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Justice Department Rejects SCOTUS Transgender Rule

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President Donald Trump’s justice department is defending women’s sports from an Idaho lawsuit by transgender activists — and from the Supreme Court’s new pro-transgender rule.

“Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes,” said a statement from Attorney General William P. Barr.

The Idaho lawsuit was filed by transgender activists and progressive groups after the Idaho legislature passed a law barring biological males from female sports, titled the Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.

That June 19 announcement comes four days after the five judges on the Supreme Court — including GOP nominee Neil Gorsuch — suddenly added the transgender claim to the 1964 law barring discrimination against women or men. The court insisted that a person’s rights are violated whenever they would be welcomed “but for” their sex, and is allowing lower courts to apply that open-ended rule in many areas of culture, such as schools, changing rooms, and sports. . .

The transgender fight is one part of the campaign by progressives to rewrite American culture. (Read more from “Justice Department Rejects SCOTUS Transgender Rule” HERE)

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Conservatives Get Massacred by Fake ‘Conservative’ SCOTUS

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Within 35 minutes today at 10 a.m. Eastern, what some thought was the most conservative Supreme Court of all time concocted a fundamental right to transgenderism in the context of labor law, erased the Second Amendment, and interfered with a state death penalty case, but declined to interfere with a California law that criminalizes law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration agents.

Taken in totality, the “conservative” legal movement, which has promoted the idea of “appointing better judges” rather than fighting the entire concept of judicial supremacism, has failed miserably. This was its Waterloo.

Here is a brief summary of four very important decisions and orders issued by the court today:

The justices denied certiorari to gun rights groups in 10 gun cases where states have denied citizens the right to carry arms under any circumstance. Justice Thomas dissented in the denial of cert in the New Jersey right to carry case and was joined by Justice Kavanagh. It takes four justices to agree to hear a case, and it’s not clear which of the others would also have agreed but didn’t sign on to the dissent. Despite the plain meaning of the Constitution, 10 years after Heller, and with circuit splits, the court refuses to act.

In U.S. v. California et al., the Supreme Court denied the petition from the Department of Justice to overturn a Ninth Circuit ruling upholding California’s sanctuary law. California prohibits local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration agents. Only Thomas and Alito would have granted the appeal.

In what has become a growing trend of SCOTUS interference with the few remaining capital punishment cases, the justices remanded a Texas capital case because they believe the accused did not have sufficient counsel. Alito dissented, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.

In a 6-3 opinion written by Justice Gorsuch, the court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Right act, which passed in 1964 before anyone could fathom transgenderism, applies to transgenderism and sexual orientation.

Taken together, these decisions show the court believes there is an inalienable right to transgenderism and illegal immigration but not to the Second Amendment. The court believes it can tamper with every state criminal and capital conviction on ever-evolving novel grounds, but it somehow believes a state can criminalize foundational federal immigration powers. A world upside down, and we only have one consistent originalist on the court in Clarence Thomas, with Justice Alito a step or two behind him.

By far, the most devastatingly consequential case of the day was the transgender “discrimination” case – Bostock v. Clayton County. Writing for the majority, Gorsuch claims that when the statute uses the term “sex,” it can apply to sexual orientation and gender identity. “An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender violates Title VII” of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, concluded Gorsuch. He was joined by the four Democrat appointees, as well as Chief Justice Roberts.

Well, it’s good to know that gender and sex are indeed not separate things, as the rainbow jihad lobby has indicated for so many years! But either way this ruling is absurd beyond belief.

Here is the relevant paragraph from Justice Alito’s dissent, joined by Thomas:

The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous. Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of “sex” is different from discrimination because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity.” And in any event, our duty is to interpret statutory terms to “mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time they were written.” A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 16 (2012) (emphasis added). If every single living American had been surveyed in 1964, it would have been hard to find any who thought that discrimination because of sex meant discrimination because of sexual orientation–not to mention gender identity, a concept that was essentially unknown at the time.

The Court attempts to pass off its decision as the inevitable product of the textualist school of statutory interpretation championed by our late colleague Justice Scalia, but no one should be fooled. The Court’s opinion is like a pirate ship. It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Justice Scalia excoriated––the theory that courts should “update” old statutes so that they better reflect the current values of society.

It’s not even worth debating the insane illegality behind retroactively adding novel concepts to a 1964 bill, novel concepts that would have repulsed every single member who voted for that act, including black civil rights leaders. But there are also serious policy repercussions.

Supreme Court decisions dressed up as legislation are like meat cleavers as compared to real legislation. Most people nowadays don’t desire to fire someone simply because of their sexual activities at home. What this opinion, without any legislative compromise or nuance, will accomplish is to make it impossible to fire anyone for any reason who identifies as any of these new protected classes, who now have super-rights.

To begin with, title VII was very controversial at the time. It is simply unconstitutional to regulate polite behavior on the part of employers. They have the constitutional right to hire and fire whomever they want. They have the right to their property, and nobody else has a right to someone else’s property. However, it was legitimately justified because our country discriminated against black people for so long and used the boot of the state to deny them real rights, including their own property. The problem is that it has subjected employers to a nightmare of litigation to fire a black worker who happens to be underperforming. But to now add transgenderism and homosexuality to the mix is ludicrous.

What if someone comes into work cross-dressing and is extremely disruptive? What if someone is just simply a lousy worker? What about religious liberty? Does the First Amendment not mean anything? Does a Catholic school now have to hire a cross-dresser? What about demanding that doctors perform castration operations? What about allowing men who think they are women into female sports? This is yet another example of the courts creating a super-right that infringes upon a real right.

