Rule of Law

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The matter of leaking the Supreme Court’s draft opinion on Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization has drawn into the open the Progressive-Democratic Party’s and its politicians’ utter contempt for law, along with these persons’ preference for our nation being ruled by men—so long as those men are members of Party.

Here are a couple of canonical examples. First up, President Joe Biden (D) through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki:

Q    Why not criticize this leak?
MS. PSAKI:  Again, because I think what is happening here, and what we think is happening here, is there’s an effort to distract from what the actual issue here—
…
MS. PSAKI:  And we are not—we are working not—to not allow that to be the distraction.

Next up is Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA):

I don’t care how the draft leaked. That’s a sideshow[.]

Laws are just distractions, sideshows, to be set aside, to be ignored, whenever they become inconvenient.

This disregard for the protection that laws give all of us against the vagaries, whims, egos of others of us and the preference for those vagaries, whims, egos—so long as it’s the right men who have them—need to be kept firmly in mind this fall.

“diminished public trust in the Court is a good thing”

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That’s the claim of Ian Millhiser over at Vox. He added this, and he actually was serious:

Litigation, in other words, is a far more potent tool in the hands of an anti-governmental movement than it is in the hands of one seeking to build a more robust regulatory and welfare state.

That’s a feature of our republican democracy form of governance, not a bug. Millhiser’s beef is with our Constitution, not with our courts; our Constitution being as clear as it is on who makes the laws (it’s not the courts) and as clear as it is, also, on the lack of sacrosanctness of legislative edifices. Parliamentary Supremacy is a British thing, not an American one.

Millhiser knows this full well, and he destroys his credibility by pretending otherwise.

Close in Spirit

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…but wide of the mark. Wide of the target itself, even. In Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section, a letter-writer offered this on the matter of student loan debt:

The solution is to hold academic institutions accountable. If they want government to give my money to their students, they need to prove the value of their product. Set parameters: an 80% graduation rate in five years, and the ability to secure a job at a reasonable salary one year postgraduation. Failure results in withdrawal of federal money available to future students until parameters are met.

It’s entirely appropriate to hold the colleges and universities individually responsible for their product: students taught, successfully or not, for one or more years along with graduated students. But the writer’s suggestion still wants far more government intervention than is warranted.

Let the free market solve the puzzle, and here is where legitimate government intervention would be appropriate. Information is key. Require the colleges and universities to publish their dropout rates by number of years in school, graduation rates by major, and both the median and mean annual incomes, again by major, of graduated students five years after graduation.

One more path for government intervention: require the colleges and universities to be the primary lender to the student or to co-sign as borrower on the loan to their students. As part of the loan or co-signed loan document, require the borrowing student to answer the income survey.

A final act of government intervention: let the borrowing student discharge his student loan debt through personal bankruptcy, as with any other personal debt, and then deal with the economic and reputational consequences of that bankruptcy.

With this, there would be no need for government to lend to students or to guarantee any loans to students. Thus, a final final act of government intervention: government should withdraw entirely from the student loan industry.

Giving the Game Away

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NBC‘s Lester Holt is a member of the journalism guild and another member of the Left who’s done so. He said, as part of his long list of our claimed failings in responding to the Wuhan Virus, while he determinedly emoted about the raw numbers of deaths from the Wuhan Virus, that

…we forgot about the unpredictability of free will….

Because we should have obeyed the “science” being put out by our Know Betters in Government. We should have meekly accepted those instructions.

We should have joined our Know Betters in ignoring the larger science behind Holt’s manufactured angst over his soul-crushing milestone of 1 million deaths from the Virus. We should have paid no attention to that larger science behind the curtain, the rest of the story that showed that the Virus’ mortality rate for fundamentally healthy adults is a small fraction of 1% and, for our children, nearly non-existent. That whole story, not the carefully selected bits and pieces that suit the Left’s artificially done hysteria, showed very strongly that the only folks truly at risk from the Virus are those with existing comorbidities and those who are older than 85-ish.

That Holt included in his tear-jerker monologue his concerns about obstructionist free will is entirely consistent with the Left’s contempt of us average Americans and the Left’s drive to reduce us to wards of an all-knowing, all-benevolent State run by those denizens of the Left.

A Clear Difference

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Assume, for a moment, that the series of attacks inside Russian territory and unexplained explosions at Russian targets near the border with Ukraine have been carried out by Ukrainian forces and are not just examples of shoddy Russian maintenance or done by disgruntled Russian protestors.

Compare, then, that damage with the damage done by Russian attacks inside Ukraine. “Ukraine’s attacks” have been carefully limited to facilities supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s continued prosecution of its unprovoked attack.

  • a fuel depot in Russia’s Belgorod region directly opposite Kharkiv
  • an explosion sparked a blaze at an ammunition depot near the city of Belgorod
  • blasts have been reported inside the city
  • fires erupted at other oil depots, including one at a Russian military base
  • explosions have damaged rail lines in Kursk and Bryansk oblasts

Russian attacks, on the other hand, have been deliberately targeted at residential neighborhoods of Ukrainian cities, and have been aimed at deliberately razing whole cities to the ground (and of simply making the rubble bounce)—Kharkiv, Kherson, Izyum, Lyman, Bucha, Mariupol, to suggest a few—and nakedly, without regard for much of anything, attacking nuclear facilities at Zaporizhzhia or firing on “targets” very close to or having cruise missiles overfly the Yuzhnoukrainsk nuclear power plant near Kostyantynivka in southern Ukraine and the Khmelnytskyi Nuclear Power Plant near Netishyn in the northeast enroute to other targets, and blithely kicking up the potentially still lethal radioactive dirt around Chornobyl.