Whether Democrats like it or not it is what it is according to Henninger
Biden Can’t Duck Trump’s Court
A Barrett or Lagoa nomination will give voters a choice about the Court’s role.
No other personal story about Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been told more this week than the one about her warm relationship with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. It brings to mind similar stories of the “Friends after 6 p.m.” camaraderie between Ronald Reagan and Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill. Thanks for the memories, but those days are gone.
With the prospect before us that on Saturday Donald Trump—a president loathed without limit by liberals—will nominate a conservative to the Supreme Court in the shadow of the 2020 election, we’d say “The Godfather” offers a more apt description of our politics just now: We are “going to the mattresses.” To quote Consigliere Chuck Schumer: “Nothing is off the table.” Nancy Pelosi is threatening fusillades of arrows.
How American politics went from live-and-let-live to tribal war is a long story, but the issue in front of us now is the Supreme Court of the United States
That subject alone surfaces an important right-left distinction. While conservatives typically talk about “the court” as an institution and its competing judicial philosophies, Democrats and the left prefer discussing the court in terms of discrete policy goals, such as abortion or various public services.
Thus did Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein summarize the battle this week: “Let’s be clear what’s at stake—health insurance for millions of Americans and lifesaving protections for the 129 million people with pre-existing conditions.” It’s about more than that.
In conservative circles, a famous date in the political system’s descent into total war is 1987 and the hearings into Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Those hearings—actually, a show trial—were presided over by Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden, an exercise that included the public excavation of Judge Bork’s history of video rentals, which ironically included Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
With respect, we would like to call Robert Bork back as a witness to what happened to American politics and why we are going to war over what looks to be the nomination of the first conservative woman to the Supreme Court, likely either Judge Amy Coney Barrett or Judge Barbara Lagoa. Back in 1971, Bob Bork saw what was coming.
Writing for the Indiana Law Journal—by some accounts it is the 10th most cited law-journal article of all time—Bork made an argument on behalf of judicial decisions based on principles in the Constitution versus rulings based on personal, albeit strongly held, values.
In an unstated homage to prescient Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts (“Sentence first, verdict afterwards!”) Bork called judging based on personally derived values, “Decisions first, principles later.”
But Bork didn’t find much to be amused about in where such judging would take American democracy, which he posed as a question. What does a man conclude, he asked, about “a Court that does not share his politics or his morality? I can think of nothing except the assertion that he will ignore the Court whenever he can get away with it and overthrow it if he can.”
And here we are, with prominent Democrats such as Rep. Jerrold Nadler and Sen. Edward Markey and liberal commentators promising to pack the court with additional justices if President Trump (whose 2016 election Democrats have rejected daily the past four years) doesn’t stand down from his constitutional right to appoint RBG’s replacement. They will overthrow the current court, if they can.
A main element of the election is tension between the Biden-led Democratic establishment and the ascendant Sanders-Warren progressives. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acidly put it: “Voting for Joe Biden, it’s not about whether you like him or not, it’s a vote to let democracy live another day.”
Mr. Biden didn’t create this division during the primaries. The Democratic Party has been moving leftward for years on policies affecting personal rights claims, the environment and regulatory authority—so much so that the possibility of liberal-conservative legislative compromise in Congress all but disappeared.
Ever resourceful, the left turned to filing policy-outcome lawsuits whose goals were implemented by policy-oriented federal judges, effectively making the courts a parallel legislature. Decisions first, principles never.
The culture wars fought in so many presidential elections didn’t originate in legislatures. They came out of left-liberal judicial decisions. A Barrett or Lagoa Supreme Court won’t “make” conservative policy. It likely will force policy making back into legislatures, where it belongs.
Robert Bork asked 50 years ago whether Americans understood enough of what was happening to the courts to be able to say they had consented to it. The left’s use of the judiciary as a parallel legislature has rarely been put clearly before Americans, in large part because Democratic candidates won’t talk about it.
With this nomination, which the Senate may confirm days before the election (the real one Nov. 3, not the mail-in tabulation weeks later), Mr. Trump is forcing an important and overdue choice before the country’s voters. We’ll see in Tuesday’s debate whether Mr. Biden can get through the evening ducking the question of the court’s proper role.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ As I recently wrote, where is the systemic racism?
Africans Knock on America’s Door
Why would millions want to immigrate if the U.S. is a land of ‘systemic racism’?
The left keeps saying America is systemically racist and President Trump is a white supremacist. So why do so many black Africans want to immigrate?
