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A Court for the Constitution
The historic Supreme Court term that ended this week was a triumph for originalism.
By The Editorial Board
A funny thing happened on the way to the supposedly partisan Supreme Court finishing its term: It ruled for the Biden Administration on immigration. Somehow that case isn’t making the dastardly hit list of those eager to declare that the Court is now “illegitimate,” but the Justices applied the law regardless of the policy and decided for the executive branch.(See nearby for elaboration.)
This isn’t a partisan Court looking for preferred policy outcomes. It’s a Court that hews to the tenets of originalism, with different shades of emphasis by different Justices. The Court’s jurisprudence is focused more than anything else on who under the Constitution gets to decide policy, not what that policy should be.
This is the main reason Democrats and the press corps are furious about the Court’s decisions. For decades they have counted on a majority of Justices to deliver or bless the policy results they want: on abortion, voting rights, healthcare, racial preferences, climate and economic regulation. You name it, the Court found ways to deliver it with balancing tests, trimester analysis, and the discovery of unenumerated rights between the lines of the Constitution’s text.
Fr decades conservative critics have argued that the role of the Court should be different—supporting rights that are actually in the Constitution, but otherwise enforcing the separation of powers so each branch of government stays in its lane as defined by the Founders. With the arrival of three new Justices nominated by Donald Trump and shepherded to confirmation by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, that Court has arrived.
The result is the opposite of judicial imperialism. In the Dobbs abortion case, the Court is trying to extricate itself from abortion policy debates. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh put it, “the Constitution is neutral on the issue of abortion.” Policy will now be set by legislators in the states as informed by voters, subject to a low-level of legal review known as the “rational basis” test.
The political result may be surprising. The right-to-life movement now must persuade voters across 50 states, and most voters favor some limits on abortion but not an outright ban. If Republicans sound like moral scolds and can’t make their case with compassion for women, they will lose the debate. If Republicans seek a national ban on abortion via Congress, the Court could strike it down. The Court majority in Dobbs has invigorated democracy and federalism.
In its administrative law cases, the Court also isn’t dictating outcomes. It is invigorating its role as a traffic cop among the branches. On immigration law, two conservatives joined the liberals to side with the White House. But on climate six Justices found that the Biden Administration had exceeded the authority that Congress provided in legislation.
The cries from the left are that the Court has doomed the world to burning up. But progressives can still regulate carbon emissions. The rub is that to achieve their climate goals, they will have to pass legislation, not merely reinterpret an obscure corner of the Clean Air Act that wasn’t written with carbon emissions in mind.
As Justice Neil Gorsuch observed in WestVirginia v. EPA, legislating can be difficult in the American system. But that is how the Founders designed it to protect liberty and guarantee political accountability. Telling Congress it must write clear commands to the bureaucracy enhances accountability.
The Court is also taking a more robust approach to protecting the rights that the Constitution does mention, especially the First and Second Amendments. On gun rights, the Justices put new substance into the individual right to bear arms recognized by the 2008 Heller decision. Politicians can still regulate guns, but they must do so more carefully so individuals can defend themselves outside their homes.
On religious liberty, the Court cleaned up decades of confusing instructions to lower courts on the separation of church and state. The Justices gave new vigor to the free exercise of religion by supporting private prayer in a public place and barring discrimination against religious schools. States don’t have to aid private schools, but if they do they can’t deny that aid to religious schools. This is a proper policing role for the Court in securing liberties specified in the Constitution.
All of this vindicates the decades-long effort known as the conservative legal movement. What started with the law and economics school grew with the Federalist Society and a generation of federal judges into something far larger and now more consequential.
Lately some on the social right have called this movement a failure, but they are as mistaken as critics on the left. This Supreme Court term yielded victories for libertarians and cultural conservatives under the principle of originalism. The separation of powers is as crucial to protecting religious freedom as it is to protecting property rights or limiting regulation without Congressional commands.
This is a Court for the Constitution, and that means the right and left will have to win their policy victories the old-fashioned way—democratically.
