The Virus is like a bad movie series that just refuses to die. There was a controversial but impactful first release that everyone was talking about, even if they didn’t see it. Then there was the lackluster sequel, which still enjoyed some popular support, even though ticket sales were down.
Now it feels like we’re on the tired third film, which is a watered-down, ineffectual finale (one hopes) to a premise that is played out. Sure, critics love it, but audiences are tired of its antics.
What still seems to make it into the script of every one of these films is the part where the government bureaucrats lock everything down and release a bunch of ghosts into Manhattan (uh, wait, what?). Meanwhile, we all kind of sit by and twiddle our thumbs and put our masks on dutifully.
What happened to the band of merry wastrels who tossed tea into Boston Harbor, rather than comply with an odious monopolization of the tea trade? Or the plucky scofflaws who made it impossible to enforce the Stamp Act? I’d rather disguise myself as an Indian (feather, not dot) and caffeinate the water supply than put a mask on again (but that would be cultural appropriation, of course).
In short, why don’t we get a backbone, instead of cowering behind masks and locking ourselves indoors? We’re literally cowering before an invisible enemy with a 99%+ survival rate.
Well, liberty is never easy. Better to stay inside watching movies and disconnecting from reality, eh?
Apologies to subscribers—I still need to make up for last week’s post, and one from about a month ago. I have not forgotten. I’ll be catching up on those posts as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience. —TPP
Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow! Roe v. Wade—that odious bit of extraconstitutional blather that stripped States of their rights and babies of their lives—has now been repealed. The issue of abortion will go the States, where many more battles will be fought for or against life.
But today is a day for celebration. For those that embrace constitutional originalism and, more importantly, life for the unborn, the repeal of Roe in the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Earlier this week I was having a conversation with someone on Milo’s rollicking Telegram chat, in which we were trying to figure out the name of a short story involving people living in underground cells, communicating only via the Internet. I had a feeling I had written about it before, but could not remember the name of the story.
Turns out it was E.M. Forster’s novella “The Machine Stops,” originally published in 1909, and I wrote about it in this catch-all post from the early days of The Age of The Virus (so early, in fact, I was not capitalizing the first “the” in that moniker, which I have texted so much, my last phone auto-predicted “The Age of The Virus”). I compared the story to Kipling’s “The Mother Hive”–a story that apparently is assigned regularly in India, because pageviews for it always seem to coincide with large numbers of site visitors from the subcontinent.
But I digress. The story sounded eerily like what our elites asked us to do during The Age of The Virus: stay home, get fat, consume mindless entertainment, and don’t socialize. Granted, some of us could go outside and plant gardens (I still got fat, though), but the messaging was not “become more self-sufficient so we can mitigate disaster” but “buy more stuff and don’t do anything fun.” It was depressing to me how many people embraced this line of reasoning, turning government-mandated sloth into some kind of perverted virtue.
I appreciated the break that The Age of The Virus afforded us, but it came with the severe curtailment of liberty—and Americans ate it up! Instead of people boldly throwing ravers and partying down, laughing at our elites, we instead retreated into our hovels, shuddering in the dark. When I did through a big Halloween bash, it was a massive success—because, I suppose, people had finally had it.
It’s doubly significant that Barrett’s confirmation comes just a week before Election Day, which is next Tuesday, 3 November 2020. Nothing speaks more powerfully to conservatives about the importance of the Trump presidency than the President’s three conservative appointments to the Court.
ACB seems to be the most conservative of Trump’s appointees yet, which is a major victory for the Right. Replacing the arch-progressive RGB with a conservative Catholic mother of seven should energize even the logiest of Republican squishes to pull the lever for Trump next Tuesday.
Recapturing the Court from progressives has been a conservative fantasy since at least Roe v. Wade, and really even earlier. It’s taken anywhere from fifty to eighty years for conservatives to hold a decisive majority on the Court—easily a lifetime of patient political campaigning and faithful prayer.
With Democrats threatening to pack the Courts if they win the presidency and Congress, conservatives can’t rest on our laurels just yet. We’ve got to get Trump reelected next week—and Republicans to take back the House and retain the Senate.
For South Carolinians, we must vote for Lindsey Graham next week, too. I know he has not always been the most reliable conservative, but the Kavanaugh confirmation process red-pilled him big time. He’s also the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and is responsible for getting Barrett—and dozens upon dozens of federal and appellate judges—out of committee and to a floor vote. We cannot afford to lose that conservative influence at this critical juncture.