On Sept. 4 the State Department released statistics on the green-card lottery, a good gauge for U.S. visa demand because anyone with a high-school diploma or specialized work experience is eligible to apply. For fiscal 2020, the number of applicants from 47 eligible Sub-Saharan African nations was 9.2 million, compared with only 2.8 million in fiscal 2011.
Residents of the countries that send the most immigrants—including Brazil, China, India and Mexico—may not apply. Hopefuls apply in the fall and receive their visas a year or more later, so fiscal 2011 applicants would have applied in the fall of 2009. Nigeria, the lone African country excluded from the program, was eligible until 2015. Between fiscal 2010 and 2016, an average of 14.9 million foreign nationals in all registered for the annual lottery. From 2017 and 2020, the average figure was 21.9 million a year.
If leftists really believed America is a hostile, dangerous place for nonwhites, wouldn’t they be warning potential immigrants from Africa and elsewhere not to come?
Mr. Seminara is a journalist and former diplomat. He is author of “Bed, Breakfast & Drunken Threats: Dispatches From the Margins of Europe.”
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Also, what I have been spouting for years.
Before Reporting Became ‘Journalism’
Writers subdued their egos and encouraged readers to think. Nowadays it’s all about arousing emotion
By Lance Morrow
My father’s favorite word of dismissal was “phony.” As a young man, he worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer. For him and his fellow reporters, phony was the watchword—an instinct. That period—the late 1930s, going into the war—had the atmosphere of a movie by Frank Capra, who was big on newspaper reporters as everyman types. After the calamitous sucker-punch of the Great Depression, a guy didn’t want to be a sap.
That generation of reporters would rather have died, or moved permanently to Albany, N.Y., than call themselves “journalists.” The term itself was phony. When young Henry Luce, who went on to co-found the Time-Life empire, was just out of Yale, he showed up for his job at the Chicago Daily News (as a legman for the columnist Ben Hecht, who, with Charles MacArthur, would write “The Front Page”), he carried a walking stick and a briefcase. The editor looked him up and down and said, “Ah, Mr. Luce. A journalist, I see.”
The lesson I absorbed as a boy was that the work of reporting called for a disinfected mind that busied itself, with little-guy sympathies and self-effacing clarity, on available facts, collected conscientiously. The ideal was fairness: Let the reader decide. It would not have occurred to my father or his fellow reporters, or to me in my apprentice days at the Buffalo News or the Washington Star, to drape the facts in adjectives and adverbs and attitude. The eye of the city editor (the great Sid Epstein at the Star, for example) was vigilant and scathing: Who gives a damn what you think?
If a sensitive person, or, God forbid, one of us on the newspaper staff, had declared that something or other made him feel “uncomfortable” or “unsafe” or constituted a “microaggression,” the answer would have been an incredulous stare: “So what?” If it happened again: “You’re fired.”
The journalistic paragon of my youth was David Broder, who covered politics for the Star and later moved to the Washington Post. He was everything that a reporter in the old model ought to be: dispassionate, nonpartisan, encyclopedic in his knowledge of his subject. Broder had not a trace of the disabling egotism, ruthless ambition or partisan zealotry that afflict media stars today.
It would be silly to idealize the old journalism, which had its problems, including excessive deference to authority and massive sins of omission in the scope of its curiosity; anyway, it belonged to a different world. But it had this virtue: The work, subduing the ego of the reporter, implied respect for the independent mind of the reader.
Alas, the independent, nonpartisan mind went out of fashion years ago in politics, media, academia and even corporate life. Emphasis on the integrity of individual judgment has all but disappeared in the face of identity politics, the religion of diversity and the radical corruption of American universities—the effect everywhere intensified by this year’s obsessive and, one might say, compulsory racialism. America won’t be an honest country until those influences have been defeated or have burned themselves out. It may take years, a generation or two.
For now, in the annus insanus of 2020, we are afflicted by a pandemic of media phoniness. Plastering the facts with attitude—tilting the story to the party line, moralizing it, sentimentalizing it, propagandizing it—is the way of noisy, distracted cable news and, increasingly, of all media. Not a sparrow falls without the New York Times, in its news columns, telling the reader that the bird was shot by a “white supremacist.” News is laid before the citizen’s mind so packaged and tarted up with a narrative line that the simple facts are often impossible to discern.
This is not honest reporting but garish, partisan fabulation. Its object is not to inform, or to encourage reflection, but to stimulate feelings. Let not the listener or viewer or reader be detained by thought but instead move briskly on to emotions, which are the addictive and highly profitable drugs in which big media traffic. News media become crack houses of information and, all the while, ruthless participants in the struggle for political power and for what the parsons on “Morning Joe“ call “the soul of America.”
