The conquest of America 157

All those who with their votes or their assistance in the ballot-cheating got the Democrats into power, are guilty of destroying the America that was free, prosperous, ruled by law, and protected by a well-trained well-equipped military.

Now we are not only poorer, but impeded in all we do. Travel? You may need certification. Learn? Only approved topics and authorized dogma. Start a business? Get a license.

Every institution on which we used to be able to rely, has been corrupted, weakened, or destroyed.

The presidency was captured by fraud. A duly elected Republican president was twice impeached for no offense, no crime, while the offenses or crimes he was accused of were openly and brazenly committed by his accusers, including the fraudulent official who succeeded him by crookery.

We can no longer rely on the rule of law. Real insurrectionists who torched city centers, looted, murdered, threatened governmental authority, go unpunished, while people who walked into the Capitol and out again a few minutes later are imprisoned without trial for a year, ill-treated, and finally threatened with long prison sentences if they don’t confess to criminal acts they never performed – which will send them to prison anyway. The initiators of the “Russia-collusion” hoax – Hillary Clinton and her political lieutenants – have not been called to account. Applicants for legal immigration are kept waiting for years, while illegal aliens pour over the border unimpeded and are immediately given housing, schooling, health care, and even voting rights.

The House of Representatives is the staff quarters of a vindictive old woman. The Senate can be toyed with by a moronic vice-president.

The Supreme Court  is under threat of extinction. The junta in power wants to turn it into a rubber-stamping bureau that will support one party rule forever. 

Victor Davis Hanson writes at the Daily Signal:

Court-packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.

The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.

Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause celebre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority.

Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states was leaked to the media by someone inside the court.

That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it was met with stunning approval from the American left.

The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two justices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progressive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm elections.

The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault on the court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats have gone ballistic ever since former President George W. Bush’s and especially former President Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a conservative majority.

During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, protesters stormed the Senate chambers in protest. …

Later in spring 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whipped up a protest crowd right in front of the Supreme Court. He directly threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh:

I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

What exactly did Schumer mean by “you will pay the price” or “you won’t know what hit you”?

Who or what would hit the two justices—and how exactly?

But it is not just the court the left is targeting. Long-standing institutions and even constitutional directives are now fair game.

At the 2020 funeral of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., former President Barack Obama crudely proposed bringing in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., as states—and with them likely four left-wing senators.

Obama’s “eulogy” also damned the 180-year-old Senate filibuster. Yet as a senator, Obama himself resorted to the filibuster in an effort to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

The Electoral College is under continued assault, especially since Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 were elected without winning the popular vote.

The Founders’ arguments for the Electoral College are never mentioned. But the drafters of the Constitution felt it forced candidates to visit rural areas. They believed it would discourage European-style multiple splinter parties. It made voter fraud more difficult on a national scale. And it emphasized the United States of America. That is, America today is 50 unique states that are represented as such in presidential elections.

The Biden administration also narrowly failed to push through a national voting law. Such legislation would have superseded the states’ constitutional rights to set most of their own balloting protocols in national elections.

So what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College? …

And how can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas openly negate federal immigration law? How can he welcome millions to cross illegally the southern border?

The answers are obvious.

The hard left had detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51% public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.

Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.

Has any institution not been deliberately spoiled? Is any activity, if not yet prohibited, left free of government regulation?

The banking system has become so byzantine that quite simple transactions, such as sending a payment abroad, takes days or even weeks to complete.

The schools and universities have been changed into indoctrination seminaries.

The mainstream media are as meekly submissive to the junta as a silly woman to a domineering husband.

The police are defunded, demoralized, weakened, disarmed, reduced in number, abused –  even murdered with impunity.

As for the army …These quotations are  from How Obama and Biden Destroyed the Greatest Military the World Has Ever Seen by Daniel Greenfield.*

Under Biden [“Biden” being the name of the president and so of the administration, though the man himself is senile and does not make the decisions propagated in his name], genocide and terrorism have become cultural norms that we are bound to accept.  (p.4)

China might beat us in the hypersonic weapons race, but America’s top military brass were determined to pull out all the stops to make sure they had the most diverse arrangement of incompetent radicals, preferably in senior leadership positions, to establish their progressive credentials. (p.10)

Obama didn’t just leave the military smaller in size, but smaller in spirit, its leadership class no longer dedicated to national security, but to the identity political agendas of the radical Left. (p.11)

Obama remade the military just as he remade the nation, from a team based on individual worth into a broken system divided by the intractable gulfs of oppressors and the oppressed. No military organization can function that way and no nation can survive that way.  (pp. 11, 12)

Long before the Taliban entered Kabul, the moral struggle had already been lost in Washington D.C. While the Taliban were carving up Afghanistan, the nation’s military leaders were busy implementing racial quotas, imposing implicit bias training, and teaching military personnel to hate their country through critical race theory. (pp.12,13)

There has been no accountability for the political leaders and military brass who wrecked the military. And none for those who were responsible for our defeat in Afghanistan. Patriots are being driven out while the disloyal leaders responsible for purging them and enabling the Taliban remain in charge. (p.62)

All that at a time when the US is faced with a more dangerous threat of attack than the nation has ever had to confront before.

