This year the numbers will be worse and we are only 3/4 through.
I got this info from a friend of mine. There is a place to go validate the information provided, but you may have another source. Just passing this along. I found it rather interesting statistically.
Time to face the truth!
Interesting info! - regarding 10 million arrests - take a look.......................... ...yes, last year there were 10 million arrests by police...
If anyone is uncomfortable with the accuracy of these numbers you can research at: Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program — FBI https://www.fbi.gov/services/ cjis/ucr
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report and the Washington Post, last year there were 10 million arrests by police...10 Million!!
Out of those 10 MILLION arrests there were 1,004 officer involved fatalities.
Out of those 1,004 officer involved fatalities, 41 were unarmed.
Out of those 41-officer involved unarmed fatalities (now you might find it hard to believe I know), but out of 41 deaths, now hear this...
19 were white -
9 were black -
Now 1 is 1 too many, but to me 41 out of 10 million is a pretty small percentage! (.00041%)
Now ask me how many police officers were killed in the line of duty... c’mon, take a wild guess...
89 police officers, but where was the news media when those took place?
Just to bring it home, take a guess as to how many people were shot in CHICAGO just this last weekend.
In Chicago last weekend, 82 people were shot within a 48-hour period.
Of those 82 people, 19 people died.
Yes, you got it.
In Chicago last weekend alone, there were more black people killed by (wait for it...) black people than were killed by police in all of last year!
The hypocrisy is mind blowing. Now go ahead, please do the research and see for yourself.
Thank you to Bernard Kerik, Former NYPD Police Commissioner for sharing this information.
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Information about the two seemingly main potential Justice nominees.
The Two Women at the Top of the Supreme Court List
Either Amy Coney Barrett or Barbara Lagoa would be a strong pick. Timing may favor the latter.President Trump has announced that he will pick a woman for the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But which one?The New York Times reports that in a phone call with Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Trump is said to have mentioned two female appellate court judges — Amy Coney Barrett and Barbara Lagoa — as being on his short list. What do we know about them?
Barrett has been initially viewed as the early favorite. Jonathan Swan of Axios reported in 2019 that Trump had said of Barrett: “I’m saving her for Ginsburg.” Axios said he used that exact line with several people, including an adviser two days before revealing Kavanaugh’s nomination.
The high standing in which Barrett is held by conservative lawyers and activists is undisputed. She is only 48 years old and would probably serve on the court for a generation. Her academic writings indicate that she’s pro-life. But Bloomberg Law reports that in a 2013 speech she said:The fundamental element, that the woman has a right to choose abortion, will probably stand. The controversy right now is about funding. It’s a question of whether abortions will be publicly or privately funded.
Her views on interpreting the Constitution are in the same mold as those of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.On a personal level, Barrett is engaging and articulate, and she has a powerful life story. She is the mother of seven children, two of whom she and her husband adopted from Haiti.
An adviser close to Trump says Barrett also “has the inside track in the sense that she was kind of battle-tested for having gone through a confirmation [for the appeals court] already.”
But another Trump appointee who has gone through an appeals-court confirmation battle has suddenly landed on the short list. Judge Barbara Lagoa, of Florida, who is 52 years old, has served on the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals since last December. While Barrett attracted considerable opposition and was confirmed by a 54 to 42 vote, Lagoa sailed though on a mostly bipartisan vote of 80 to 15.Lagoa is the daughter of Cuban parents who fled Castro’s dictatorship and moved to Miami. She has said that her father had to give up his “dream of becoming a lawyer” because of Castro.
Born in 1967, she inherited her family’s anti-Communism and served as a pro bono lawyer for the Miami family of six-year-old Elian Gonzalez. In 2000, Elian’s Miami relatives fought unsuccessfully to prevent his return to Cuba by the Clinton administration.
A former federal prosecutor, Lagoa was appointed to a state appeals court by then-governor Jeb Bush in 2006. In 2019, she was appointed by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a hero of conservatives, as the first Hispanic woman on Florida’s supreme court. After less than a year on that bench, Trump elevated her to the Eleventh Circuit.When asked about Lagoa on Saturday, Trump was effusive: “She’s an extraordinary person. I’ve heard incredible things about her. . . . Highly respected.”Trump has told allies he sees political advantages in appointing Lagoa. The mother of three daughters, she would be only the second Hispanic justice to ever serve. The first was Obama appointee Sonia Sotomayor.Lagoa’s heritage is one of several reasons that 26 Senate Democrats voted to confirm her in 2019. Among those in her corner was California’s Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats might find it difficult to viciously attack Lagoa, given how many of them rely on Hispanic voters in the November elections.Lagoa’s nomination would be viewed favorably in Florida, a state with 29 electoral votes. The last three major statewide elections there — the 2016 race for president and the 2018 races for governor and U.S. senator — have all been won with less than 51 percent of the vote.Although she has served less than a year as a federal appeals-court judge, similarly short stints have not been a barrier to confirmation to the high court in the past. Former justice David Souter had been an appeals-court judge for only two months when he was appointed in 1990. Clarence Thomas had been an appeals-court judge for only 15 months when he was appointed in 1991.Conservatives who have been disappointed over past appointees who have drifted to the left — see Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts — have expressed concern that Lagoa lacks a clear conservative footprint on the bench. In chat rooms, some conservatives have even descended into personal attacks: “Harriet Miers with a tan,” “John Roberts with better hair,” “Sotomayor 2.0.”That’s not fair. The conservative footprint that Lagoa has left isn’t a deep one, but it’s solid. Democrats demanded that she recuse herself from a case involving felons’ voting rights in Florida that she had previously participated in as a state judge. She fought back with élan and bite.
