Last night was the first presidential debate between President Trump and former Vice President Biden. It was a grudge match; “hard to watch” and similar sentiments are the main comments I’m seeing on social media.
As a Trump supporter, I enjoyed the debate for GEOTUS’s zingers and no-nonsense combativeness. He was aggressive and feisty, and clearly understood the Leftist slanting of the questioning (as Milo Telegramed, “Why are we still talking about climate change?” Chris Wallace was clearly in Biden’s corner in terms of the tack of his questions, and he didn’t interrupt Biden the way he interrupted Trump.
To be fair to Wallace, Trump was talking over Biden and Wallace frequently, and as the role of a moderator is to moderate the debate, Wallace’s job was to try to keep the candidates to the two-minute rule. That said, Trump was responding to a number of inaccurate and false accusations against him, including the widely debunked but oft-repeated Charlottesville myth.
I do think on the substance of the issues, Trump hammered Biden. Trump has facts, history, accomplishments, and morality on his side. His first term has been wildly successful by any metric. The irony of Trump’s presidency is that if it were anyone else in his position, they’d be lauded as the greatest president in a generation, but anyone else wouldn’t have had the cajones to accomplish what Trump has.
Unfortunately, for all that I loved Trump’s aggressive attempt to rattle the ailing Biden, I’m afraid it came across as bullying and unprofessional to squishy swing voters. Trump’s base is with him no matter what (especially after he refused to be maneuvered into denouncing the Proud Boys, a completely benign organization unfairly slandered as “white supremacists”). He’s got to win over those undecided folks in key swing States who probably love the president’s policies, but find the president personally distasteful.
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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Perhaps one of President Trump’s most enduring achievements has been his Supreme Court nominations. He’s managed to tip the Court, however slightly, towards the conservatives. With the death of Justice Ginsburg, Trump has the opportunity to secure a solid conservative majority on the highest court in the land for at least a generation.
With that, it looks like a good opportunity to review some posts about the Supreme Court:
“Breaking: Trump Nominates Judge Brett Kavanaugh to Supreme Court” – The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh was a major shift in American politics. His confirmation hearings saw the entire fury of the Left unleashed, and it was during those hearings that I believe many of us realized that the old playbook of compromise among competing parties was no long valid or useful.
“SCOTUS D&D” – This post was a fun one—looking at the Supreme Court justices (from 2018) in terms of the Dungeons and Dragons alignments.
“Logic Breakdown and the Kavanaugh Hearings” – As noted above, the Kavanaugh hearings were a turning point. I was blown away with the number of arguments people were making on social media that boiled down to “I was raped/sexually assaulted/abused, therefore Brett Kavanaugh assaulted Dr. Blasey Ford.” The complete embrace of emotionalism and illogical thinking braced me to this stark reality.
“Screwed by SCOTUS” – One of my more recent posts on the Court, this piece explored the tendency of conservative justices to make surprisingly bad decisions in league with progressive cause du jours.
That’s it for now. Here’s hoping President Trump and Senate Republicans can get it done and slam in a super conservative appointee ahead of the election. We’ll see.
Today’s post is a new exclusive for $5 and higher subscribers to my SubscribeStar page. Five Dollar Fridays will be a regular feature heading into the 2020 election, with unique analysis of and insights into the presidential and other national, State, and local elections.
Also, I am pleased to announce I have reached eight subscribers! Half of subscribers are at the $5 level, and already enjoy weekly installments ofSunday Doodles. Of course, I’ll continue posting exclusive content every Saturday for $1 subs and higher.
Since the 2000 election’s infamous “hanging chads” and Bush v. Gore, Florida has been the quintessential swing State, the make-or-break for presidential hopefuls, and a must-win for any Republican candidate. It’s a tricky State, as it’s really three States in one.
North Florida is basically like the rest of the South: pine barrens and good ol’ boys. That’s Trump Country. Southern Florida is a melange of New York Jews and Cubans, the former of which are firmly in the Democratic fold, the latter of which historically have voted Republican, but have begun to shift blue over the last decade. Central Florida is a mix of both regions, it seems.
In the 2016 Florida GOP primary, Trump demolished the Sunshine State’s favorite son, Senator Marco Rubio by 18.68%. The general election was much closer, with Trump winning 49.02% to Secretary Clinton’s 47.82% (Libertarian goofball Gary Johnson won 2.2%, which very nearly spoiled Trump’s narrow victory)—a margin of just over 100,000 votes.
Trump’s win in Florida early on election night surely fed into the electric momentum of that historic night. While other States—think Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan—have gained in importance for President Trump, Florida still remains a critical State, central to the president’s path to reelection.
Fortunately, recent polling—and some interesting nautical events—suggest that President Trump is well-positioned to a repeat victory on the peninsula. It may even be bigger this time.
As an ostensible politics blogger I’ve been quite derelict in my duty to watch the Republican National Convention, at least with the kind of rapt attention I should. I completely skipped out on the terrible Democratic National Convention, which was, by all appearances, a disaster in both form and substance.
That said, what I have seen is encouraging. The theme of the RNC seems to be that a vote for Republicans is a vote for sanity, and that the Republicans are the party of normal people. The implication, of course, is that the Democrats support insanity and the abnormal, which is objectively true.
The media has reported that the RNC is throwing out red meat for its base, but considering that Trump naturalized five immigrants and Tim Scott was calling for criminal justice and law enforcement reforms suggest otherwise. If anything, the convention this year is a sales pitch to independents, who are no-doubt weary of seeing cities burn and cops reviled.
