To Hell with Bipartisanship

Arizona Progressive-Democrat Senator Mark Kelly has made Party’s disdain for us average Americans clear (as if it isn’t already, for some time). He said in an NBC News interview,

that he favors overriding the Senate filibuster to pass national abortion protections.

And

two years ago he [Kelly] argued for passing progressive “voting rights legislation” with 51 votes.

This position jammed my irony meter needle hard against the stop. Progressive voting rights are “rights” of non-citizens to vote in our elections. It’s hard to get more undemocratic than that. Indeed, that’s tautologically completely un-American.

Of course, Party won’t stop there. They’ll always have a Very Good Reason® for carving out Just One More® exception to the filibuster rule.

Just shut up and do things our way. That’s not just Kelly’s purpose—it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s pushing to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster. Outliers like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema will soon be gone.

The WSJ thinks the Senate filibuster is on the ballot this fall. The news outlet is correct, but only in a limited way. The filibuster matter has put our free-market economy on the ballot, along with the concept of limited government with limited regulation of our lives.

Our two-party system of governance is on the ballot.

Yet Another Example…

…of Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s disregard for our Constitution. This one comes from the supposedly independent Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of Biden’s Executive Branch (we know what the statute says; we also know who appoints EEOC commissioners). The EEOC’s latest rule

elevates gender identity as a protected class under discrimination laws like race, sex, and religion.
Prohibited harassment includes “repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new regulatory document declared.

This is the Federal government attempting to dictate to Americans operating private enterprises what they must say. This is a direct contradiction of our Constitution’s 1st Amendment requirement that Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…. Of course, this limit applies to the Executive Branch, also.

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R, NY) emphasized the Biden administration’s hypocrisy in her own response to this…overreach:

They can’t tell you [that] you have to say the Pledge of Allegiance or stand for the flag. And so forcing someone to actually use pronouns that they don’t choose to use, and then holding your employer liable, to me, is going to have First Amendment problems.

It’s also a contradiction of our Constitution’s 10th Amendment which is even clearer:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

In our Constitution there are no powers conferred on the Federal government authorizing it to compel particular speech. Indeed, compelling speech is the same as abridging speech, since forced words take the place of barred words.

And none of this even begins to approach the idiocy of setting gender ideology above the facts of biology.

Trusting the Department of Justice

The level of trust is such that several States are explicitly barring DoJ personnel from those States’ polling places in the November general elections.

When the DOJ announced that it was sending election monitors to polling sites in multiple states for the 2022 midterm elections, Florida and Missouri said that the department employees would not be permitted to observe the polls. Now, eight other states have said that they will also not allow DOJ election monitors to enter polling sites during the election this November, with some saying that banning them prevents federal interference in elections.

Unfortunately, those States are entirely justified in barring officials of a “Justice” Department that accuses traditional Catholics of being right-wing extremists and treats mothers objecting to wokeism in their children’s schools as domestic terrorists, and that routinely lies to the FISA court in its pursuit of surveillance warrants against American citizens, that pursues cases in Article III courts seeking to overturn voter-protection laws, and that has run guns to Mexican drug cartels.

It’s also the case that today’s Progressive-Democrat nominated and populated DoJ is substantially the same as the post-2008 elections Progressive-Democrat nominated and populated DoJ (the names are different, but the bias and the ideology are the same) that refused to prosecute two members of the New Black Panther Party who were engaged in armed voter intimidation at the entrance to a Philadelphia polling station.

This is an indication of how far the believability of the DoJ has deteriorated.

Backwards

The arrogance of the Biden-Garland DoJ is on full display with its continued refusal to provide the audio tapes of the Hur-Joe Biden interviews.

The Biden-Garland refusal, through Garland’s Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte, in their letter to the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that require the tapes:

We have repeatedly invited the Committees to identify how these audio recordings from law enforcement files would serve the purposes for which you say you want them[.]
We have also repeatedly urged the Committees to avoid unnecessary conflict and to respect the public interest in the Department’s ability to conduct effective investigations by protecting sensitive law enforcement files. The Committees have repeatedly failed to explain your needs or to demonstrate respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions[.]

Nor Congress nor any of its committees have any obligation to satisfy the demands of the DoJ. The obligation runs in the opposite direction: the DoJ must satisfy the Congress and its committees of the reasons why it cannot—not does not want to, but cannot—turn over the materials called for by the Congress or any of its committees.

If Biden-Garland are truly interested in avoiding unnecessary conflict, they will instruct the DoJ to stop forcing one and turn over the tapes. If they continue to refuse, then the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees must formally subpoena the tapes, if they have not already, promptly move to hold AG Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over this refusal, and then withhold funding, including salaries, from the Office of the Attorney General and from the White House Office until the contempt is satisfied.

Regarding respect for the Department’s law enforcement functions, this is especially risible. If the Biden-Garland DoJ wants to be respected and wants its law enforcement functions to be respected, they must behave respectably. The former would begin by turning over the tapes without any further stalling. The latter cannot begin to behave respectably until there’s a complete replacement of those functions’ top managers, teams that variously lie to or condone lying to FISA courts, and who have accused traditional Catholics of dangerous extremism, accused mothers objecting to school board woke policies of being terrorists, and on and on.

Australian Regulators’ Mistake

Australian regulators are pressuring X to take down—to delete—a video posted to X showing the real-time terrorist attack in a western Sydney suburb on a Bishop of the Christ the Good Shepherd Church. X has blocked access to the video from locations within Australia per the regulators’ request, but is balking from going further. The regulators, though, are demanding the video be deleted altogether. Musk has responded that that would set the dangerous precedent of allowing one nation’s regulators to control the content of the Internet everywhere in the world, not just within the regulators’ own nation.

That’s a valid beef, but it misses entirely the much larger problem.

Deleting a posting altogether is nothing more than rewriting history and pretending the event posted about, and the post itself, never happened.

History is how we know where we were—geographically, economically, politically, socially, genetically, and on and on—how we know where we are (itself at immediate risk due to demands for real-time excision of current events), how we know how we got from then to now, and how we can learn how to get from now to a desired future. Rewriting history as every bit as dangerous to us as is any war and far more dangerous to our civilization.

X needs to stand tall against the Australians’ demand for revisionist history, and its fellow social platforms, vis., Meta, who so meekly complied with the regulators’ demand to rewrite history, need to find some courage, and some understanding of what they’re doing, and stop deleting postings, however repugnant, or merely government-disapproved, they may be.