Then again, ignoring foundational rights while creating super-rights is exactly what the Supreme Court has been doing for decades. “Conservative” justices taking part are merely the icing on the cake. (For more from the author of “Conservatives Get Massacred by Fake ‘Conservative’ SCOTUS” please click HERE)

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Judge Puts Injunction on Border Wall – When SCOTUS Already Ruled There’s No Standing

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Can I get standing to sue our policy of disarming soldiers on military bases because it embarrasses our image as Americans and makes us look weak in the eyes of the world? Well, if Trump legitimizes a district judge’s opinion granting a city government standing to sue the construction of border wall because of “reputation” issues, then there is quite literally no political question a court can’t decide, on any standing or none.

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge David Briones of El Paso, a Clinton appointee, ruled that Trump has no authority to reprogram $3.6 billion in military construction projects for border wall construction as part of his emergency declaration powers. The Department of Homeland Security was slated to use those funds to construct 175 miles of border wall in several border states.

Let’s put aside the fact that 10 U.S.C. § 2808 allows the president to reprogram defense funding for construction of barriers if he declares a national emergency, which he did last February. Even if the president indeed infringed upon Congress’ power of the purse, since when did the judicial branch hold the power of the purse? How in the world can a federal judge grant standing to random plaintiffs to rule upon a national question dealing with defense funding?

The “plaintiffs” in this case weren’t defense contractors or people standing to lose from the reprogramming. They were the city government of El Paso, Texas, and an agitation group named Border Network for Human Rights. How can a city government and a left-wing political group get standing to sue against transferring funds to our own national security?

As the Washington Post reports, the city “argued that the new barrier was unwanted by the community and would inflict permanent harm on its reputation as a welcoming, cross-border place.”

So now a single district judge can grant standing to a city government to rule on a national policy affecting national security at an international border and then place an “injunction” on all construction, even outside El Paso?

Of course not. No judges have such power. The problem is the administration continues to act as though they do, perpetuating this dangerous myth that there is nothing out of bounds for the courts to rule on.

Simply saying that the administration will appeal the decision is not good enough. This was already appealed in a similar case. After a California judge placed an injunction on the first $2.5 billion of reprogrammed funding, the Supreme Court stayed the injunction. Yet, as we’ve seen in the growing trend of lower courts ignoring the Supreme Court, that didn’t stop the El Paso judge from issuing a similar injunction.

It’s true that the California case involved the $2.5 billion in non-emergency funding to combat drug smuggling, which might be a stronger authority for the president than the $3.6 billion in emergency military construction funding, but that doesn’t matter. The reason the Supreme Court stayed the injunction is because, regardless of whether the president was correct in using the funding, courts have no power to grant standing to outside organizations to sue against a border wall. The case in California involved the Sierra Club and a group named Southern Border Communities Coalition. The reasons why these groups do not have standing applied to the El Paso case as well. “The government has made a sufficient showing at this stage that the plaintiffs have no cause of action to obtain review of the Acting Secretary’s compliance with Section 8005,” stated the 5-4 majority SCOTUS order in July.

Yet liberal judges will just come back in identical cases and start the injunction process all over again. At some point, the Trump administration needs to make the point that if the Supreme Court won’t effectively defend its own decisions from the lower courts, the other branches of government will.

Going forward, if the administration is going to salvage some semblance of border security, it has two choices: Either refuse to give force to this lawless ruling, or engage in a budget fight with Democrats and refuse to sign a funding bill without border wall appropriations. One of the two needs to take place. Otherwise, the foremost promise of Trump’s presidency goes down the tubes. (For more from the author of “Judge Puts Injunction on Border Wall – When SCOTUS Already Ruled There’s No Standing” please click HERE)

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SCOTUS Decision Might Lead to Release of Thousands of Violent Felons

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Justice Neil Gorsuch seems really determined to give violent gun felons a degree of due process our founders never envisioned. In yet another opinion, expanding upon previous decisions declaring the “crime of violence” statute unconstitutional, Gorsuch joined with the four liberal justices to vacate the criminal conviction of two violent robbers while declaring the statute upon which the conviction rested as unconstitutional. Meanwhile, there is no urgency from Congress to promote “criminal justice reform” that would actually stem the tide of judicially-mandated jailbreak of violent criminals.

One of the centerpieces of the Reagan-era tough-on-crime regime was the federal Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA). ACCA established mandatory minimum sentencing for those who used firearms while committing crimes and enhanced penalties for repeat offender. The bill helped spawn the most precipitous drop in crime in our nation’s history by taking the most violent criminals (not just “nonviolent” drug offenders) off the streets. Numerous statutory clauses reference a “violent felony” as eligible for these penalties. Violent felony is described as including crimes such as assault, burglary, arson or a crime that “otherwise involves conduct that presents a serious potential risk of physical injury to another.”

Thousands of these cases were tried in the courts for three decades without any problems until in 2015, the Supreme Court in Johnson v. U.S. “struck down” that final clause of the statute, known as the residual clause, as unconstitutionally ambiguous. A year later, in another creeping pattern of applying their breaches in the Constitution retroactively, the Court in Welch v. United States applied this ruling retroactively to the thousands of people who were sentenced under this law since 1984. Justice Clarence Thomas vigorously dissented.

Thus, the worst of the worst within the prison system are now eligible to reopen their cases in front of numerous liberal district judges, even if they committed violent offenses, as long as they weren’t the handful of crimes enumerated explicitly in the statute.

