Category Archives: politics

Religious Tests for Federal Office

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Here’s what our Constitution says about religious tests for Federal office, from Article IV [emphasis added]:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Despite this, the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Senators, on two separate occasions, challenged judicial nominees over their religious beliefs.

The prior occasion was when Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) objected to Amy Coney Barrett and her nomination to the 7th Circuit.

Dogma and law are two different things.  And I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma. The law is totally different. And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern.

Progressive-Democrat Senator Dick Durbin (IL) challenged Barrett with his own religious test:

Do you consider yourself an “orthodox Catholic”?

Fortunately, Barrett was confirmed despite the slurs.  However, this turns out to be not an isolated incident; the religious test is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s actual, out loud position.

The Party also objected to the (Catholic) religion of current judicial nominee Brian Buescher, this time through the voices of Mazie Hirono (D, HI) and Kamala Harris (D, CA).  Here’s Hirono:

The Knights of Columbus has taken a number of extreme positions. For example, it was reportedly one of the top contributors to California’s Proposition 8 campaign to ban same-sex marriage.

As if opposing same-sex marriage on religious grounds, especially in a purely State-level debate, is somehow extreme.  As if it’s in some way extreme to disagree with Heavenly Master Buddha Hirono.

Harris asked Buescher whether he was aware that the Knights of Columbus was anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage at the time he joined.  As if that matters to a judge who is called to apply the law as it’s written, not at the Party demands it be applied.

I had trouble with the weakness of Buescher’s responses (it would have been good had he pushed back on this blatant bigotry and violation of the Senators’ oath of office), but that doesn’t excuse the religious bigotry so obvious in the Progressive-Democratic Party, nor does it excuse the lack of understanding of our Constitution or of the nature of oaths (as my friend Grim pointed out in his blog, Grim’s Hall).

Threats

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General Anthony Tata (former Deputy Commanding General of US forces in Afghanistan) laid out his concerns regarding America’s helplessness in a determined enemy’s cyber war inflicted on us, particularly the threat from the People’s Republic of China.

In the cyber warfare domain, many experts believe America faces a “Sputnik moment” as China plans to exceed US artificial intelligence capabilities by 2030.
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China’s deliberate plan to accelerate artificial intelligence capabilities by 2020, catch up to the US by 2025, and surpass the US by 2030 is disconcerting in its forthrightness. China seems to have had its own “Sputnik” moment and has now developed its own project to become the world leader in artificial intelligence.

A critical difference between the Soviet Union’s “Sputnik moment” in near-earth orbit and the PRC’s “Sputnik moment” in artificial intelligence (and in cyber war capabilities generally), though, is that the Soviets’ moment heralded weapons to come, whereas the PRC’s moment will represent a weapon in being.

Beyond that, the pace of development and the pace of action once deployed are such that there is little time to catch up with the PRC (I think our lead is much smaller, if it exists at all today, than Tata does).  The pace of action in the long runup to cyber war is not a matter of building out systems and deploying them, we race to build out and deploy our systems, and everybody yells, “King’s X.”  Software doesn’t take weeks or months or years to deploy—it takes seconds.  And we know that the PRC (and Russia) have been deploying malware in our systems against a future use; we keep finding such.

Nor is use a matter of launching missiles and several minutes later we respond with our counter-missile missiles and our own offensive launches.  The launch of cyber weapons results in instantaneous paralysis of our detection systems, our weapons systems—both physical and cyber—our communications systems, our life-maintaining infrastructure systems.

Keep in mind, too, that this is an area where Alphabet and its Google subordinate entity have refused absolutely to help our own DoD work to develop capabilities, even purely defensive ones, in this area—at the same time that it’s actively helping the PRC to develop AI capabilities along with citizen-monitoring capabilities (which extends in a moment to monitoring foreign soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines wherever they may be).

President Xi Jinping’s Warring State won’t hesitate once he has the weapons.

Cyber—in all its forms, recognized today and unrecognized before tomorrow—is an area of national security in which we cannot afford to lag, ever.  This is an area of national security in which we can’t even afford to have a small lead, ever.

A Hearing

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Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D, IL) refused to participate in one last Thursday—the House Judiciary Committee’s hearing for the purpose of questioning DHS Secretary Kirsten Nielsen about the Trump administration’s (illegal) immigration policy.  Never mind that Gutierrez is a member of that committee.  He was present long enough to chew her out for six minutes, concluding his tirade with

Shame on us for wearing our badge of Christianity during Christmas and allowing the secretary to come here and lie.

Nielsen responded, in part:

I’m not a liar. We’ve never had a policy for family separation. I’m happy to walk the gentleman through it again. A policy of family separation would mean that any family I encountered in the interior, I would separate. It would mean that any family that I found at a port of entry, I would separate.
It would mean that every single family that I found illegally crossing, we would separate. We did none of those. What we did do is uphold the laws that Congress has passed, and we prosecuted those who choose to come here illegally.

And

Nielsen said the administration had shown compassion by working with other northern triangle countries to help migrants “as soon in their journey as possible,” blasting the current system that puts them at the mercy of abusers, traffickers, and child exploiters.

The system, mind you, that as Nielsen had just pointed out, was carefully put in place by Congress—of which Gutierrez was a member in good standing and who raised not a scintilla of objection to that system.

She concluded:

I take personal offense on behalf of the 240,000 men and women of the Department of Homeland Security.

Yewbetcha.  But Gutierrez was too intimidated by facts to stay and hear them.

Of course, this is the same Gutierrez who sold his Obamacare vote to then-President Barack Obama (D) like a Thursday night hooker in return for Obama’s promise to deal with immigration.  Obama paid Gutierrez’ fee by producing a vapid Executive Order saying, in essence, “I’ll think about it.”  And Gutierrez meekly accepted it.  He has a history, too, of running out when he doesn’t want to hear what’s being said.

The Progressive-Democrat Gutierrez: a streetwalking coward then and a Chamber coward today.

Half Measures

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President Donald Trump has decided to bring our troops home from Syria, asserting that the Daesh has been defeated.  It is, after all a season of homecomings and military families across America are being reunited for the holidays.  With this…victory…our troops can come home with their heads held high.

Never mind that the Daesh still have a presence on the Syria-Iraq border.

It’s another half-measure withdrawal, and aside from many in Congress who recognize this, so do some of our putative allies.  But they expose their own half-measure goal in the matter.  Here’s France’s Defense Minister Florence Parly, for example:

…acknowledged that the group had been significantly weakened, she said the battle was not over.
“Islamic State has not been wiped from the map, nor have its roots elsewhere. The last pockets of this terrorist organization must be defeated militarily once and for all,” Parly said on Twitter.

But this also is a half measure.  It’s not enough to defeat the Daesh militarily. It must be crushed politically and psychologically, also.

And that requires, as Trump did correctly assert, those putative allies’ more active participation in the problem.  But it also, unfortunately, requires our own continued participation.

Threats

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Your moves to strengthen your ability to defend yourselves will be met by us with greater force.  So says Russian President Vladimir Putin.

If the US puts intermediate-range missiles in Europe, Russia will take countermeasures, Putin said at his end-of-year press conference. He warned the “threshold” for the use of nuclear weapons was getting lower.

And this:

In a wide-ranging press conference, Mr Putin also blamed the US for triggering a new arms race and raising the threat of a nuclear war, slamming Washington for abandoning Cold War-era missile treaties even as he boasted of Moscow’s plans to develop new weapons.
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Russia, whose military budget is only about a 10th of that of the US….

No contradiction there. Bring it. Repeat your predecessor nation’s arms race performance.