That case was eventually decided by Lagoa’s Eleventh Circuit Court, where she joined the court’s six-to-four majority decision to uphold a Florida law requiring nearly 800,000 former felons in the state to settle their court fines and fees before they regain the right to vote. She declared Florida’s law reasonable: “It falls to the citizens of the state of Florida and their elected state legislators, not to federal judges, to make any additional changes to it.”There is no doubt the organized Left would strenuously oppose Lagoa. The Alliance for Justice, a very left-wing group, issued an extensive attack on her decisions involving business and criminal-justice issues. AFJ claimed that Lagoa had been “screened” by the Federalist Society for her Florida supreme-court appointment. It also fretted that she had been endorsed by the pro-tort-reform Florida Justice Reform Institute and the Florida Family Policy Council, a group of social conservatives.The fear that some Trump advisers have is that Barrett’s staunchly expressed religious views would make her lose the votes of Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, both of whom have said that at a minimum they oppose filling the vacancy before the November election. But the president also has to worry about Senators such as Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has said he will refuse to vote for a nominee who won’t state publicly that Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided.”“The Supreme Court judicial selection process with the president is a very fluid one,” a “source familiar with the matter” told Axios. “He floats in and out of these discussions over a period of time.”
No one knows what Trump will decide until he makes his announcement, but the peculiar timing of this appointment augurs well for Barbara Lagoa’s chances. If the vacancy had occurred in the spring, it’s likely Amy Coney Barrett would have remained the favorite.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++As previously noted, radical Democrats have threatened to impeach Trump as he performs his constitutional duty, they have threatened to riot if the selection to replace RBG does not satisfy them, they also have threatened, should they win The Senate, to pack the Court, to eliminate the filibuster and to rid the nation of the Electoral College. They act like pathetic petulant children who do not get their way and it is going to backfire on them. This is why they want to focus on two things:
a) Scaring Republicans by accusing them of throwing vulnerable campaigning Senators over the cliff. I believe vulnerable Republicans Senators will benefit from doing the job they were elected to do.
b) They are attacking Trump because 200,000 Americans have died because of COVID 19. Trump responded and China is to blame for the world wide pandemic, not Trump. What China launched was unprecedented and the PCC withheld critical information and Trump responded.
The previous administration left the medical cabinet bare and Trump responded..
He was attacked for doing what he did by Biden who has offered nothing different other than to be critical and carping. More BS
.Court-Packing 101: What Would FDR Himself Do?
By PAUL ATKINSON, Special to the Sun
What would FDR do? That’s what we’re thinking as the battle over a nomination to replace Justice Ginsburg engulfs the Senate. President Franklin Roosevelt was the last president to get so irked at the nation’s highest court that he tried to pack it with his constitutional cronies. That’s what today’s Democrats are threatening to do if the 116th Senate confirms a Trump nominee. Hence the question, what would FDR do?
Before we get there, though, what, exactly did FDR do in the great court-packing caper that forever tarnished his legacy?
It turns out that the number of justices is not fixed in the Constitution. What it says is that the “judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” The first Judiciary Act, which Congress passed in 1789, set the number of Justices at six.
Since then, Congress has changed the number six times. During the Civil War, the court totaled ten. That was the result of a court packing by Northern Republicans. The prospect of a 21st century expansion recalls FDR’s “court packing” scheme in the spring of 1937, when the President was frustrated by Supreme Court rulings against various New Deal measures.
Agencies declared invalid included the National Recovery Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration. One case cast doubt on the Tennessee Valley Authority. Many feared for the Social Security and National Labor Relations Acts. For Roosevelt, the last straw was a June 1936 decision that invalidated a New York State minimum wage law for women, a measure that had been copied by other states.
On March 9, 1937, fresh from a resounding re-election, FDR told the nation “we must take action to save the Constitution from the Court and the Court from itself.” He accused Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes and his associates of assuming a role as a third branch of the legislature. “The Court has been acting not as a judicial body,” he boomed, “but as a policy making body.
Today it’s an amazing irony that the politicians mirroring Roosevelt’s beef regarding the court are not Senators Chuck Schumer or Sheldon Whitehouse. Rather, the analogs of FDR today are the Republican conservatives and originalists, who, like FDR did, see the Supremes as improperly acting as legislators through judicial overreach.
FDR’s vaunted political skills, though, failed him in his attempt to pack the court. There’s a wonderful chapter on it in Conrad Black’s magisterial biography of FDR, “Champion of Freedom.” FDR eschewed any attempt at a constitutional amendment, and offered the Judicial Branch Reorganization Plan to deal with allegedly aging justices.
It requested that Congress expand the Court (and the lower courts as well) by adding one judge for every incumbent over the age of sixty-nine, up to, in the Supreme Court’s case, a limit of fifteen. The legislation was initially couched as an effort to relieve the courts of overwork and clear case backlogs, implying that aged justices were not up to the demands of their offices.
For a man himself disabled, FDR called into question the “capacity” of “aged or infirm judges,” particularly those “unable to perceive their own infirmities.” He charged that “a lowered mental or physical vigor leads men to avoid an examination of complicated and changed conditions.”
