Never Apologize

 So, libertarian law guru Ilya Shapiro got a gig at Georgetown Law. When Grandpa Badfinger got his chance to keep his racist promise to only appoint a black woman, Shapiro observed that the nominee would forever bear an asterisk since she had been selected for her race and gender. This is not only true, but it is central to Biden’s decision. He said it. And the libs love it. Then Shapiro said it. And they freaked out.

Of course people will think she was picked for a reason other than her abilities. Biden promised he would pick his nominee for a reason other than her abilities.

Apparently, telling the truth is racist, even when the truth is that Democrats are racist. You just can’t say it, even though they say it. It’s like CRT. No, it is not taught in schools and also it must continue to be taught in schools.

Regardless, conservatives need to understand that the institutions – like academia – are past hope. They must be leveled and rebuilt into something that’s not trash. Anyone who does not get this, absolutely understand this, should not be elected dog catcher.

Opinion: Lies the Supreme Court Told Me

It's time to telll the Supreme Court, "It's not me, it's you."

In a fashion we must now regard as entirely predictable the Supreme Court of the United States has dismissed (i.e., thrown out) the various state challenges to the 2020 presidential election.

Any decisions on these challenges were determined by the majority to be “moot” because the election had already been decided, and Donald Trump has conceded to Joe Biden. (Associate Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch objected in varying degrees.)

In other words, a stolen presidential election—if it happens, we don’t really know in this case—has an almost immediate statute of limitations, although the results of that election can affect hundreds of millions, if not, as in the case of the United States, nearly the entirety of humanity.

This is true, apparently for a majority of the Supremes, although all sorts of crimes, some not particularly onerous, have statutes of limitations that can go on for years.

Go figure.

....

 If I sound cynical about the Supreme Court, I have to admit I am. It’s even true of the law in general, which I want to believe in and admire, but increasingly no longer do.

... The law belongs to those who have the deepest control of a society at the time.

John Kennedy: Democrats Will Accuse Barrett Of ‘Drowning Little Newborn Puppies’ Before It’s Over

 “It’s only in Monday,” Kennedy quipped. “So far, Judge Barrett has been called a religious bigot, a racist, an antifeminist, anti-public health. Her opponents haven’t gotten around yet to calling her an alien lizard person, but it’ll come. Before it’s over with, I’m afraid, that they will accuse her of drowning little newborn puppies.”

“That’s not what this is all about though, and I think almost all of my Democratic colleagues know that none of these things are true,” he continued. “This is what they’re upset about. Judge Barrett is a Constitutionalist, which means she’s a Madisonian, which means she believes in the separation of powers, which means she believes that federal judges are not politicians in robes, which means she believes that the United States Supreme Court is not supposed to be a mini Congress, which means that she believes that federal judges are not supposed to try to rewrite the Constitution every other Thursday to advance a political or social agenda that they can’t get by the voters, which means that she believes that the law is not supposed to be politics practiced a different way.”

Supreme Court Doesn't Care About the Law or the Constitution. It's a policy making body.

The inside story of how John Roberts negotiated to save Obamacare.

The discussion focused on the individual insurance mandate and Congress' power to regulate commerce. Roberts went first, as was the custom, laying out his views. He emphasized that he believed the Constitution's commerce clause never was intended to cover inactivity, such as the refusal to buy insurance.

After the chief, conservative Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas offered their views. Like Roberts, they thought Congress' commerce authority did not cover an individual's decision to forgo -- rather than obtain -- health insurance.

So far so good; what does the Constitution say?

The votes of the liberals were known, too. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fifth in seniority, was the first to cast a vote to uphold the individual mandate. She believed Supreme Court precedent demanded the law be found constitutional. She was followed by Justice Stephen Breyer, who agreed with her.

What court precedent? Let's not kid each other, they like the policy and the constitution was not goint to get in the way..

Roberts did not want the entire law to fall. A pro-business conservative, he understood the importance of the insurance industry to US businesses, and he was genuinely concerned about invalidating an entire law that had been approved through the democratic process to solve the intractable health care problem.

There goes the constitution; the focus became the policy.

