A Wonderful Choice

One America News is reporting today that President Trump has nominated 48-year-old Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court. If she is confirmed, she will be the youngest justice on the court.

The article reports:

“Today it is my honor to nominate one of our nation’s most brilliant and gifted legal minds to the Supreme Court,” he (President Trump) said. “She is a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution.”

Judge Barrett thanked the President and his administration for their kindness and the honor of being nominated.

“If the Senate does me the honor of confirming me, I pledge to discharge the responsibilities of this job to the very best of my ability,” she stated. “I love the United States, and I love the United States Constitution.”

If she is appointed to the Supreme Court, she noted she will “be mindful of who came before me.”

“I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the Supreme Court,” added Barrett.

I hope that she will be more mindful of Justice Antonin Scalia than of Justice Ginsburg.

The article notes some highlights of Judge Barrett’s career:

Judge Barrett’s legal career began when she graduated from Notre Dame Law School in 1997.

She went on to clerk for late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, where she earned a reputation among her associates for “destroying flimsy legal arguments.”

Barrett then went on to practice and teach law in Indiana for the next 15 years.

The nominee has been a federal judge at an appellate court in Chicago for the past three years, where her reputation as a conservative has grown. The Catholic judge has become a well-known, staunch opponent of abortion.

She has hinted she would want to leave the basic right of abortion in place, but also allow states to make some abortions difficult to acquire.

“I don’t think the core case that women have a right to an abortion will change, but I think the question of whether people can get very late term abortions, how many restrictions can be put on clinics, will change,” she said.

Also prominent in Barrett’s list of policies was her stance on healthcare. In 2017, she denounced Justice John Robert’s decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act. Experts have predicted she will pose a threat to Obamacare moving forward.

Regarding guns, Judge Barrett previously struck down a federal law that barred felons from owning guns. She is expected to be a firm advocate for the Second Amendment.

Hopefully we can have a civilized confirmation process. The Democrats didn’t do themselves any favors in the way they treated the confirmation hearings of Justice Kavanaugh, and they lost Congressional seats because of it. Hopefully they will be more courteous and more inclined to follow a more reasonable confirmation process this time.

The Basis Of The Argument

The Democrats have become somewhat unglued at the prospect of President Trump nominating someone to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg before the November election. They have said that if they win the Senate, they will add justices to the Supreme Court to blunt the influence of President Trump’s appointees and that they will end the filibuster (which allows the minority in the Senate to have some degree of power). It is becoming obvious that they have no intention of ‘playing well with others.’ Considering how they have handled some nominations in the past (Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, to name a few), we can expect a true ‘scorched earth’ policy when someone is nominated. They are very upset at the prospect of the President naming a Justice during an election year. But they were also upset when the Senate refused to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland. Mitch McConnell cited the ‘Biden Rule’ as the reason the nomination was not considered. So what is the Biden rule?

In a speech given on June 25, 1992, Joe Biden, who was then Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee stated:

Given the unusual rancor that prevailed in the Thomas nomination, the need for some serious reevaluation of the nomination and confirmation process and the overall level of bitterness that sadly infects our political system and this Presidential campaign already, it is my view that the prospects for anything but conflagration with respect to a Supreme Court nomination this year are remote at best.

Of Presidents Reagan’s and Bush’s last seven selections of the Court, two were not confirmed and two more were approved with the most votes cast against them in the history of the United States of America.

We have seen how, Mr. President, in my view, politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date. One can only imagine that role becoming overarching if a choice were made this year, assuming a Justice announced tomorrow that he or she was stepping down.

Should a Justice resign this summer and the President move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all. Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the President, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.

Mr. President, where the Nation should be treated to a consideration of constitutional philosophy, all it will get in such circumstances is partisan bickering and political posturing from both parties and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. As a result, it is my view that if a Supreme Court Justice resigns tomorrow, or within the next several weeks, or resigns at the end of the summer, President Bush should consider following the practice of a majority of his predecessors and not–and not–name a nominee until after the November election is completed.

In 2016, the Democrats said there was no ‘Biden rule.’ Now there is a ‘Biden rule.’ So which is it? Either you believe that the Merrick Garland nomination was handled properly and the rule should be followed or you don’t. This is a glaring example of why Americans do not trust politicians to do the right thing.

There was a valid argument in 2016. The President was a lame duck, and the Senate was controlled by the opposing party. If the President were a Republican and the Senate controlled by the Democrats, would the Democrats have acted any differently than the Republicans? I believe that is the real question here.

