Category Archives: politics

A Judicial…Misunderstanding

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The Supreme Court has struck Louisiana’s abortion law that required doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital before they could be permitted to carry out abortions. The ruling was by a 5-4 vote; the five hung their ruling on the Court’s 2016 Whole Woman’s Health decision holding that there were “no medical benefits” to such a requirement, and so “a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy” was circumscribed.

One of the five was Chief Justice John Roberts.

Here’s his rationalization for his vote:

I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today however is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong, but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.

Wow.

If the decision being used as precedent was wrongly decided, the correct response is to overrule that precedent and correct the error, not to flip and bureaucratically uphold the error and, by doing so, codify it.

Codifying error as precedent also has a strong whiff of legislating from the bench.

With his logic, maybe Roberts would have argued against going to war to overrule a Dred Scott, or argued against altering Plessy.

A Winning Strategy

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Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ) suggested one for President Donald Trump a couple days ago, and it’s as simple and elegant as President Ronald Reagan’s regarding winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union: we win, they lose.

He just needs to be Trump, and the campaign guys need to let him be Trump.

True enough. However, the Trump he needs to be—and soon—is the Trump he was in the fall of 2016—toned down rhetoric, including on Twitter, and talking extensively about the future and his policies for making the future occur, rather than solely negative attacks on the opponent.

It’s easy enough—especially with Biden and the running mate the Progressive-Democratic Party selects for him—to talk down his opponent simply by contrasting his policies with the policies Biden is touting, both domestic economic and social policy and foreign policy.

Running Mate

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I wrote earlier of Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s promise to pick a woman running mate and the implications of such a promise.

Now we have this.

…some Democratic women are urging Mr Biden’s campaign during phone calls, at fundraisers and in writing to be part of history…by selecting the first black woman as a vice-presidential running mate.

For instance, this from House Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass (D, CA):

It would be energizing and exciting for there to be an African-American woman on the ticket. If there is not an African-American woman on the ticket, I think people will be disappointed.

Just as it’s hard to be more sexist (and demeaning to women) than to pick a candidate for Vice President because the candidate is a woman and not the most qualified person who happens to be a woman, it’s hard to be more racist (and demeaning to the race of the selected candidate) than to pick a candidate for Vice President because of the race of the candidate and not the most qualified person who happens to be of one race or another.

The racism and sexism are strong in Party.

Becoming Happy

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It’s what Thomas Jefferson said a while ago:

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy.

If the people become happy, though, they—we—would have little need for so large a government. And that would put a lot of bureaucrats, and most importantly, politicians out of business.

That is what today’s Progressive-Democrats and too many establishment Republicans fear, even above fearing failing our nation—being unnecessary.

Speech and Private Enterprise

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Some companies are reaching the conclusion that it’s become necessary to pull advertising from Facebook over the latter’s mishandling of speech, if in many cases they’re misapprehending the types of speech being abused.

The WSJ article at the link led off with this:

Facebook Inc said it would start labeling political speech that violates its rules and take other measures to prevent voter suppression and protect minorities from abuse.

Pick one. Suppressing political speech is suppressing voters.

Furthermore, Zuckerberg is hardly in a position to define “abuse;” his censorship is itself abuse.

There’s also this from a commenter in the article’s comment thread, which illustrates the breadth of the misunderstanding regarding free speech obligations:

Facebook is a private company, and platform. It can do as it pleases so long as you sign off on their terms and conditions agreement….

As a legal matter, sure. However, the principle underlying the injunction against Government abridging the freedom of speech is universal and applies to everyone. Zuckerberg knows this full well, and he knows further from that that he has a moral obligation to actively support free speech as well as to passively not abridge it.

His obligation is expanded by the size and control over political—and other—speech his Facebook has achieved and exercises.