Breyer and Kagan had voted in the private March conference to uphold the new Medicaid requirement, and their votes had been unequivocal. But they were pragmatists. If there was a chance that Roberts would cast the critical vote to uphold the central plank of Obamacare -- and negotiations in May were such that they still considered that a shaky proposition -- they were willing to meet him partway. ..

Perhaps Roberts' move was born of a concern for the business of health care. Perhaps he had worries about his own legitimacy and legacy, intertwined with concerns about the legitimacy and legacy of the court. Perhaps his change of heart really arose from a sudden new understanding of congressional taxing power. However the chief would explain it -- and he has not explained it beyond his written opinion -- the case added a new dimension to a man who insisted that he always decided cases based on the law.

Viewed only through a judicial lens, his moves were not consistent, and his legal arguments were not entirely coherent. But he brought people and their different interests together. His moves may have been good for the country at a time of division and a real crisis in health care, even as they engendered, in the years since, anger, confusion and distrust.

Mark Steyn: "Swingin' Supremacists"

This is why you get such death duels about Supreme Court appointments: 

If you incline to the view that Obamacare is a transformative act, isn't there something slightly pitiful about the fact that the liberties of over 300 million people hinge on the somewhat whimsical leanings of just one man? I mean, Kennedy seems a cheery enough cove, but who died and made him the all-powerful Sultan of Swing? "It is a decision of the Supreme Court," explained Nancy Pelosi a few years back in more congenial times for the Democrats. "So this is almost as if God has spoken."

He wrote this in 2012 while the Supreme Court was debating the constitutionality of ObamaCare.

Thus, in this week's debate on whether Obamacare is merely the latest harmless evolution of the interstate-commerce clause, the most learned and highly remunerated jurists in the land chewed over the matter of whether a person, simply by virtue of being born, was participating in a "market." Had George III shown up at the Constitutional Convention to advance that argument with a straight face, the framers would have tossed aside the quill feathers and reached for their muskets.

Recall that Nancy Pelosi famously said that we have to pass it to know what's in it?

He was making a narrow argument about "severability" — about whether the Court could junk the "individual mandate" but pick and choose what bits of Obamacare to keep. Yet he was unintentionally making a far more basic point: A 2,700-page law is not a "law" by any civilized understanding of the term. Law rests on the principle of equality before it. When a bill is 2,700 pages, there's no equality: Instead, there's a hierarchy of privilege micro-regulated by an unelected, unaccountable, unconstrained, unknown, and unnumbered bureaucracy. It's not just that the legislators who legislate it don't know what's in it, nor that the citizens on the receiving end can never hope to understand it, but that even the nation's most eminent judges acknowledge that it is beyond individual human comprehension. A 2,700-page law is, by definition, an affront to self-government.

Read the whole thing.

Recall the last High Tech Lynching - Democrats learned nothing from the last one.

"This sleaze, this dirt, was searched for by staffers of members of this committee, was then leaked to the media, and this committee and this body validated it and displayed it at prime time over our entire nation. It is a high-tech lynching."

Familiar?🤔pic.twitter.com/AmNsI7QhPK

— Maverick (@RodStryker) September 23, 2018

On Immigration and the Supreme Court, Democrats Are Snookered

Conrad Black via Instapundit

“One overconfident position of Trump’s enemies after another has been overrun, and now they are having to face the most blood-curdling horror of all: He may durably uproot and expel them from their incumbency and legitimacy as a permanent government, and he may actually succeed as a president. This is the explanation for the mushroom cloud of Democratic disconcertion about the ambivalent Anthony Kennedy. He provided the deciding vote on the three cases mentioned that closed this session of the Court, but he was pro-choice, pro the legality of Obamacare, and as liberal as he was conservative. All of the nominees on the president’s list of 25, from which the well-respected Justice Neil Gorsuch was chosen last year, are clearly qualified. All, when probed about abortion, will say something like what Circuit Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a practicing Roman Catholic with seven children, replied at her confirmation hearing, that no judge should allow personal views to get in the way of established law.”

The Supremes Want You to Shut Up and Sit Down and Doesn't Want to Tell You Again

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES

No. 14–981

A WYATT MAN, PETITIONER v. UNIVERSITY OF DIVERSITY, ET AL.

ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FIFTH CIRCUIT

JUSTICE KENNEDY delivered the opinion of the Court.