 

Some Thoughts On Our Religious Liberty

Yesterday Andrew McCarthy posted an article at The National Review about a recent Supreme Court decision. The title of the article is, “It wasn’t just religious liberty that Chief Justice Roberts strangled.” The article is detailed and complex, so I suggest that you follow the link to read the entire article. However, there are a few things I want to point out that I think are very significant.

The article notes:

Most startling was that Chief Justice John Roberts not only joined the court’s four left-leaning justices (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan) in declining to uphold religious liberty. Roberts also wrote a brief opinion explaining his decision. 

That opinion is an eye-opener. Roberts accords the right to worship no deference by virtue of its being a fundamental liberty expressly protected by the First Amendment. We are to see it as an activity like any other activity, commercial or social, the pros and cons of which technocrats must weigh in fashioning regulations. The opinion, moreover, champions the power of government officials to dictate to the people who elect them without “second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary” — exactly the power that the Bill of Rights, and the incorporation jurisprudence by which the court has applied much of it to the states, are meant to deny.

The article also points out:

In rejecting the religious liberty claim, Roberts counters that it is not a matter of unlawful discrimination if different things are regulated in different ways. Religious gatherings, he rationalized, are being restricted like gatherings that are physically similar, such as lectures, concerts, theater productions and spectator sports. He conceded that less intense restrictions have been imposed on other activities, such as shopping, banking and laundering. But that, he insists, is because of salient differences in the way they are conducted: small groups, no extended proximity, and so on.

But wait a second. What about the constitutional pedigree of religious exercise? That was the point pressed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a brief dissent joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. (Justice Samuel Alito also opposed the denial of First Amendment relief but did not join Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion.)

The article concludes:

There is no recognition, in Roberts’ rendering, that there is another side to this equation — a side where 400 times the number of people who’ve died have lost their jobs, millions of them facing ruin. The stubborn message: Don’t expect the court to help you, you’re the ones who elected these people; if you don’t like what they do, un-elect them. If you’ve elected social engineers who say the Bill of Rights is above their pay grade, that’s your problem.

The justices are happy to order that abortion must be available, to decide which couples (or perhaps throuples) must be permitted to marry, and to dictate what’s ever next in the ceaseless march of progressive, organic “liberty.” But as for the liberties that are actually in the Constitution, we are on our own.

Unfortunately Justice Roberts has been something of a disappointment to those of us who expected him to be a responsible judge who would uphold the Constitution. He has wandered away from the constitutional role of the judiciary more than once.

Better Late Than Never

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon reported on a Supreme Court ruling that happened on Tuesday.

The article reports:

The court ruled Tuesday that Obama appointee Lafe Solomon illegally served as acting general counsel to the National Labor Relations Board from 2010 to 2013. Solomon, who once violated the agency’s ethics rules, should have vacated the position in accordance with the Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 (FVRA) after the Senate refused to take up his nomination to serve as permanent general counsel in 2011, the court found in a 6-2 opinion authored by Chief Justice John Roberts. The appointment was an “end-run around” the Constitution.

“We cannot cast aside the separation of powers and the Appointments Clause‘s important check on executive power for the sake of administrative convenience or efficiency,” the majority ruled.

The case came to the court after the NLRB filed unfair labor practice charges against an Arizona-based ambulance service, Southwest General, following union complaints.

David Phippen, a management-side labor attorney at the firm Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete, said the decision clarifies the meaning of the FVRA.

“The case is a reminder that the language of the FVRA statute means what it says and must be followed, not ignored by Presidents, as appeared to be the case here,” Phippen said in an email. “The decision … appears to make it somewhat more difficult for Presidents to put ‘her or his people’ into important agency positions unilaterally, i.e.,  without approval of the Senate.”

The article notes that Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were the only Justices who dissented from the majority vote.

On another note, the media spin on this story is very interesting. While The Washington Free Beacon focused on the case and the fact that the actions of President Obama were unconstitutional, Yahoo News posted the following headline about the story:

Supreme Court restricts Donald Trump’s power to fill temporary government posts

This case had nothing to do with Donald Trump, although it will prevent him from ignoring the Constitution, as President Obama did.

This Man Is Not A Moderate

On Friday, Life News posted some information on Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Obviously their issue is abortion, but the article sheds some light on the broader issue of religious freedom.

The article reports:

Garland joined in a unanimous decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in November 2014, which concluded last year that the HHS mandate doesn’t abrogate the religious freedoms of Priests for Life or 11 other religious groups that also challenged the mandate.