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White House “Collusion” With Big Tech Reported By State Attorney General
(RoyalPatriot.com )- https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/06/missouri-attorney-general-files-landmark-lawsuit-biden-colluding-big-tech-evidence-gateway-pundit-plays-major-role-case/
Gateway Pundit reports that if you’re a supporter of Donald Trump, chances are you’ve already been a victim of Big Tech’s censorship. You may have noticed that censorship ramped up as soon as Biden took office.
The office of Missouri Attorney General (AG) Eric Schmitt filed a historic lawsuit against the Biden Administration at the beginning of May 2022, completely unnoticed by the mainstream media.
Last week, The Gateway Pundit, in collaboration with the Missouri Attorney General Schmitt, claims it dealt the Biden Administration a severe blow. The Attorney General’s Office presented ample proof of Big Tech’s massive censorship and coordination with the federal government.
A report shows the AG’s complaint is brought against the Biden Administration, agencies, and individuals, including:
President Joe Biden
Former Biden Press Secretary Jen Psaki
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)
NIAID Director Anthony Fauci
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas
The CyberSecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
Former “Ministry of Truth” head Nina Jankowicz
And others not yet named.
The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana jointly with the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office.
The suit alleges that the Biden regime both conspired with and compelled Big Tech social media companies to censor millions of Americans on their social media accounts through a government-created social media censorship program.
Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s suit was filed to prevent the Biden Administration from further violating Americans’ First Amendment rights. The Motion asks the Court to
immediately restrain the Biden Administration from colluding with and or compelling Big Tech to censor Americans’ speech, and Permit an investigation into Biden’s social-media censorship activities.
Reports show the Attorney General’s Office received substantial documentation of alleged Big Tech censorship from the well-known news website The Gateway Pundit, which was filed with the court.
We can only hope that the Court recognizes the seriousness of the Constitutional violations that millions of Americans have experienced and still experience daily.
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Individual ownership and entrepreneurship has always been a hope in this country because of marked individualism and freedom. Biden's policies are crushing the small business owner.
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Small Business Is America
Small business is the epitome of the American Dream. It’s the reason why America became the richest nation in the world. After all, every successful big business started out as a small one. So in a post-Covid world, how do we encourage and protect this most valuable asset? Carol Roth has the answer.
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Humor relieves tragedy:
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The Greatest Jewish Joke Ever
By Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz
In 1893, Rabbi Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi of England, wrote an essay about Jewish humor for The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science and Art. He was responding to comments made by two prominent intellectuals, Ernest Renan and Thomas Carlyle, suggesting that Jews completely lack a sense of humor. (They probably were projecting a medieval caricature of the rigid Pharisees onto their Jewish contemporaries.) Rabbi Adler wrote a lengthy essay in response, in which he collected examples of Jewish humor from the Tanakh down to Moses Montefiore. Rabbi Adler himself had a sharp wit, and in his essay, he makes it clear that he took great pride in the Jewish sense of humor.
One might find it difficult to believe that anyone could accuse the Jews of being unfunny. Steve Allen, in his 1981 history of American humor “Funny People,” labeled comedy as a “Jewish cottage industry,” and observed that 80% of the comedians in the U.S. at that time were Jewish. The association of Jews with humor is so strong, that in the 2013 Pew study, 42% of American Jews responded that having a sense of humor was an essential part of what being Jewish means to them. (Of course, one wishes that contemporary Jews were as devoted to Shabbat as they are to sitcoms.) There are many, many books of Jewish humor, numerous studies analyzing Jewish humor, and multiple types of Jewish jokes. There are jokes about antisemites, foolish Jews and rabbis, off-color jokes and witty jokes, jokes about business, family and Judaism itself.
