Which will it be?

The New Neo Posted on by

Is he going to just let her walk away?

Or is he going to plead with her to come back?

Then again, maybe she’s been giving him mixed messages. This song, written by Bruce Springsteen, was popularized in a female version by the Pointer Sisters, who give a really steamy rendition here featuring what is probably the longest mid-song pause in history. The lyrics are now so very un-PC that my guess is that this song is now verboten to perform. But hey, it’s a great song, and ambivalence can be a very real thing:

Or maybe he’s reached the point of zen indifference (I recently discovered to my surprise that this song was written by none other than Paul Simon):

It’s good to get my mind off the dismal subject of politics for a while.

How far will Democrats go to loosen election procedures in order to ensure continual victory?

The New Neo Posted on by

This chaotic 2020 election and the subsequent SCOTUS rejection yesterday of the Texas lawsuit have highlighted the enormous influence election fraud in big cities in swing states can have on the final outcome of a presidential race. We already knew – from “found” votes – that fraud in a big city in one state can affect the Senate contests in close races in that state. We also already knew that fraud in a certain city (such as was alleged in Chicago in 1960) can affect the outcome in the state as a whole and in a very close presidential race that can create a tipping point in the Electoral College that determines the outcome.

But never before (at least, to the best of my knowledge) have we looked at anything like what is alleged to have happened this year: coordinated and massive fraud in four deep blue cities, each in a separate swing state, determining the outcome in an election that may not even have been close otherwise. The idea is that loose rules and procedures for voting and vote-counting/authentication opened the door for such an opportunity for a small group of people to have an enormous effect on the outcome, and that our judicial system either lacks the ability or the courage to evaluate whether this really happened and if so how to remedy the situation.

A person doesn’t even have to believe that such fraud did occur to realize how dangerous such a situation is. I am deeply disturbed that our media (a big part of the problem anyway) has no interest in fairly reporting on the allegations of fraud, and that our judiciary is punting. But I’m afraid that’s what we’re facing.

The Texas lawsuit highlighted a question I think is of the utmost importance: do states have the right to challenge the election procedures in another state involving a national election, if those procedures are seen as opening up great vulnerabilities to and opportunities for fraud? And if they don’t have the right, should they have the right? If not, what’s to stop any state from loosening its rules so that elections are basically a sham? Or, what’s to stop a city in that state from being so lax about enforcing the laws that the city can effectively manipulate its votes to control the election results in that state?

That’s bad enough. But all that may soon be moot, because we face another threat that’s even bigger. If the Democrats end up controlling the Senate as well as the House and eliminating the filibuster, and if Biden or Harris becomes the president, I predict that the Democrats will revive their intent to effect an extremely radical remaking of election law in order to favor their party. You may or may not recall that one of the first acts of the new Democrat House when it was installed in January of 2019 was to pass (by strict party-line vote) the Orwellian-entitled “For the People Act”. It died in the Republican-controlled Senate, and so not all that much attention has been paid to it. But we need to take another look, because if the Democrats do get the Senate this time, I believe that passing it will be one of their first orders of business.

This is what Mitch McConnell said about it back then:

I think it’s more accurately described another way: The ‘Democrat Politician Protection Act.’

“This sprawling, comprehensive proposal is basically the far left’s entire Christmas wish list where our nation’s political process is concerned. What would it do? It would pile new Washington D.C.-focused regulations onto virtually every aspect of how politicians are elected and what Americans can say about them. So my Democratic friends have already tried to market this unprecedented intrusion with all the predictable clichés. Quote – ‘restoring democracy.’ Quote – ‘for the people.’ Really? The only common motivation running through the whole proposal seems to be this: Democrats searching for ways to give Washington politicians more control over what Americans can say about them and how they get elected…

To begin with, Democrats want to make the Federal Elections Commission a partisan institution…

…[T]he legislation that Democrats are moving through committee would throw away that bipartisan split. It would reduce the FEC to a five-member body and — listen to this — let sitting presidents hand-pick their majority. Obviously this is a recipe for turning the FEC into a partisan weapon.

