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Brief squibs:Israel punishes IDF troops who abused Palestinian.
Men and women beginning to change voting pattern causing issues.
Far left French railroad sabotage are suspects.
Biden seeks radical overhaul of SCOTUS.
There no longer would be 3 independent entities. SCOTUS would be totally beholden and controlled by one party because radical elitist Democrats don't like several recent legal decisions. So much for democracy and they accuse Trump of destroying Democracy.
Scotus is the weakest of our 3 entities because SCOTUS has no enforcement arm ,have no control over their salaries yet, as long as Americans want to obey their rulings it remains the most powerful. This is why the elite neo-Marxists, who seek total power, hate it and want to change and control Scotus.
If Jewish governor of PA. is Kamala's choice for V.P, how does she explain that and her Jewish husband to her radical Islamists in her party who support Hamas etc.?
Gov. Shapiro has begun his own "EXODUS" from prior viewpoints in order to become more palatable/amenable?
And:
Biden’s Political Assault on the Supreme Court
His destructive plan would make the Justices servants of the politics of the day.
By The Editorial Board
President Biden on Monday announced his plan to “reform” the Supreme Court, and it’s important to understand how radical this political moment is. The President is putting the full weight of the Democratic Party behind an assault on judicial independence and the constitutional order. You might call it an attack on democracy.
“I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today. I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers,” Mr. Biden said in an essay in the Washington Post justifying his assault. “What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.”
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Never mind the spectacle of a man in public life for 50 years demanding term limits. The “breach” is his. As a Senator in 1987, he helped to defeat the superbly qualified Robert Bork for the Court because Bork endorsed judicial originalism. But the originalists have prevailed in the long run and now have great influence on the Court. This is what infuriates him and his fellow Democrats. So they are now willing to destroy the Court to supposedly save it.
“Destroy” is not too strong a word. Mr. Biden is proposing to subject the Court to an ethics regime “enforceable” by someone other than the Court itself. His conceit is that this merely means the Justices would have to abide by the Code of Conduct of the Judicial Conference of the United States.
But the Justices already have a code of conduct they enforce that is nearly the same as that judicial code. The difference is the demand for outside enforcement. Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee want lower-court judges to investigate charges of ethics violations and then rule on the Justices’ behavior.
This is an invitation for partisans to besiege the Court with complaints, however trivial. If you want to know how that would go, consider that last month the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals stopped accepting duplicative complaints about Judge Aileen Cannon, who is sitting on the Donald Trump documents case. The circuit court received more than 1,000 complaints in a week as part of what it called an “orchestrated campaign.”
Mr. Biden says his reform will “restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy,” but it would do the opposite. The deluge of ethics complaints, amplified by the press and partisans, would leave the public with the impression of routine corruption. This would further undermine respect for the Court’s decisions.
That’s even more true of Mr. Biden’s proposal to make it easier to disqualify Justices from hearing certain cases. The decision—often the duty—to sit on a case is at the heart of the judicial enterprise.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse’s ethics bill, which has passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, would let litigants at the Court file motions for recusal by Justices, whose colleagues could boot them off cases. This would make the Court an adjunct of whatever political atmosphere exists at a given time. The Justices targeted most would be those who issue unpopular opinions, however correct they are on the law or Constitution.
The President’s claim that the Court is currently “mired in a crisis of ethics” is simply false. Justice Thomas failed to disclose that he flew on a friend’s private aircraft before the Judicial Conference changed its rules to require that judges disclose such flights. He violated no judicial rules. No one has come up with any evidence that the Court’s rulings, or any Justice, has been influenced by gifts or other outside influence.
If Mr. Biden and Democrats were really concerned about ethics in government, they’d impose a total ban on Congress of all gifts, trips to conferences at fancy resorts, speaking fees, or anything else that provides even the appearance of a conflict of interest. But they won’t because the Members enjoy those perks and their anger at the Court has nothing to do with ethics. They are using ethics as a political ruse to gain more influence over the Court and its decisions.
Mr. Biden also endorsed an 18-year term limit for Justices, though the Constitution gives them life tenure. The idea is that Congress can create a “Senior Justice” position akin to the “senior status” that judges take on the circuit courts. But those lower-court judges take that status voluntarily, and Mr. Biden wants to forcibly retire Justices to duties akin to watching paint dry.