Justice Thomas is getting on in his years; we need a reliable conservative to replace him. But there are progressive justices also approaching their expiration dates. Justice Stephen Breyer is 82. Respectable retirement can’t be far off for him. Replacing Breyer would truly cement a conservative majority for a lifetime.
For now, congratulations to JusticeAmy Coney Barrett. Do us proud!
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As of right now, it looks like Amy Coney Barrett will get confirmed to the Supreme Court before the election, even if she’ll be seated under the wire. A plurality of Americans want Barrett seated, according to a Rasmussen poll. Conservatives shouldn’t take anything for granted; to quote Marcus Cato Censorius, “many things can come between the mouth and a morsel of food.” But it does seem that ACB will soon be Justice Barrett, and America will be better off for it.
Of course, the Democrats are in high dudgeon, and are already threatening to pack the Court should they win the presidency and gain a senatorial majority this November. Conservatives have anticipated this potential move for some time, but haven’t done much to stymie it. Our focus has been, understandably, affixed on merely gaining a solid constitutionalist majority on the Court, but today’s Left will do anything to demolish a conservative Court.
Just as Democrats threatened to impeach Trump [thanks to jonolan for sharing that post with his readers, too —TPP] for making a constitutional appointment, they’re not seeking to dilute the Supreme Court, cheapening its gravity and significance, by adding additional justices. Their solution is to expand the Court enough enough to make the potentially 6-3 conservative majority irrelevant.
After all, with the Democrats, if the rules favor your opponents, change them. If the people don’t want your ideology, force it on them via judicial or executive fiat.
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It looks like President Trump will make his Supreme Court nomination pick later this week, and that Senate Republicans will deliver the votes he needs. Lindsey Graham, who is in a surprisingly tight race here in South Carolina, came out with full-throated support for confirming a nominee, even this close to the November election.
What came as a major surprise was Mitt Romney‘s willingness to vote for a Trump nominee. He did qualify his support by stating that he intends “to vote based upon [the nominee’s] qualifications,” which still leaves open the possibility of his characteristic perfidy. Even with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins demurring, that gives Senate Republicans some cushion in confirming the president’s choice.
Of course, the Left is in a full-scale, apocalyptic meltdown. They’d turned Ruth Bader Ginsburg into a symbol for their preferred style of judicial activism, and saw her as a crotchety, sleepy champion for their pet causes. Ginsburg never saw an abuse of judicial power she didn’t like, and was a guaranteed vote for the progressives on any case.
The prospect of replacing her with a constitutional conservative is the Left’s worst nightmare. RBG’s refusal to step down into a peaceful (and, surely, lucrative) retirement during the Obama administration has not cost the Democrats—potentially—a reliably Leftist seat for probably another forty years.
It’s little wonder, then, that the Democrats are pulling out every trick imaginable to stall or prevent confirmation hearings, and to otherwise scuttle Trump’s eventual nominee. That includes threats of impeachment.
With the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Friday, the political world was thrown into hysterics. Democrats are threatening to set the Supreme Court building and the White House ablaze if President Trump attempts to nominate a replacement for the Notorious RBG before the November election.
Even if they were serious about their histrionic, treasonous threat, President Trump should do it, and Senate Republicans should act speedily to confirm his nominee. For that matter, President Trump should appoint the most stridently right-wing, pro-life, socially conservative, religious justice possible.
If the Kavanaugh hearings taught us anything, the Left will pillory any mildly conservative nominee to the Court. Kavanaugh is a Beltway Dudley Do-Right, and he was treated as a de facto stand-in for every unpleasant interaction a woman has ever had with a man. If the Left treated him so shabbily, why not go for broke and get the second coming of Antonin Scalia, or a young Clarence Thomas clone?
When I first heard the news, I remembered President Obama’s Merrick Garland appointment, and how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold confirmation hearings. That was entirely constitutional, both for the president to nominate, and for the Senate to decline to confirm. McConnell’s rationale was that the Senate should not confirm a nominee during a presidential election year, so as to give the people a chance to vote for new leadership first.
My initial reaction was, “Well, screw it—just slam in a nominee and control SCOTUS for generations.” The Senate isn’t bound by an unwritten rule or custom, and the Left has broken so many rules (including threatening to impeach Trump for performing his constitutional duty to make an appointment), it’s time for us to do so to win.
