Tag Archives: political parties

The Case Against Brett Kavanaugh

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The writer JD Vance, this time in The Wall Street Journal, has made a strong case for Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the DC Circuit, being nominated for the Supreme Court.

He is a committed textualist and originalist, one whose time on the bench has revealed a unique ability to apply these principles to legal facts. He deeply believes in the constitutional separation of powers as a means for ensuring governmental accountability and protecting individual liberty.

And

…Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions have been adopted by the Justices 11 times—a record of influence and persuasion that suggests he would be effective on the still-divided high court.

I disagree, though.  Ex-President Barack Obama (D) stacked the DC Circuit with a number of “liberal,” activist judges.  Kavanaugh is more valuable, say I, staying on the DC Circuit, where he can apply those qualities in counterbalancing that liberally stacked court.  He still will have, from there, the influence on the Supreme Court and on our jurisprudence generally that he already has.

There are a number of other judges with the same talents, skills, and understanding of and appreciation for our Constitution, its text, and the text of our laws.  Any of those would make excellent choices for the Supreme Court.

It’s true enough that any of those also would make excellent choices for backfilling Kavanaugh should he depart for the Supremes.  However, that would require a second confirmation hearing and Progressive-Democratic Party time-wasting fight.

The Sanctity of Precedent

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The Progressive-Democrats have their panties in large, tight twists over the possibility of President Donald Trump getting another pick for the Supreme Court.  So much so that now they’re making stuff up in their hysteria.

“Abortion will be illegal in twenty states in 18 months,” tweeted Jeffrey Toobin, the legal pundit, in a classic of cool, even-handed CNN analysis soon after the resignation news.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY):

Whomever the president picks, it is all too likely they’re going to overturn health-care protections and Roe v Wade[.]

And so on.

What these guys are carefully ignoring, though, are some basic fundamentals (excuse the redundancy).

Conservatives are very reluctant to overturn precedent, as the Editorial Board points out. However, the Progressive-Democrats’ insistence on the absolute sanctity precedent—and of Republican Senator Collins’ identical insistence—means that now these worthies have to defend the sanctity of the Dred Scott precedent, and they have to defend Plessy‘s separate-but-equal and explain the inequity of Brown fixing that.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for their explanations. Don’t hold your breath, either, waiting for the NLMSM—CNN, for instance—to ask them for those explanations.

Non-Merit Discrimination in College Admissions

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The non-merit discriminants that colleges and universities use—Harvard comes to mind—center on race, ethnicity, and gender.  The Trump administration has moved to reduce that reliance on bigotry for admissions (ironic word, that), and the Left is crying race.

Anurima Bargava, ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ head of “civil rights enforcement” (an ironic title), insists that the rollback of regulations authorizing racism and sexism in determining who will be admitted—and who will be barred from admission—is

a purely political attack that benefits nobody.

The rollback benefits those being discriminated against without harming anyone else. But the Obama administration’s politics of divisiveness and…identity…considered those people to be nobodies; that’s why the policy discriminated.

The bigotry lives loudly within the Left, to paraphrase a Progressive-Democrat Senator from California.

Pick One

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Tony James, Blackstone Executive Vice Chairman, thinks his Progressive-Democratic Party needs to become a party of growth and inclusive prosperity.

The problem is that the Party is a Progressive one and becoming a socialist one.  This is not contradictory; the two ideologies are political allies if not siblings, too, and they’re not far apart economically.  The Party’s embrace of the former is demonstrated by Barack Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D, CA), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY), Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (D, MA), Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA), newly ascendant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ (D, NY), and a host of others’ loud and enthusiastic embrace of progressivism.  The Party’s embrace of the latter is demonstrated by the strength of Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) and Ocasio-Cortez’ socialism within Party circles.

But progressivism is inherently exclusionary.  Progressivism insists that ordinary Americans are morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [their] responsibilities as…democrat[s], and so we must be instructed and led by our Betters.  We must be excluded from the heady responsibilities of governance and of economic independence.  More, those proud Progressives have proclaimed us ordinary Americans to be irredeemably deplorable homophobic misogynist racists, and all of us Middle Americans in flyover country are just bitter Bible-clinging gun-toters.  These proud Progressives and their acolytes on the Left openly act on this exclusionary attitude with their constant harassment of those of us who are so impertinent (if not outright dishonest) as to disagree with them, with their overt calls to bar those of us not toeing the Party’s line from public places, and with the violence with which they threaten us and often inflict against us, whom they’ve termed fascists and Nazis.

Socialism is inherently anti-growth.  These adherents demand to set all performance goals, for everyone, from the hallowed halls of government instead of a free market doing so for us as individuals and owners/operators of our private enterprises.  Their demand for equal outcomes necessarily caps growth by sapping the abilities of the best among us because others can’t—or won’t—keep up and by denying the ability of any of us to to show the best that there is in [us] and to maximize our personal prosperity, which of necessity maximizes the prosperity of all of us.  These socialists demand to raise our taxes—to take our money—and to give—give!—Medicare to all, Federally guaranteed jobs to all, thereby reducing growth capacity by taking money away from us.

The Party can have a pro-growth platform, or it can be progressive socialist; the two are mutually contradictory.

For the Progressive-Democratic Party to become an inclusive, pro-growth party, though, it must remake itself 180 degrees away from where it currently, proudly stands: it must recreate itself a party of conservatism.

That’s an impossible task for progressive socialists.

An Ego Move

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…by a flake.  Senator Jeff Flake (D R, AZ) says he’s going to block any and all judicial nominees until he gets his way.

Myself and a number of senators, at least a few of us, will stand up and say let’s not move any more judges until we get a vote, for example, on tariffs[.]

This is just another ego move by a flake Senator.  Were Jeff Flake serious about this, he would have moved before he rendered himself a lame duck Senator; there were plenty of questions on which he could have done this sort of thing besides tariffs.  He chose to wait, though, until there would be no consequences for his ego trip.

Now he’s ready to destroy the judiciary, to let it get populated by a later administration with activist judges and Justices for whom the law and the Constitution are mere suggestions, to be disregarded when they become inconvenient to those activists’ personal agendas.