Adam White, who served on Mr. Biden’s judicial commission in 2021, makes the useful point that term limits would tie Supreme Court vacancies and appointments even more to presidential elections. He says this would further erode the appearance of judicial independence and make “the Court a spoil not just of politics, but of presidential politics exclusively.”
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Mr. Biden also proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn the Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity, but we’ll leave that for another day. Suffice to say that it’s impossible to overestimate how pernicious Mr. Biden’s reform plan is. It doesn’t matter that its chances of passing are nil at the moment.
The President is giving this proposal an official Democratic Party imprimatur, and Vice President Kamala Harris was quick to endorse the plan on Monday. Its most damaging parts are a threat to pass the next time Democrats control all of the government.
And what about Republicans? Do they realize the Court’s future is on the ballot this year? Mr. Trump has spoken up in his fashion, but will Senators start explaining what is truly at stake? Maybe J.D. Vance could stop talking about cat ladies and start talking about the threat the Biden scheme poses to the Court and our constitutional republic.
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Kamala Harris’s Chicago Moment
Hard-left protesters denounce ‘Genocide Joe.’ They revile the vice president too.
By William McGurn
In an election already roiled by a disastrous presidential debate, an attempted assassination, and the withdrawal of a major party’s candidate, the new presumptive Democratic nominee—Kamala Harris—faces two other potential game-changers just ahead.
One is debating Donald Trump. Before that comes August’s Democratic National Convention, where delegates and protesters alike will descend on Chicago. The protesters’ goal is simple: to ruin the convention. But that also presents the vice president with an opportunity for a Sister Souljah moment à la Bill Clinton. In the 1992 campaign, after the hip-hop artist had made some incendiary remarks about race, Mr. Clinton likened her to the white supremacist David Duke—impressing voters by standing up to extremists in his own coalition.
Today’s opportunity is being teed up by a coalition of hard-left organizations called March on the DNC 2024. They are determined to bring their demands to the Chicago convention. They don’t like “Genocide Joe” because they consider him the war’s enabler.
But here’s the kicker. They don’t see Ms. Harris as any different. In a statement headlined, “We’re still marching for Palestine at the DNC,” organizers explain their position:
“Genocide Joe Biden has stepped down from running for President as the Democratic Party nominee. His decision doesn’t change the policies of Democratic Party leadership, specifically their support of the genocide in Palestine, so our movement must continue to apply pressure . . .
“Democratic Party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands. Biden’s entire administration, together with high ranking members of the Democratic Party from all over the country, spent the last ten months wholeheartedly supporting the genocide in Gaza with our tax dollars.”
On Monday Newsweek quoted Walter Smolarek, a spokesman for the Answer Coalition (an acronym for Act Now to Stop War and End Racism), who likewise condemned Ms. Harris. “For over nine months,” he said, “Harris has served as the No. 2 official in an administration that has actively facilitated horrific war crimes.”
Last week Ms. Harris offered something for both sides. On Thursday, after a meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the vice president declared that although Israel has a right to defend itself, she would “not be silent” about “the death of far too many innocent civilians.”
Those are tough words. But if they’re meant to mollify the protesters, it won’t work. It won’t work because they don’t want to be mollified. No matter how far Ms. Harris goes, it will never be far enough.
More surprising, she unequivocally denounced American-flag-burning protesters at Washington’s Union Station, criticized “dangerous hate fueled rhetoric,” and labeled Hamas a “brutal terrorist organization.” That’s a good start. The question: Will she repeat that on the larger stage of Chicago, including explicit support for police, when the whole nation is tuned in?
Commentators have likened the potential for chaos today to the disastrous 1968 Chicago convention. Then, a Democratic Party divided over Vietnam met inside the city’s International Amphitheatre to nominate Hubert Humphrey—himself torn between his natural dovish instincts about Vietnam and his public support for the war as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president. America watched police battling protesters on the nightly news.
This year’s protests could be a make-or-break moment for Ms. Harris. But she might also recognize it as an opportunity to show she means it when she condemns criminal behavior. No doubt she knows that many of the protesters will never vote for her. By opposing them to increase her appeal to moderate Democratic and independent voters, she would boost her chances in the swing states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin that she needs to defeat Mr. Trump. It would further help if she backed up her words with actions—such as choosing the relatively moderate Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro as her running mate.
The unrulier the protesters, moreover, the greater the opportunity to burnish her credentials as a no-nonsense leader who supports law and order. It isn’t without its risk: A tough line might alienate Muslim voters in Michigan, another swing state. But the alternative—trying to appease both sides—is probably a loser.
