Tag Archives: culture

Arrogance of an Activist Justice

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The Supreme Court recently lifted a district court judge’s injunction that blocked President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order requiring heads of agencies to work with the Department of Government Efficiency on hiring decisions and developing plans for layoffs. The Court also ruled that it had based its decision on the legality of Trump’s Executive Order, and didn’t rule on whether any reorganization plans broke the law. And

The Government is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful[.]

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson piped up in her lone dissent.

This was the wrong decision at the wrong moment, especially given what little this Court knows about what is actually happening on the ground[.]

This is her Preciousness, and the arrogance of her activism. The Court knows little of what’s actually happening on the ground? But Jackson does know? Or in her shared Court ignorance, she would leave intact an injunction that’s blocking no known ill effects? Of course, highly talented and educated woman that she is, she knows full well that “don’t know” means…”don’t know.”

What she does know, though, as do all of the Justices on the Court (the other eight of whom voted to lift the injunction), is that no hiring decisions or layoff plans have been developed yet, much less begun execution. There is, then, no reason for the injunction, the EO itself being entirely legal.

This is the sort of activism—ignorant, not just ideological—that we can expect to deprecate the Supreme Court under a Progressive-Democrat President and Progressive-Democratic Party-dominated Senate.

Right On

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Cliff Asness and Michael Mendelson, of AQR Capital Management, wrote in the Saturday Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section decrying Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s statement that we “shouldn’t have billionaires.”

The money part of their letter, though, is their closer:

We are tempted to end by saying, with considerably more evidence than Mr Mamdani, that “we shouldn’t have socialists.” The country would be better off without such noxious and destructive ideas. But unlike him, we know we don’t get to decide who exists and who doesn’t.

Right on.

Misplaced Attributions

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A couple of letter-writers in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section are worried about the the Trump administration supposedly pressuring people out of their offices. These are misplaced attributions that exaggerate the strength of “pressure.”

One opines,

Reports that political pressure from outside forces may have contributed to the resignation of UVA’s president are troubling and strike at the heart of institutional autonomy.

This writer should concern himself more with the UVA President’s lack of courage. He resigned; he was not fired. Resigning is entirely a voluntary decision, no matter the level of perceived pressure to leave. What strike[s] at the heart of institutional autonomy is not “political pressure;” it is institutional managers in leadership positions who run away rather than stay and defend their institutions and their own actions in support of those institutions.

The other letter-writer wrote,

President Trump used his political and executive powers to force an end to [Senator Thom Tillis’ (R, NC)] public service….

Leave aside the fact that Tillis had, some months before, reached his decision to not run for reelection and that Trump’s supposed pressure merely accelerated his announcement of his decision. It’s possible that this letter-writer was unaware of that fact.

What should be obvious to this person is the same thing that is so apparent in the UVA President’s case: Tillis’ decision, and his choice of timing for announcing his decision, were entirely voluntary acts entered into by Tillis himself. No amount of pressure from Trump (which were, at bottom, merely words of opprobrium) should have been sufficient to “force an end.” That’s especially true in Tillis’ case, or that of any other politician: a President has no power to force a Congressman of either house to serve or not to serve. That choice is decided entirely by the incumbent in his decision to stand for reelection or not, and in the former case, falls next to the voters of his constituency and to no one else.

Pressure can be decidedly uncomfortable, but only the faint of heart succumb to it, and we’re all better off with the faint of heart departing.

Disingenuousness of the Abortion Industry

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Planned Parenthood is the industry’s canonical example. This organization has announced that it is going to sue the Trump administration over cuts in funds to it that are contained in the just-passed reconciliation bill.

The provisions contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act prohibits abortion providers from receiving Medicaid funding for up to one year for any other reproductive health services they may provide.

Those “other reproductive health services” are primarily related to Planned Parenthood’s and other abortion centers’ abortion activities. Access to any government funding for these is immoral and should be prevented.

Planned Parenthood’s legal beefs, though, are two: one is Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson’s statement:

Everyone deserves access to high-quality, affordable health care.

This is absolutely true (just not by government issue, but that’s a different story), and that care can be provided by a host of facilities, government, NGO, and private. However, abortion is not health care, it’s strictly a matter of killing not yet born babies.

Planned Parenthood’s other beef is this:

Planned Parenthood said the provision puts nearly 200 centers across 24 states at risk of closure and that 90% of those closures would occur in states where abortion is still legal.

That makes explicit that Planned Parenthood puts abortion at the center of what they claim is health care. Aside from that, it’s an irrelevant beef, as is the sub-beef of those business’ locations. No business model creates a government obligation to fund it. If Planned Parenthood, or those centers, wherever they are, want to continue operating, they should change their business models to focus on actual health care provision.

The beefs are wholly irrelevant in another way: government has no obligation to send taxpayer money to any entity, whether NGO or private enterprise.

Even more cynical and disingenuous aspect of this is that nowhere in any abortion providers’ beefs about lack of government funding is there even the smallest syllable of concern for the welfare of the baby being killed by an abortion.

Insidious

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A letter-writer in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section wrote,

In the dissenters’ telling [in Mahmoud v Taylor], children can be expected to manage the complex issues of sex and gender as objective information, quite apart from the faith and morals their parents seek to instill.

What’s especially insidious here, though, is government, public school administrators, and public school teachers pushing onto their students, our children, clear disinformation and outright lies on more than just issues of sex and gender, such claims as gender being a matter of choice and not genetically, and so immutably, determined at conception, and that some races are intrinsically and irreversibly oppressed while other races are intrinsically and irreversibly oppressors.

That’s the sort of thing those…dissenters…want to see continue, whether deliberately or from the blindness of their modern liberal/monarchist ideology that insists that government, public school administrators, and public school teachers each know better than parents.

School choice, above all, would allow parents to rescue their children from such sewers. To that end, as another letter-writer in the same section wrote,

Let public-education funding follow families’ decisions.