Dear dumb white shits,

We have attempted to mollify your persistent bleating with the sort of sweeping rhetoric that has so often rendered you insensate to the ongoing defenestration of your national interests. Thus it was hoped we could evade the necessity of settling this issue with uncomfortable candor. Yet your determined inability to absorb politely oblique guidance has rendered that aspiration impractical. As a result, the court is obliged to speak loudly.

THE CONSTITUTION IS MERELY THE GAUZE THROUGH WHICH OUR PERSONAL POLITICS ARE FILTERED. THAT OF WHICH WE APPROVE IS CONSTITUTIONAL AS THAT WHICH WE DO NOT ISN’T. SEEK, IF YOU MUST, LOGICAL CONSISTENCY BEYOND THIS. BUT DO SO WITHOUT HOPE OF SUCCESS. AS A RESULT, YOU WILL BE RACIALLY DISCRIMINATED AGAINST, AND BLACKS WILL NOT.

UNDERSTAND THIS CLEARLY AND DON’T FUCKING BOTHER US WITH THE MATTER AGAIN.

It is so ordered.

Does the President Have A Duty To Nominate Supreme Court Candidates? Does the Senate Have A Duty To Consider Nominees?

Short answer: NO.

Longer answer:

The position that a President has a duty to put forward a Supreme Court nominee is narrowly elitist and overtly judicial-centric. Nothing distinguishes the President in his role here in regard to nominating Supreme Court nominees from (1) his role in regard to nominating other judicial nominees and (2) his coordinate role in regard to nominating persons for any and every other office (however humble) within the President’s orbit. If the President fails to nominate a person to one of these less prominent offices who would say that the President failed in his constitutional duty? I think few, and perhaps no commentators would make such an argument. And if you will not make that argument for each and every one of the less prominent positions subject to presidential nomination, I think there is no good reasoned basis for making it for Supreme Court vacancies—except that the great & good all think the Supreme Court was, is, and must be the center of our attention and political life. In other words, this Supreme Court-centered view is exactly the position that Antonin Scalia fought tooth-and-nail. He was right to do so.

Trump Courts Evangelical Vote at Regent University

Some excerpts:

Trump spoke before a packed theater at Regent University as part of the university's Executive Leadership Presidential Candidate Forums series.

On the debt:

"We owe $19 trillion -- most people don't even know what a trillion dollars is, how many hundreds of millions is in a trillion," Trump said. "It's such a number that, it's a name that 10 years ago you never even heard the word trillion, but we owe $19 trillion."

"A very bad budget was passed just about four weeks ago that's going to add at least $2 trillion to it. So we'll be up essentially to $21 trillion, and at a certain point it's really the point of no return. And you really have to have somebody that knows what he or she is doing,"

On the Supreme Court:

Robertson wanted to know if President Trump would have a litmus test for those he'd nominate to the Supreme Court.

"In your selection as president, what criteria would you use to pick somebody?" he asked.

"Pro-life. We want-- It starts with that, starts with it. A very conservative, a very, very smart, I mean like Judge (Antonin) Scalia would be a perfect He was a perfect representative," 

On Obamacare:

"We're going to get rid of Obamacare," .... "Obamacare has turned out to be a total disaster."

Breaking: Supes Put Obama's 'Global Warming' Regs on Ice

A divided Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to halt enforcement of President Barack Obama's sweeping plan to address climate change until after legal challenges are resolved. The surprising move is a blow to the administration and a victory for the coalition of 27 mostly Republican-led states and industry opponents that call the regulations "an unprecedented power grab."

By temporarily freezing the rule the high court's order signals that opponents have made a strong argument against the plan. A federal appeals court last month refused to put it on hold. The court's four liberal justices said they would have denied the request.

The future of marriage is here.

Dutch woman will marry dog after her husband — a cat — dies

Widow Dominque Lesbirel of the Netherlands is getting married again, after losing her husband to kidney failure.

She's getting hitched to her dog. Her first husband, Doerack, was a cat.

"Putting Doerack to sleep was horrible, I've had him since he was three, but I feel lucky to have had 16 lovely years with him," she said, according to Britain's Daily Mirror.

She plans to wed Travis, but wants to wait a while to get over her grief at losing Doerack.

