Racism in the White House

And Sexism. That’s what Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential nominee Joe Biden is promising for us if he’s elected.

No, this isn’t about his sexist promise that he’ll have only a woman for Vice President, rather than the most qualified person, who might happen to be a woman, nor is it his strong leaning that the woman must be black, not—again—the most qualified person, who might happen to be black (and/or a woman).

This is about Biden’s promise of who he’ll nominate for Supreme Court Justice.

I have—we are putting together a list of a group of African-American women who are qualified and have the experience to be in the court.

Not people who are qualified and have the experienced to be on the Court and who happen to be black and women. No. Biden’s first criteria for his selections are skin color and gender—only third is actual qualification and experience.

This isn’t just pandering to blacks for their vote. This isn’t just insulting blacks by presuming they’re stupid enough to be bought off by such naked pandering.

Nor is this just a matter of pandering to women for their vote. Nor is it only insulting to women’s intelligence.

This is far worse than that: this is stinking sexism and rank racism.

A Judicial Error

The Supreme Court has ordered a restructuring of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: its single director, removable only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office, among other things, was an unconstitutional abridgment of Executive Branch authority.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the Court, said that the

setup meant the CFPB’s director was unaccountable to the executive branch, creating an unconstitutional diminishment of presidential power.
“The CFPB’s single-director structure contravenes this carefully calibrated system by vesting significant governmental power in the hands of a single individual accountable to no one[.]”

And then,

To address the problem, the court changed the CFPB removal provision to make the director subject to presidential removal for any reason.

That’s the error. The Court’s position of the unconstitutionality of the CFPB’s structure is entirely correct. The Court’s remedy is entirely wrong.

With this ruling, the Court has unconstitutionally legislated from the bench, a thing it does far too often for far too long.

The correct remedy would have been to strike the CFPB entirely as unconstitutional and return this inherently political matter to where it belongs: the political branches of the Federal government, Congress and the Executive Branch for new legislation. And to We the People, the owner-boss of our Government, both the two political and the judicial branches.

An Efficient Labor Market

A writer, published in Wall Street Journal‘s Letters, responded to the idea that emphasis on education credentials over actual experience averred that the emphasis isn’t at all misplaced.

It’s more likely that there is a limited number of high-wage jobs available and that the market has efficiently set the wage based on the supply/demand curves.

This is a remarkably ill-informed claim, assuming as it does that we actually have an efficient market in labor.

Such a market cannot exist, though, in an environment where unions have monopoly power over labor in the industries in which they operate, nor can it exist in an economy with such widespread minimum wage mandates.

Since both of those exist, we are even farther from an efficient market for labor.

A Judicial…Misunderstanding

The Supreme Court has struck Louisiana’s abortion law that required doctors to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital before they could be permitted to carry out abortions. The ruling was by a 5-4 vote; the five hung their ruling on the Court’s 2016 Whole Woman’s Health decision holding that there were “no medical benefits” to such a requirement, and so “a woman’s constitutional right to end a pregnancy” was circumscribed.

One of the five was Chief Justice John Roberts.

Here’s his rationalization for his vote:

I joined the dissent in Whole Woman’s Health and continue to believe that the case was wrongly decided. The question today however is not whether Whole Woman’s Health was right or wrong, but whether to adhere to it in deciding the present case.

Wow.

If the decision being used as precedent was wrongly decided, the correct response is to overrule that precedent and correct the error, not to flip and bureaucratically uphold the error and, by doing so, codify it.

Codifying error as precedent also has a strong whiff of legislating from the bench.

With his logic, maybe Roberts would have argued against going to war to overrule a Dred Scott, or argued against altering Plessy.

A Winning Strategy

Congressman Andy Biggs (R, AZ) suggested one for President Donald Trump a couple days ago, and it’s as simple and elegant as President Ronald Reagan’s regarding winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union: we win, they lose.

He just needs to be Trump, and the campaign guys need to let him be Trump.

True enough. However, the Trump he needs to be—and soon—is the Trump he was in the fall of 2016—toned down rhetoric, including on Twitter, and talking extensively about the future and his policies for making the future occur, rather than solely negative attacks on the opponent.

It’s easy enough—especially with Biden and the running mate the Progressive-Democratic Party selects for him—to talk down his opponent simply by contrasting his policies with the policies Biden is touting, both domestic economic and social policy and foreign policy.