The “Reorganization Plan” created a tsunami of opposition and split the President’s own party. The scourge of Wall Street, Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, spoke for the Southern Democrats in declaring the bill “utterly destitute of moral authority” and an attempt to “replace representative government with autocracy.”
On July 20, the Senate rejected that plan by a vote of 70 to 20. A bill did finally emerge from the wreckage, though — the Judicial Procedure Reform Act of 1937. It expedited appeals to the High Court and limited the capacity for court injunctions. Even as the prospects for packing the court faded, Hughes and fellow sages on the high bench took pre-emptive action.
In a March 29 decision, a change in vote by Justice Owen Roberts completely reversed the Court’s stance on state minimum wage laws. It was by immortalized by humorist Cal Tinny, who quipped: “A switch in time saves nine.”
Three cases in April confirmed the constitutionality of the NLRB and its parent Wagner Act. The Court was seen as sending a message of compromise, one that offered the President some semblance of victory, as his legislative prospects withered.
FDR was soon to have the future of the court in his hands. With no vacancies to fill in his first term, he ended up, between 1937 and 1943, nominating eight justices, more than any president save George Washington. His nominees included not only Hugo Black of First Amendment fame but Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and liberal icon William O. Douglas. Douglas and Black would serve for thirty-six and thirty-four years respectively.
How might the country react to a 2021 Biden court packing plan — one designed, not to curtail judicial activism, but expand it? Might a contemporary Carter Glass emerge to chastise fellow Democrats over such a blatant usurpation of the separation of powers? Will Chief Justice Roberts emulate Justice Hughes and attempt to engineer a more moderate tilt to the Courts, a tactic he has previously employed?
Well, it is worth recalling the dictum of another eminent Roosevelt-appointed justice, and chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, Robert Jackson, regarding the political standing of the Court and its legitimacy: “We are not final because we are infallible, we are infallible because we are final.”
Mr. Atkinson, a contributing editor of the Sun, covers the 20th Century.
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An article sent by a friend and fellow memo reader:
I NEVER DREAMED THAT...
I never dreamed that I would have to face the prospect of not living in the United States of America, at least not the one I have known all my life. I have never wished to live anywhere else. This is my home and I was privileged to be born here.
But today I woke up and as I had my morning coffee, I realized that everything is about to change. No matter how I vote, no matter what I say, something evil has invaded our nation, and our lives are never going to be the same.
I have been confused by the hostility of family and friends. I look at people I have known all my life--so hate-filled that they agree with opinions they would never express as their own. I think that I may have entered the Twilight Zone.
You can't justify this insanity. We have become a nation that has lost its collective mind!
• Somehow, it’s un-American for the census to count how many Americans are in America.
• Russians influencing our elections are bad, but illegals voting in our elections is good.
• It was cool for Joe Biden to "blackmail" the President of Ukraine, but it’s an impeachable offense if Donald Trump inquiries about it.
• Twenty is too young to drink a beer, but eighteen is old enough to vote.
• People who have never owned slaves should pay slavery reparations to people who have never been slaves.
• People who have never been to college should pay the debts of college students who took out huge loans for their degrees.
• Immigrants with tuberculosis and polio are welcome, but you’d better be able to prove your dog is vaccinated.
• Irish doctors and German engineers who want to immigrate to the US must go through a rigorous vetting process, but any illiterate gang-banger who jumps the southern fence are welcome.
• $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
• If you cheat to get into college, you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
• People who say there is no such thing as gender are demanding a female President.
• We see other countries going Socialist and collapsing, but it seems like a great plan to us.
• Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
• Criminals are caught-and-released to hurt more people, but stopping them is bad because it's a violation of THEIR rights.
• And pointing out all this hypocrisy somehow makes us "racists?!"
Nothing makes sense anymore, no values, no morals, no civility and people are dying of a Chinese virus, but it racist to refer to it as Chinese even though it began in China.
We are clearly living in an upside-down world where right is wrong and wrong is right, where moral is immoral and immoral is moral, where good is evil and evil is good, where killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.
Wake up America, the great unsinkable ship Titanic America has hit an iceberg, is taking on water, and is sinking fast. The choice is yours to make. What will it be? Time is short, make your choice wisely!
Not my words but very accurate and disturbing!
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The despicable Kavanaugh Hearings are coming back to bite radical Democrat's as well as Harry Reid's Ruling regarding Judicial nominations.
Don’t Give In to Democrats’ Supreme Court Extortion
If Republicans don’t appoint a new justice, they’ll alienate their most loyal voters.
President Trump’s determination to fill the Supreme Court vacancy has enraged Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ominously warns that if Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is replaced and Democrats gain a Senate majority, “nothing is off the table.” It’s not clear what was off the table before: Democrats had already threatened to end the filibuster, ignore pay-as-you-go rules, make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states and pack the court.
The media frantically replays 2016 clips of Republican senators like Lindsey Graham, now Judiciary Committee chairman, explaining their refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing. They are less likely to mention the many Democrats who flip-flopped in the opposite direction. But Republicans note that their objection to election-year nominations applied when the president’s party was a Senate minority. They reason that voters gave them the majority in 2014 as a brake on President Obama’s ambitions.
The media breathlessly cites Ginsburg’s dying wish that the next president appoint her successor, as if she had any claim to the seat after her death. It’s reminiscent of Democratic outrage a decade ago that Republican Scott Brown should occupy Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, as if it belonged to the family and not the state of Massachusetts. And never mind Ginsburg’s own 2016 comments in favor of approving an election-year nominee or her decision not to retire before 2015, when Mr. Obama and a Democratic Senate could have appointed her successor.