But then my younger brother informed me that a confirmation at this time would not be a breach of senatorial custom. The rule that McConnell invoked in 2016 only applies when the President is one party, and the Senate is controlled by the opposing party. Presidents who have attempted nominations in those conditions during election years have failed. Ted Cruz covers it beautifully in a short YouTube video:
“29 times there has been a vacancy in a presidential election year. Now, presidents have made nominations all 29 times. That's what presidents do. If there's a vacancy, they make a nomination.”https://t.co/ajV3LOhtE0
Of course, McConnell warned then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in 2009 when the Senate got rid of its requirement that sixty Senators were necessary to confirm Supreme Court nominees that it would one day come back to haunt the Democrats. The price of their political expediency could very well be—let us pray!—a conservative-controlled Court.
Sadly, it seems that the Democrats will keep moving the goal posts, as usual. The cry now is that if Trump gets his nominee before the election, the Democrats will engage in court-packing should they win the presidency and Congress; in other words, they’ll add Supreme Court seats to dilute the conservative majority.
Congress has the authority to alter the number of Supreme Court seats (when the Constitution was first ratified, the Court only had six justices, rather than the present-day nine). However, the last infamous example of court-packing—Franklin Roosevelt’s ham-fisted attempt to inflate the Court to fifteen justices from nine—was met with severe push-back from even his own party, which saw it for the transparently naked power-grab it was. Democrats nearly ninety years later are all too eager to engage in that power grab.
Therefore, even if President Trump gets his nominee confirmed before the 3 November election, it could all be undone with a Biden win and a “blue wave” seizing control of the Senate. That’s why it’s all the more imperative—especially in swing States—to get out and vote for Trump. The Supreme Court pick will be meaningless if Democrats take control of the levers of power again.
More importantly, it will—barring progressive court-packing—secure the Court for conservatives for at least a generation, and possibly beyond. If President Trump is reelected and Republicans maintain the Senate, it may then be advisable—as much as I hate to suggest it—for Justice Thomas to step down, thereby allowing Trump to appoint a younger conservative who can maintain the conservative majority for another thirty or forty years.
Big things are afoot. The Republicans and Trump may just have one last shot to save the Republic.
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My brother sent me a meme the other day: a picture of nine Clarence Thomases under the heading “The Ideal Supreme Court“:
Memes are often pithy statements of the Truth, and, boy, this one nails it. Given the treacherous and boneheaded rulings from the Supreme Court this week—particularly from perennial traitor Chief Justice John Roberts, joined in one ruling with milquetoast toady Neil Gorsuch—we could do for a Court full of Clarence Thomases. Such a Court would understand the Constitution and the role of the Supreme Court in relation to it better than any Court we’ve had since the 1920s.
On Wednesday, 13 May 2020, blogger Audre Myers posted a piece at Nebraska Energy Observer entitled “What Do You Think?” The piece prompted readers to answer the question “Would we be the America we are if the Civil War had never been fought?”
Below is my response, which you can also view here. The TL;DR summary of my answer is that, while it was good that the Union was preserved and that slavery was abolished, it came with some heavy fees—the expansion of federal power (and the loss of liberty inverse to federal expansion), the erosion of States’ rights, and—most importantly—the triumph of Yankee progressivism over Southern traditionalism.
The temptation is always to reduce the American Civil War to being ONLY about slavery. Slavery was, obviously, a huge part of the Southern economy and culture, and motivated a great deal of Southern politics at the national level. But slavery was not the be-all, end-all of the “Lost Cause.” There were legitimate constitutional questions at play. Indeed, an open question—one the American Civil War closed by force of arms—was that, having opted into the Constitution, could States later opt out? John Randolph of Roanoke, among others, seemed to believe this question was legitimate, and such an exit was allowed—even acknowledged.
Of course, the slavery narrative serves modern progressive ends. It allows for throwing the baby—States’ rights—out with the bathwater. Suddenly, States’ rights becomes “code,” in the progressive mind, for justifying slavery or segregation. Yes, States’ rights was invoked to support wicked things. Nevertheless, it is fully constitutional—just ask the Tenth Amendment.
Nullification and secession were dangerous doctrines, but the loss of them also meant that the federal government could expand with far fewer limits on its power. The States lost the nuclear option, so to speak, of bucking unconstitutional acts (although, to be fair, States can challenge such acts more peacefully through lawsuits against the federal government—even if those cases are heard in federal courts). Seeing as we’re living in times when a peaceful separation between fundamentally opposed ideologies may be the most attractive option for the future of our nation, it’s worth reviewing the history of these ideas.
Well, that’s enough preamble. After two days of self-indulgent, girly navel-gazing, it’s time for some substance:
The Portly Politico 