Jewish humor is not a religious tradition. In fact, rabbinic literature is ambivalent about comedy, and there are frequent condemnations of “leitzanut,” mockery, in ethical guidebooks. Many rabbis condemned the folk tradition of a “Purim Rav,” a comedian who would parody the local rabbi on Purim, mimicking the rabbi’s mannerisms and ridiculing his idiosyncrasies. Some rabbis found the lampooning they received on Purim difficult to take; there is a legend that Rabbi Shimon Sofer, the Chief Rabbi of Krakow, died right after Purim due to the grief caused by a particularly irreverent “Purim Rav.” At the same time, jokes are recognized as being a valuable psychological tool; the Talmud tells of one rabbi who would always tell jokes before he taught, to get the students to relax and focus. In another passage, Elijah comes from heaven to tell a local rabbi that two jesters in his neighborhood have an honored place in the world to come, because their jokes cheered up the depressed. Humor can certainly be a spiritual tool, but there is no commandment to be funny.
Jewish humor is not a religious tradition. In fact, rabbinic literature is ambivalent about comedy, and there are frequent condemnations of “leitzanut,” mockery, in ethical guidebooks.
So why are Jews so funny? Sigmund Freud, in his 1905 essay “Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious,” devotes an unusual amount of space to Jewish jokes; it is clear that he believes Jewish humor is remarkable. In a time when Jews were extremely discreet in what they wrote about their compatriots, Freud features some unflattering jokes Jews would tell about themselves. He repeats a joke about Galitzianer Jews that pokes fun at their reputation for rarely taking baths:
“Two Jews met in the neighbourhood of the bathhouse. ‘Have you taken a bath?’ asked one of them. ‘What?’ asked the other in return, ‘is there one missing?’” (This is one of four different jokes about Jews and bathing that Freud repeats.)
Ruth Wisse, in her book “No Joke: Making Jewish Humor,” points out that Freud’s contemporary Arthur Schnitzler criticized Freud for publishing these jokes, which Schnitzler said made Freud sound more antisemitic than antisemites. However, Freud was unconcerned, and saw these jokes as depicting a positive side to Jewish culture. He explains that these Jewish jokes are “meant to portray the democratic mode of thinking of Jews, which recognizes no distinction between lords and serfs, but also, alas, upsets discipline and co-operation.”
Jews certainly know how to laugh at themselves, and to make fun of their failings. There is a joke about three Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad. The sergeant in charge asks each one whether he wants a blindfold. “Yes,” says the first Jew, in a resigned tone. “OK,” says the second Jew, in a quiet voice. “And what about you?” he enquires of the third Jew. “No,” says the third Jew, “I don’t want your lousy blindfold,” followed by a few choice curses. The second Jew immediately leans over to him and whispers: “Listen, Moshe, take a blindfold. Don’t make trouble.”
This joke is mercilessly self-critical and funny at the same time; but laughter helped Jews contend with a hostile environment, and cope during the most difficult of times. There was an entire genre of jokes created by Jews from the Soviet Union; and several books have been written about Jewish humor during the Holocaust. One would think that there are times and places where humor is impossible; but actually, that is where humor is most needed. Comedy is a refuge, a shelter for the heartbroken. One excellent example of this, from an obituary in Canadian newspaper, tells of a Holocaust survivor returning to visit the concentration camps:
“When, in the 1980s, Celine returned to Theresienstadt with her husband Maximilien, they were stopped at the ticket counter. ‘Last time I was here,’ Celine told the ticket vendor, ‘I got in for free.’”
I had heard a similar anecdote about another survivor who returned to Auschwitz. At the ticket counter, he rolled up his sleeve, showed the number tattooed on his arm, and asked, “do I get an alumni discount?” Laughter offers ready relief for the persecuted.
Laughter offers ready relief for the persecuted.
Some Jewish jokes wield ridicule as a weapon. The Midrash tells the story of a young Avraham breaking his father’s idols, and then claiming that the largest idol was angry, and broke the others; this is pure satire, a joke about the silliness of paganism. (And the Talmud makes clear that one is entitled to mock paganism, even in an extreme fashion.) In response to antisemitism, Jews mocked their boorish and barbaric enemies. One example of this is the joke that Joseph Telushkin retells in his book “Jewish Humor”:
“During the Second World War, a southern matron calls up the local army base. ‘We would be honored,’ she tells the sergeant who takes her call, ‘to accommodate five soldiers at our Thanksgiving dinner.’ ‘That’s very gracious of you, ma’am,’ the sergeant answers. ‘Just please make sure they’re not Jews,’ the matron adds. ‘I understand, ma’am.’ Thanksgiving afternoon, the woman answers the front doorbell and is horrified to find five black soldiers standing in the doorway. ‘We’re here for Thanksgiving dinner, ma’am,’ one of the soldiers says. ‘Bu … bu … but your sergeant has made a terrible mistake,’ the woman says. ‘Oh no, ma’am,’ the soldier answers. ‘Sergeant Greenberg never makes mistakes.’”