Looking at national polls and predictions, it’s easy to get discouraged about President Trump’s reelection prospects. Even with Joe Biden losing his mind, and the pick of a radical, authoritarian Kamala Harris as his running mate, “Sleepy Joe” is managing to stay up by hunkering down.
On our side there’s grumbling that Trump hasn’t done enough—on immigration, on law and order—and those aren’t entirely warrantless grumbles. Republicans squandered—perhaps intentionally—an opportunity to fund the construction of the border wall while they controlled both chambers of Congress. John McCain pompously and vindictively voted to keep the odious Affordable Care Act in place, a clear parting shot at Trump. Trump did not seem to offer a robust response to the CHAZ/CHOP fiasco, but is now belatedly defending federal property in Portland, Oregon.
Those critiques aside, it’s worth remembering what Trump has accomplished—and he wants you to be reminded. That’s why he gave Breitbart a six-page document of his achievements. They are substantial—and make him one of the greatest presidents of the last fifty years.
It’s another Lazy Sunday dive into some of my deep cuts—the forgotten or neglected posts of yesteryear. As a reminder, here’s my loose criteria for selecting these posts, as spelled out last Sunday:
That’s all a long way of saying that I’m doing some deep dives for an indeterminate number of Sundays into some forgotten posts. These are posts that don’t immediately spring to my mind when I’m referencing my own work. These posts may or may not have had high or low hit counts; they are just posts that don’t linger strongly in my memory. They’re the red-headed stepchildren of my churning mind.
“Breaking: Trump Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize” – I used to do these “breaking” news posts periodically—dashing off a couple hundred words about some major development. I was perhaps overly optimistic about Trump’s peace talks in Korea, but while they might not have ended the Korean War’s long cease-fire, they definitely calmed down tensions between the US and North Korea.
“George Will’s Self-Destruct Sequence” – The Never Trump phenomenon was gasping for air in 2018, but it still had some loyal adherents (and still does, if you check out National Review, The Dispatch, and The Bulwark, the last of which is blatantly progressive, despite its claims to be a conservative site). One of the first major figures to succumb publicly and wildly to the disease was George Will, the long-time WaPo columnist and tweedy neocon. Will argued that Republicans in Congress should be voted out to avoid giving Trump dictatorial powers—a ludicrous obsession with the Left and the Never Trumpers, and completely deleterious to the future of the nation. Sure, we Republicans might be the “Stupid Party” sometimes, stupidity in the highest halls of power is generally preferable to the “Evil Party” of intentional wickedness. Now we have so-called conservatives plumping for Joe Biden on similarly faulty premises. Yeesh!
“HSAs are A-Okay” – I’m a big fan of health savings accounts, or HSAs, thanks in large part to my younger brother’s financial wizardry. Health savings accounts allow account holders to deposit funds that can be used to cover future, out-of-pocket medical expenses. Since my cut-rate insurance comes with a hefty $6750 annual deductible, squirreling away cash into my HSA helps in the event of a catastrophic injury or health crisis. But the real beauty of an HSA is that the deposited funds can be invested in mutual funds and grow in value—tax-free. They’re the ultimate investment vehicle, and you can save medical receipts for years before using them to withdraw HSA funds (if you use an emergency fund to cover medical expenses on the front-end, the HSA funds can grow unmolested until you decide to use them).
That’s it for another edition of Lazy Sunday—one of the last truly lazy ones for some time, as I report back to school tomorrow morning. Classes resume 20 August 2020, so I still have about eleven days to prepare for the return of students.
Trump won in 2016 running on a strong “America First” platform. A major component of America First-ism is prioritizing the interests and the well-being of American citizens first—before the interests and well-being of foreign-born workers and immigrants, legal or otherwise. The appeal and the concept aren’t difficult to understand: a government should, chiefly, operate in the interest of its citizens before anyone else. We can discuss the best immigration policies as a nation, but those policies should always place American citizens at the forefront.
It’s such a simple and pure political philosophy, it’s a wonder it comes under such fire. But such is the world of globalists—who want cheap labor and sacrificial offerings to Efficiency—and progressives—who think anyone who is white and cares about having a job is a racist. Take out the mercenaries (the former group) and the insane (the latter group) and you have reasonable people, those folks that might quibble around the edges of America First doctrine, but can’t disagree with its fundamental premises.
Trump has been better than most of his predecessors on immigration, though his waffling and equivocating—likely the product of Jared Kushner’s influence—have soured his some of his earliest supporters. His turn on Jeff Sessions and the former Attorney General’s ultimate defeat in the Alabama Republican primary this summer seemed to many Trumpists to be a betrayal of immigration patriotism. Sessions was, indeed, the leading voice in the United States government, pre-Trump, in denouncing open borders and unlimited immigration. With Sessions leaving the national scene, immigration patriots and restrictionists have reason to worry.
That said, it bears remembering that Trump won the presidency campaigning on building a wall, prioritizing Americans over foreign workers, and keeping American industries at home. No one in meaningful national politics (other than Jeff Sessions and Pat Buchanan) was beating that drum prior to Trump. Trump tapped into a deep well of resentment over the Obama administration’s decade of putting middle-class Americans last, and several decades of neglect and open scorn from national politicians.
I also don’t expect Trump to reverse the postwar consensus overnight, or to get the whole loaf all at once. I think Trump’s basic instincts are to put Americans first, while weighing the complexities of various interest groups and economic factors.
But Trump is at his best when he cuts the Gordian Knot and drives to the heart of the issues. If Americans are losing jobs to foreign visa holders, well, make those visas less valuable. He’s done that with an executive order barring H1B visa holders from working in federal government jobs, and barring the government from using contractors who use H1B visa holders.
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