Quotations from an article  by Judith Bergman at Gatestone:

China is putting up satellites at twice the rate of the United States and fielding operational systems at an incredible rate.

Look at what they [CCP) have today…. We’re witnessing one of the largest shifts in global geostrategic power that the world has witnessed.

The Chinese are building up their military capabilities in space, cyberspace, and in the conventional force. It’s all happening at the same time.

There is now as well the added probability of China and Russia engaging in military coordination…. a strategic partnership of “no limits” and with “no forbidden areas” in an agreement that they said was aimed at countering the influence of the United States.

Meanwhile, the Left has already captured and destroyed the free republic of America. It no longer influences the world for the better. It is ripe and ready for Chinese Communist conquest. 

Can the free republic be resurrected? Can America be saved?

 

 

*Published by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, PO Box 55089, Sherman Oaks, CA 91499-1964

Supremely disappointing 10

When President Trump succeeded, after bitter struggles, in establishing a majority of conservatives in the Supreme Court, his voters felt enormously relieved. They and he trusted that now the country would be protected from the worst the revolutionary globalist Democrats could do to destroy the free Republic.

But as it turns out, they were mistaken. With the shining exception of Clarence Thomas, the George W. Bush appointee who has proved to be staunchly conservative (supported to some extent by Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito), the justices chose to let the free Republic go.

Margot Cleveland writes at The Federalist:

On Feb. 22, the Supreme Court refused to hear two 2020 election-related appeals, falling one vote short of the four needed for the high court to agree to hear the case. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the denial of certiorari, as did Justice Samuel Alito in a separate dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

With Joe Biden now a month into his office as president of the United States, Americans may shrug at the court’s decision, but we shouldn’t: the Supreme Court’s abdication of its authority to answer important constitutional questions only encourages further lawlessness by state election officials and courts, undermines voter confidence, and threatens even more chaotic federal elections.

The two cases the Supreme Court rejected on Monday both involved the 2020 election in Pennsylvania and the constitutionality of a state court decision overriding an unambiguous deadline the Pennsylvania legislature established for the receipt of mail-in ballots by 8 p.m. on election night. As Justice Thomas explained in his dissent, “Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a post mark—that the ballots were mailed by election day.”

The Republican Party of Pennsylvania and several members of the Pennsylvania House and Senate attempted to challenge the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision in the U.S. Supreme Court before the election, but, at the time, the justices refused to expedite the case, leaving the petitions for review to proceed under the normal briefing schedule. But following briefing, the court denied the petition on Feb. 22.

Thomas dissented from the court’s denial of the petition for certiorari, calling the court’s refusal to hear the case “inexplicable”. In his dissent, Thomas explained both the problem with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision and why it was imperative for the U.S. Supreme Court to enter the fray.

“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘manner’ of federal elections,” Thomas opened his dissent, citing Article I, § 4 clause 1 and Article II, § 1 of the national Constitution. “Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead,” the originalist jurist continued.

Whether such nonlegislative actions violate the Electors Clause of the Constitution, as Article I, § 4 clause 1, has become to be known, or Article II, § 1, which governs the selection of the president, is the essence of the exercise of self-government, Justice Thomas wrote, because “elections are ‘of the most fundamental significance under our constitutional structure’.”

Elections, however, “enable self-governance only when they include processes that ‘give citizens (including the losing candidates and their supporters) confidence in the fairness of the election,” the dissent continued. “Unclear rules threaten to undermine the system. They sow confusion and ultimately dampen confidence in the integrity and fairness of elections.” … The Supreme Court should make clear “whether state officials have the authority they have claimed” [and]  “if not,” then the Supreme Court should “put an end to this practice now before the consequences become catastrophic”, Justice Thomas wrote.

Yet the Supreme Court refused to hear the case. But why? Both constitutional and prudential principles weigh in favor of granting certiorari.

Constitutionally, while federal courts only have the power to hear a “case or controversy,” meaning the Supreme Court lacks jurisdiction to hear “moot” cases, here there is a well-established exception to the mootness doctrine: the capable-of-repetition-but-evading-review exception.

This exception to the mootness doctrine provides that federal courts hold authority to resolve cases where “the challenged action is in its duration too short to be fully litigated prior to cessation or expiration” and where “there is a reasonable expectation that the same complaining party will be subject to the same action again.”

Both criteria exist here, Justice Thomas wrote, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision came a mere six weeks before the election, and the petitioners in the cases—the state Republican party and state legislators—are likely to “again confront nonlegislative officials altering election rules”.

In his separate dissent, Justice Alito also concluded that certiorari should be granted because the cases “present an important and recurring constitutional question.” His dissent, joined by Justice Gorsuch, focused mainly on the mootness question.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision was so broad, Alito wrote, that the questions presented to the U.S. Supreme Court are “surely capable of repetition in future elections”.  “That decision,” Alito explained, “held that a state constitutional provision guaranteeing ‘free and equal’ elections gives the Pennsylvania courts the authority to override even very specific and unambiguous rules adopted by the legislature for the conduct of federal elections.”