The “Biden rule”—which the then-Judiciary chairman put forth in 1992, the vice president rejected in 2016, and the nominee has re-embraced in 2020—is that the president shouldn’t make a nomination to the Supreme Court in an election year so that voters have a chance to make their voices heard. That implies that presidential elections should be national referendums on the high court—a view that is of a piece with liberal judicial philosophy in that it is at odds with the Constitution.
If Republicans give in to Democratic extortion, it will never end, and they will forfeit the authority to govern—along with the support of the voters who make up their electoral base. If Republican senators fail to stand up and fight back, many of the party’s most committed supporters will decide it is time to quit the party and perhaps even politics. They won’t support Joe Biden or other Democrats, but they have little reason to go to the polls on Election Day.
Many voters were inspired by Mr. Trump’s promise to take on the establishment and drain the swamp. They wish he had kept all his promises, but they also credit him for having the courage to try. Some pundits claim beleaguered Republican senators from purple states—Arizona’s Martha McSally, Colorado’s Cory Gardner, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis—can demonstrate their independence from Mr. Trump, increase their election odds, and appeal to moderate voters by joining a Democratic effort to keep the seat open. The committed conservative voters those senators would lose would more than offset any such gains.
The best way to reduce the intensity of fights over judicial nominations is for the other branches of government to reclaim their constitutional powers. Liberal judges have assumed too much power; they want to write the laws, not just interpret them. Society’s most intense debates over the limits on individual autonomy and the proper role of government should not be decided by five unelected jurists, but rather by political leaders accountable to the voters.
Mr. Jindal was governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
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Breaking Judicial Norms: A History
A Democratic Senate pattern, from Bork to the filibuster rule.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is widely reported to have told his Democratic colleagues on Saturday that “nothing is off the table for next year” if Republicans confirm a Supreme Court nominee in this Congress. He means this as a threat that Democrats will break the filibuster and pack the Court with more Justices in 2021 if they take control of the Senate in November’s election.So what else is new? Democrats have a long history of breaking procedural norms on judges. While packing the Court would be their most radical decision to date, it would fit their escalating pattern. Let’s review the modern historical lowlights to see which party has really been the political norm-breaker:
So what else is new? Democrats have a long history of breaking procedural norms on judges. While packing the Court would be their most radical decision to date, it would fit their escalating pattern. Let’s review the modern historical lowlights to see which party has really been the political norm-breaker:•
The Bork assault. When Ronald Reagan selected Robert Bork in 1987, the judge was among the most qualified ever nominated. No less than Joe Biden had previously said he might have to vote to confirm him. Then Ted Kennedy issued his demagogic assault from the Senate floor, complete with lies about women “forced into back-alley abortions” and blacks who would have to “sit at segregated lunch counters.” Democrats and the press then unleashed an unprecedented political assault.
Previous nominees who had failed in the Senate were suspected of corruption (Abe Fortas) or thought unqualified (Harrold Carswell). Bork was defeated because of distortions about his jurisprudence. This began the modern era of hyper-politicized judicial nominations, though for the Supreme Court it has largely been a one-way partisan street.
No Democratic nominee has been borked, to use the name that became a verb. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose left-wing legal views were obvious upon her nomination, received a respectful GOP hearing and was confirmed 68-31 with nine GOP votes. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3, Stephen Breyer 87-9, and Elena Kagan 63-37.
Democrats, meanwhile, have escalated to character assassination. Clarence Thomas was unfairly smeared on the eve of a Senate vote and barely confirmed. Democrats accused Samuel Alito of racism and sexism for belonging decades earlier to an obscure Princeton alumni group.
Democrats promoted the uncorroborated claims of women accusers against Brett Kavanaugh from his high school and college years. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse undertook a deep dive into Justice Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook. This treatment has become the real Democratic Party “norm.”
• Filibustering appellate nominees. It’s mostly forgotten now, but in George W. Bush’s first term Senate Democrats pioneered the use of the filibuster to block nominees to the circuit courts. That was also unprecedented.
Miguel Estrada was left hanging for 28 months before he withdrew, though he had support from 55 Senators. A 2001 Judiciary Committee memo to Sen. Dick Durbin was candid in urging opposition to Mr. Estrada because “he is Latino” and couldn’t be allowed to reach the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals lest he later become a candidate for the Supreme Court.
Democrats also filibustered or otherwise blocked appellate nominees Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, Charles Pickering Sr., Henry Saad, Carolyn Kuhl, William Pryor, David McKeague, Richard Griffin and William Myers, among others.
This violation of norms was stopped only after the GOP regained the majority and threatened to change Senate rules. A handful of Senators in both parties then negotiated a deal to vote for nominees except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Republicans did not unilaterally break the filibuster for judicial nominees.
• Breaking the filibuster for appellate nominees. That norm-breaker was executed by Democrats in 2013, led by then Majority Leader Harry Reid with the enthusiastic support of Barack Obama. Democrats rewrote Senate rules in mid-Congress, on a party-line vote, to add three seats to the D.C. Circuit. The goal was to stack that court with liberals who would rubber stamp Mr. Obama’s “pen” and “phone” regulatory diktats.
Those liberals have done that numerous times, while sometimes blocking President Trump’s deregulatory rule-makings. But the political cost has been high, as we warned at the time. Harry Reid’s precedent allowed GOP leader Mitch McConnell to do the same when Democrats tried to filibuster Neil Gorsuch. The GOP majority can now confirm Mr. Trump’s next nominee with 51 votes.