“Democrats also empower that newly-partisan FEC to regulate more of what Americans say. That 3-to-2 FEC would get to determine what they subjectively see as ‘campaign-related’ — a new, vague category of regulated speech. There’d also be new latitude to decide when a nonprofit’s speech has crossed that same fuzzy line and subsequently force the publication of the group’s private supporters. All this appears custom-built to chill the exercise of the First Amendment and give federal bureaucrats — and the waiting left-wing mob — a clearer idea of just who to intimidate…

Perhaps most worrisome of all is the unprecedented proposal to federalize our nation’s elections, giving Washington D.C. politicians even more control over who gets to come here in the first place. Hundreds of pages are dedicated to telling states how to run their elections, from when and where they must take place, to the procedures they have to follow, to the machines they have to use.

“Democrats want to import the inefficiencies of state and federal bureaucracy to ballot boxes and voter rolls while making it harder for states and localities to clean inaccurate data off their voter rolls, harder to remove duplicate registrations, ineligible voters, and other errors, harder to check every box Washington Democrats demand before allowing you to pick your representatives. Provision after provision would make it easier for campaign lawyers to take advantage of disorganization, chaos, and confusion…

This sprawling power grab clocks in at around 570 pages. Seemingly every one of those pages is filled with some effort to rewrite the rules to favor Democrats and their friends.

Obviously, I can’t cover all the provisions in this post, but suffice to say this is an extraordinarily dangerous bill. It also contained voting rights for felons and statehood for DC. I don’t think any Democrat would vote against it. Would SCOTUS let it stand? The tradition is to allow Congress broad discretion to set rules for voting in federal elections (president, House, and Senate), although not in local or state ones (see this for an example). So it seems to me that a Democrat-controlled Congress could pass such a bill without SCOTUS interference, as long as the bill referred to federal elections only.

This is actually terrifying. The only preventative I can see – at least temporarily – is for Republicans to win those Senate seats in the Georgia runoffs. And unless Republicans continue to hold at least one branch of government, I think this bill or its equivalent will be passed as soon as the Democrats hold the House, Senate, and presidency. SCOTUS precedent is that Congress can pass laws superseding state rules in federal elections, and so I don’t see that SCOTUS will be willing or able to stop this sort of bill if and when the Democrats manage to pass it.

I’m no expert on election law, so if anyone can see a flaw in my reasoning I’d actually welcome it, because I find these conclusions of mine incredibly chilling.

On judicial philosophy, liberal vs conservative

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Something tells me that now might be a good time to revisit and add to some ideas I expressed in this post from two years ago.]

Remember the brouhaha that ensued when Trump called a judge who ruled against his asylum policy an “Obama judge”? It drew a rebuke from Justice Roberts: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.”

It strikes me that the argument between Roberts and Trump is a typical DonQuixote/SanchoPanza dispute. Roberts is stating an ideal that does not exist in the real world, and what’s more just about everybody knows that Trump is stating something that seems very very real. But although that’s the case – as the bitterness of so many confirmation fights in recent decades has made crystal clear – presidents aren’t supposed to actually say that sort of thing, and SCOTUS chief justices certainly aren’t supposed to say it. So Roberts is defending what he sees as the integrity of the judicial system, and his own integrity as a justice who no doubt prizes his own idea of his own lack of partisanship and his devotion to objectivity.

But maybe what passes for political partisanship – and acts as partisanship – on the part of judges is also a reflection of a deeper divide between left and right, a divide based on judicial philosophy. To put it in a very simplistic (perhaps too simplistic) way, judges appointed by Democratic administrations usually operate under the idea that the Constitution is a document that must adapt to modern times, and can be stretched and reshaped to find penumbras and intents to fit whatever the left happens to think is a worthy cause. Judges appointed by Republican administrations usually (although certainly not always, since there is variation as well as “changers” among them) operate under a more restrictive idea of what judges must do: interpret cases in accord with the intent of the Founders and the words of the Constitution, plus case law. “Creative” stretching and innovation by judges is largely frowned on; the idea is that change should be the province of other branches of elected government or of amendments.