Journalism’s metaphysical decline proceeds parallel to the deterioration of American politics. In both fields, we behold the lingering death of public trust. The energies that flow into the vacuum left by the departure of trust are self-righteousness, violence of mind and an ineffable stupidity—the civic despair and hysteria that have become the style of poor, miserable 2020.
Mr. Morrow’s latest book is “God and Mammon: Chronicles of American Money.”
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Yup, Trump's election fraud cynicism appears justified?
Donald Trump Releases Second-Term Agenda
24 Aug 2020
President Donald Trump released his second-term agenda on Monday, sharing
it in an email to journalists; promising more of the same policies he pursued
during his first four years as president.
Trump wants to create more jobs, end Covid-19, defend police officers, end illegal
immigration, and stop endless wars. The president also calls for passage of
congressional term limits, school choice, and ending America’s economic reliance
on China.
Here is the full list:
JOBS:
Create 10 Million New Jobs in 10 Months
Create 1 Million New Small Businesses
Cut Taxes to Boost Take-Home Pay and Keep Jobs in America
Enact Fair Trade Deals that Protect American Jobs
“Made in America” Tax Credits
Expand Opportunity Zones
Continue Deregulatory Agenda for Energy Independence
ERADICATE COVID-19:
Develop a Vaccine by The End Of 2020
Return to Normal in 2021
Make All Critical Medicines and Supplies for Healthcare Workers in The United
States
Refill Stockpiles and Prepare for Future Pandemics
END OUR RELIANCE ON CHINA:
Bring Back 1 Million Manufacturing Jobs from China
Tax Credits for Companies that Bring Back Jobs from China
Allow 100% Expensing Deductions for Essential Industries like Pharmaceuticals and
who Bring Back their Manufacturing to the United States
No Federal Contracts for Companies who Outsource to China
Hold China Fully Accountable for Allowing the Virus to Spread around the World
HEALTHCARE:
Cut Prescription Drug Prices
Put Patients and Doctors Back in Charge of our Healthcare System
Lower Healthcare Insurance Premiums
End Surprise Billing
Cover All Pre-Existing Conditions
Protect Social Security and Medicare
Protect Our Veterans and Provide World-Class Healthcare and Services
EDUCATION:
Provide School Choice to Every Child in America
Teach American Exceptionalism
DRAIN THE SWAMP:
Pass Congressional Term Limits
End Bureaucratic Government Bullying of U.S. Citizens and Small Businesses
Expose Washington’s Money Trail and Delegate Powers Back to People and States
Drain the Globalist Swamp by Taking on International Organizations That Hurt
American Citizens
DEFEND OUR POLICE:
Fully Fund and Hire More Police and Law Enforcement Officers
Increase Criminal Penalties for Assaults on Law Enforcement Officers
Prosecute Drive-By Shootings as Acts of Domestic Terrorism
Bring Violent Extremist Groups Like ANTIFA to Justice
End Cashless Bail and Keep Dangerous Criminals Locked Up until Trial
END ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND PROTECT AMERICAN WORKERS
Block Illegal Immigrants from Becoming Eligible for Taxpayer-Funded Welfare,
Healthcare, and Free College Tuition
Mandatory Deportation for Non-Citizen Gang Members
Dismantle Human Trafficking Networks
End Sanctuary Cities to Restore our Neighborhoods and Protect our Families
Prohibit American Companies from Replacing United States Citizens with Lower-
Cost Foreign Workers
Require New Immigrants to Be Able to Support Themselves Financially
INNOVATE FOR THE FUTURE:
Launch Space Force, Establish Permanent Manned Presence on The Moon and
Send the First Manned Mission to Mars
Build the World’s Greatest Infrastructure System
Win the Race to 5G and Establish a National High-Speed Wireless Internet Network
Continue to Lead the World in Access to the Cleanest Drinking Water and Cleanest
Air
Partner with Other Nations to Clean Up our Planet’s Oceans
AMERICA FIRST FOREIGN POLICY:
Stop Endless Wars and Bring Our Troops Home
Get Allies to Pay their Fair Share
Maintain and Expand America’s Unrivaled Military Strength
Wipe Out Global Terrorists Who Threaten to Harm Americans
Build a Great Cybersecurity Defense System and Missile Defense System
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How could this be?
https://www.breitbart.com/clip
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