Tag Archives: ethics

A Thought on Reason

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Peggy Noonan had some thoughts on reason, centered on the just concluded confirmation process for Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Senator Susan Collins’ (R, ME) analysis of her reasons for voting for his confirmation.

I have a couple of thoughts on a couple of Noonan’s thoughts.

Susan Collins put on a clinic in thoroughness and justice. Democrats need to stand up to the screamers.

Noonan needs to understand: the Progressive-Democrats are the screamers.

A word on the destructive theatrics we now see gripping parts of the Democratic Party. … Do you know how that sounded to normal people, Republican and Democratic and unaffiliated?

It sounded perfectly normal to those of the Progressive-Democratic Party. First, hear the deafening silence of the remainder of Noonan’s parts of the Democratic Party: not a word in demurral of that behavior. Second, hear Hillary Clinton’s rejection of civility and Eric Holder’s threats of violence. Third, recall Spartacus Booker’s “come up in Congressmen’s face;” Clinton’s statement that millions of Americans are irredeemably deplorable racists, homophobes, and misogynists; Barack Obama’s dismissal of millions of Americans as nothing more than bitter Bible-clinging, gun-toting denizens of flyover country; Maxine Waters’ incitement to harass Republicans wherever they are; the NLMSM’s dismissal of Kanye West as just a token negro and a negro who doesn’t read.

That’s the danger we face this fall.

Future Nominations for Judgeships

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A denizen of flyover country—Jan Graham of Nebraska, in fact—had a thought in her Letter to the Editor of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal:

Every one of those Harvard and Yale law students protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment should have their names written down and kept in case they want to be a judge someday. At that point their college-age record can be used to show that they don’t believe in due process and shouldn’t ever be considered for the bench.

Nor can they be considered, legitimately, for any prosecutorial office, Federal, State, or count/parish.

Full stop.

The ABA and Judicial Ratings

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Judge, now Justice, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court and hearing cases.  The American Bar association is still looking for relevance here.  The ABA, after first giving Kavanaugh glowing marks as a judge wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was “reopening” its evaluation—timing its letter for 5 Oct, just before the Senate’s floor vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The ABA was ignored when Kavanaugh, et al., were being evaluated for a Supreme Court nomination and again when Kavanaugh was nominated. That prior ABA endorsement was simply the association’s jumping on the band wagon.

Now its irrelevance is manifest, and the ABA is squalling and trying to get back in the game.  That’s all this is.  That’s all that lately letter was all about.

Now the chairman of the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, Paul Moxley, is claiming he’s being bullied by Association President Robert Carlson, and that lately letter was an example.

[I]f he’s [Paul Moxley] being bullied by Mr Carlson or Democrats on his committee, he ought to resign and say so publicly.

That’s what the worthies on the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal claim.

No. Bullies only have the power their putative victims choose to give them. If Moxley thinks “Carlson or Democrats” are trying to bully him, he should have the integrity to stay put and call them out publicly.

In the meantime, the ABA needs to figure out what it means when it says something, and stick to it.  That’s the road back to relevance.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

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The tentacles reach far—even into the origin of Western concepts of individual liberty.  A British court has ordered

the wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker to explain how she and her husband could afford their multimillion-pound London mansion or face having it seized.

Government does not have to prove the illegal origin of the money.  No, the holder of the money must prove her innocence.  Here is the outcome of the British government’s legislation ostensibly aimed at allegedly dirty money held by people with political connections or suspected of serious crime.

Think about that: someone with the wrong political connections in the eyes of someone in government, or someone whom somebody in government decides is behaving suspiciously, now must prove his lack of guilt.

Money laundering might seem a perfectly fine excuse for invading individual liberty in this way: truly laundered money does indeed have origins that are inimical to safety.

But so are individual liberties critical to the safety of each of us.  What is the government’s limiting principle here?  Where does the tradeoff between security and liberty naturally end?

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept that must protect even the unsavory, or apparently unsavory, among us because that protection is critical to our own safety.

The New Left

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There can be no reasoning, no rational debate anymore with the Progressive-Democratic Party and the Left in general.  This is made clear by the statements luminaries of that collection have made in recent days—confirming their behavior during the Kavanaugh confirmation process just concluded, during which they actively rejected a foundation of liberty: innocent until proven guilty.  Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) was the loudest on this, saying outright that then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh had to personally authorize an investigation into himself or he would show himself guilty.

It began earlier.  Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D, CA) called for Republicans to be physically confronted wherever they are.  Senator Corey Spartacus Booker (D, NJ) called on the Left to get up in the face of congresspeople.

Now the Progressive-Democrats and their Left are expanding on the thesis that there can be no rationality in discourse—if, indeed, there can be discourse at all—with those of us to the right of center.  Here’s Hillary Clinton, in an interview with CNN:

You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about….  That’s why I believe, if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or the Senate, that’s when civility can start again.

That destruction is exactly what the Progressive-Democrats are attempting.  Yet, only when that Party is in control can there be any pretense of civility.  Only when the Party can require debate to be on their terms, within their parameters, can there be anything like peaceful disagreement.

The threats from the Left are palpable:

  • Senator Cory Gardner’s (R, CO) wife received a graphic text message with a video depicting a beheading
  • Progressive-Democrat intern Jackson Cosko has been arrested for posting the personal information, including home addresses, of Senators Lindsey Graham (R, SC), Mike Lee (R, UT), and Orrin Hatch (R, UT) on Wikipedia
  • Senator Jeff Flake (R, AZ) was trapped in an elevator with two screaming women “activists”

Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) worries about assassination attempts—a concern made concrete by last year’s mass assassination attempt of Republican Congressmen at a baseball practice.

Minnesota Special Education teacher, Samantha Ness, has actively called for the assassination of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

This is just a taste of what we can expect if the Progressive-Democrats are successful in this fall’s elections.  This is a taste of Progressive-Democrat “civility.”  It isn’t republican democracy that these folks want for our nation.  Not anymore.