These two philosophies lead to very different results, and those results are relatively consistent and predictable in that the decisions of Democratic-appointed justices and judges tend to follow the interests of the left and the decisions of Republican-appointed justices and judges tend to follow the interest of the right – only less often. If you look at the philosophical differences, the flexibility of the liberal judicial philosophy versus the relatively rule-bound rigidity of the conservative one means that liberal justices have more “freedom” to twist things to reach decisions they desire, whereas conservative justices are more inclined to apply the letter of the law even when it sometimes leads to results they might not agree with politically.

Lastly, I believe that Roberts may also have been reacting to the pernicious influence of something called “critical legal studies,” although I doubt that motive is perceived by most people. I keep meaning to write a long post on critical legal studies, but I haven’t done it yet. Critical legal studies got going in law schools during the 70s, during the time Justice Roberts would have been in law school. Here’s a brief idea of what the movement was about in those days:

The critical legal studies movement emerged in the mid-1970s as a network of leftist law professors in the United States who developed the realist indeterminacy thesis in the service of leftist ideals…

Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard law professor who along with Unger was one of the key figures in the movement, has said that, in the early days of critical legal studies, “just about everyone in the network was a white male with some interest in 60s style radical politics or radical sentiment of one kind or another. Some came from Marxist backgrounds–some came from democratic reform.” Kennedy has emphasized the twofold nature of critical legal studies, as both a network of leftist scholar/activists and a scholarly literature…

The approach is too complex to go into here, and it has many components. Its practitioners have become extremely influential in legal education. One of its main philosophies is that the idea of the judiciary as an objective impartial interpreter of law is invalid and incorrect. And not only invalid and incorrect, but not even desirable or possible as a goal. Instead:

…there is the idea that all “law is politics”. This means that legal decisions are a form of political decision, but not that it is impossible to tell judicial and legislative acts apart. Rather, CLS have argued that while the form may differ, both are based around the construction and maintenance of a form of social space. The argument takes aim at the positivist idea that law and politics can be entirely separated from one another.

Chief Justice Roberts may have thought he was upholding the idea of the judiciary as something different from “politics by another name,” and the notion that objectivity is a good thing and something to strive for even if not always achieved.

SCOTUS refuses Texas lawsuit for lack of standing

The New Neo Posted on by

You can read some of the details at Legal Insurrection. Excerpt from the opinion:

The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.

Earlier today I wrote in a comment that there was a conservative argument SCOTUS could use for refusing to take the case, which is that “it has to do with whether there is standing for one state to challenge another over these particular issues, or whether it violates the federalism principle.”

That was a quick comment, but I want to elaborate a bit more. I have a law degree but it’s ancient, and I’m not a lawyer or any kind of expert on election law. However, I have an interest in law and I’ve thought about it a good deal, especially the philosophical and psychological questions connected with law. So ever since the morning of November 4th, that’s the perspective from which I’ve looked at the question of what the legal remedies might be for the huge number of terrible problems connected with this 2020 election and its aftermath.

How do judges make decisions? Of course they look at the law, but few questions of law are 100% cut and dried with answers that are completely obvious. Other elements come heavily into play, among them judicial philosophy and the judge’s hunches about what the larger effects of any decision might be. Judges are human, and there are probably personality quirks that enter into it as well.

The election cases of 2020 have consequences that I believe most of the SCOTUS justices and perhaps all of them find frightening. The rift in the country is serious and vast, and it is my sense that they don’t want to be the ones blamed for bad things happening as a result of their decisions. Perhaps they would deny that, but that’s just my gut feeling (I think it’s especially true for John Roberts, but I think it’s true to a certain extent for many or even all of them).