Mockery was a weapon, a way for Jews to belittle and diminish those who mistreat them.
But there is no purer form of Jewish humor than the absurd. A classic example is a joke told by Leo Rosten in “The Joys of Yiddish.”
A man posed a riddle to his son: “What’s purple, hangs on the wall and whistles?”
When the son gave up, he answered: a herring.
“A herring?” his son said. “A herring isn’t purple.”
“Nu,” replied the father, “they painted the herring purple.”
“But hanging on a wall? How does a herring hang on a wall?”
“Aha! You nail the herring to the wall.”
“But a herring doesn’t whistle,” his son shouted.
“Nu, so it doesn’t whistle.”
This joke is actually a joke about jokes, a riddle that fails to add up; it absurdly ends up with a “nu” for a conclusion. And it is here where the Jewish love for humor begins. Let me explain why.
The name of the second Jewish patriarch is Yitzchak; the root word of his name is tzachak, which means laughter. In our Parsha, the root tzachak is employed several times; almost all are in relation to the birth, naming and raising of Yitzchak. They indicate the joy and shock Avraham and Sarah have when learning they will have a child in old age. The root word is also used when Lot tells his sons-in-law that their home city of Sodom is about to be destroyed. They do not believe him, for his words are “like a joke [kimitzacheik] in their eyes.”
The double reference to laughter highlights that both events are improbable to the point of being funny. And indeed they are. To an observer at the time, the possibility that a major city like Sodom will disappear, or that a childless, wandering, elderly couple will be the progenitors of a great civilization seems ludicrous. The funny thing is, this strange outcome is precisely what occurs; and it is here that the Jewish love for humor begins.
It is difficult to write a short article on Jewish humor; there are only so many jokes that you can tell, and so many others that have to be left out. But the greatest Jewish joke is ever-present: that am yisrael chai, that a small nation beat ridiculous odds time and time again. Just like the elderly couple Avraham and Sarah, Jews were expected to disappear; instead, they continue to thrive, year after year. Isn’t that laughably absurd? Yes, it is; and that’s why the first Jewish child was named Yitzchak.
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz is the Senior Rabbi of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York.
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Why the Left Truly Is Evil, (Not Stupid!)
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Top Obama Adviser Delivers a Devastating Observation of the Biden White House
By Matt Vespa
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What We Love About America
Yeonmi Park, Roland Fryer, David Sabatini and more
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Happy Independence Day. — BW
There’s lots of talk of privilege these days, and we are privileged here. I don’t mean white or cishet or able-bodied. I mean privileged by being in this country.
Even with all the intrusions on our freedom that we regularly document here—intrusions from government, from tech, from the hall monitors of elite culture—we still know that we are the freest citizens of any country on Earth.
We are all familiar with the complaints and critiques of America. We lodge many of them ourselves. But there’s always still that fundamental truth: Every single person in this country is lucky. Not by a little—lucky by a lot.
Today, in honor of the 4th of July, we asked Americans we admire to tell us what they love about this country. You’ll notice that many of them are immigrants. We don’t think that’s coincidental: Those who were not born into freedom are alive to what makes this country exceptional.
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The Constitution
By Yeonmi Park
I read the Constitution for the first time when I finally made it from North Korea to South Korea. I was studying English, and collecting letters of recommendation in the hopes that I would win a visa and be able to travel across the ocean to America. Even with my broken English, I teared up reading the sentences. I didn’t know then what the word dignity meant, but that was what I felt for the first time in my life.
My mother and I didn't risk our lives trekking across the Gobi Desert so we could buy a nice car or live in a nice home. We did it to get an I.D. from a government that recognized us as human beings—not as slaves. To us, to become American was like winning a thousand lotteries.