Last April, Justice Gorsuch joined with the four liberals expanding Johnson to the context of immigration cases in Sessions v. Dimaya. In that case, Gorsuch said that a criminal legal immigrant cannot be deported under crime of violence laws. As we noted at the time, this was a massive expansion of his own doctrine of constitutional vagueness because even if crime of violence language is too vague for a criminal convictions, the courts have long said that deportations are not criminal punishments but the extension and consequence of sovereignty. As Thomas noted at the time, it was the first time the court held a criminal alien statute unconstitutional.

Which brings us to Monday’s ruling in U.S. v. Davis. Gorsuch once again joined with the four liberals in expanding the assault on the Armed Career Criminal Act, this time by saying that 924(c)(3), the statute that prohibits using or carrying a firearm during and in relation to a federal “crime of violence,” is unconstitutional, and therefore vetoed out of existence. This was a huge expansion because, as Justice Brett Kavanagh noted in his dissent, unlike in Johnson and Dimaya, which “involved statutes that imposed additional penalties based on prior convictions,” Davis dealt with “a statute that focuses on the defendant’s current conduct during the charged crime.”

Yet, Gorsuch joined with the four liberals to say the entire statute is unconstitutionally vague, thereby vacating the criminal conviction of two armed robbers who pointed short-barreled shotguns at store clerks during their robberies.

The problem with his assertion is that there is no vagueness here. The letter and intent of Congress is clear. They wanted to put away people who have violent tendencies. After all, we see this debate playing out today in the political branches over deciphering between violent and nonviolent criminals. 924(c)(3)(B) simply targets those who use a firearm in a crime that “by its nature, involves a substantial risk that physical force against the person or property of another may be used in the course of committing the offense.” This standard is all over the criminal code, and while we don’t like Congress delegating too much authority to the executive, this falls well within the reasoned delegation that had already been in the system long before the rise of the administrative state.

Moreover, there is no doubt that this specific case of two convicted armed robbers who robbed a convenience store with short-barreled shot guns jabbed in the side of a store clerk would be viewed by any reasonable person as part of the statute. The fact that there might be some cases where Gorsuch believes the statute might be applied in a vague way does not veto the statute. Courts don’t get to veto laws and rip statutes out of the law books. They render judgments in individual cases. If there is an individual defendant where 924(c) is applied to a case that is not clear-cut, it would be OK for Gorsuch to vacate the conviction. But he has no such power to abstractly rip statutes out of the books, thereby making it that even the most violent actors would not be covered.

The Due Process Clause of the Constitution doesn’t give criminal defendants the power to have statutes they believe as vague to be categorically “struck down.” The entire modern vagueness doctrine is new to the 20th century and rose exactly at the same time that the courts began using the due process clause in general to “veto” democratically-passed laws rather than rule on individual cases. Any true originalist would scuttle this doctrine as a violation of judicial power.

However, putting aside the legal analysis, even if one agrees with Gorsuch’s very strict standard on the vagueness doctrine in criminal statutes, everyone should agree from a political perspective the results of these cases, culminating with Monday’s ruling, will be devastating to our communities. Thousands of the most hardened violent criminals who graduated to the federal system, and often work for transnational cartels and gangs, will be released early and many will never be convicted. As Kavanaugh warned in his dissent, which was joined by John Roberts, Thomas, and Samuel Alito, “defendants who successfully challenge their §924(c) convictions will not merely be resentenced. Rather, their §924(c) convictions will be thrown out altogether.”

Shouldn’t everyone agree that Congress must rewrite the statute? Indeed, even former Attorney General Eric Holder agreed that retroactivity should not be applied to those who received a mandatory minimum sentence for a firearms offense pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 924(c).

Yet, rather than pushing the first step of getting tough on the most violent criminals, Jared Kushner is pushing President Trump into supporting a “second step” act on behalf of criminal justice “reform.” But if their entire premise was to help nonviolent criminals, how can they remain silent and not push to convict the most violent gun felons under clear statutes?

I guess Kim Kardashian’s zeal for gun control only applies to law-abiding gun owners, but not armed robbers. And yes, Kushner’s zeal for helping so-called nonviolent criminals is not reciprocated with a commensurate zeal for keeping the violent criminals off the streets and preserving the last modicum of Reagan’s successful reduction in violent crime. (For more from the author of “SCOTUS Decision Might Lead to Release of Thousands of Violent Felons” please click HERE)

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2020 Census: SCOTUS Will Decide Citizenship Question

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Once again President Trump has to rely on the Supreme Court to reaffirm another action item. It took quite a bit of time before the Supreme Court finally declared what many who aren’t raging liberal knew: that his executive order on immigration erroneously referred to as the so-called Muslim ban was constitutional and well within his authority as president of the United States. With the 2020 census coming up, the Trump White House wants to include a citizenship question in the survey, something that hasn’t been done since the 1950s. Of course, the Left went nuts. One Obama-appointed judge slapped it down, but another federal judge from the D.C. District Court refused to block it based on privacy grounds. On Friday, the Supreme Court officially added the case to its docket. Arguments will begin in April, as a definite decision must be rendered by June (via WaPo):

The Supreme Court added a politically explosive case to its docket Friday, agreeing to decide by the end of June whether the Trump administration can add a question about citizenship to the 2020 Census form sent to every American household. . .

The Trump administration had asked the court to bypass its normal procedures and accept the case immediately because it needs an answer by the end of June to print census forms and conduct the count on schedule.