Urged on by the progressive media, Democrats are now vowing that they’ll break the 60-vote legislative filibuster rule to add two, or even four, new Justices to the Supreme Court next year for a total of 11 or 13. But they have already been saying this for months. Barack Obama gave the green light when he used John Lewis’s funeral to call the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic.” Never mind that as a Senator he endorsed a filibuster of Mr. Alito. Mr. Whitehouse and four colleagues explicitly threatened in an amicus brief that the Court would be “restructured” if Justices rule the wrong way.
Republicans could surrender and not confirm a nominee, and Senate Democrats would still break the filibuster. Court packing would then become a sword hanging over the Justices if they rule contrary to the policy views of the Senate left. Leader Schumer won’t resist because he is quaking at the prospect of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2022.
Judges were also on the Senate ballot in 2018 after the Kavanaugh ugliness. The GOP gained two net seats. The use of their elected Senate power now to confirm a nominee would be a wholly legitimate use of their constitutional authority. They should not be cowed by Democratic threats from confirming a nominee. Democrats have shown they will do what they want with Senate power no matter what Republicans do now.
What Republicans should do is let the voters know about the Democratic filibuster and court-packing plans, and make them a campaign issue. Democratic Senators and candidates should have to declare themselves not merely on Mr. Trump’s nominee but on the filibuster and court-packing that Mr. Schumer has now told the country will be on the table.
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Supreme Court Succession Battle Shows Hypocrisy Is an Enduring Norm
One exception is Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose position in 2020 is consistent with 2016’s.
Try to imagine the reaction of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi and their Hallelujah Chorus in the media if a conservative Supreme Court justice had died weeks before the re-election bid of a Democratic president while that party also controlled the Senate.
See if you can make the statesmanlike words fit the mouths of these stolid custodians of honor, integrity and unswerving principle.
“It is our solemn duty to set aside our ambition to remake the court and patiently await the outcome of the people’s decision,” says Sen. Schumer, demonstrating once again why he has a glowing reputation for devotion to selfless virtue over ambition and political self-interest.
“Though we strongly believe this is a matter of the greatest importance for our nation, for life, liberty and the pursuit of our agenda, it would be wrong to fill this vacancy with just a few months left of this presidency,” says Speaker Pelosi, emerging perfectly coiffed from a locked-down hair salon to denounce hypocrisy and double-standards in politics.
“Fiat justitia, ruat caelum,” declaims a tearful Don Lemon on CNN, explaining to his less erudite fellow commentators that justice must be done, rules observed, whatever the lost political advantage.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the vacancy it has produced on the Supreme Court have produced a now familiar word spray on the importance of norms and the scourge of hypocrisy in the nation’s politics. Yet hypocrisy is itself a political norm with a long pedigree. At least since Brutus plunged his knife into Julius Caesar for the alleged crime of exaggerated ambition, politicians have been asserting one set of rules for their opponents and living by another.
In the case of the new court vacancy, it’s not even evident that the Republican leadership is being hypocritical, despite the howls of their opponents.
It’s true that some Republicans, such as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, have had to use some awkward rhetorical acrobatics to explain why the rigid barriers they erected four years ago to President Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland were merely flexible guide ropes, to be moved now they are no longer convenient.
But the principle invoked by Mitch McConnell in 2016 is still intact. The majority leader back then repeatedly insisted his controlling authority was the precedent that the Senate doesn’t confirm a nominee in an election year when the White House and the Senate are controlled by opposing parties.
“Remember that the Senate has not filled a vacancy arising in an election year when there was divided government since 1888,” he said on the Senate floor.
In a thorough examination of the historical record for a recent National Review article, Dan McLaughlin cataloged all these cases and found precedent is indeed on the Republican side. There have been 19 cases in which a president of one party nominated a justice for approval by a Senate controlled by the same party between Jan. 1 of an election year and Inauguration Day the following year. Only two of these nominees—Abe Fortas for chief justice and Homer Thornberry to fill Fortas’s seat, both in 1968—were not confirmed.
But there’s a larger principle at stake in any case than the often dispensable one of sticking rigidly to convention: that old-fashioned idea about the democratic will.
It’s hard to think of a more apt conclusion to this tumultuous presidential term in fact than the fight that now will presumably unfold over Ginsburg’s successor.
The reason millions of voters swallowed their doubts about Donald Trump in 2016 was that they believed their voices had too often been ignored. They could elect presidents and Congresses, but the relentless march of an increasingly authoritarian progressivism seemed immune to the popular will.
The Supreme Court was central to this sense of alienation: The transfer of lawmaking powers to activist judges in a whole range of areas that were once decided by voters only deepened the impression that unaccountable elites make the rules a nation of deplorables must live by.
In electing President Trump in 2016 and a Republican-controlled Senate that year and again in 2018, voters were in part daring to defy that rule. If that Senate were now to fail to confirm a justice nominated by that president, it would surely only deepen the cynicism of those voters
There’s another sense in which this battle is a fitting one for these times.
It’s been clear all summer that there’s an emerging progressive consensus that considers the nation’s institutions, traditional values and even its history to be fundamentally illegitimate. Should the Democrats win in November, their leaders can be expected to reflect and advance much of that radicalism.
A conservative court, committed to reaffirming rather than rewriting the principles on which the nation was founded, might prove timely indeed.
