Restoring Notre Dame with ancient techniques of construction.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg hagiography: “Grant her dying wish!”
Almost undoubtedly you’ve seen the Democrats’ arguments that Republicans should desist from approving a new SCOTUS justice to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg because it was her dying wish that they refrain. It’s a bizarre thing for Democrats to say, but of course that doesn’t stop them.
There are various excuses they give. One is offered here, for example:
Women such as today’s sitting Republican senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Joni Ernst, Martha McSally, and others, whose careers were made possible by Ginsburg, and who now have in their power to grant her that dying wish by blocking their party’s leadership from ramming through her replacement.
So out of gratitude to RBG – without whom there would be no GOP women in the Senate (I wasn’t aware of any decision she ever rendered that impacted on that) – the GOP women should stop the crass GOP men from “ramming through” (that is, having a vote on, as is their prerogative) a replacement.
It doesn’t take much thought to understand that the author would be saying nothing of the sort if the situation was reversed. This is politics, and niceties such as respecting a person’s wishes are simply not part of the game unless it’s politically expedient. It’s politically expedient for the left to talk about Bader’s wishes, but Bader had a chance to make those wishes come true by retiring when a liberal replacement would have been assured. She chose not to do so.
In a larger sense, though, I think this approach is emblematic of the Democrats’ approach to politics these days. Emotion and heartstrings when needed and especially when out of power, appeals to identity politics, and absolute toughness and ruthlessness when in power. This particular gambit is designed to appeal to liberal women, of course, as did the entire last ten or so years of adulation of Ginsburg as some sort of liberal popstar and/or saint.
My own opinion of Ginsburg is that she was very very smart – as are nearly all the SCOTUS justices – and very very liberal. She had a long and interesting life and showed courage when young when there really was quite a bit of discrimination against women lawyers. If I’d been a liberal I would have admired her but I can practically guarantee I would have been puzzled by all the worship.
Ginsburg was a SCOTUS justice, not a queen choosing a successor. But the Democrats have calculated that pretending she was the latter appeals to their base and energizes it. And they probably are correct.
Susan Collins has decided what hill she’s going to die on…
…and it’s the hill of betraying the right.
I suppose she thinks this might get her re-elected. I doubt it. I think it seals her fate with Republicans in Maine, whom she needs in order to win. I could be wrong, but that’s what I think.
So I think what she has done in saying she won’t vote for a Trump nominee is to stab the right in the back while not helping herself at all, and therefore perhaps helping them lose the majority in the Senate as well.
Collins held firm during the Kavanaugh hearings, but unless she changes her mind again (which I don’t think she will) she’s folding on this. Maybe she’s tired of politics. Maybe she wants to retire and continue to live in Maine, and she doesn’t want any more death threats.
I have contempt for her. And her reasoning doesn’t even make sense, because there’s no rule about not taking a vote so close to the election. The rule is that the party controlling the Senate can vote or not vote, as it wishes. She knows that, and she knows that the Democrats would seize the opportunity to do whatever it took, if that opportunity ever came their way. With Garland, Democrats lacked that opportunity for the simple reason that they did not control the Senate, and the Republicans did control it. And yet what she’s doing now makes it more likely that Democrats will control the Senate come next January.
It’s not totally clear how all the other RINOs will vote, but I am very concerned that they will follow Collins. It’s up to McConnell to do his best to make sure they don’t. The situation is complicated by the fact that there are two votes on this. The first is whether to bring the nominee up for a vote, and the second is the vote on confirming the nominee. I believe that Collins is the only one of the RINOs who has already said she will vote “no” on both.
[ADDENDUM: I will add that I think Republicans in Maine should vote for Collins nevertheless. This is absolutely not the time to take some sort of vengeful/purist stand. It’s Collins or the Democrat, and this is the Senate. I will add that, if Collins does win and chooses to run again and some other Republican to the right of her decides to primary her and gets the nomination, that Republican will lose to the Democrat.
Maine is a very purple or even blue state, and conservatism is not popular there. Convservative LePage won the governorship by a fluke, because of a five-party race for his first term and a three-party race for his second. He never had a majority and he was quite unpopular. See this. I believe that Collins is the most conservative Republican that Maine would be willing to elect to the Senate, and she may lose this time anyway.]
