by the end of Election Day—and not by the end of the day itself—can be counted. Full stop.

Defense of the Republic of China

Paul Wolfowitz had a thought on that last Tuesday. His opening paragraph laid out his thesis.

Beijing has been making a show of hostility toward Taiwan. Last week China released footage of “real combat” it conducted last month in Taiwanese airspace. A Chinese invasion would present the greatest threat to global peace in a generation. The US would confront an agonizing dilemma: risk an armed clash between two nuclear superpowers or abandon a free people to communist tyranny. But there’s an alternative—deter the threat by committing to oppose it, by force if necessary.

I’d be a bit more blunt.

It would be good to remind the PRC of who has vastly more nuclear warheads than the other, who has the better cyberwar capability, and how little the US depends on river dams—or a single dam—for its food supply.

It also would be good to stage our own demonstrations, real rather than virtual, throughout the East and South China Seas and in the Taiwan strait and to increase and accelerate arms sales to the Republic of China.

Joe Biden, however, is the epitome of an Asian nation being of little strategic value, of a commitment to use military force in [RoC] would be ill-advised and impracticable, and whose prevailing mood… [is] not to interfere—after all, the PRC, Biden insists, is not a serious competitor; the nation isn’t a “patch on our jeans.”

Illegitimacy

One of a President’s duties is to fill vacant seats in his cabinet and in the Federal judiciary—especially the latter. Yet today’s Progressive-Democrats in Congress are actively attempting to block President Donald Trump from fulfilling that duty as it applies to the Supreme Court with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death. Filling that seat is especially important given that those same Progressive-Democrats have committed to challenging the election outcome if it doesn’t give them the proper outcome, and an empty seat on the Court leaves it unable to resolve tie votes on the upcoming election lawsuits.

Not only are they seeking to block the filling of that vacancy, they’re threatening retaliation if they don’t get their way. Beyond that, the Progressive-Democrats’ supporters are threatening outright violence and widespread destruction.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D, NY):

If Senator McConnell [R, KY] and @SenateGOP were to force through a nominee during the lame duck session—before a new Senate and President can take office—then the incoming Senate should immediately move to expand the Supreme Court[.]

Here’s Hillary Clinton’s (D) Presidential campaign press secretary Brian Fallon:

Any Supreme Court with a Trump justice confirmed to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat at this point in the calendar would be fundamentally illegitimate, and Democrats must be prepared to act accordingly[.].

Here’s ardent Progressive-Democrat supporter Reza Aslan:

If they even TRY to replace RBG we burn the entire f—–g thing down[.]

And in response to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R, KY) vow to hold a vote on President Trump’s nominee:

Over our dead bodies, literally[.]

And fellow ardent Progressive-Democrat supporter Aaron Gouveia:

F–k no. Burn it all down.

And Wisconsin Ethics Commission member (!) Progressive-Democrat Scot Ross directly to Senator Ed Markey (D, MA):

F—–g A, Ed. If you can’t shut it down, burn it down[.]

This has been the drumbeat of the Progressive-Democrats since November 2016. Nothing is “legitimate” unless it’s done by Progressive-Democrats. They’ve been attacking our government, and through that, our nation ever since:

  • in Congress; with their sham investigations and “impeachment”
  • in the courts with their obstructionist lawfare
  • in the streets with their grassroots supporters’ rioting, looting, and street-painted graffiti
  • with one group of supporters in particular threatening that “if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it”
  • House Progressive-Democrats threatening to fundamentally alter the Supreme Court if Evil Republicans fill an empty seat with someone and at a time that Progressive-Democrats personally disapprove
  • supporters’ threats “burn Congress down”
  • to mailing ricin-laced letters to the President.

This puts an enormous premium on voting all up and down the ballot in November.

“You Do Not Need….”

In Canada, too. There’s a petition—one that drew a record number of signatures—in Canada calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to withdraw his Order in Council (roughly analogous to our Presidents’ Executive Orders) regarding his gun control overreach [emphasis added, but that’s a side issue].

We, the undersigned, citizens of Canada, call upon the Prime Minister to immediately scrap his government’s May 1, 2020, Order in Council decision related to confiscating legally owned firearms and instead pass legislation that will target criminals, stop the smuggling of firearms into Canada, go after those who illegally acquire firearms, and apologize to legal firearms owners in Canada[.]

Trudeau’s Order was instituted through taking cynical advantage of the upset over a mass murder in Nova Scotia a short time earlier, and he executed it in the absence of Parliament, which was not sitting due to the Wuhan Virus situation in Canada. His Order banned more than 1,500 models and variants of rifles, including AR-15s, Mini-14s, and firearms that the Nova Scotia gunman used. Trudeau, in the arrogance of government, rationalized his Order:

You do not need an AR-15 to take down a deer[.]

Those in government can’t conceive of the need for those being ruled over to defend themselves against criminals, including home invaders, rioters, looters—and crazed gunmen—when it’s so plainly the government’s police who are solely responsible for such defense, and it’s the responsibility of the attacked citizens to wait patiently on the government’s police’s arrival.

Those in government can’t conceive of the need for those being ruled over to defend themselves against that very government.

Those in power are oblivious to their own arrogance. That obliviousness itself creates an entirely separate need for the citizenry to define for themselves their need for and their purpose in having weapons.

That obliviousness itself creates an entirely separate need for an armed citizenry, one armed with the weapons of their individual choice, not those permitted by government.

A Naked Purchase Attempt

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have given $250 billion (that’s with a ‘b’) to the Center for Tech and Civic Life, an election activist organization that’s active in a number of Progressive-Democrat strongholds in Wisconsin and expanding nationwide.

George Soros, even if the tales are true, is a piker. Zuckerberg and Chan are openly trying to buy the upcoming election. This is another example of the Progressive-Democratic Party in action.

Our republic is in increasing danger from the Patrician class.

For another perspective, that works out to about a dollar a voter in the general election. When I was in the Philippines during the post-Marcos (it turned out) Philippine Presidential election, the one that brought Corazon Aquino to power, my house girl told me that she’d been offered by a lower-level politician candidate 20 pesos—about a dollar at the time—if she’d vote for him. She then proudly said she’d declined his offer; she’d already accepted another politician’s pesos, and she’d stay with that one.