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As noted in previous memos, I have called attention to the fact that Greens raised the cost of nuclear power because of red tape, delays and restrictions. Nuclear is the cleanest energy as is natural gas, which is also opposed by radical Democrats. Finally, we do not control the actions of China so what we do and ask of them is a total disconnect.
Appeasing China Won’t Cool the Earth
A President Biden would face pressure from climate hawks to go easy on Beijing.
As policy makers in Beijing weigh their options in the event of a Biden victory, one of the subjects that will most engage their attention is climate change. Joe Biden has repeatedly stated that he will put the goal of slowing climate change at the heart of U.S. foreign policy. Washington would rejoin the Paris Climate Accords and urge all countries to enact measures to keep Earth’s temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, as the Democratic Party platform states.
China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Does this mean a Biden administration would add another dimension to U.S.-China tensions? Beijing likely hopes it’ll ease them.
For Chinese officials, the goal would be to get the Biden administration to negotiate with itself—the climate hawks persuading the incoming president to squelch the China hawks to save the planet. Beijing is the key to climate change, climate warriors will say, and America can’t persuade China to help cool the Earth by harassing it on trade, imposing sanctions against its companies, arming Taiwan, and encouraging its neighbors to form alliances against Beijing.
This is an approach China can work with. Beijing wants to fight climate change, its diplomats will whisper to U.S. climate hawks, but Chinese hard-liners need to be convinced. Help us to help you: If America demonstrates a spirit of compromise and cooperation on issues important to the hard-liners, well, who can say? We might even give up our coal plants. Someday.
There are Democrats to whom this will seem like smart statecraft. Global governance, they will tell Americans, transcends the petty stakes of geopolitical competition. Our common interest in saving humanity outweighs ephemeral disputes over maritime boundaries. Can we really let a conflict over Taiwan, a small island that America already officially recognizes as part of China, stand in the way of a climate treaty that could halt extinction?
The Biden team needs to assess Beijing’s position on climate change realistically. Global temperatures aside, China wants to improve the energy efficiency of its economy because energy is a cost. Beijing wants to reduce the country’s reliance on foreign fuel because the U.S. controls the sea lanes through which China’s Middle East imports must flow. It wants to mandate a shift from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles because this would destroy German and Japanese competitive advantages in the automobile industry. A new technology would give Chinese car companies a chance to occupy the industry’s commanding heights. Beijing wants to reduce water and air pollution in and around China’s great cities because residents, including powerful Communist Party members, like clean water and air.
China’s emissions will slow also because its economy is no longer growing as rapidly as it did during the boom years. As Chinese consumers become older and more affluent, demand will tend to shift to less energy-intensive services, like health care. The information revolution, which is making the world more energy-efficient and reducing humanity’s environmental footprint, is at work in China as well.
Like diplomats from many other countries, Beijing’s climate negotiators spend a lot of time packaging steps their country would take anyway as bold and courageous initiatives demonstrating its altruistic leadership. Because China’s environmental record is so poor, there is much low-hanging fruit still to gather; Beijing can achieve significant progress on emissions while honoring its other policy goals. On the other hand, it will resist any commitments that seriously interfere with its economic and strategic ambitions. The sad reality is that there isn’t all that much difference between the steps China is prepared to take on its own and the steps U.S. pressure might induce it to take.
The November election is still six weeks away, but Team Biden needs to begin preparing now to avoid a foreign-policy train wreck over climate and China policy. Just as Washington doesn’t accept linkage between geopolitics and human rights—e.g., America doesn’t offer to pull the navy out of the South China Sea if China agrees to ease up on the Uighurs—the U.S. needs to keep climate diplomacy and geopolitics on separate tracks.
That approach won’t please some Democratic activists, but if America fails to manage the geopolitical challenges associated with China’s rise, the world won’t be interested in Washington’s views on climate change or anything else.
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Another Rant:
Some additional stats: Real median household income in 2019 rose by $4,378 to $68,709. That one year rise is 50% greater than occurred in all eight years of Obama Biden. Median household income for blacks rose 7.9% and Latinos 7.1%. whites 5.7%. So next time Biden says Trump is bad for minorities, here are the data. In 2019 full time employed rose. Median income rose by 7.8% for women. In 2015 labor participation declined 2%, and under Trump rose 2.2% for 25-54 years olds in Q1 2020. The poverty rate dropped to 10.5% in 2019, the lowest since 1959. Black poverty dropped 2.0%. Child poverty dropped to 14.4% from 18% in 2016. The decline in 2019 was two times the decline as during the entire Obama Biden years.
The percentage of workers earning more than $200,000 rose in 2019 to 10.3% vs 8% in 2016. So when the Dems say Trump is bad for workers, these are the real numbers. New business formations applications doubled in the first two years of Trump vs Obama Biden due to much less regulation plus tax reductions. Employment became so robust that companies even hired felons and disabled who had not had previous jobs. At the beginning of 2020 there were well over 7 million unfilled jobs and nobody left to hire. This is why wages at the lower end rose so much more than at white collar management levels. So as jobs continue to return, and the GDP number for Q3 is over 30%, Trump will be well ahead of Biden’s record of slow growth over eight years. It is the economy stupid.