Of course, even issuing no ruling on the legal questions raised in a case, and refusing to give relief – not hearing this case, for example – has consequences. It’s a form of decision. But it’s a passive type of decision that allows people to tell themselves they’re not responsible for what happens. They may indeed be fooling themselves. But passivity can be attractive when faced with something very tough. And this is very tough, because no matter what the Court does, half the country is going to be very very angry indeed.

That’s the situation we face, and that’s the situation that in my opinion probably made the SCOTUS justices want to run the other way. So if there are legal arguments they can find that allow them to do that – and in this Texas case there were such arguments – most of them will grasp those arguments as a lifeline. That is why I have been wary from the start about any legal remedies coming in these 2020 election cases.

You might ask, but what of 2000 and Bush v. Gore? Didn’t SCOTUS make a decision? Yes, but recall that in Bush v. Gore SCOTUS issued a stay against a recount. Essentially, they froze the proceedings and said “enough already”:

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. Justice Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida’s counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately. On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay for Bush, with Scalia citing “irreparable harm” that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast “a needless and unjustified cloud” over Bush’s legitimacy. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm.” Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.

In a per curiam decision, the Court first ruled 7–2 (Justices Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting), strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, the use of different standards of counting in different counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. (The case had also been argued on the basis of Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor with only Justices Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist.) Second, the Court ruled 5–4 against the remedy, proposed by Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter, of sending the case back to Florida to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard before the scheduled December 18 meeting of Florida’s electors in Tallahassee. The majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 “safe harbor” deadline set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5, which the Florida Supreme Court had stated that the Florida Legislature intended to meet.

In Bush v. Gore it was also not an interstate dispute, unlike the present Texas case. That matters, particularly in terms of the question of applying the Equal Protection Clause. If I’m understanding Bush v. Gore correctly, in 2000 the Equal Protection question in the case involved an intrastate matter: comparing counties within a single state, Florida. In 2020, the Court was asked to deal with an interstate Equal Protection matter and compare states. And yet (to the best of my admittedly shallow knowledge, anyway) states have ordinarily been allowed to use quite different voting rules from other states as long as each state meets the requirements for federal elections set forth in the US Constitution. Otherwise, each state is allowed quite a bit of leeway in setting its own rules.

So I am not surprised by this ruling and in fact I would have been surprised had it gone otherwise. I wish I could be more optimistic about the legal prospects, but I just don’t think there will be a legal remedy issued for the utter disaster that has been Election 2020.

And by “utter disaster” I don’t simply mean a Trump loss and a Biden win, although that aspect definitely upsets me. I am talking about the disastrous process by which the safeguards and protections that reassure us that our elections are fair and valid have been systematically stripped away in many many states. That has left us with a situation that was an invitation to election fraud and/or to the strong suspicion of election fraud. Not only was there a vulnerability to fraud and an opportunity for fraud, but without those proper security measures, fraud was always going to be alleged by whatever party was the election loser. I am firmly convinced that, had Trump been the winner, Democrats would have been screaming “fraud!” and suing in the courts, and there would also have been rioting by the left.

What actually happened, though, was that the Biden win occurred under especially suspicious circumstances. It wasn’t just the enormous number of insecure mail-in ballots; it was also the late-night stoppage in four swing states when Trump was way ahead, the throwing out and/or distancing of many observers, the ballot counting that continued afterwards and went so tremendously heavily for Biden, the insecure voting machine programs (known to be insecure even before the election), and other suspicious anomalies such as the gains by the GOP in the House that seemed to contradict a Biden win and Trump’s sweep of bellweather counties despite the Biden win.

So we had a perfect storm of suspicious occurrences, and now we have a house utterly divided. Can that house stand? I don’t know, but I certainly don’t think we can look to the court system to assist us in finding our way through this.

Barr may have known about the Hunter Biden investigations prior to the election…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and kept mum about it.

That doesn’t surprise me at all, if true. My reading of Barr is that he’s an old-fashioned by-the-book guy, and that although he sometimes acts as if he understands the enormous stakes, he still feels he must follow the rules.