I'm fairly confident that the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges could  see their way clear to inter-species marriage.  Why limit the love that endures even past death to people; isn't that bigoted?

“As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves.”

The Dutch led the way in gay marriage, they are now breaking new paths.


 

What does the Supreme Court Think About "Less Crunchy" Abortions?

Was this what the ultimate defenders of abortion rights had in mind?

The public relations department at Planned Parenthood is probably working overtime today, as there’s yet another undercover video of some of their top officials casually discussing over dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant the sale of organs from the fetuses are that aborted at their clinics....

Both high officials acknowledge that Planned Parenthood would be willing to use different abortion techniques to harvest salable fetal organization, or “less crunchy” ones in the gruesomely tone-deaf terminology of one, and at this point we can ascertain whether the women who signed those consent forms that Planned Parenthood boasts of were informed of what risks those procedures might entail.

Making sure the baby comes out with salable organs intact does require a procedure that's harder on the woman than simply cutting the baby up and sucking out the parts.

Keep in mind that 58 million dead babies later, the American people never voted for abortion on demand.  It was imposed as a Diktat by the Supremes who discovered the right to kill babies in the womb in the "penumbras and emanations" of the US Constitution.  Attempts by elected officials to alter or abolish the practice are routinely swatted down by the Liberal Bloc of the court, defenders of the right to "crunchy" or "less crunchy" abortion.

We suspect that they are not nearly as troubled by the practice they created as people in general.  Members of the Ruling Class don't typically frequent Planned Parenthood; they have more refined facilities what are higher priced and don't feel the incentive to shop baby organs around.  On the other hand, we could be wrong; perhaps its an abortion industry standard.

We thought we would ask the Supremes for their opinion so we asked them via e-mail and are waiting a reply.

If you want to ask the Supremes themselves, you can do so here.

At the current rate of Muslim immigration to the west, gay marriage is just a temporary condition.

Mark Steyn makes an interesting point. In Europe there are areas when the rule of Sharia prevails and the rule of Western law does not. Who will win the dispute when Islam and Gay collide? Judges can impose gay marriage because Christians are not going to cut off anyone's head. Anthony Kennedy won't have to worry about Christians urging churchgoers to kill him.  Not so with Islam, where gays have a choice between being thrown off high buildings or having surgery to be transformed into the gender of their choice. Which leaves the interesting question: what's the surgical procedure for the other letters of the LBTGQ alphabet?  

Islam is a religion where disagreement does not result in an angry letter to the editor but with a fatwa demanding your death.

Swimming against the tide is grueling - but tides ebb and flow. Kate McMillan doesn't think the civilizational clash between the dar al Islam and the dar al Gay is much of a showdown:

At the current rate of Muslim immigration to the west, gay marriage is just a temporary condition.

She's right on that. I don't want to wind up with a choice between the twin totalitarianisms of soulless state-regulated hyper-sexualized semi-tyranny and sharia - because, if that's what it comes down to, I know who'll win. But conservatives have spent the supposed "end of history" winning a zillion elections, and losing everything that matters. To most of the so-called millennials, conservatism is entirely invisible except as a Jon Stewart punchline - and that invisibility was largely our choice. Instead of launching another radio show or news aggregator or think-tank, never mind obsessing over whether Jeb or Jindal or Christie will play better in Iowa, we need to make like the Islamic mullahs and the sex mullahs and start competing for the space where people actually live.

The Roberts Court

One of the most common beliefs about the way that John Roberts has voted on ObamaCare is that he's doing so to preserve the Supreme Court from ferocious attacks by the Liberal elite.  Commentators beleive that Roberts caved to political pressure, fearing that opposing Obama and the left would "de-legitimize the Court."

There is no question that the major organs of public opinion would have been hysterical if ObamaCare had been gutted or gay marriage had not put on the same pedestal as abortion on demand.

So Roberts chose to protect the Supreme Court from the wrath of the New York Times and NPR. The Constitution was left to fend for itself.

Love Her or Hate Her, Ann Coulter Warned Us About John Roberts 10 Years Ago

After conservatives took another gut punch from black-robed Obamacare cheerleader Chief Justice John Roberts, many of us were left wondering just what in the heck is wrong with this guy. After all, these Republican appointees to the Supreme Court are supposed to be on our side, right? They can’t all be David Souter.