I officially became an American six months ago. It was January in Chicago, the judge was late, we were all in masks, and there were no guests allowed. In my heart, though, I became an American when I first read the Constitution. That day in Chicago, I was given a copy of that document, plus my naturalization certificate, and instructions for registering to vote after I took my oath. Then, I celebrated by going out for steak at the Ralph Lauren Cafe in downtown Chicago with family and a few friends (my mom, who is in South Korea, joined via Facetime.)
It was important to me to eat steak that night because back in North Korea, my mom witnessed the public execution of a man in his twenties who had killed and eaten a cow from a collective farm. He was dying of starvation and he had tuberculosis, but the cow was the government's property, so he was put to death. The regime there gives more rights to cows than to human beings.
Now that I’m an American, I get to eat steak as much as I want. And Kim Jong-un can’t do anything about it.
Yeonmi Park is a North Korean defector and the author of “In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom.”
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Pioneers! O Pioneers!
By Liel Leibovitz
Maybe it was the Muppets that made me fall in love with America. I was eight when I saw them on TV, in my native Israel, and I imagined that every American was covered in felt and free of inhibitions and always in a rush to put on a show. Maybe it was the American Patriot missiles I watched from a Tel Aviv rooftop in 1991, intercepting Saddam Hussein’s deadly Scuds and giving me a real life rockets-red-glare display of what fighting for freedom looked like. Maybe it was moving here with a few hundred bucks in my pocket and a college diploma and nothing else and believing—really, truly, profoundly believing—that hard work and good cheer was all it took for me, or for anyone else, to make a life here.
Maybe it was all of the above. And maybe they’re all the same—different facets of the national soulfulness Walt Whitman captured so effortlessly when he sounded that great and ageless American battlecry: Pioneers! O Pioneers!
So what am I most proud of as an immigrant to this land of wonders? Precisely this spirit of hurling ourselves into the impossible.
While some murmur and some despair and far too many rage futilely, American pioneers are building an excellent tomorrow. Some are starting schools to replace the ones corroded by ideological zealotry. Some are launching entire towns built around tried and true American principles of faith, family, and community. All are forging a future our children will be as proud of as we’re proud of the sacrifices and the imagination and the daring that made our American turn possible. So forget the whiners and the shouters, the hysterics and the cynics and those who count the seconds to midnight. Now and forever, it’s morning in America. Thank God.
Liel Leibovitz is editor at large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast, Unorthodox, and the daily Talmud podcast Take One.
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Upward Mobility
By Roland Fryer
Over the years, I’ve met people from small conservative towns in Eastern India to liberal neighborhoods on the outskirts of Vienna to religious communities in rural Mississippi who have almost nothing in common except the audacity of their dreams, their willingness to sacrifice for them, and America’s role in fulfilling them. In one generation, whether you are an immigrant from Asia or a sharecropper’s grandson, America is a place where you can accomplish whatever you set your mind to.
This stunning trait—the dispensing of opportunity regardless of the hue of your skin or the rhythm of your accent—is what makes me most proud to be an American.
According to my colleague Raj Chetty and his collaborators, the chance that a child is in the top 20% of incomes in America, given their parents were in the bottom 20%, is roughly 10%.
Yes, this differs substantially by race and region of the country. And as a nation, we must do a lot more to ensure that America’s opportunities are more equally distributed across all communities. But I am part of that 10%.
In 2014, I had the pleasure of meeting Barack Obama for the first time. We were in the Roosevelt room in the West Wing of the White House—having lunch beneath the portrait of Theodore Roosevelt on his rearing horse. When the meal ended, he and I shook hands, and the handshake became an embrace.
“Only in America,” I told him, “can a guy like me meet the president.”
“Only in America,” he replied, “can a guy like me become president and meet a guy like you.”
Twenty years prior to that hug, was a wayward teenager who had given up on America. Luckily, America never gave up on me.