Priests for Life was one of the earliest organizations to file a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its HHS mandate. The mandate compels religious groups to pay for birth control drugs and drugs like ella that can cause very early abortions. But Garland’s court ruled against the pro-life groups.

The court case and  others like it are part of a move to keep the practice of religion inside the walls of the church and take away the influence of religion in everyday life. Although the Constitution makes clear that the state has no authority to set up a national religion, our Constitution assumes that we will be government by a God-fearing moral people and protects the right of Americans to practice their religion. John Adams stated, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Religion does belong in the public square–not as a denomination–but as the foundation of our values. Our legal system is based on a Judeo-Christian ethic, and is not designed to work for an amoral people. Unfortunately the political left in America is attempting to move us away from traditional morality to a place our government was not designed to go. Political correctness is one way the left is attempting to overcome America’s religious roots, and using a very loose definition of ‘hate speech’ is another way.

The article further reports:

Writing for the 5-4 majority, Justice Samuel Alito handed down the decision for the high court, saying, “The Supreme Court holds government can’t require closely held corporations with religious owners to provide contraception coverage.”

The court ruled that the contraception mandate violated the Religious Freedom and Restoration Act, a 1993 law and it held that the mandate “substantially burdens the exercise of religion” and that HHS didn’t use the “least restrictive means” to promote this government interest, tests required by RFRA.

Chief Justice John Roberts, Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy joined in the majority decision. Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Garland’s decision would put him squarely against the then-majority of the Supreme Court and would have someone who oppose religious liberty for pro-life groups replace a champion of it in Justice Scalia.

…Garland has praised the author of Roe v. Wade and said his court paper are “the greatest gift to the country.” And information has surfaced showing that his former clerks have gone on to serve liberal judges by a 3-1 margin.

Unfortunately, if Hillary Clinton is elected President, chances are that her nominee for the Supreme Court will be even further to the left. Meanwhile, we all need to remember and follow the Biden Rule.

Keeping Election Integrity

In the last state legislative session, North Carolina changed its voting laws to ensure the integrity of its elections. Photo ID will be required in 2016, there will be no more same day registration, and voters will be required to vote in their own precincts.

The reasoning behind these changes was simple. Voter ID prevents a voter from being disenfranchised by someone who casts an illegal vote. Same day registration does not provide a way to check to make sure someone actually lives at the address they state. As I recently reported, a friend of mine who lives in North Carolina checked the voter registration rolls a few weeks ago and found out that there were six people who claimed her house as a residence, but did not live there. That is potentially six illegal votes cancelling out the votes of legal voters. Requiring people to vote in their own precinct ensures that they receive the appropriate ballot. Precinct ballots vary according to local offices being filled, obviously, voters need to vote for their local officials–not someone else’s. The idea behind the new law was to secure the right of voters to an honest election.

Unfortunately, some of that law was recently struck down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. According to the U. S. Supreme Court blog, the Fourth Circuit judges felt that the new laws would limit the black vote. I guess I’m a little dense, but it seems to me that if it actually limited anyone’s ability to vote (which it doesn’t), it would limit everyone’s ability to vote. Registering to vote is easy–it can be done five days a week at the Board of Elections or when you get your license. Advance registration gives the Board of Elections time to confirm your address. Voting in your precinct should not be a problem as your precinct is determined by where you live–therefore the voting place should be relatively close to your home.

Well, now the U. S. Supreme Court is involved.

The article reports:

The Supreme Court, with two Justices noting dissents, on Wednesday afternoon allowed North Carolina to bar voters from registering and casting their ballots on the same day, and to refuse to count votes that were cast in the wrong polling places.  Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.  The majority did not explain its action.

The order gives the state time to file an appeal from lower-court rulings striking down those two provisions, which were part of a larger, sweeping change in voting rights in the state.  If the Court grants review of the state’s appeal, the postponement will remain in effect until there is a decision.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for herself and Justice Sotomayor, argued that the two restrictions at issue as well as others in the broader reach of the new law probably would have been found illegal, if the Voting Rights Act of 1965 remained in full effect and North Carolina had had to ask permission from the federal government to make those changes.  The Court last year limited the 1965 Act in a way that the dissenters said “effectively nullified” the law’s pre-clearance requirement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit found that the two provisions permitted by Wednesday’s Supreme Court order would risk a significant reduction in voting opportunities for black voters in North Carolina, in violation of a part of the Voting Rights Act still intact.

Ensuring the integrity of the vote does not disenfranchise anyone–in fact, it ensures that legal voters will not be disenfranchised by illegal voters.

 

Is This What We Had In Mind?