Those old rules used to go like this:

Barr may have kept a lid on the investigations to avoid breaking a Justice Department rule. The Washington Times noted that “Justice Department guidelines prohibit disclosing or opening politically-charged investigations within 60 days of a presidential election. It’s possible that Mr. Barr was worried of running afoul of that rule.”

Of that, and of his enemies blasting him for trying to influence the election. Of course, keeping it under wraps influenced the election as well.

Most of you will probably disagree with me, but I don’t fault Barr very much for this. It wasn’t his responsibility to reveal it, or at least it shouldn’t have been his responsibility. The responsibility and the fault lies in the MSM for spiking the Hunter Biden story that was dumped in their lap, and for social media for blocking it as well. The New York Post spread the word, but the left successfully suppressed and/or discredited the Post. I never expected Barr to break the rules and comment, even though some part of me wishes he had done so. However, if he had, I think the left would have successfully established the idea that he was biased and shilling for Trump.

It’s the old old question: how do you fight against a group that fights incredibly dirty? How dirty do you get? If you keep your hands clean, you lose to that group. If you dirty your hands enough, at what point do you become too much like that group?

I don’t have the answers, but I have the questions.

The plans for Joe

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “I Am Sparacus” writes this about the Hunter Biden investigation:

I disagree that this investigation will end up in nothing. The Obama team is not going to let “this crisis go to waste”. They will use it to push him out. Already there are leaks and stories on how the Harris team is leaking. Will they have the decency to let him take the oath of office? Probably not.

Well, maybe. But I don’t quite see it that way.

To kick Joe out for the Hunter Biden corruption problems is way too damaging an admission for the Democrats to make. Why, it would mean – to practically any sentient being – that the GOP was right all along and the MSM deceptively covered it up in order to elect Biden and screw Trump. Plus, the Democrats impeached Trump for even suggesting to the Ukrainian president that these matters should be investigated. No, that’s just too much to own up to, both for the Democrats and for the MSM.

And it’s not even necessary. There’s a very simple solution for getting rid of Joe if they think that’s best – just declare him to have mentally and/or physically declined to the point where it would be a good idea to retire him. That might sound like an admission that those Republicans who claimed Biden was senile were correct, but the news could be carefully described as referring to a very recent decline in Joe’s mental abilities.

But I don’t think they actually want to be rid of Biden – yet. Yes, his “gaffes” (errors, mental absences) probably are making them cringe. But the anti-Trump pro-Democrat public has shown that it’s pretty much okay with that and will not demand he step down. So, as long as Biden doesn’t thwart the left’s plans by nixing something they want to do, why not keep him in the presidency as a figurehead? Others can pull the strings (Kamala or, as I suspect, Obama and/or his people) from behind the scenes and it will work just fine for the left.

There is an added benefit to waiting two years to remove Biden. Not only does it make the “recent decline” claim more plausible because of the passage of time, but it means – if the waiting period is long enough – that Kamala could finish up the remaining two years of Biden’s term and still be eligible to run for two more terms.

So that’s the scenario I see right now as most plausible, although things could change.

Happy Chanukah!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of a previous post.]

This is the first night of Chanukah, and I wish everyone a happy one. Chanukah is about a successful revolt and a miracle of light:

The miracle of the one-day supply of oil miraculously lasting eight days is first described in the Talmud, committed to writing about 600 years after the events described in the books of Maccabees. The Talmud says that after the forces of Antiochus IV had been driven from the Temple, the Maccabees discovered that almost all of the ritual olive oil had been profaned. They found only a single container that was still sealed by the High Priest, with enough oil to keep the menorah in the Temple lit for a single day. They used this, yet it burned for eight days (the time it took to have new oil pressed and made ready).

The words of this Chanukah song in Yiddish—written in 1924 before the Holocaust and before the establishment of Israel—are not happy. But I didn’t know that when I first heard it, and I post it anyway because I think it’s very beautiful:

Here are the lyrics, as translated by Theodore Bikel (you can hear an excerpt of him singing it here):

O little lights of mystery
You recall our history
And all that went before
The battles and the bravery
And our release from slavery
Miracles galore.