They’ve arrested someone for sending the ricin letter to Trump
Lots of info at Ace’s:
She was found because her Twitter account listed “techno-creative nomad” and she called herself a “techno-creative Nomad” in her threatening letter to Trump.
She also called Trump an “ugly tyrant clown” in both her ricin letter and in a response to someone else on-line.
What a genius.
Even more information can be found here, including this:
Ferrier was carrying a gun when she was arrested, CNN reported. She was trying to cross the border from Fort Erie, Ontario, into Buffalo, New York, via the Peace Bridge when Customs and Border Protection agents took her into custody, NBC News reported.
The Peace Bridge.
Biden admits the election is only about Trump and that Biden’s plans simply do not (or should not) matter to voters
Just because Joe Biden has cognitive challenges and is often very foggy, that doesn’t mean he isn’t sometimes coherent. It’s a big error to think he’s in the late stages of cognitive decline; he’s not.
And I think that he’s sometimes telling the voters what is actually true of the left’s 2020 election strategy, which is that he and the Democratic Party have been trying to make it a referendum on Trump alone and that therefore voters don’t have to think too much about Biden himself. The only salient facts are what his opponent thinks and does – or, rather, the distorted version of it that Democrats have been projecting the entire time Trump has been in political life.
So when asked if he would release a list of his potential nominees for SCOTUS justices, here’s the way Biden responded:
Biden…said his 1st choice is to select an African-American woman, but outlined his reasoning for not releasing a list of nominees…
“Should voters know?” the reporter asked. “Should voters know who you’re going to appoint?”
“No, they don’t, but they will if I’m elected. They’ll have plenty of time,” Biden answered.
He claimed he would not share the names, in part, because doing so would give critics too much time to scrutinize them.
Isn’t that the point? Not just to give critics time to scrutinize them, but to give voters time to scrutinize them? Biden and company obviously don’t think so. The entire campaign is about Trump and only Trump, and Biden is the not-Trump.
Then there’s this, when Biden was asked for his opinion on court-packing:
Asking Biden what he thinks is changing the subject, you see, because the subject is Trump.
Now, it’s also obvious that Biden and/or his handlers think it’s a question they don’t want Biden to answer because his answer is certain to displease one wing or other of his party. Besides, how he thinks on the subject depends not only on what he’s told to think but on what’s politically expedient at the time it comes up. But he can’t say that. All he can do is talk about how it’s only about Trump and not about what Biden thinks.
Kim Klacik goes for another walk
I love Kim Klacik and I love her ad. She’s also gaining fame from her appearance on “The View,” which ended abruptly when the show decided they’d had enough of her feisty challenges.
However, Klacik has a very tough hill to climb, running as a Republican in her district:
A co-host, Sunny Hostin, chimed in Friday to rebut the claim of Klacik, who is Black, of having Black support.
“The Black community has your back? The Black community does not vote for you. What planet are you living on?”
“Wowww,” Hostin continued, stretching out the word.
Klacik then sought to explain the results of last April’s special election in which Democrat Kweisi Mfume defeated her by a 3-to-1 margin in the heavily Democratic 7th Congressional District, which includes parts of Baltimore City, Baltimore County and Howard County.
“It was during a special election while we were still under [coronavirus] lockdown and I could not talk to people,” Klacik said.
Klacik is running in Elijah Cummings’ old district, and he consistently won by similar 3 to 1 margins. I hate to be a downer, but although Klacik may do better in November than she did in April’s special election, I find it hard to believe she can make up a gap like that in a district in which voting for the Democrat is practically automatic.
I wish her well, though. If logic ruled elections, most of the voters there ought to try a Republican for a change. But elections don’t run on logic.
Joe Biden: these are not gaffes
I’m going to assume the MSM didn’t show this, except for outlets on the right such as Fox and the NY Post. I certainly couldn’t find any other coverage of it than on the right.
So I guess this just isn’t news. It’s a tree falling silently in the right-wing forest:
Very very disturbing. And this is far from an isolated incident, as you probably are well aware. What’s especially alarming about it – aside from the media silence, of course – is that Biden doesn’t seem to recognize that he’s said anything wrong with the 200 million figure. Even if he’s reading off a teleprompter that’s hard for him to see (and I’m going to assume that’s the case), at some point his mind should kick in and he should catch himself.
But that doesn’t happen here, and it doesn’t happen often with him. It’s as though the words on the screen are totally disconnected from thought. It’s just the habit of reading, a skill he developed as a youngster, that persists.
