Category Archives: politics

The Sanctity of Precedent

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The Progressive-Democrats have their panties in large, tight twists over the possibility of President Donald Trump getting another pick for the Supreme Court.  So much so that now they’re making stuff up in their hysteria.

“Abortion will be illegal in twenty states in 18 months,” tweeted Jeffrey Toobin, the legal pundit, in a classic of cool, even-handed CNN analysis soon after the resignation news.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Whomever the president picks, it is all too likely they’re going to overturn health-care protections and Roe v Wade[.]

And so on.

What these guys are carefully ignoring, though, are some basic fundamentals (excuse the redundancy).

Conservatives are very reluctant to overturn precedent, as the Editorial Board points out. However, the Progressive-Democrats’ insistence on the absolute sanctity precedent—and of Republican Senator Collins’ identical insistence—means that now these worthies have to defend the sanctity of the Dred Scott precedent, and they have to defend Plessy‘s separate-but-equal and explain the inequity of Brown fixing that.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for their explanations. Don’t hold your breath, either, waiting for the NLMSM—CNN, for instance—to ask them for those explanations.

Non-Merit Discrimination in College Admissions

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The non-merit discriminants that colleges and universities use—Harvard comes to mind—center on race, ethnicity, and gender.  The Trump administration has moved to reduce that reliance on bigotry for admissions (ironic word, that), and the Left is crying race.

Anurima Bargava, ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ head of “civil rights enforcement” (an ironic title), insists that the rollback of regulations authorizing racism and sexism in determining who will be admitted—and who will be barred from admission—is

a purely political attack that benefits nobody.

The rollback benefits those being discriminated against without harming anyone else. But the Obama administration’s politics of divisiveness and…identity…considered those people to be nobodies; that’s why the policy discriminated.

The bigotry lives loudly within the Left, to paraphrase a Progressive-Democrat Senator from California.

They Would, Indeed

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Commenting on the upcoming nomination for Supreme Court Justice and the Progressive-Democrats’ hysteria over President Donald trump’s choice—long before he makes it—former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said

If he put Moses up for the possibility of being Supreme Court Justice—the ultimate lawgiver, the Ten Commandments—they would still be against it[.]

He’s right.  Recall Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D, CA) objection to Judge Amy Coney Barrett during the latter’s 7th Appellate Court confirmation hearing:

When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you[.]

Never mind that at the outset of that hearing—preceding Feinstein’s slur (of course one’s religious beliefs (or atheism) should live loudly, but Feinstein meant it as a slur)—in response to a question from Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Barrett had said

It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they derive from faith or anywhere else, on the law.

Never mind, either, that Barrett and her then-law professor John Garvey had written in a 1998 paper that

in certain circumstances a Catholic judge (like many Quakers, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and the member communions in the National Council of Churches) might be compelled to recuse herself or himself under 28 USC § 455, a federal statute that suggests a federal judge should step aside in the face of conscientious scruples.

The Left and their representative Party are very much anti-Christian, anti-Judaism, anti-religion or even the whiff of any.

Remember this in the fall, and don’t be a stay-at-home.

Business Models Don’t Create Business Rights

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There’s a lot about which to criticize California, but in one case, early though it is, the State appears to be on the right track.  California passed a consumer privacy law, and businesses everywhere are in an uproar over it.  The bill

requires [businesses] to offer consumers options to opt out of sharing personal information, and it gives Californians the right to prohibit the sale of their personal data.

Business’ objections center on their premise that it

risked far-reaching damage to everything from retailers’ customer-loyalty programs to data gathering by Silicon Valley tech giants.

This is that business model granting rights to business foolishness.  The claimed damage to customer-loyalty programs is especially rich.  If the business earned customers’ loyalty with actual quality goods and services and actual customer service in response to the inevitable problems that arise, the need for loyalty programs would be lessened.  The still-useful loyalty programs would be easier to sell from that demonstrated quality performance.  Beyond that, businesses could make the perks of joining the program more visible, more actually usable—and do better at tailoring them to individual, or small groups of, customers.  Of course, that last would require collecting customer data, but they might be pleasantly surprised by the outcome of a customer-customizable set of personal data to give access to—and by saying “pretty please” instead of demanding broad-ranging data as a condition of doing business.

The tech companies are being disingenuous, too.  They have yet to demonstrate a need for the wide-ranging data they take without permission; they just say “we need it” without discriminating their claimed need from their obvious “we want.”  And they demand it as a condition of doing business, again refusing the simple courtesy of “pretty please” and the tailoring of the data they want as well as legitimately need.

David French, National Retail Federation Senior Vice President of Government Relations worried, with a straight face, about customers and personalized marketing campaigns.

The consumer will actually be the big loser.

Not this customer.  I object to personalized marketing campaigns aimed at me.  These folks don’t know what I’m in the market for; my past buys are no indication of my current or future needs.  Nor do I want my browsing circumscribed by what offers of what I bought yesterday.  I want the full range of what’s available.  I especially don’t need my time wasted with efforts to create a need or a want where none exists.  I won’t be losing anything by not being inundated with personalized “advertising.”

It’s early, but the law looks like a good start.

Playing Politics with the Constitution

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What kind of judge do we want as a replacement for Justice Anthony Kennedy?

Folks are talking about a President Donald Trump nominee being a shoo-in because Republicans have a majority in the Senate, and there’s no filibustering of judicial nominations.  I’m not so sure.

The Left, of course, are crying the End of Times and the end of Roe v Wade, but that’s less a factor than a more pernicious conflict in the offing.

Late Thursday, the president met with a bipartisan group of six senators who will play a pivotal role in selecting Mr Kennedy’s successor because they have deviated from their party on key votes in the past. The lawmakers signaled they want an ideological centrist….

Those Senators included Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Susan Collins (R, ME), Lisa Murkowski (R, AK), Joe Donnelly (D, IN), Heidi Heitkamp (D, ND), and Joe Manchin (D, WV).

Litmus tests and centrism.  Collins and Murkowski look like they’re going to hold out for someone who’ll explicitly protect Roe.  I’d like to see that ruling at least adjusted, but a single, narrow issue should not be a deal maker or breaker.  Litmus tests are out of place here.

Others of that crowd are holding out for a centrist, a middle of the roader, so as not to too badly upset the balance of ideologies on the Supreme Court.  The problem with centrism, though, is that it is committed to finding consensus on a case before the Court and doing so for the sake of consensus not because that would represent the best ruling.

Moreover, consensus-building gives too much opportunity to deviate from the text, to legislate by that deviation from the bench, even to amend the Constitution from the bench.  No.  There can be no compromise here.  The words of the Constitution and of any Constitutional law are fixed, and any alteration of them can only be a political decision, not a judicial one.

Nor is there any place for ideology on the Court or in any court.  The Constitution is written and amended by the People, laws are written and enacted by the political branches of our government.  Our judiciary’s task is to apply the Constitution and laws to particular cases before them.  Ideology has no place in the application; ideology, to the extent it has a role in government, is a political matter alone.

No.  We shouldn’t be playing politics with the Supreme Court picks, naïve as that seems.  The best pick for this Justice, and for all nine Justices in their turn, is someone who will uphold the Constitution and hold laws accountable to the Constitution.  That requires a textualist.  Full stop.

 

Unfortunately, any two of those six Senators are enough to kill a nomination.  Or any one of them, since Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) has said he’ll block all judicial nominations until he gets his way on wholly unrelated matters.  Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R, KY) have their work cut out for them.  This is not a slam-dunk matter.