The stock market seems to be rotating to more traditional growth stocks like industrials and a little away from the big tech names and Tesla, all of which had gotten to silly valuations. It is likely that the tech stocks will decline and muddle along for a while, but if you are a long term investor like me, you still have tremendous upside over the next several years in the big tech names. Just be patient. Those stocks will face regulatory pressures, but stocks like APPL and ADBE are not targets of Congress like the social media and search sites. APPL has lost 22% from its recent high. It is probably a good buying opportunity now if you are a long term holder. The reality is, the economy is doing quite well, and some companies will show excellent earnings in October, and housing and autos are doing very well. The Fed is keeping rates at zero, so there is no good alternative other than US stocks. Expect volatility in October. However if the Dems win the election then that is a whole different case. Don’t get all caught up in polls. They are usually wrong as we all know.
Early in the year I predicted Ginsberg would die soon, but just did not think she would live as long as she did. This will be a giant issue on the election now. The fight will make Kavanaugh look like kindergarten. That seat controls the court until the next vacancy. If Trump wins, the court is locked to be strict construction adherence to what the constitution says, and not a living document subject to what is “in vogue” at the moment. If Trump wins and the R’s control the Senate, the court will be conservative for a generation, or until the Dems win control of the White House and Senate and pack the court.
Here is the conundrum. If they vote before the election Collins, Gardner and Tillis have to choose party, or maybe losing, if they wait to vote, the court needs to have all 9 members to deal with the legal battle the Dems will wage if Trump wins. The moderate Republicans need to say they need more time until after the election to consider the vote. This is really messy. You can expect massive demonstrations either way McConnell does it. They will need an army of law enforcement to protect the court and capitol buildings from violence. The Dems have already said they plan to pack the court if they win the Senate. Biden says he will nominate a black woman. That is blatant discrimination. Imagine if Trump said he is only going to nominate a white male. The Dems and press would go berserk. What happened to nominate the best qualified person.
Maybe I am missing something , but Trump is the elected president until January 20, and as such he has the obligation to name a replacement justice, and the Senate has the obligation to vote on that person. If the president is barred from doing his duty because it is near the election in regard to a justice, is he also barred from carrying out his other duties which may also have great consequences, like doing more peace deals between the Arabs and Israel, or signing the budget, or negotiating a phase 4 of a stimulus bill. It has been done 29 other times with no complaint. We are about to enter a very dangerous few months that will make what recently occurred in Portland, Seattle and NY look not so bad. This election is now going to determine where the country goes. Everything is at stake in this election. Make sure you go vote, and do it in person. There are a lot of illegal games going to be played with mail in voting which is why the Dems are so adamant to have it.
If you think the reasons for more chaos has ended, wait a few days. Senator Johnson is going to release a major report on Hunter Biden, and it will directly impact Joe. It will be emails that show extensive corruption by the Biden family, and the emails are from the state department senior officer who testified before Congress and is non-partisan. It is an account of major conflicts -spelled corruption- about Biden. Graham will be releasing some new documents that show what was really happening at the FBI. That will be followed soon after with the Durham report which will come with indictments, and a scathing report on how the Dems and FBI tried to stage what amounted to a soft coup to remove Trump. Pelosi will try all sorts of ugly games to try to stop the SCOTUS vote.
The Dems claim Trump is a threat to democracy, and in the next breathe they say they will end the filibuster, and pack the court, eliminate the electoral college, and make DC a state to try to assure forever control. The Dems have tried everything they can including the false dossier, fake impeachment, false threats to impeach Barr, Mueller with now wiped phones, and Adam Schiff lying. They have fed to press constant lies and false leads, and have done anything they can to undermine the duly elected president. That is why we have elections in a democracy. The Dems now realize Trump will get to shape the court, and they are at risk of losing this election and they will use mail in votes to try to cheat. This election will make 2000 look easy.
Our democracy is truly under attack from the left and Pelosi is the general and the bartender from the Bronx is the colonel in the field.. There will be so much happening up until the election it will be mass chaos and incredible fake news stories of all sorts. Then we will have the election and a massive effort by Dems, especially in PA, WI and NV to show up with late ballots as they try to claim a change in the outcome. All this while the confirmation hearings are happening. And while all this is happening, there will be new riots and protests over the SCOTUS confirmation. And now Nancy says there could be a new impeachment case. China and Putin must be thrilled.
It began with the phony dossier paid for by Hilary. The false FISA warrants, Then Flynn is set up by the FBI to get him out of the White House because he has too good a network in intelligence areas. Then Mueller, followed by the press being fed a stream of lies by Schiff and others. This was accompanied by trying to get rid of Kavanaugh. Then there was Vindeman and impeachment. Now it is an irrational attempt to stop a legitimate SCOTUS confirmation, and new impeachment threats against Trump and Barr. The Dems have said they plan to end the filibuster and pack the court, and attempt to pack the future votes by adding DC and Puerto Rico as states, which may be illegal under the constitution. Add on the Dem control of big cities, and the rush to charge cops doing their job, but to not charge any rioters.
The far left now has control of universities, and the press. Major steps for controlling the narrative and creating a grass roots force to take to the streets. The Dems have fed a race war starting with Obama and Holder in Ferguson, and by backing BLM, an avowedly Marxist group, and a refusal by mayors or governors to move against ANTIFA. Bernie campaigned on “we intend to transform America.” Do independent voters not understand that we are in the midst of an attempted takeover of the government by the far left headed by Pelosi. AOC and her squad are blatant anti-Semites, which goes along with the program, and which has lodged itself on campuses. They are also anti-religion. Shut places of worship, but open all sorts of other things. I am rarely, if ever, alarmist, but we are now in a real crisis for the country that must be stopped.