It turns out that Ann Coulter sniffed another Souter-esque betrayal in the offing ten years ago:

After pretending to consider various women and minorities for the Supreme Court these past few weeks, President Bush decided to disappoint all the groups he had just ginned up and nominate a white male.

So all we know about him for sure is that he can't dance and he probably doesn't know who Jay-Z is. Other than that, he is a blank slate. Tabula rasa. Big zippo. Nada. Oh, yeah ... We also know he's argued cases before the Supreme Court. Big deal; so has Larry Flynt's attorney.

But unfortunately, other than that that, we don't know much about John Roberts. Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never. Not ever.

Since the announcement, court-watchers have been like the old Kremlinologists from Soviet days looking for clues as to what kind of justice Roberts will be.

-- Will he let us vote?

-- Does he trust democracy? Or will he make all the important decisions for us and call them "constitutional rights"?

-- Does he live in a small, rough-hewn cabin in the woods of New Hampshire and avoid "womenfolk"?

It means absolutely nothing that NARAL and Planned Parenthood attack him: They also attacked Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter.

The only way a Supreme Court nominee could win the approval of NARAL and Planned Parenthood would be to actually perform an abortion during his confirmation hearing, live, on camera, and preferably a partial-birth one.

Read the whole thing.

Ann Coulter is very, very smart ... and fast with a quip which hides the fact that she's wise. We tend to support those who are attacked by Liberals, but as Ann points out, Liberals will attack anyone who has not come out - loudly and strongly - for abortion, gun control and government control of everything. This causes us to fall into the trap of supporting people with personal agendas that have nothing to do with the good of the country and protecting the right of everyone to live the life as they see fit.

On a related note, Roberts came out against the the judicial decree making gay marriage the law of the land. I suspect that this is his attempt to make up with conservatives, giving a throw-away vote to the dissent, knowing his vote was not needed to change the definition of marriage. had his vote been needed one can be sure that he would have switched positions.

House bill would force the Supreme Court to enroll in ObamaCare

It's only fair and entirely logical. I'm sure it's in the emanations and penumbras of the law.

A House Republican on Thursday proposed forcing the Supreme Court justices and their staff to enroll in ObamaCare.

Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) said that his SCOTUScare Act would make all nine justices and their employees join the national healthcare law’s exchanges.

“As the Supreme Court continues to ignore the letter of the law, it’s important that these six individuals understand the full impact of their decisions on the American people,” he said.

“That’s why I introduced the SCOTUScare Act to require the Supreme Court and all of its employees to sign up for ObamaCare,” Babin said.

Gay marriage and he Supremes

Things are moving so fast in Fantasy Land Liberal Culture that the upcoming Supreme Court blessing  of gay marriage is already past it's sell-by date already even before the judges declare their fidelity to crazy. The cutting edge of societal evolution is my right to marry my horse who is actually a trans-species differently-abled blue dragon ... as am I.

A Coming Issue (Religious Freedom)

Bud Norman

Sometimes the big stories sneak up on a country, but in this case we have been duly forewarned by a remarkably candid Solicitor General. Whether or not any institution of freely associated Americans can continue to hew to a traditional ideal of sexual morality without penalty is going to be an issue. Most churches hew to a traditional ideal of sexual morality, as do most synagogues, and even the more moderate mosques are downright strict about it, which will raise all sorts of interesting multi-cultural issues for the sorts of people who concern themselves with such things, and many of the unchurched and apolitical are also reluctant to embrace the newly fashionable attitudes, so we expect it’s going to be quite an issue. There’s already a broader of issue about religious freedom, which includes another case awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision about Obamacare’s requirement that nuns purchase contraceptive coverage as part of their health care plans, and the debate about whether businesses should be compelled to participate in same-sex marriages, and elite opinion’s general disdain for Judeo-Christian western civilization, and a Solicitor General has made clear that there’s more coming.

Obama promised to "fundamentally transform" America.   You were warned.  Some promises he kept.

An Interesting Summary of the FDR Supreme Court Rulings and the Re-ordering of America

This series of cases set the stage for an entirely new American governance that has little to do with the system the founders established. It was a revolution as profound as that of 1776, only no one sets off fireworks to commemorate the occasion.

Read the whole thing.