As my eyes behold your flames
I recall our heroes’ names
And our ancient dream:
“Jews were learning how to fight
To defeat an awesome might
They could reign supreme”

“They would rule their own domain
When the enemy was slain,
The Temple cleansed and whole.
Once there was a Jewish land
And a mighty Jewish hand.”
Oh, how it moves my soul!

O little lights of mystery
You retell our history
Your tales are tales of pain.
My heart is filled with fears
My eyes are filled with tears
“What now?” says the haunting refrain.

Remember: written in 1924.

Bikel translated the song that way in order to make the rhymes come out. But a more literal translation of that last verse might be:

Oh little candles,
your old stories
awaken my anguish;
deep in my heart there
stirs
a tearful question:
What will be next?

Indeed.

Oh, that Hunter Biden, says CNN and the FBI

The New Neo Posted on by

The right has known about this sort of thing since the Hunter Biden laptop story broke, not long before the election. I said “broke,” but perhaps I should have said “tried to break but only caused the slightest of ripples because the MSM and social media actively and forcibly suppressed and/or pooh-poohed and ‘debunked’ (their new favorite word) the story, in order to elect Joe Biden.”

But apparently now even CNN can report on it – and the alphabet agencies can resume their investigation of Hunter. My sense from reading the linked article is that the reason this is now being reported – aside from the fact that they think Trump is soon to be out of the way – is that the news was coming out in the not-too-distant future anyway, and CNN wanted to be careful to distance Joe Biden from it and exonerate him in advance.

For example, here’s the lede:

After pausing in the months before the election, federal authorities are now actively investigating the business dealings of Hunter Biden, a person with knowledge of the probe said. His father, President-elect Joe Biden, is not implicated.

No, of course not.

Compare and contrast to Crossfire Hurricane:

The investigation was officially opened on July 31, 2016, initially due to information on Trump campaign member George Papadopoulos’s early assertions of Russians having damaging material on Donald Trump’s rival candidate Hillary Clinton. From late July to November 2016, the joint effort between the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA) examined evidence of Russian meddling in the 2016 United States presidential election. The FBI’s team enjoyed a large degree of autonomy within the broader interagency probe.

The FBI was busy investigating Trump’s campaign associates, based on things they knew to be lies, falsifying evidence in order to obtain surveillance warrants from FISA, and leaking like a sieve to the media, all in the fall of 2016 in order to destroy Trump. No pre-election pause for Trump; au contraire.

But back to Hunter:

Investigators have been examining multiple financial issues, including whether Hunter Biden and his associates violated tax and money laundering laws in business dealings in foreign countries, principally China, according to two people briefed on the probe.

Some of those transactions involved people who the FBI believe sparked counterintelligence concerns, a common issue when dealing with Chinese business, according to another source.

The investigation began as early as 2018, predating the arrival of William Barr as US attorney general, two people briefed on the investigation said. The existence of the probe will present an immediate test of Biden’s promise to maintain the independence of the Justice Department.

Sinclair Broadcast Group reported in October that the FBI had opened a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden. CNN has learned new details about the scope of the probe, including that it is focused on China.

More here, here, here, and here.

Will anyone apologize to Rudy Giuliani, mocked and reviled for the laptop story? No. The Big Brother MSM and social media giants did what they needed to do in order to help their guy. And this investigation, like so many others, may end in nothing much as well.

A good summary of the legal issues in the Texas et al. SCOTUS case…

The New Neo Posted on by

…can be found here. Recommended reading.