I can’t wait for Durham and Ron Johnson to issue their reports. Biden is just the avatar they are using to front their efforts to mislead the big money donators that he is really moderate and that he will be a real president. Harris let it out-“In a Harris administration….”. What is it these donors do not understand. They are the same people who donate millions to universities that do not allow free speech, just to get their kid admitted or their name on a building. It all just proves that you can fool a lot of the people some of the time.
Merkel has a major decision to make very soon. Either go ahead with the Nordstream pipeline from Russia, or abandon it as the US and most of the EU demand, in light of the poisoning. The pipeline is critical for Putin. Trump is working to stop it. Next time Biden and the press claim Trump is a tool for Russia, ask about how come he is killing the project most key to Russia. The world is waiting to see what Merkel’s real position is. Even members of her own party say the pipeline needs to be stopped. Merkel has always been accommodating to Russia, believing it was better to play nice than to confront Putin for his misdeeds and threats against the EU border nations. Candidates to succeed her are against the pipeline.
One major change is Trump is pulling troops out of Germany so the German policy of decades of having the US as a protector allowing Germany to play nice with Russia as a policy, is over. Even the invasion of Ukraine was not enough to give pause to German policy, but the poisoning, combined with Trump pulling out troops, has changed everything. Merkel needs to make a decision soon in the face of extensive opposition inside Germany and the EU and from Trump. So when the press says the US has lost all its allies, this is what they are talking about. Trump is not going along with bad policy by Merkel and making a public issue of it as he should.
If Germany abandons the pipeline, there is an abundant supply of gas available from the US and other sources now. If Merkel goes ahead, Putin gets billions to spend on arms and espionage, and he holds Germany by a vise. All of the foreign policy establishment and press claiming Trump is doing a terrible thing, are locked into decades of a policy that allowed Germany to be defended by American taxpayer dollars while they spent little and used that money to build their export industries. Germany still refuses to come anywhere close to meeting its obligations to pay for its share of NATO while much of the rest of the EU is meeting it or getting close to do so.
What the Dems still don’t understand is that when you add layers of regulation, you add operating costs and reduce cash flow to increase wages, and when you raise taxes on corporations you reduce cash flow to pay wages and to expand the business, so you get less jobs. Many of you who now run, or ran companies, likely say- how can someone not understand these basics. Because none of them ever ran a business. They, like Biden, have been politicians all their lives. They have no clue what it means to meet a payroll, or to take a risk to expand the factory, or a product line. They just think you make too much profit off the sweat of workers, and you are over compensated for being successful. They get lifetime pensions and healthcare paid for with your tax dollars, but they think that is OK since they served the people! It is OK for Nancy to get her hair done and not wear a mask, but you better not open your beauty parlor and try to make money. It was not coincidence that new business formation was very slow under Obama Biden, and rose very rapidly after taxes were cut and regulation reduced.
It is not hard to understand why there is such a shortage of affordable housing in CA. If you are a developer, the cost of excess regulation of residential development is estimated to be $70,000 per unit. I do not know if this number is accurate, and it might be higher, but having been involved in development in CA., the excess cost of any development is astronomical compared to most every other states. It is why the cost of operating a business in CA is so much higher than anywhere else other than NY. It is why several major Silicon Valley companies are now telling staff they are free to move elsewhere and work remote, but at a lower salary. The cost of living everywhere else is far lower than CA and NY. A friend just moved from a modest home in the Hamptons to a nice home north of Atlanta in a very nice upscale area. His property taxes went from over $10,000 to $1,000 for a similar sized home. Excess regulation and higher taxes hurts the people the Dems claim they are trying to help. They just do not understand how it works.
The last time Biden tried to run for president he had to drop out for extensive plagiarism -lies. Has that gone away. Trump campaign should resurrect all that since Joe accuses Donald of lying.
The first US death from the virus was Feb 23. So all the talk about what should have been done in Jan or Feb is BS since things did not get to pandemic definition until March. Deaths to confirmed cases in the US are 2.9% vs 3.1% across the world with the EU ramping up and the US moving down. US deaths vs total population 202,000 vs 327 million. Death rate is only .06%, and most are over 80 with comorbidity, and blacks, and nursing home residents disproportionately affected. Therefore, as I have been saying since spring, if you are a healthy white person under age 65, the chance of being hospitalized is tiny, and of dying is miniscule.
Week of Sept 12 ages 0-17 hospitalizations .25 per 100,000. 18-49 1.3, 50-64 3.1 and over 65 5.6. Under 17 has been nearly zero the whole time. Over 65 has dopped from 32.5 per 100,000 in April 18 to 5.6 today. As treatments are improved, these death rates will decline further. The graph of hospitalizations in the US since July 25 has been a 45 degree angle down. Deaths have dropped quickly, and are down to only 674 per day. So we should reopen like Sweden, even if we all wear masks which seems to be pretty much being done now anyway, and all schools should be open for in-person classes like the rest of the world. There is always the anecdotal story of one young guy or kid dying, but it is one off and we do not know any of the medical data, nor where he was treated and what protocols were used by what quality of doctors. Kids and young people who otherwise seem to be healthy die every day from some disease or other. We need to get some perspective. If we take extra precautions with nursing homes and assisted living, and other vulnerable people, we could resume a near normal life and end the press fear mongering.
The next two weeks will decide the election.
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