The EU is pressing its effort to punish Great Britain for the latter’s effrontery in leaving the EU.
German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has reiterated that the EU finds a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland “unacceptable.” He warned of “serious damage” in the event of a no deal scenario.
Because the EU wants to split Northern Ireland away from Great Britain.
No threat there.
Extending their perpetuation of the existing partial government shutdown, now the Progressive-Democrats won’t even allow the Senate to function.
Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked the chamber from considering bipartisan foreign-policy legislation in a bid to pressure Republicans to reopen the government….
This is of a piece with their “rebuttal” of President Donald Trump’s Oval Office speech calling for negotiations on a border wall and border security generally, wherein the Progressive-Democrats reiterated their refusal to negotiate at all, and they denied the facts presented regarding our border situation while cynically declining to present their own facts.
And their Wimpy-esque promise to gladly negotiate the wall later for a government opening today? Trump tweeted of Wednesday’s abbreviated meeting with Progressive-Democrat and Republican leaders,
I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO.
So much for the believability of Progressive-Democrat commitments.
Remember this in the coming election season.
Here come the Progressive-Democrats, and they’ve made their priorities clear in the House with the first things they want to get done. Here’s some of what’s in their HR1:
For Progressive-Democrats, it’s all about personal political power. Remember this in the coming election season.
Newly sworn-in California governor Gavin Newsom (D) has a plan to expand on the State’s sanctuary “status” and draw even more illegal aliens into the State and into the country:
…an unprecedented new health care agenda for his state, aimed at offering dramatically more benefits to illegal immigrants….
As Newsom noted,
People’s lives, freedom, security, the water we drink, the air we breathe—they all hang in the balance
And Newsom wants to increase that risk by encouraging a flood of illegal aliens to enter the State. It’s true enough that the vast majority of those illegals are harmless beyond the economic burden they’ll inflict in Newsom’s brave new world of hugely expanded, and hugely more expensive, health care for all, citizen and illegal alike. However, it’s also that the few who are dangerous are capable of inflicting vast damage—as the families of MS-13, et al.; the survivors of 9/11 (which terrorists entered legally, but they’re not the only terrorists entering); the victims and their families of the cartels’ drug epidemic; the families of Kate Steinle, Ronil Singh, Pierce Corcoran, Silvano Torres, and a host of others can attest.
His health care “expansion?” He intends to implement the erstwhile Obamacare Individual Mandate at the State level. Everyone will be required to purchase health coverage whether they need it or not, whether they want to or not. Except those like illegal aliens, who can’t afford it. Those coverages will be paid for by the State’s citizens and legal residents. Somehow. Oh, and “children?” They’ll be allowed, under Medi-Cal, to stay on mumsy’s and pop-pop’s health coverage plans until they’re 26, instead of the current age limit of 19.
Newsom has had no words on how this expansion is to be funded. Apparently, he’s channeling Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY):
People often say, like, how are you going to pay for it, and I find the question so puzzling because “How do you pay for something that’s more affordable? How do you pay for cheaper rent?” You just pay for it.
Because vastly expanding a program makes it cheaper. Sure.
But Newsom and his clan of Progressive-Democrats in the State’s legislature don’t care about that. They only care about the bennies flowing from their expensive, and dangerous, virtue signaling.
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.