(Read more from “2020 Census: SCOTUS Will Decide Citizenship Question” HERE)

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What President Trump Should Say in His State of the Union Address

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Below is what I believe President Donald Trump should say in his State of the Union Address. Given the gravity of the current internal threat to freedom and to everything America has stood for, the address should be short; and without the usual lists of proposals and accomplishments most presidents use for applause lines.

The Constitution requires that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” However, given the disreputable dishonesty of most of the media, it is appropriate that I use these remarks to talk directly to the American people. This is the best chance a president has to reach them, without his words being twisted beyond recognition by most who call themselves journalists.

I have done my best during the last two years to Make America Great Again. But I accept Alexander Hamilton’s wisdom: It is “my duty to [portray] things as they are ….” Today, our Union is more divided than at any time since before and during the Civil War. While a significant number of Americans enthusiastically support my efforts, a true account of the state of the union must recognize the existence of extremist resistance to American greatness.

Because of the current internal war against American history, traditions and values, and especially against the United States Constitution, it would be inappropriate for me to deliver a standard State of the Union address providing a laundry list of proposals and boasting of my accomplishments, which can be found at whitehouse.gov. Instead, this will be short, in order to focus a spotlight on the threats from within facing all decent, freedom-loving Americans.

Much bitter opposition is the result of deception. The presence of the woman in the seat behind me is proof positive of how many in front of me obtained their seats by fooling voters. Remember, this woman objects to my denouncing brutal murderers as “animals” instead of “humans.” After vowing not to vote for her to be Speaker, they broke their promises on the very first roll call vote of this Congress. Despite “dozens who originally pledged to oppose her return to power,” only 15 kept their word, probably only because their votes were not needed for their party to break faith with their voters. During the next two years, I urge all Americans to scrutinize the performance of these people and ask: “Is this what I voted for?”

As president, in the face of bitter resistance, I have worked very hard to keep my promises. The refusal of professional politicians to keep their word is now a major threat to representative self-government. Were today’s politicians in business, they would be sent to jail for violation of the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act. When citizens cannot know what those for whom they vote are going to do once elected, the right to vote is meaningless. (Incidentally, the punishment of private citizens but not politicians, for false advertising and labeling, is just one of countless scandalous examples of how hypocritical out-of-touch legislators exempt themselves from the very laws, rules and regulations they impose upon ordinary Americans.)

Returning to the ferocious and hateful opposition to me for keeping my promises, my staff has found no prior examples of major media outlets having suggesting the assassination of a president. Yet major TV networks, such as CBS and CNN, repeatedly (p. 205) have suggested that about me. So too has the New York Times, which used to be considered the most influential newspaper in the country; and still has influence among many people. Also, most regrettably, officials of a prior administration have advocated a coup d’etat.

I was not a professional politician and had a good life before I sought the presidency. I ran for president because I was appalled by the utter contempt the Washington establishment has for both the American people and the Constitution they cherish. This establishment consists of most in the media, many members of the Congress, including most Democrats, as well as holdover Deep State bureaucrats who daily violate the law and their oaths of office. Their war is not just against me but against the people and their constitutionally prescribed right to choose who governs them.

Regrettably, the establishment, with utter contempt self-government, also includes unelected federal judges who arrogantly abuse their authority by issuing orders against the entire country rather than confining them to their own local districts and to the parties in the cases before them. These judges have caused great harm. Their abuses have resulted in barbaric murders of American citizens by foreign criminals who have no right to be here; and are a continuing threat to public safety.

Once rare, federal judge-shopping is now rampant. What authority to make nationwide immigration policy does an unelected local judge have in Hawaii, which is nowhere close to the southern border where an organized massive invasion by illegal immigrants is a major problem? Why is a judge in the Northern District of California asked to decide an immigration case rather than a judge in the Southern District, which is right on the border?

Make no mistake. Although we are not in a shooting war, we are in a war nevertheless — a war against American values, a war against American culture, a war against the American way of life and, above all, a war against constitutionally-protected freedoms, the rule of law and representative self-government. For short-term political gain, many current members of Congress would abolish the basic hard-won rights of freedom of speech and due process of law.

For elections to mean anything, voters need information upon which to base their choices. But not many Americans know what the fake news media has refused to report: Four years ago, every single Democrat senator voted to abolish First Amendment free speech protection, ceding to Deep State Swamp officials the power to prohibit speech they considered “unreasonable.” Tellingly, the anti-freedom Democrats made an exception for their allies, the fake news media. (The official roll call vote and official Democrat amendment to mutilate the sacred First Amendment are now posted on the WhiteHouse.gov website.)

My obligation as president is to do the best I can. I have lived most of my life and I do not fear assassination regularly advocated by leftist fanatics. However, I do fear the prospect of what would happen if citizens conclude that they have been cheated out of what they voted for in a constitutionally legitimate election. This is made all the more ominous when the leaders of a major political party no longer accept the results of elections they lose.

Just recently, a defeated Democrat presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, declared that there is no reason to be civil when Democrats lose. This is in stark contrast to Richard M. Nixon, another president whose legitimacy leftist Democrats refused to accept, despite his having won re-election by a landslide in 1972. Just 12 years earlier, in 1960, Nixon lost a very close election. But he rejected pleas by his supporters to contest disputed vote counts in Illinois and Texas. Instead, in his constitutional role as Vice President presiding over a joint session of Congress, he delivered one of the most eloquent forgotten brief statements in American history. For the benefit of today’s impatient sore losers who never have accepted the constitutional results of the 2016 election and are unable to wait until next year to vote me out of office, it is worth quoting Nixon’s eloquence 58 years ago:

This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the Presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent. I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing, respecting, and honoring the institutions of self-government.