Roland Fryer is a professor of economics at Harvard University and a John A. Paulson Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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Diners
By Joseph Massey
There is nothing like huddling with friends over weak coffee in 24-hour diners. That’s where I spent my teens and twenties, babbling late into the night about art, poetry, politics, and philosophy, free under the bright fluorescent light. Regardless of how packed it often was, the booths felt so private, designed for leaning in, for getting close.
That face-to-face intimacy is lost now. And diners have become novelties—living-history museums complete with tabletop jukeboxes that stopped working decades ago.
But they were once ubiquitous. An American invention (first called “night-lunch wagons” in the late 1800s), diners served graveyard-shift workers and jobless dreamers, the perpetually downtrodden, and broke students for nearly a century. Every town had one, and they dotted the highways in dependable intervals. I remember the Hollywood Diner in Dover, Delaware, the city where I spent my adolescence. (A Google search reveals the Hollywood Diner permanently closed last year after new ownership rebranded it The Southern Grille, a move that failed to revitalize business.) I remember the waitress with the hands that held time in each crease and vein as she gripped the handle of a bottomless coffee pot. Her voice was warm and raspy. She called everyone “dear,” and she meant it.
Joseph Massey is a poet. His latest book is “Rosary Made of Air.”
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The Pursuit of Scientific Truth
By David M. Sabatini
There is simply no other country in the world that has fostered an explosion in scientific research whose fruits are impacting humanity for the better. We’ve done this by attracting the best talent from all over the world and allowing those people to pursue their curiosity without fear.
In my field of molecular biology, it is de rigueur to point out the many challenges that biomedical researchers face. Some of these criticisms, like the relatively low pay and structural barriers to entry, are well warranted. But I never lose sight of the fact that people like me are paid to make discoveries about nature. I never forget that only a tiny fraction of all the people who have ever existed have had the blessing of being able to earn a livelihood by satisfying their curiosity. I am so lucky to be one of them.
The labs I have been in and have led were microcosms of America: melting pots of hardworking people of diverse backgrounds; rigorous, but zanny; warm, but unpretentious. They were places where every few weeks someone revealed another of mother nature’s secrets—sometimes just a little one but always giving the scientist the thrill of knowing they were the first person to know it. When I worked in the lab I worked crazy hours, sometimes to exhaustion and often to the point where my fingertips would bleed from opening and closing test tubes. I cannot recall a happier time.
David M. Sabatini is a molecular biologist who studies how organisms sense nutrients to control their growth and metabolism.
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Self-Determination
By Lulu Cheng Meservey
I was born in a rural village in China. Our family consisted of subsistence farmers who had lived through abject poverty and famine, who had never attained higher education, who had for long stretches survived on one potato a day.
It wasn’t easy to leave the country, but my parents managed it and took me with them. We lived in several different countries and ultimately settled in the U.S., in pursuit of The Good Life.
It worked. I am, like the Big Poppa lyric, living better now.
But what I’ve come to appreciate most about being an American isn’t simply living well in the sense of having cars in the driveway or a well stocked fridge, although those are nice. It’s living the consequences of my own choices.
Where I come from, much of your biography was already written by the time you entered the world. The choices available to you were heavily based on things like your ethnicity, social class, and household registration. The path of your life was determined less by your own decisions and more by a central committee.
In the U.S., being simultaneously female, foreign, and broke didn’t bar me from a good education (and being an ethnic minority and generally lippy individual didn’t flag me for “reeducation”). I’ve been able to decide the course of my career, pursuing the work most meaningful to me—not the work most useful to the government. Here, I can choose to accept the consensus view or to side with the minority. I’ve been able to support political organizing that has criticized both major political parties—and I’ve never wound up in jail. Most importantly, my husband and I were able to marry across geographic, demographic, and political lines. The number of kids we have was decided by us, not by state diktat.
Many people in China, including my family who stayed behind, enjoy a rich and fulfilling life. Maybe I would have too if I’d stayed. But enjoying a life is different from leading a life, and the latter is what I’m able to do in the U.S.
It’s far from perfect, but here, more than where I was born and probably more than anywhere else, we write our own biographies. In deciding to become American, I’m getting to decide much more.
Lulu Cheng Meservey is VP of Communications at Substack.
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