Tag Archives: government

Side Note

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Much has been made of the Republican Party’s “control” of a unified Federal government these past two years, with Republicans “controlling” the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Presidency.  Much is made, also, of the Republican Party’s continued “control” of the Senate, indeed its increased “control” following the mid-terms, as a result of which Republicans extended their majority from 51 to 53.

The latest is Matthew Continetti’s claim on last Friday’s Special Report (hosted by Bret Baier on Fox News): in discussing the Schumer Shutdown Redux (my term, not Continetti’s), Continetti insisted that this shutdown began in that unified government—repeating particularly the claim that Republicans “controlled” the Senate.

After all this time, the claim of Senate control cannot be simply a misspeak or a one-time bit of sloppy journalism; I have to ask.

In what fantasy world do Continetti and his fellows live where 60 is less than 51?  Less even than 53?

Foolish Misunderstanding

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CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria is dismayed with our Constitution and the concept of a republican democracy.

[T]he Constitutional concept of equal representation in the U.S. Senate [is] a “structural problem.”

And

…”new dividing line in Western politics,” which [Zakaria] describes is the “less-educated rural populations” he calls “Outsiders” who “feel ignored or looked down upon” and “feel deep resentment towards metropolitan elites.”

And

…30% of America is now electing 70% of the Senate.  All those states with—you think of Wyoming. It has roughly a million people. It has two senators. California with 70 million people has two senators as well. So we have a kind of structural problem here where the land is being overrepresented. The people are being underrepresented. So both sides feel deeply wronged.

However.

That alleged imbalance is a designed-in feature, not a problem; it’s what makes us a republican democracy of some durability, not a popular democracy doomed to the failure of tyranny at the hands of a few—Zakaria’s metro elites, for instance.

The need to balance the large- and small-population States in one house of our Congress is just as important today as it was those 230 years ago.  For the same reason and for another: the political divide between the populous coastal States and less populous flyover country—illustrated by that very term of the Left’s and by Zakaria’s plain contempt for the less-educated (as we must be, because rural)—is even deeper than the political divide between the populous and rural States of those original thirteen.

Wyoming needs to be able to defend itself from an overweening California.

It’s sad that Zakaria slept through his 8th grade civics class.

Pre-Determined Outcome

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New York’s Attorney-Elect Letitia James says she’s made her decision about the guilt of a man, a family, and a business, and now he’s going to collect the information needed to support her decision.

We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well.
We want to investigate anyone in his orbit who has, in fact, violated the law[.]

She’s already determined, prior to any investigation whatsoever, that they’re guilty of having violated one or more [unnamed] laws.

An honest investigator, on suspicion of an illegal activity—not on suspicion of a person—would seek out all information surrounding the activity, both exculpatory and damaging, and then decide whether an illegal activity had occurred.  If an illegality had been done, then an honest investigator would seek out all information regarding who might have done the deed (and, yes, there would be considerable overlap with that prior phase), both exonerating and guilt-implying, and then decide whether to prosecute, or not.

But, hey—this is the age of We Can’t Handle the Truth of an Election.

Faith in the PRC

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The People’s Republic of China is broadening the reach of its religion.

Officials have threatened to close the Early Rain Covenant Church in the central city of Chengdu by the end of the year in keeping with new religious-management regulations, according to several congregants who said they had been waiting for the net to fall. In coordinated raids starting Sunday night, police detained Pastor Wang Yi and more than 100 of the church’s 500 members, said Li Yingqiang, a church leader.

Wang and his congregants have committed no felonies that anyone outside of the PRC would recognize.  He has, though, objected to the intrusiveness of President Xi Jinping and his Party and government, though, and he’s done so often from the pulpit.

That’s blasphemous: the One True Religion in the PRC is that of the Chinese Communist Party.

Just ask the Muslim Uighers, the Falun Gong, Yellow Hat Buddhists (and all other Buddhists), and the Christians.

A Conservative’s View….

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My latest effort, a pamphlet on the American legal system (because I don’t lack for ego), A Conservative’s View of the American Concept of Law, has been released, and it can be found on amazon.com: https://amzn.to/2L4iVXx .  Links also can be found on my Books page.

Our legal system is explicitly founded on natural law through our Creator’s endowment—the origin and source of our fundamental principles.

Though government should not legislate morality beyond a very narrow arena (vis., a measure of specificity regarding types of homicide and theft; strictly limited controls on bearing false witness, etc.), with natural law as the foundation of our legal system, morality inescapably informs it.  This is so because morality flows from the Creator-endowed and individually-imbued nature of our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our social compact was founded explicitly to protect these.  From that, our statutes are at their best when limited to attempts to implement and protect those foundational principles and nothing more. Any further legislation should be limited to improvements on those strictly circumscribed efforts. In particular, legislation should not be used to generate new morals.

The nature of our American judiciary and the proper role of judges in our jurisprudence has been argued throughout our history, but the argument has been especially virulent over the last dozen or so years.  The current dispute (I don’t call it a debate) centers on whether our Constitution means what it says and neither more nor less, or whether it’s a living document that should grow and adjust to meet a judge’s understanding of changing times and mores.

In this pamphlet, I lay out three key propositions.  The first is that only Congress may make law.  The second is that judges may strike a law before them as unconstitutional, but if they do not, they must apply the law as written.  The third is that the Constitution must be applied as it is written.  Alterations or updates to it are political decisions, and thus only We the People may make them.

Understand: I’m not writing about the origins of the idea of law or of systems of law.  A plethora of legal philosophers (HLA Hart, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, and Gustav Radbruch to mention a few Western ones) treat these subjects should the reader wish to explore them. I begin later, with the principles underlying our American legal system.

 

Keep in mind, too, that government, per se, does not make law; the men who populate the government do.

 

Finally, Justice Antonin Scalia made this claim in his A Matter of Interpretation,

Surely this is a sad commentary: we American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most.
Even sadder, however, is the fact that the American bar and American legal education, by and large, are unconcerned with the fact that we have no intelligible theory.

I agree, and in my hubris, I offer the beginnings of such a theory here.