In our campaigns, no matter how hard-fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win … [I]t is indeed a very great honor … to extend to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson … my heartfelt best wishes [as they] work in a cause … bigger than any man’s ambition, greater than any party. It is the cause of freedom, of justice and peace for all mankind.

Tragically, many now seated here scornfully reject Nixon’s gracious wisdom. They and their corrupt, dishonorable and disloyal Deep State cronies pose a monumental threat to the United States Constitution. I urge all Americans who love our country and the great Constitution bequeathed to us over 200 years ago to resist the resistance to constitutional self-government. Only the American people can stop them from getting away with their tactics of stealing elections, vote fraud, speech suppression, intimidation and seeking to overturn elections they lose.

One of the most deplorable tactics of the Deep State and FNM resistance is to accuse their opponents of the very sins of which they are guilty. A group called Antifa regularly smear proponents of freedom as fascists. In truth, it is the left that today is fascist as witnessed by repeated actual and attempted suppression of free expression of any opposing views.

Many decent American citizens are rightly concerned about the radical left Democrat assault on the Second Amendment. But we must not forget that that amendment is second for a reason. Without freedom of speech and the right to petition for redress of grievances secured by the First Amendment, there will be no right to defend and safeguard the Second Amendment. The right to petition already has been seriously undermined. As noted, just four and one-half years ago, every Democrat Senator voted to abolish First Amendment protection for their political opponents. These U.S. senators – all Democrats – supported government regulation of speech critical of the government, or, as they put it, the power to “reasonably limit” money spent to “influence elections.” Do you want the deep state swamp to decide if what you say is “reasonable”?

The 54 anti-free speech Democrats included 35 still in the senate. They should be exposed for the freedom they seek to suppress: Baldwin (WI), Bennet (CO), Blumenthal (CT), Booker (NJ), Brown (OH), Cantwell (WA), Cardin (MD), Carper (DE), Casey (PA), Coons (DE), Durbin (IL), Feinstein (CA), Heinrich (NM), Hirono (HI), Kaine (VA), King (ME), Klobuchar (MN), Leahy (VT), Manchin (WV) Markey (MA), Menendez (NJ), Merkley (OR), Murphy (CT), Murray (WA), Reed (RI), Sanders (VT), Schumer (NY), Shaheen (NH), Stabenow (MI), Tester (MT), Udall (NM), Warner (VA), Warren (MA), Whitehouse (RI), Wyden (OR).

Leftist contempt for the freedoms provided by the Constitution does not end with the First and Second Amendments. This contempt extends to elimination of due process for their opponents. For Senators such as Feinstein, self-proclaimed “Spartacus” Booker, Harris, Hirono, Gillibrand, Klobochar, to name just a few of the worst, the mere making of a charge against one of their political opponents is proof of its truth. This is the stuff of the Inquisition of the middle ages, where torture extracted false confessions or the old English Star Chamber, which the Fifth and Sixth Amendments were intended to protect against. And if false charges does not work, harassment and intimidation of Storm Trooper days are advocated by the likes of Senator Spartacus Booker, Represenative Maxine Waters and hate-filled Hillary Clinton.

These are perilous times. After Jan. 20, 2025, I will no longer be president. Therefore, it is ultimately up to the American people to decide whether to fight for their freedom or to allow it to be destroyed by the very fascists who smear as fascists all decent Americans who oppose their march toward tyranny. As demonstrated by many examples of book-burning throughout history, one of the keys to totalitarianism is the elimination of any and all persuasive opposing ideas. President Ronald Reagan often pointed out that “[f]reedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Reagan echoed another famous warning: “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”

Finally, it is long overdue for people who have never discriminated against anyone because of race, religion or sex and do not believe in such discrimination to fight back against the libels against them by those fanatically devoted to these practices. In particular, for many years, leftist Democrats have been libeling and defaming as racist and sexist anyone who disagrees with them or opposes them in any way.

And yet, it is the Democrat Party that has a long history of defending slavery, racial discrimination and even lynching. It was the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who ended slavery. Just a year ago and six weeks after smearing me as a racist, the Democrat Leader of the Senate explicitly voted against a judicial nominee solely based on the nominee’s race and sex. And just a year ago, shamelessly and publicly, Democrats refused to applaud low minority and female unemployment; and they showed complete disrespect for the grieving parents of black rape and murder victims. Right now leftists are warning the Democrat Party not to nominate a presidential candidate next year who is of the “wrong” race or sex.

Long ago, the Democrat Party and its leftist allies abandoned the late Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” They are almost exclusively fixated on racial and sexual identity rather than on actual qualifications and the policies the candidates represent. They don’t care what’s best for the country but, instead, focus on the race and sex of those who hold office. They don’t care if minority unemployment is high rather than low if the president is of a politically correct race or sex. They don’t care if innocent people are raped and murdered as long as officeholders are in lockstep with preferred identity politics.

In closing, I sincerely hope that God grants all liberty-loving Americans the will and the strength to resist a resistance fanatically devoted to denying all that has made America great: its history, traditions, values and Constitution. God bless America.

_________________________________________

Lester Jackson is author of numerous articles about capital punishment, the Supreme Court, and American politics. His recent book is Equal Justice for Victims: A Blueprint for the Rightful Restoration of Capital Punishment. Reviews are here, here, here. Copyright © 2019 by Lester Jackson, Ph.D. The foregoing has been updated and revised; originally at westernjournal.com and enterstageright.com.