Also notice how he walks forward alone – a rather lengthy walk – in a mask, which he immediately takes off to speak. Why wear a mask on the walk when there’s no one around? My guess is that it’s become a virtue-signaling trademark and a way to distinguish himself from Trump, as well as something that gives him a secure feeling. And yet, just a moment into the speech, he coughs and covers his mouth with his bare hand.
The Supreme Court system is broken
I’ve thought for a long time that the Supreme Court is far too supreme. The “living constitution” doctrine of the left has been used not just to update and apply constitutional principles to modern times but to lay down law that should instead have been addressed by either legislation or an amendment. The Court has become a shortcut to get the result the left desires but which the nation’s citizens do not support in sufficient numbers to enact such laws in any other manner at the time.
I don’t know when this began, but I know that Roe is an example of it. Prior to that famous SCOTUS decision, many states had already allowed and regulated legal abortion:
Prior to Roe v. Wade, 30 states prohibited abortion without exception, 16 states banned abortion except in certain special circumstances (e.g., rape, incest, health threat to mother), 3 states allowed residents to obtain abortions, and New York allowed abortions generally.
My sense is that over time this trend would have continued. Another way to legalize abortion in the entire United States would have been a constitutional amendment, but I’m less sure that would have gotten enough support to pass in enough states. At any rate, what actually happened was that SCOTUS used a supposed right of “privacy” to prohibit the banning of abortion, under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. You can agree or disagree with the result (and that’s the understatement of the year), but the method and reasoning SCOTUS used to arrive at it has been widely criticized on the right and even by some on the left:
Liberal and feminist legal scholars have had various reactions to Roe, not always giving the decision unqualified support. One argument is that Justice Blackmun reached the correct result but went about it the wrong way. Another is that the end achieved by Roe does not justify its means of judicial fiat.
Justice John Paul Stevens, while agreeing with the decision, has suggested that it should have been more narrowly focused on the issue of privacy. According to Stevens, if the decision had avoided the trimester framework and simply stated that the right to privacy included a right to choose abortion, “it might have been much more acceptable” from a legal standpoint. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had, before joining the Court, criticized the decision for ending a nascent movement to liberalize abortion law through legislation. Ginsburg has also faulted the Court’s approach for being “about a doctor’s freedom to practice his profession as he thinks best…. It wasn’t woman-centered. It was physician-centered.” Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox wrote: “[Roe’s] failure to confront the issue in principled terms leaves the opinion to read like a set of hospital rules and regulations…. Neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution.”
In a highly cited Yale Law Journal article published in the months after the decision, the American legal scholar John Hart Ely strongly criticized Roe as a decision that was disconnected from American constitutional law.
“What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. … The problem with Roe is not so much that it bungles the question it sets itself, but rather that it sets itself a question the Constitution has not made the Court’s business. … [Roe] is bad because it is bad constitutional law, or rather because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
Roe was a bad legal decision with a result that has caused fierce battles ever since, and some of those battles have involved SCOTUS candidates. The incredibly bitter battle over the nomination of Judge Bork involved many accusations by the left, but one of the main points of contention was the fear that he would somehow manage to overrule Roe, a case that is shaky in the legal sense but was already firmly ensconced in modern society. The abortion question is still behind some of the bitterness in present-day battles over SCOTUS, including the one we’re engaged in now – although of course it is hardly the only such issue.
The fear on the right – a very reasonable one, I believe – is that if the left ever gets a majority again the Court will impose a leftist agenda on the entire country. The fear on the left is that the right will be able to halt that agenda, at least temporarily.
What is there to be done? The left has an answer if the right starts to predominate: pack the Court. Of course. The right’s answer is not at all clear, except that so far it has involved trying to get a Republican president and a Senate where there is a majority of Republicans and not enough RINOs to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings, and wait for the opportunity to make an appointment.
Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has an idea:
When Congress decides an issue by passing a law, democratic politics can change that decision by electing a new Congress. When the Court decides an issue by making a constitutional ruling, there’s no real democratic remedy…
…All the hysteria about a Ginsburg replacement stems from the fact that our political system is dominated by an allegedly nonpolitical Court that actually decides many political issues. And that Court is small (enough so that a single retirement can throw things into disarray) and unrepresentative of America at large.
