Category Archives: ethics

A Misunderstanding

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board had a piece about Justice Stephen Breyer’s impending retirement last Wednesday. One bit in it caught my eye.

Like many liberals of his generation, he [Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer] is an institutionalist who believes in the promise of the Constitution and incremental social improvement.

And herein lies the fundamental misunderstanding of liberal judges regarding their role as judges. A judge cannot both believe in the promise of the Constitution and act on the premise of incremental social improvement.

Acting on social improvement, incremental or otherwise, is a strictly political matter and is solely the province of the political actors—Congress and We the People who hire those actors.

If a judge believes in the promise, he must adhere solely to his duty to apply the statute(s) and Constitution that are before him in any case. If he acts on those views of social improvement—which views are inherently his personal views—he is violating both Article I, Section 1, of our Constitution and his oath as a judge to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Virtue-Signal Success

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Congressman Jamaal Bowman (D, NY) has finally arrived. He’s made the big time.

New York Democratic Jamaal Bowman was arrested Thursday alongside more than two-dozen other protesters at the U.S. Capitol as they demanded the Senate alter its 60-vote legislative filibuster pass key tenets of the lawmaker’s political party.
A Bowman spokesperson said the first-term congressman took part in a “voting rights non-violent direct action at the North Barricade of the US Capitol Building and was arrested by the US Capitol Police.”

Got his arrest record, now. He can put a star on his calendar and his arrest Certificate of Achievement on his hero wall in his office.

Woo hoo.

So What if it Is?

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Great Britain, in a move toward filling the vacuum left by President Joe Biden’s (D) dangerous timidity when facing Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sent serious arms into Ukraine to help that nation prepare for the coming Russian invasion. (It’s telling that Germany, dependent as it has sold itself into, on Russian energy, forced the British supply aircraft to fly around German airspace to get to Ukraine.)

Putin reacted to that and trotted out his Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, to object to plussing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. As cited by Fox News, she said that

Ukraine perceives Western military assistance as a “carte blanche for a military operation in Donbas.”

I certainly hope Ukraine has that perception, and that the perception is grounded in fact. The Donbas is, after all, Ukrainian territory, for all that Russia currently occupies most of it.

Negotiating

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Ex-SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. had some thoughts on negotiating in his take on the relationship between the Biden-Harris White House and Congress. In one thought in particular, though, Levitt is badly…off.

Governance takes two. If a director opposed the CEO without proposing something better, he’d be ignored. In Washington, Republicans don’t seem interested in negotiating. … Republicans, you can oppose, but if you have an opportunity to shape policy, take it.

Levitt badly misunderstands. Progressive-Democrat Ocasio-Cortez openly hoped for Progressive-Democrat control of Senate explicitly so Party would not need to negotiate with Republicans.

Republicans have often tried to negotiate, only to be told “we won, you lost.” The last time Progressive-Democrats controlled Senate, then-Majority Leader Reid routinely “filled the tree” precisely to prevent Republicans from offering amendments.

Progressive-Democrats have already passed one reconciliation bill so as to exclude Republican amendments, and they’re bent on same a second time. They’re also determined to blow up up the filibuster so they no longer have need even to pay lip service to negotiating.

Where is this “opportunity” of which Levitt wrote for Republicans to shape policy with Progressive-Democrats refusing to negotiate?

President Joe Biden (D) often says it’s his goal to fundamentally change America. How is it possible to negotiate with a Party that refuses to negotiate and that is openly bent on destroying the republican democracy that is the United States and to remake us into their image?

Inadequate

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Co-President Joe Biden-Kamala Harris are having trouble getting much of their political and (pseudo-)economic agenda passed. (Aside: failure isn’t a done deal; it would behoove the pundits on the right side of center to stop their crowing and predictions of landslide Republican elections in November.)

That’s not a failure of the agenda or of Biden-Harris or of Party managers in the House and Senate, though.

Not at all, insisted Paul Begala.

I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, okay?

And

In other words, those of us who want to say voting rights– we need to get to work. I do think Biden is putting everything behind this. But he needs– he needs better followers….

This is an example of the contempt Progressive-Democrats have had for us Americans all along. Here is Herb Croly, one of the founders of the modern Progressive movement that has evolved the Democratic Party into its current form as the Progressive-Democratic Party:

But the fault in that case lies with the democratic tradition; and the erroneous and misleading tradition must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy. The national advance will always be impeded by these misleading and erroneous ideas, and, what is more, it always should be impeded by them, because at bottom ideas of this kind are merely an expression of the fact that the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to a serious and consistent conception of his responsibilities as a democrat.