Roberts and Kavanaugh Prove the Myth of the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court

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This year at the Supreme Court has been extremely boring so far. If we didn’t have lawless hyperactive lower courts engaging in a daily constitutional convention, that would actually be a good thing, as the judiciary should be a boring place with no input into political issues, which should be left up to the political branches. John Jay hated the court because it didn’t get to throw its weight around in politics. Unfortunately, with lower courts permanently altering the trajectory of our politics, culture, sovereignty, and even national security, the passivity of the Roberts court is a recipe for judicial hell.

Once we agree to legitimize judicial supremacy, we have lost our nation, regardless of the orientation of the Supreme Court. That was on full display at the high court on Monday. In a new trend where several members of the “conservative wing” of the court allow very consequential bad lower court rulings to stand, Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh refused to hear an appeal on the issue of forcing states to fund Planned Parenthood.

Five federal circuit courts created a right for Planned Parenthood to obtain state funding or for private citizens to sue the state for not giving them access to any provider they choose through Medicaid. Never mind that some of these same circuits believe an individual doesn’t have a Second Amendment right. They now believe there is a private right to sue states over termination of Medicaid contracts in federal court, a power never granted to them by Congress.

The sheer fact that the Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and even Fifth Circuits signed on to this insane idea demonstrates, as I’ve long warned, that almost all of the circuits are irremediably broken, and even two terms of Trump’s presidency will only change the margins. The Eighth Circuit was the only appeals court that sided with the state (Arkansas, in this case) against abortion funding. Such a circuit split on a vital issue concerning state powers would normally have triggered a review from the Supreme Court upon appeal. Yet on Monday, in the appeal from the Fifth and Tenth circuits, the Supreme Court denied certiorari to the states of Louisiana and Kansas respectively. Only Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito would have heard the case. It takes four justices to grant cert.

Thomas wrote an impassioned dissent from the denial of cert because this is a dangerous trend we are seeing from his colleagues. We are seeing it with immigration, public prayer, global warming cases, and election law, where lower courts are either violating precedent or all sorts of legal norms, and Roberts and one or two others of the conservative wing join with the Left to allow the lower court insanity to continue.

Until recently, Roberts hid behind the fact that there weren’t any circuit splits in many contentious cases. After all, the Left shops its cases so effectively that it often wins every time. But now we are seeing, as with the public prayer case, that even when there is a circuit split, Roberts is going out of his way to avoid ruling on these cases. The problem is, as Thomas notes, this allows the lower courts to permanently alter the political trajectory of state governments.

Not only are the lawsuits themselves a financial burden on the States, but the looming potential for complex litigation inevitably will dissuade state officials from making decisions that they believe to be in the public interest. State officials are not even safe doing nothing, as the cause of action recognized by the majority rule may enable Medicaid recipients to challenge the failure to list particular providers, not just the removal of former providers.

Thus, anything conservatives ever want to accomplish, even if they win elections, is essentially dead on arrival because of lower court judges allowed to reign supreme. The legal profession erroneously believes that lower courts can grant standing to anyone so they can babysit the other branches on clear political questions, yet the Supreme Court refuses to babysit their own quite inferior courts.

Even when the Supreme Court is forced to take up a case and overturn it, it never does so categorically, as Thomas does. This allows the lower courts and their allies to come back for more and shut down our sovereignty, election law, and fiscal and cultural decisions in 100 other ways.

Absent wholesale judicial reform, if we continue to legitimize judicial supremacy, even with “the right sort of judges,” we should just abolish the other two branches and the state governments in favor of the robed masters. (For more from the author of “Roberts and Kavanaugh Prove the Myth of the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court” please click HERE)

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No, Anthony Kennedy, It Is You Who Destroyed Democracy

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The country is racked with strife and acrimony over the filling of a single Supreme Court seat. Nobody is supposedly more dismayed over the rancorous political debate than the man who vacated the seat himself. But if Anthony Kennedy would actually look in the mirror, he’d understand that he is the cause of the problem we have with idolatry of the Supreme Court.

Speaking to a group of high school students in his hometown of Sacramento, California, the former justice lamented the loss of civil discourse and the decline of democracy. “Perhaps we didn’t do too good a job teaching the importance of preserving democracy by an enlightened civic discourse,” said Kennedy in response to concerned questions from the audience last Friday. “In the first part of this century, we’re seeing the death and decline of democracy.”

Leaving aside the fact that we are a republic and not a democracy, Kennedy should look at himself to discover the number-one source of the breakdown of our democracy or republic. When you believe that all the power over our culture and society and even our borders resides in the hands of unelected judges, most pivotally the “Kennedy swing vote” on the Supreme Court, then nothing else matters but who will fill that seat. Our Founders didn’t envision this much uncivil discourse over a single Supreme Court seat because they understood that we have three branches of government, with the judiciary as the weakest, and 50 individual state governments. But according to Kennedy, a Supreme Court justice can single-handedly redefine the building block of all civilization from the bench.

In the infamous same-sex marriage case of 2015, Justice Anthony Kennedy didn’t just redefine marriage from the bench. He remade our Constitution and our entire system of governance. After asserting that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t possibly know “the extent of freedom and all its dimensions,” Kennedy penned twenty-three words that will forever endanger our sovereignty unless the courts are stripped down to size: “and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

The “we” is, of course, referring to the courts. Kennedy believes that the courts are the final say even over natural law and that they can rediscover new insights into the Constitution as they see fit.

This is more power than King George held at the time of the Revolution. As such, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why such a fabricated position of power will bring out the worst in America every time there is a vacancy.