“Indeed, it would be surprising if parties who are unhappy with the legislature’s rules,” Justice Alito continued, “do not invoke this decision and ask state courts to substitute rules they find more advantageous.”

Not only were the cases not moot, but as the dissents both made clear, the cases both “call out for review”, as Justice Alito put it. The cases present “an important and recurring constitutional question” [one that has] “divided the lower courts”. … Further, as Justice Thomas stressed, “postelection litigation is truncated by firm timeliness,” which “imposes especially daunting constraints when combined with the expanded use of mail-in ballots.”

Thomas’s dissent highlighted another significant reason for review. “Because fraud is more prevalent with mail-in ballots,” Justice Thomas wrote, “increased use of those ballots raises the likelihood that courts will be asked to adjudicate questions that go to the heart of election confidence.”

Here Justice Thomas wisely noted in his dissent that “settling rules well in advance of an election rather than relying on postelection litigation ensures that courts are not put in [the] untenable position of either potentially disenfranchising a subset of voters or ignoring the rules the legislature believes necessary to ensure election integrity”.

Yet the Supreme Court denied review.

Maybe the six justices who voted against certiorari believe the country will be better off without re-litigating the election. The denial, however, will not heal a country that witnessed state officials and courts changing the rules mid-vote—not just in Pennsylvania, but in Wisconsin and Michigan too. Then her citizens saw the Supreme Court seemingly ignore those violations of the Electors Clause when Texas sought relief in the Supreme Court.

Worse yet will be the damage done to our republic when the bending and breaking of election laws repeats in the future.

For now, as Justice Thomas concluded, by doing nothing, the Supreme Court invites erosion of voter confidence.

We citizens deserve better and expect more.”

It is one of the worst of our – the citizens’ – disappointments.

Considering that, in the perception of half the voters, constitutional law had been broken, and considering what was at stake – nothing less than the free Republic itself – and how confidently we had looked to the Supreme Court as the most dependable and incorruptible of the Constitution’s protectors, its refusal to do what was to us clearly right was worse than a shocking and painful blow, it was crushing.

And it is hard to believe that the refusal was for reasons of constitutional law and not political choice.

Triumph and disappointment 57

President Trump is strong, but the Big State is stronger.

Bruce Bawer finds consolation in historical precedents for the political disaster happening now. They are interesting, but we omit them from our quotation of his article at Front Page, being concerned for the moment only with the great disappointment he describes:

This year’s apparently successful election fraud … was not a stand-alone event but the culmination of several years of Democratic chicanery, beginning with the effort to destroy Trump’s campaign and continuing with the attempt to bring down his presidency. During these years, one public figure after another was held up to us as a hero and then shown to be yet another Big State sewer rat. …

Remember being assured by people you trusted that Bill Barr and John Durham would get to the bottom of the Russia hoax? The other day, when Texas AG Ken Paxton took his election-fraud case against four other states to the Supreme Court, were you among those who expected the three Trump appointees to join Alito and Thomas in stopping the steal?

Yes, the Trump administration has yielded one triumph after another. But living through it has also meant experiencing one crushing disappointment after another. It’s been hard not to feel that the swamp was too deep even for Trump to drain, and that, by dreaming otherwise, we were being hopelessly naïve.

For heaven’s sake, not only did Barr, after promising to deliver a long-overdue reckoning, drag his heels on the Russia probe; it now turns out that during the entire campaign season he’s known about investigations into the Biden clan that, if made public, would almost certainly have reduced voter support for Joe to a point that would’ve made the election steal impossible.

We feel duped. Deflated. Stunned in 2016 by Trump’s victory, we’re even more stunned in 2020 to see victory snatched from our president and handed to a senile, China-owned mediocrity.

We now face the prospect of an inauguration at which Joe and Hunter, Bill and Hill, Barack and Michelle – all of whom should be in prison – will be celebrating their joint triumph over Trump.

We shouldn’t let this election steal … make us feel that a golden age of morality has given way … to an era of perfidy and lies. Nor should we feel disappointed in Trump if he fails to overcome the election steal. He’s accomplished a remarkable amount, but expecting the superhuman from him is neither fair to him nor good for us. …

Our country’s Founders … in their wisdom, sought to fashion a government that would, in the face of our species’ moral frailty, stand a chance not only of enduring in the long term but also of making possible, from one generation to the next, the survival of liberty.

But the preservation of that liberty depends on us. “Freedom,” Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed, “is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Indeed. At this admittedly strange and disturbing historical moment, it’s important for all Americans of good faith to rise above any self-pitying or (heaven forfend) nihilistic sense of lost innocence that we might feel, to embrace with hope and heart our role as the Constitution’s current custodians, and – for the sake of our progenitors and our posterity – recommit ourselves to our obligation to right our beloved ship of State when she’s been buffeted, or worse, by the waves of malfeasance and mendacity.

Stirring stuff. But a gang of crooks has been wangled into power by the Big State in order to discard the Constitution and replace it with a Great Reset, a new world order, an agenda that renders our Constitutionally recognized rights no longer “unalienable”.

They will if they can scuttle the ship of State. Destroy America.

What will, what can, heart and hope do to save it?