Tag Archives: rights

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.

They Would, Indeed

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Commenting on the upcoming nomination for Supreme Court Justice and the Progressive-Democrats’ hysteria over President Donald trump’s choice—long before he makes it—former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said

If he put Moses up for the possibility of being Supreme Court Justice—the ultimate lawgiver, the Ten Commandments—they would still be against it[.]

He’s right.  Recall Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D, CA) objection to Judge Amy Coney Barrett during the latter’s 7th Appellate Court confirmation hearing:

When you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you[.]

Never mind that at the outset of that hearing—preceding Feinstein’s slur (of course one’s religious beliefs (or atheism) should live loudly, but Feinstein meant it as a slur)—in response to a question from Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA), Barrett had said

It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they derive from faith or anywhere else, on the law.

Never mind, either, that Barrett and her then-law professor John Garvey had written in a 1998 paper that

in certain circumstances a Catholic judge (like many Quakers, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and the member communions in the National Council of Churches) might be compelled to recuse herself or himself under 28 USC § 455, a federal statute that suggests a federal judge should step aside in the face of conscientious scruples.

The Left and their representative Party are very much anti-Christian, anti-Judaism, anti-religion or even the whiff of any.

Remember this in the fall, and don’t be a stay-at-home.

Business Models Don’t Create Business Rights

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There’s a lot about which to criticize California, but in one case, early though it is, the State appears to be on the right track.  California passed a consumer privacy law, and businesses everywhere are in an uproar over it.  The bill

requires [businesses] to offer consumers options to opt out of sharing personal information, and it gives Californians the right to prohibit the sale of their personal data.

Business’ objections center on their premise that it

risked far-reaching damage to everything from retailers’ customer-loyalty programs to data gathering by Silicon Valley tech giants.

This is that business model granting rights to business foolishness.  The claimed damage to customer-loyalty programs is especially rich.  If the business earned customers’ loyalty with actual quality goods and services and actual customer service in response to the inevitable problems that arise, the need for loyalty programs would be lessened.  The still-useful loyalty programs would be easier to sell from that demonstrated quality performance.  Beyond that, businesses could make the perks of joining the program more visible, more actually usable—and do better at tailoring them to individual, or small groups of, customers.  Of course, that last would require collecting customer data, but they might be pleasantly surprised by the outcome of a customer-customizable set of personal data to give access to—and by saying “pretty please” instead of demanding broad-ranging data as a condition of doing business.

The tech companies are being disingenuous, too.  They have yet to demonstrate a need for the wide-ranging data they take without permission; they just say “we need it” without discriminating their claimed need from their obvious “we want.”  And they demand it as a condition of doing business, again refusing the simple courtesy of “pretty please” and the tailoring of the data they want as well as legitimately need.

David French, National Retail Federation Senior Vice President of Government Relations worried, with a straight face, about customers and personalized marketing campaigns.

The consumer will actually be the big loser.

Not this customer.  I object to personalized marketing campaigns aimed at me.  These folks don’t know what I’m in the market for; my past buys are no indication of my current or future needs.  Nor do I want my browsing circumscribed by what offers of what I bought yesterday.  I want the full range of what’s available.  I especially don’t need my time wasted with efforts to create a need or a want where none exists.  I won’t be losing anything by not being inundated with personalized “advertising.”

It’s early, but the law looks like a good start.

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.