In an earlier article, responding to Democrats’ plans to “pack” the Court with several additional justices whenever they get control back, I suggested going a step further, and add fifty new justices, one each to be appointed by every states’ governor. My proposal wasn’t entirely serious, being meant to point up the consequences of opening the door on this topic. But on reflection, maybe it was a better idea than I realized.
Under my proposal, the death or retirement of a single justice wouldn’t be much more than a blip in the news, instead of something serious enough that there are people talking about violence in the streets. A Supreme Court composed of 59 justices wouldn’t have the mystique of the current Court — you might believe in 9 Platonic Guardians, but the notion of 59 such is absurd. And since governors would presumably select people from their own states, it would bring a substantial increase in diversity to the Court.
It’s hard to even imagine how that would work or whether it would have the desired affect, but I doubt that such a law could ever be passed by Congress in order to set it up. And why would it stop
at 59?
Congress also has the ability – at least, on paper – to limit the Court’s jurisdiction in appeals cases by taking certain topics off the table. But again, I doubt that Congress would ever pass a law taking away really important areas of contention from the Court’s jurisdiction. The Court and its increased power are too tempting a way to circumvent the legislature and even the president, and since appointments continue for life, it seems that every appointment from now on is going to start a war, either metaphorical or actual.
[NOTE: Regarding Bork’s hearing, Joe Biden played a role:
Bork also contended in his best-selling book, The Tempting of America, that the brief prepared for Sen. Joe Biden, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “so thoroughly misrepresented a plain record that it easily qualifies as world class in the category of scurrility.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]
Stolen Blackness
The pretense of blackness seems to be a form of “stolen valor” for white women, who get to feel heroic while claiming victim status. There have been several cases outed and/or confessing recently, the latest being here.
It’s really not parallel to the older phenomenon of black people “passing” for white. They did it for obvious reasons, back in the day when being black really was to be oppressed. The people who did it were ordinarily of mixed race but with so much white genetic contribution that they simply didn’t look black although their family and cultural heritage was.
In contrast, the white women (and it’s mostly women) who these days are donning a black identity – a sort of new-age blackface, without the makeup but maybe with a hair perm – are utterly white. The woman pictured at the link is so white I’m not sure how she could ever have claimed blackness, but I suppose it’s something you don’t challenge in polite society.
Not that our present-day society is polite.
There are several advantages to the charade, I suppose. One is that it might make it possible to be the recipient of affirmative action in various spheres. Another is the ability to hitch one’s wagon to a cause perceived as noble. Still another is to claim victimhood while getting such benefits.
The latest women to be exposed in this way has the following story:
Satchuel Cole (they/them), born Jennifer Lynn Benton, is a prominent & highly respected BLM activist in Indiana.
As best I can determine – and I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time figuring this one out – this is a biological woman now identifying as gender binary, as well as a white woman previously identifying as black who became prominent in the BLM movement. That’s interesting to me because (1) BLM itself is based on lies about the deaths of people such as Michael Brown (2) according to the left, male or female sex is unmoored from biology and not binary, but race is tied to biology and is binary. That last statement is a case of things being backwards, because in fact it is sex that is binary nearly 100% of the time, and it is biological race that is often unclear because many white people have some black DNA and the vast majority of American black people have a significant amount of white DNA. Race is determined mostly by cultural heritage (at least one black parent) and phenotype. Today’s society (fortunately) has not devised a percentage of black DNA that would give a person the right to claim blackness (or as Satchuel Cole née Jennifer Benton put it in her confession, the right “to take up space as a Black person”).
Have you ever noticed how much jargon leftists use? They rarely speak in plain English, and that is no accident. Jargon is used for obfuscation, for propaganda, to give a semblance of erudition to those who are not learned, and in order to show membership in the wokeness club.
This woman has a Fifties obsession
But it’s lighthearted and fun. And boy, does she look good. She also managed to find the perfect husband. He tolerates it and even cooperates, although he doesn’t seem to participate in terms of his own garb.
I recognize every item in her house.
In addition, not all that long ago I lived in a house in which the kitchen remained unchanged since 1953, although (unlike her kitchen) the appliances were newer. The kitchen had been top-of-the-line in 1953 and it was still fabulous. The drawers slid perfectly, and it had features that were unusual in 1953, such as lower cabinet shelves that slid all the way out on smooth rollers so you didn’t have to engage in gymnastics to get something from them.