There is another reason for her to take on Chicago’s protesters. Though organizers talk about a family-friendly demonstration, they also make clear they are going to march where they want even if they don’t get permits. A court filing in July reckoned there may be as many as 100,000 protesters in Chicago. Given what we saw with the protests last week over Mr. Netanyahu’s visit, Chicago will likely feature the usual brew of vandalism, lawlessness and inconveniencing of ordinary citizens trying to go about their business.
The public is tired of it. Chicago offers Ms. Harris an opportunity to walk back her earlier sympathy for the defund-the-police movement and show that she meant what she said about the ugliness at Union Station.
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Finally A Repeat Op Ed:
Kamala Harris’s Gift to Hamas
She relieves pressure on the terror group to agree to release Israeli hostages.
By Amit Segal
The war in the Gaza Strip is more about losing time than capturing territory. Time works in Israel’s favor because it is a half-trillion-dollar economy contending with a few thousand terrorists who lack supply routes, hospitals for treating the wounded and camps for training fighters. But time also works in Hamas’s favor because international acceptance of action in densely populated Gaza is eroding, along with Israel’s economy and its army’s weapons.
Who will run out of time first?
In the spring, it seemed Israel would. President Biden turned a cold shoulder to the Jewish state as support for destroying Hamas morphed into a call to end the war and a warning against entering Rafah. Strategic weapons shipments were delayed in American ports. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court is seeking arrest warrants for the Israeli prime minister and defense minister, effectively equating them with Hamas leaders. No wonder Hamas refused any deal offered, however generous. If the U.S. president seeks to end the war and the world will soon force the Israel Defense Forces to stop, why give up Israeli hostages?
Sometime last month, the hourglass turned. It happened because Israel didn’t yield to Mr. Biden and in May entered Rafah, cutting off Hamas’s last lifeline to the world. Mr. Biden found himself facing troubles of his own at home, while his presidential rival, whose only complaint against Israel was that it wasn’t destroying Hamas fast enough, began climbing in the polls. Suddenly, Hamas showed it could be flexible. It begged to restart negotiations even as Israel dropped 9 tons of precision bombs on its chief of staff, and agreed not to end the war.
Then Mr. Biden withdrew from the presidential race. Vice President Kamala Harris became the de facto nominee and gave Hamas an important gift. Never mind her childish boycott of Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress last Wednesday. Why was it necessary to side with the Palestinian narrative that places the blame for the war on Israel? “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies,” she said the next day, after meeting with Mr. Netanyahu. “We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.” This is a direct threat to Israel if it continues the war, a war the Biden-Harris administration itself supported and called “just.”
Ms. Harris, who in a recent interview said she was “hearing stories” about people in Gaza “eating animal feed, grass,” is apparently unaware that food prices there are significantly lower than in Israel. In any other war in the past century, has one side regularly supplied food and goods to the enemy’s civilians—and still been attacked by the White House?
By adopting the anti-Israel narrative, Ms. Harris is giving Hamas’s leader, Yahya Sinwar, every reason in the world to refuse a hostage deal. Why give Israel the hostages without ending the war if there is a possibility the 47th president will force Israel to end it anyway? “Let’s get the deal done so we can get a cease-fire to end the war,” Ms. Harris said Thursday, distancing the deal with her words.
This is more than diplomatic incompetence. Ms. Harris’s worldview is troubling in its immorality. Campus protesters “are showing exactly what the human emotion should be as a response to Gaza,” she said recently. “There are things some of the protesters are saying that I absolutely reject, so I don’t mean to wholesale endorse their points. But we have to navigate it.” The state of the Democratic Party is such that its presumptive presidential nominee claims that a war between a pro-Iranian murder organization and a democratic state “is not a binary issue.”
The administration is taking a similar stance on the Lebanese front. The Iranian proxy Hezbollah has been firing at Israel for months, destroying villages and slaughtering innocent children playing soccer. There is no “siege” and no “occupation,” yet the Biden administration is mediating between Hezbollah and Israel like a real-estate broker. Instead of sending Iran an unequivocal, threatening message, it is sending adviser Amos Hochstein to plead with Hezbollah to halt the rocket fire and offer Israeli territorial concessions.
If Israel fights back and the White House again calls for an end to the violence, we can expect another nonbinary war.
Mr. Segal is chief political commentator on Israel’s Channel 12 News and author of “The Story of Israeli Politics.”
Correction
An earlier version misstated the court that is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.
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