This Isn’t Just Political Mischief

Posted on by
Reply

Nor is it merely divisiveness.

Jay Jones, Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Virginia Attorney General, has threatened a political opponent, Todd Gilbert, at the time the Republican Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, with murder, with implied threats against his wife and children, as well. This was as recently as August 2022. What he texted another delegate, a Republican:

Three people, two bullets. Gilbert, Hitler and Pol Pot. Gilbert gets two bullets to the head.

Here’s Jones’ full sequence:

From inflicting metaphorical violence on us average Americans with their government shutdown to threatening physical violence in the form of murder threats by a candidate for State Attorney General(!)—this is, mind you, against years of assaults like Bernie Sanders smearing Republicans as Nazis, followed shortly by a mass murder attempt against Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice; Chuck Schumer threatening by name two Supreme Court Justices, followed shortly by a murder attempt against one of them; Party politicians in drumbeat cadence calling Donald Trump Nazi, Hitlerian, a threat to democracy, followed shortly by two murder attempts—this is the Progressive-Democratic Party’s view of how to deal with their political opponents. If they don’t get their way, they will attack American citizens as a whole and seek to murder their political opponents.

And just to drive home Party’s point, Jones is refusing to withdraw his candidacy for State AG, and no one in Party is pushing him to withdraw. To a man and woman, Party politicians are downplaying Jones’ threats, pretending he was joking.

This is the Party that wants to seize control of our Congress in 2026 and seize the White House in 2028.

Hardly Overreach

Posted on by
Reply

President Donald Trump (R) has offered nine universities preferential access to Federal funds if they sign on to an agreement that, among other things, bans race or sex in admissions, freezes tuition, and caps international enrollment. Whether or not that’s a good idea, or unsavory, or… can be debated.

However, the tenor of the hue and cry over the offer is badly overwrought and illustrative of the outright timidity of far too many.

[T]he proposal provoked strong reactions across higher education, with some decrying it as federal overreach….

There is no Federal overreach in the offer. No one is forcing these schools to sign up. They can do—they have been doing all along—with “ordinary” access to Federal funds. Moves to reduce or deny access to Federal funds by schools that are openly antisemitic or supportive of terrorist-supporting entities on their campuses is an entirely separate thing.

Many States and localities offer enormous financial incentives in return for making movies in those locales. Offering Federal financial incentives to companies, foreign and domestic, to produce goods and services in the United States or to increase current domestic production is a widespread and long-standing practice, and it is a far cry from withholding Federal funds from businesses who do not so produce or increase production.

This offer to nine schools is no different from those other financial incentives.

It’s sad, it’s a mark of how far fallen is an education system that produces such timid ones, and it’s an indication of how far we are—four generations–from our last struggle for our national sovereignty. Too many who should know better have gone soft and weak in the knees.

Hard times make strong men; strong men make easy times, easy times make weak men, weak men make hard times. We’re in a dangerous phase of that cycle. Western Civilization’s last weak time interregnum lasted 800 years.

Lower Court Obstructionism

Posted on by
Reply

In a legal environment in which Federal district court judges routinely block President Donald Trump’s (R) initiatives and the Supreme Court, via Trump emergency appeals, overrule those judges (and the occasional appellate court ruling) more often than those lower court judges deem appropriate, we’re seeing increasing whining from those lower court judges: they’re getting quite cross over not being listened to, all the while pretending not to understand the Supreme Court’s stays of these lower court blocks while the underlying case works its way through the legal system. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer put it,

The court, has given Trump much of what he has asked for so far, but the brevity of its orders has flummoxed judges who say there is no way to interpret them.

This is the measure of the lower courts’ defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court lifts the stays explicitly to let the underlying cases concerning the Trump initiatives proceed pending a final judgment. Often, appellate courts and district court judges, in lifting a stay or HIAing one, will say they’re doing so because they think the relevant party to the litigation is likely to prevail in the underlying case. The Supreme Court cannot say such things without prejudicing its eventual ruling in the case while it’s before those lower courts. The Court does say, often but not always, that it’s staying a case while the case wends its way. Even in those cases where the Court does not say, though, that much is clear to anyone reading with objective eyes.

These district (and appellate) judges know that.

Here’s an example of lower court defiance in the judge’s attempts at obstruction:

“Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system,” Gorsuch wrote.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts fired back at Gorsuch a couple of weeks later when she ruled the administration’s cuts to Harvard’s research funding were unconstitutional. In a footnote, Burroughs said it was “unhelpful and unnecessary” to criticize judges for defying the Supreme Court “when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”

What part of set that precedent aside is unclear to this judge? If it appears to her to be set aside, then from her perspective it is set aside. Is Burroughs really insisting she’s unable to follow a simple ruling without having in hand a long, detailed dissertation on why the ruling exists and why she must follow it? Would that ruling need to be written in words of one syllable or less? If so, she needs to find another line of work where her bosses have the time and inclination to hold her hand every step of the way.

On the other hand, it sounds like this judge is letting her disdain for Trump lead her to disrespect for and defiance of the Supreme Court. In that case, too, she needs to find another line of work, maybe with Bill Kristol.

How Many Bureaucrats?

Posted on by
Reply

James Freeman asked this question in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, regarding the bureaucrats in the Federal government.

The government, and I [ahem], answered this question during an earlier Progressive-Democrat-led Federal government shutdown, and we’re about to get an empirical demonstration with the current Schumer Shutdown which began Wednesday morning. Here’s what that earlier shutdown demonstrated about the number of bureaucrats actually needed:

Office Per Cent Nonessential
White House 74
Treasury 82
Labor 82
Interior 81
EPA 94
NASA 97
Housing and Urban Development 96
Education 94
Commerce 87
Smithsonian 84

 

There are others, also, with a different per centage of nonessentials:

Office Per Cent Nonessential
U.S. Commission of Fine Arts 100
U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness 100
USDA Risk Management Agency 100
Federal Maritime Commission 100
Economic Development Administration 100
Minority Business Development Agency 100

There’s a more complete list over at Slate.

The short answer is: not many of the bureaucrats on the payroll are actually needed. The longer answer will be begun to be delivered with the RIF that the OMB has instructed Executive Branch Departments and Agencies to prepare lists for, with those lists beginning with programs and projects currently unfunded and that do not align with Presidential policy. The answer will be expanded on by all the Leftist and Civil Service union lawsuits objecting to the RIF, even to preparing for a RIF. Those lawsuits will prove the lack of need for those bureaucrats.

State Auspices

Posted on by
Reply

Louisiana’s Republican Governor, Jeff Landry, has acknowledged that his State has a crime problem for all that the State has made laudable progress against crime (that’s how bad it had been). It would be good if Progressive-Democrat Governors had the same integrity, introspection, and insight for their States, but they are what they are.

Where I disagree with Landry, though, is this:

Louisiana GOP Governor Jeff Landry has asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy as many as 1,000 state National Guardsmen to help curb crime.

Landry doesn’t need SecDef to Federalize the National Guard to do this. He can call up his State’s 1,000 Guardsmen for the purpose himself. If he needs the Guard, he needs to stop injecting delays and get it done.