In particular:

Texas’s lawsuit is a procedural creature differing greatly from the Bush v. Gore case about the 2000 election. Unlike Bush v. Gore, which traveled to the Supreme Court on appeal, Texas’s lawsuit relies on the Supreme Court’s “original jurisdiction,” or power to hear a case initially…

…[T]the Supreme Court does not have to hear a dispute between the states. Rather, controlling precedent holds that whether to hear such a dispute is within the Supreme Court’s discretion…

…Texas argues that the case “presents constitutional questions of immense national consequences,” namely that the 2020 election suffered from serious constitutional irregularities, including violations by the defendant states of the Electors Clause and the Due Process Clause of the Constitution…

In its Bill of Complaint, filed along with its Motion for Leave, Texas presents three constitutional challenges. Count 1 alleges the defendant states violated the Electors Clause of the Constitution…

In Count 2, Texas relied on the same facts, then asserted an Equal Protection claim, premised on the reasoning of the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution is violated when states apply differing standards for judging the legality of votes cast for president…

Finally, in Count 3, Texas asserts a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution. This claim is premised on Texas’s allegation that the election practices of the defendant states in 2020 reached “the point of patent and fundamental unfairness,” thus violating substantive due process.

Much more at the link.

Senator Grassley, 87, tested positive for COVID…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but never had a symptom, and the quarantine period has passed.

Interesting. Just another reminder that, even for the very elderly who definitely are at much greater risk of dying from COVID than people of other age groups, a positive COVID test is not a death sentence for the majority nor is it necessarily even experienced as a serious illness.

And now Morocco says it will be establishing full diplomatic ties with Israel – plus, the Hydroxy Effect

The New Neo Posted on by

Today’s announcement:

In a statement, Moroccan sovereign King Mohammad VI says Morocco intends to “resume official bilateral contacts and diplomatic relations [with Israel] as soon as possible.”

King Mohammad says that Morocco will take three moves in the near future. First, facilitating direct flights to transport Jews of Moroccan origin and Israeli tourists too and from Morocco. The North African nation will also seek to “resume official bilateral ties and diplomatic relations [with Israel] as soon as possible.”

Morocco will also seek “to develop innovative relationships in the economic and technological fields. As part of this goal, there will be work on renewing liaison offices in the two countries, as was the case in the past for many years, until 2002,” King Mohammad says.

He thanks US President Donald Trump for recognizing Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed region of Western Sahara, which observers believe was done as a quid pro quo in exchange for normalization.

I keep wondering whether a Biden administration would try to undo this, and if so whether they would succeed in that endeavor. Or, alternatively, they might do something unintentionally that would mess it up. Either course of action is possible. Biden has already signaled his desire (or someone’s desire) to court Obama’s favored nation Iran once again, but emboldening and empowering Iran might just make the Arab nations now allied with Israel cling to that alliance ever tighter – you know, the “enemy of my enemy.”

In line with that thought – I notice that Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article in National Review about what he calls “the hydroxy effect” and whether if Biden becomes president he will go with it as policy. An excerpt:

Trump’s presidential endorsement [of hydroxychloroquine] was apparent proof of rank quackery [to the MSM and the Democrats]. Yet a few recent second-look studies, especially abroad, suggest that hydroxychloroquine, a dirt-cheap, time-tested anti-malarial drug, can in fact offer help in treating some cases of COVID-19.

This Hydroxy Effect — hysterical disavowal of anything Trump has endorsed — is dangerous to the country at large.

Hanson goes on to list several other ways in which it played out that a Trump statement or opinion or policy was widely derided and yet was correct and/or advantageous. For some of those things there’s a post-election-day “now it finally can be told” element going on in the press. Of foreign policy, Hanson writes:

Logic dictates that Biden would not scrap the framework of an effective containment policy of expansionist China. Pacific nations such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan appreciated Trump’s efforts to corral China…

Logic suggests that Biden would appreciate inheriting a more stable Middle East, with Arab states and Israel increasingly united against the theocracy in Iran. The emerging alliances seem tailor-made to allow Biden to take credit for still more Arab nations recognizing Israel…

But the logic we see as logical is not the logic Democrats see as logical. Biden has his own reasons for wanting to cozy up to China, in addition of course to the need to do the opposite of what Trump has done. It may be the same for Israel, although the Arab nations may not really care if Biden doesn’t approve – their motive to ally with Israel at this point may be just that powerful.