And the entire kitchen, walls and ceiling, was lined with large slabs of green Vitrolite (scroll down for color “Jade”). It looked like Oz, the Emerald City.
Romney, Murkowski, and Collins: what about those RINOs in 2020?
Senators Murkowski, Collins, and Romney have imposed their low-mid level Conservatism on the party for years. It used to be their party. It has not been that Country Club party for years now. Republicans may lose the Senate this time around, and with this Supreme Court vote, it is more likely to happen. But honestly- the removal of Sens. Murkowski, Collins, and Romney is something that needs to be done. Murkowski has been a vote against what is needed for too long. Collins has had to do her dance for decades, and Romney? Well, Romney was never worth a nickel. He seems to play to an audience that no one else sees.
But the three are very different and in states that are different as well. And their histories of being primaried from the right are different, too. It’s not one size fits all.
Romney’s state of Utah is very Republican, and Romney probably is no longer popular there. I believe he could easily be replaced by a more conservative Republican, but there’s one catch: he was elected in 2018 and isn’t up for re-election till 2024. The GOP might be stuck with him till then.
How did Romney win the Utah seat? It was actually a close campaign against his GOP challenger for the nomination (see this and this). But once he won the GOP nomination his victory was practically assured. The degree of his opposition to Trump was known (at least to a certain extent), but I doubt very much that the people of Utah guessed what he had planned in terms of opposition to the entire conservative agenda in the Senate. I think any primary against him by even a moderately strong GOP candidate in 2024 could go well, but I don’t think there’s much to be done till then.
Lisa Murkowski is also in a red state, but nevertheless Alaska is not as strongly Republican as Utah (few states are). She is the daughter of a former GOP leader of Alaska who appointed her when he left his Senate seat to become governor, and at the time she was more conservative than now. Nevertheless she was primaried by a Tea Party candidate in 2010 and lost the GOP nomination. But you may recall that she led a write-in campaign and won, which was surprising.
After that, Murkowski turned more liberal. And yet in 2016 she won the primary again against challengers from the right. I’m not sure why she won, but my guess is that her challengers just weren’t strong candidates. She won the election despite not being particularly popular:
Murkowski was re-elected with 44.4% of the vote, becoming the first person in history to win three elections to the U.S. Senate with pluralities but not majorities, having taken 48.6% in 2004 and 39.5% in 2010. Miller’s 29.2% finish was the best ever for a Libertarian candidate in a U.S. Senate election in terms of vote percentage.
Murkowski is not up for re-election till 2022. Again, it seems the GOP is stuck with her, and yet it also seems as though a more reliably conservative candidate could win in Alaska. However, it’s not as though Murkowski hasn’t been primaried from the right before; she has, and in 2010 that primarying was successful and yet she managed to work around it even though she never got a majority of the vote.
Collins of Maine is in an entirely different position. Firstly, she is up for re-election this year. Secondly, she is in a purple state that trends blue. So I have long felt that Collins is the only type of Republican that could win a Senate election there. If she were not running I believe a Democrat would win the seat, unlike in Utah and Alaska. There was a Republican attempt to primary her this year, but it failed. Collins used to be very popular in Maine but her decision to stand behind Kavanaugh has lost her some support among moderates.
Collins faces a very difficult dilemma concerning voting for a Ginsburg replacement, but she is in trouble anyway either way she goes with this. Polls showed her significantly behind her Democratic challenger even before Ginsburg’s death, but are the polls correct? If Collins fails to vote to confirm, she probably loses because some conservatives in Maine will almost certainly turn against her. If she votes to confirm, many more moderates may abandon her and she will lose for that reason. But my guess is she’s toast either way, and that she actually stands a better chance of winning if she votes to confirm. Then again, I’m not a political strategist.
And of course, if Trump does win a second term but the GOP loses the Senate, that would be the end of approval for any of Trump’s judicial appointments.
The death of Ginsburg: chaos
My first reaction to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a groan, “Oh, no!” Without even thinking it through, I felt that it would almost certainly increase the chaos in an already chaotic election situation. I still feel that way, and I don’t see that as good.
I’m not going to take a lot of time right now discussing all the possibilities and suggestions and analyses and predictions. That’s been done – for example here, here, here, and here.
As time goes on, the picture may shape up more clearly. Right now, there’s a lot of static.