A polarized and diverse country of this size will always reflect sharp political and societal disagreements. But at least when those decisions are made through the political process, there is always recourse for the losing side to force compromises, concessions, and conditions on those changes, or they can live to fight again another day, reverse course through the electoral process, and see their vision of society actualized through the new representatives.

As Justice Scalia used to say, “Persuade your fellow citizens it’s a good idea and pass a law. That’s what democracy is all about. It’s not about nine superannuated judges who have been there too long, imposing these demands on society.”

None of this can occur when the consequential societal issues of our time are decided by the unelected branch of government, as Anthony Kennedy would have it.

What’s worse, now any district judge, deliberately shopped by a plaintiff, can create new rights. Just last night, Judge Edward Chen of the Northern District of California said that Trump must continue Temporary Protected Status for primarily illegal aliens from Sudan, El Salvador, Haiti, and Nicaragua. As we noted in a similar lawsuit, the statute explicitly strips jurisdiction over this issue from courts, the president has full authority to discontinue the status, and the statute requires that the program only be temporary. Yet judges are now creating a right to make a temporary humanitarian program a permanent amnesty for illegals.

At the same time, the Ninth Circuit is now asserting that ICE can’t detain Central American teenagers suspected of being MS-13 members. The court said these individuals are entitled to litigate their designation as a gang member, even though they have no right to be in this country in the first place.

Remember, we already won a Supreme Court case over whether a plaintiff can assert that Trump is banned from enforcing immigration law as written because he is a supposed racist, and the high court tossed it out. Yet it’s meaningless. With the system Kennedy and others created, it’s heads the Left wins, tails the Left wins. It’s a perfect one-directional ratchet that Kennedy and his ilk in the corrupted legal profession have created.

Once we agree that a judge sets the terms for life, marriage, and borders, there’s nothing left in our political system but to tear each other apart over judicial picks.

During a speech he delivered at Harvard in 2015, Kennedy was asked by a law student whether state officials are always bound by the “new insights” of Kennedy and his colleagues and whether they are forbidden to “act according to the old understanding of life and the Constitution.”

Kennedy replied by extolling the virtues of those who resign when their faith comes into conflict with what he views as the law. He even gave the bizarre analogy of judges resigning in Nazi Germany, and then noted the following:

Great respect, it seems to me, has to be given to people who resign rather than do something they view as morally wrong, in order to make a point. However, the rule of law is that, as a public official, in performing your legal duties, you are bound to enforce the law.

So, Kennedy himself believes that his branch of government alone has the power to unilaterally alter the Constitution and force others to resign or break the real moral law, reminiscent of a dark time he himself references.

Indeed, there is nothing more antithetical to democracy than the system Kennedy has built for his entire life. If we would undo his judicial tyranny, we would go a long way toward restoring our democratic republic and defuse some of the polarization through federalism.

In one of his final dissents, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, Justice Scalia warned of the dangers of Kennedy’s penchant for inventing new rights. In that case, Kennedy discovered that a sentence of life imprisonment without parole for a juvenile murderer essentially violated the Constitution, even though this practice had been in place since our Founding. He called Kennedy’s opinion an “embarrassment” and an extortion of states in “Godfather fashion.” Scalia observed that Kennedy was also the author of an opinion a decade earlier that essentially gutted the death penalty for juvenile murderers on the basis that life in prison without parole was a severe enough punishment. Yet, a decade later, Kennedy was able to discover a new right for juveniles against even that punishment, much as he discovered gay marriage in the Constitution just two years after he said that states get to decide the issue. “As we learn its meaning,” indeed!

Kennedy made the court powerful enough that everyone in the country feels that their survival depends upon it, so of course they will act out during a nomination fight … as if their survival depends upon it! As Scalia warned in Obergefell, “With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the ‘reasoned judgment’ of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.”

Indeed, Anthony Kennedy has nobody to blame but himself. (For more from the author of “No, Anthony Kennedy, It Is You Who Destroyed Democracy” please click HERE)

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Can We All Agree Now That the Supreme Court Has Too Much Power?

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Why are the Democrats fighting so hard to prevent the president from performing his constitutional function of nominating Supreme Court justices and the Senate from performing its function to advise and consent? Why the nuclear warfare over the weakest branch of government while both parties amicably agree about the power of the purse, which is manifestly more important and impactful?

It has become clear that every Supreme Court vacancy will trigger the type of thermonuclear fight we are seeing today. And for good reason. If we are going to crown the Supreme Court as God with the ability to immutably determine the outcome of every issue until the end of times, then you better believe there will be a no-holds-barred brawl over every nominee. But it’s only a fight because we’ve placed the outcome of the entire political war in the hands of “the Anthony Kennedy seat.”

The Founders would laugh at such a spectacle over a Supreme Court nominee. It’s not that they didn’t engage in mortal combat over politics. The presidential election of 1800 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson took the cake. It’s just that they only envisioned such desperate politicking over offices that actually mattered to the character of the nation, such as the election of a president. The Supreme Court did not hold such offices.

Here is how much influence the Supreme Court had besides interpreting banal statutes, back when we followed the blueprint accepted by our nation in 1789.

Just as the nascent republic was getting off the ground in April 1789, James Wilson, one of the greatest Founders and perhaps the greatest legal mind of the generation, personally lobbied President Washington to be nominated as chief justice of the United States. It’s not that he thought this position would be on par or even greater than that of president. It’s that as the consummate legal nerd of his time, Wilson felt his calling in life was to adjudicate complex cases and controversies, not to be a politician. Unlike the other Founders of similar prominence, he is the only one never to have served in a political position after the government was established.