Abortion has been legal in America since 1973. For those Americans under forty, it was an established fact of life before they were born. Abortion is one of the most financially lucrative industries in the United States because of the lack of regulation (something that is changing in many states) and because the government subsidizes Planned Parenthood,  one of the largest providers of abortions. So what is abortion about?

On Wednesday, National Review posted an article titled, “We Only Whisper It.” The article deals with some recent statements by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a recent interview.

The article reports:

Speaking about such modest restrictions on abortion as have been enacted over the past several years, Justice Ginsburg lamented that “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women.” Then she added: “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”

…In an earlier interview, she described the Roe v. Wade decision as being intended to control population growth, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” She was correct in her assessment of Roe; the co-counsel in that case, Ron Weddington, would later advise President Bill Clinton: “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” by making abortifacients cheap and universally available. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.”

I thought America was the land of opportunity–not the land of killing children because they were born into poor households. Some of our greatest leaders were born into poverty. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas grew up in poverty and now sits on the bench with Ms. Ginsburg.

The article points out a basic philosophical difference between those who encourage abortion and those who oppose it:

There are two ways to account for humans beings: as assets, or as liabilities. For those who see the world the way Justice Ginsburg does — which is also the way Barack Obama does, along with most of his party — human beings are a liability. That is why they fundamentally misunderstand challenges such as employment; if you see people as a liability, then you see labor in terms of “creating jobs,” i.e. neutralizing that liability with a check every two weeks. It does not matter whether that labor produces anything valuable; if the liability is being met with a sufficient paycheck, problem solved. It should go without saying that Barack Obama et al. do not see themselves as liabilities. They see themselves as assets, which is how left-wing activists and Democratic functionaries justify their own enormous paychecks.

And they don’t see their own children as liabilities, either — just your kids, loser.

The alternative is to view human beings as having inherent value. In economics, that means thinking of every worker as having something potentially valuable to contribute. In broader terms, that means thinking of every person as a full member of the human family, no matter if they are healthy or sick, running marathons or profoundly disabled, Bill Gates rich or Bangladesh poor.

We need to elect leaders who value human beings. It is frightening to think that a Supreme Court Justice feels that babies born into poverty have less value than babies born into wealth. That is the kind of thinking that leads to genocide.

It’s Not Really About Safety–It’s About Money

The Democrats have claimed that they want to make abortion safe and rare, but when it comes to supporting laws that make the procedure safer for women, they protest. The recent changes to abortion law in Texas are a good example of this.

Today the Daily Caller is reporting that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overturned a lower court‘s decision that the changes in abortion laws in Texas were unconstitutional.

The article reports:

The higher court’s opinion upheld the requirements that a lower court deemed unconstitutional — specifically the mandate that abortionists have admitting privileges in nearby hospitals and that the administration of abortion-inducing drugs comply with Food and Drug Administration protocols.

The ruling had one caveat, that the requirements may not be enforced against abortionists who already applied for admitting privileges but are still waiting to be accepted by hospitals.

There is a risk in any medical procedure, including abortion. What the new law does is put provisions in place to help ensure a woman’s safety if something goes wrong during an abortion. There is no reason that Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups should fight this as they have been claiming for years that their desire is to make abortions safe.

Abortion is about money, as the chart below from the Life Issues Institute illustrates (PPFA stands for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America):

planned parenthood profitUnfortunately, killing babies is big business.

 

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The First Qualification To Hold Office In America Ought To Be A Respect And Love For America

The Daily Caller reported today that Supreme CourtJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated in a television interview that when the people of Egypt write their constitution they should not look to the U. S. Constitution as an inspiration. She stated that the U. S. Constitution is too old and that there are more recent constitutions to use as examples.

The article reports:

Ginsburg, appointed to the Supreme Court by former President Bill Clinton, said South Africa’s constitution is “a great piece of work that was done” and cited other documents outside America’s constitution that Egyptians should read.

“Much more recent than the U.S. Constitution, Canada has a Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” Ginsburg said. “It dates from 1982. You would almost certainly look at the European Convention on Human Rights.”

Might I point out a few flaws in her logic. Under the European Convention on Human Rights, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff was sentenced to prison for stating an inconvenient truth about the founder of Islam (see rightwinggranny). In Canada, Mark Steyn was put on trial for stating something true about Islam in a publication. In both cases, the facts these people were citing were true–that was not the issue–the issue was that they were charged with hate speech for telling the truth. In America, we can still speak the truth without fear of arrest. What part of free speech does Justice Ginsburg not understand?

 

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