Interestingly, Washington passed over Wilson for the job and instead selected John Jay. Jay was a flashy diplomat, politician, and war hero but was clearly not a scholar like Wilson. Washington did selected Wilson as one of the original associate justices, and it was during his time on the court that he delivered his famed series of legal lectures, among the most scholarly legal works in American history.

During Jay’s six years on the court, he heard only four cases. He was mainly preoccupied with politics. He even served as acting secretary of state for the first six months of his tenure as chief justice. He left the court even before George Washington retired, eventually became governor of New York, and launched a failed bid for president. He was a politician at heart, and at the time, the last place for an ambitious politician was the Supreme Court. He hated the job of chief justice. Then, in 1801, President John Adams offered Jay the opportunity to return as chief justice. Jay responded in a way that nobody in Washington could relate to today, but is nonetheless very revealing as to the power of the federal courts during our founding generation:

Such was the temper of the times, that the Act to establish the Judicial Courts of the United States was in some respects more accommodated to certain prejudices and sensibilities, than to the great and obvious principles of sound policy. Expectations were nevertheless entertained that it would be amended as the public mind became more composed and better informed; but those expectations have not been realized, nor have we hitherto seen convincing indications of a disposition in Congress to realize them. On the contrary, the efforts repeatedly made to place the judicial department on a proper footing have proved fruitless.

I left the bench perfectly convinced that under a system so defective it would not obtain the energy, weight, and dignity which are essential to its affording due support to the national government, nor acquire the public confidence and respect which, as the last resort of the justice of the nation, it should possess.

Jay turned down a life-tenured job as chief justice because he felt the courts had no ability to shape politics, and as a politician, he found such a job unappealing. Also, remember that Congress controls the entire jurisdiction of the Supreme Court (except for a few cases), and Jay lamented that Congress barely gave it any power in the Judiciary Act of 1789, which wasn’t signed into law until after Jay had already accepted the position as chief justice.

To give you a sense of how unremarkable the high court was at the time, James Wilson himself, while sitting on the court, spent time in debtor’s prison because of bankruptcy. Talk about prestige!

The moral of the story? All the power over politics and the judiciary itself lies with Congress. So if we are going to tear each other apart and destroy people in the court of public opinion in pursuit of power, let’s at least confine this spectacle to congressional and presidential elections, where the consequences are directly determined by voters. Why outsource our political warfare to an unelected branch, when the entire purpose of not electing judges was to ensure that politics never seeped into the courts in the first place? (For more from the author of “Can We All Agree Now That the Supreme Court Has Too Much Power?” please click HERE)

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The Hit Job on Brett Kavanaugh: You Can’t Make This Stuff up

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I had intended to write, this week, about an egregiously stupid and poorly written Nevada law which was signed twice by a governor who used to be a wannabe federal judge.

But allegations about a real federal judge — as opposed to a former wannabe — became public as a Democrat hit job over the weekend, and what I originally intended will have to wait until next week.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh went through four days of intense hearings where the Democratic Party threw everything at him — from pop-up astroturf demonstrators in the hearing room to questions no Supreme Court nominee should have to listen to much less answer — and a vote was scheduled for Thursday.

That was derailed when a clearly unhinged Sen. Dianne Feinstein sent a letter she had been sitting on for at least three months from a woman who wanted to remain anonymous saying that Kavanaugh had attempted to rape her 36 years ago at a high school party.

She didn’t report it at the time.

Seriously?

I was in Tulsa when Anita Hill — who used to teach at Oral Roberts University — made ridicules charges against Justice Clarence Thomas at his confirmation hearings.

She was a lightweight then and is a self-professed victim today. (Remember her allegation that now Justice Thomas asked her, “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?”)

At least her allegations were only 10 years old.

Christine Blasey Ford waited 36 years to write an anonymous letter to a member of the House who forwarded the letter three months ago to Sen. Feinstein, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. She’s a psychology professor at Palo Alto University who “discovered” the “repressed memories” in couples therapy, allegedly 30 years after the high school incident she “recalled.”

It’s not even a good episode of “Law & Order.” Where are Sam Waterston and Fred Dalton Thompson when you need them?

And the reaction of the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee is also nuts.

They postponed the vote so Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, could testify next week — if she wanted. Turns out, her showboat lawyer is demanding an FBI investigation before she’ll testify. If Republicans have any spine at all, that won’t happen.

Judge Kavanaugh wants to testify to clear his name.

The president wants him to as well — and let’s stop kidding each other — that is the real reason the Democratic Party is so unhinged. Kavanaugh isn’t the target. Trump is the target.

Keep in mind that Kavanaugh has been through six — yes six — FBI background checks in his career. Not a whiff of any impropriety came up. The Democrats were so desperate that they pointed out that Kavanaugh spent a lot of money on Washington Nationals baseball tickets. That’s only a lapse of judgment if you are a Mets fan.

It’s not like he’s Harvey Weinstein or Les Moonves with a judicial casting couch.

He’s a family man with two young daughters and he’s being accused by a woman of something which allegedly happened 36 years ago. Her details are vague and inconsistent. And she is a Democrat activist. Further, her parents lost a foreclosure suit in which Judge Kavanaugh’s mother was the presiding judge.

This is an obscene abuse of the process from a party which specializes in the abuse of any process the opposition party is in favor of.

This is the exact reason the American people made Donald Trump President. And the longer it goes on, the deeper the Democratic Party is digging its grave. (For more from the author of “The Hit Job on Brett Kavanaugh: You Can’t Make This Stuff up” please click HERE)

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