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May 2023

Law Commentary The Left’s Plan for Hostile Takeover of Supreme Court Thomas Jipping

https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/05/01/lefts-plan-hostile-takeover-supreme-court/

“If successful, the Left’s hostile takeover of the Supreme Court will destroy the independence of the judiciary that is necessary for our liberty.”

Democrats in Congress, together with their allies among left-wing groups and in the media, are attempting a hostile takeover of the Supreme Court. Their current tactics demonstrate what “by any means necessary” really means.

In the system of government America’s Founders gave us, limits on government are necessary to achieve its purpose of protecting liberty. Those limits include the separation of powers, federalism, a written Constitution, and a judiciary that will follow—rather than control—that Constitution.

Limits like those help keep too much power from ending up in too few hands.

The Left, however, is after power rather than liberty and, therefore, sees limits on government as obstacles to be overcome. They especially want to control the Supreme Court because it’s the final interpreter of the Constitution, the “supreme law of the land.”

Joseph Ladapo Bucks the Covid Vaccine Orthodoxy The Florida surgeon general’s critics ignore the science and resort to personal attacks.By Allysia Finley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joseph-ladapo-bucks-the-covid-vaccine-orthodoxy-politico-sensitivity-analysis-myocarditis-43201b8b?cx_testId=3&cx_testVariant=cx_171&cx_artPos=5&mod=WTRN#cxrecs_s

Justice Clarence Thomas isn’t the only black conservative target of a recent media drive-by. Last week Politico published a hit piece on Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, who has long resisted the left’s Covid orthodoxies.

The story, by Arek Sarkissian, claims that Dr. Ladapo “personally altered” a state study last year to show that mRNA vaccines posed a significantly higher cardiac health risk for young men “than had been established by the broader medical community.” In reality, he simply reviewed a study conducted by lower-level staff before publication.

Nowhere in Politico’s piece will you find an explanation of what’s supposed to be wrong with Dr. Ladapo’s edits. It merely quotes people who denounce it, such as Matt Hitchings, an assistant biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, who asserts without elaboration: “I think it’s a lie.” Politico does include a link to the pre-published study, which indicates Dr. Ladapo’s edits and shows how Mr. Sarkissian is making a Matterhorn out of a molehill.

Dr. Ladapo’s study found a doubled risk of cardiac death for men 18 to 39 in the 28 days after vaccination. His offense appears to be that he removed a “sensitivity analysis” in the draft study that showed a statistically insignificant increase in cardiac mortality among young men after the second dose.

Prosperity Requires a Stable Dollar By trying to do too much, the Fed has given us a volatile currency. I’d change that as president. By Vivek Ramaswamy

https://www.wsj.com/articles/prosperity-requires-a-stable-dollar-federal-reserve-fomc-rates-easing-2024-vivek-bdfed87b?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

With a recession looming, and on the heels of recent regional bank failures, the Federal Open Market Committee meets this week. The standard account for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and now First Republic is that the Federal Reserve held interest rates too low for too long, only to hike rates too high too quickly. The deeper problem, however, is how the Fed has tried to achieve its mandate.

Attempting to balance low inflation and full unemployment—trying to hit two targets with one arrow—has proved to be disastrous since the Phillips Curve cult gained prominence at the Fed around 2000. If elected president, I will return the Fed to a narrower scope: preserving the U.S. dollar as a stable financial unit to help prevent financial crises and restore robust economic growth.

Beginning in the 1980s and lasting through most of the 1990s, the Fed governors, including Vice Chairman Manley Johnson and Wayne Angell, used a framework first adopted by Paul Volcker in 1982 to stabilize the dollar. The idea was to consider the dollar’s value in terms of commodities, letting it serve as a reference point for other nations’ floating fiat currencies. This provided financial stability for two decades following the stagflation of the 1970s.

Beginning in the late 1990s, the Fed’s scope drifted to include “smoothing out” business cycles. This was a mistake, since business cycles serve a healthy function by transferring the assets and employees of poorly run companies to more capable management. Even worse, the Fed’s actions often exacerbated business cycles by creating transitions that create boom-bust-bailout cycles instead. The Fed now typically tightens when an economic slowdown is impending, engineering a downturn of liquidity that catalyzes a profit downturn, leading to a credit-cycle downturn in which credit events—bankruptcies, credit spreads and financial-institution failures—prompt cries for bailouts. This was the pattern in 2000, 2008 and—so far—2023.

The ‘Ethics’ Assault on the Supreme Court Democrats want to gain more political control over the Justices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-court-ethics-reform-hearing-senate-democrats-john-roberts-clarence-thomas-ketanji-brown-jackson-sonia-sotomayor-d0304d65?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Senate Democrats are holding another hearing on “Supreme Court Ethics Reform” on Tuesday, and it’s important to understand that this isn’t about ethics at all. This is another front in the political campaign to delegitimize the Supreme Court, with a goal of tarnishing its rulings and subjecting it to more political control.

The campaign is on full display in the press, with reporters at multiple publications suddenly searching for supposed ethics violations or conflicts of interest. Our writers have examined and debunked these reports highlighting Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in recent weeks.

It’s useful to expose for the record how thin these accusations are. But it’s also a mistake to assume that the facts matter to Democrats and their media researchers. This is a political project, and hyped accusations will continue to be asserted as if they are serious.

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“Ethics” is a time-honored political weapon in Washington, and it’s being used now against the Court because conservatives have a majority that is cleaning up some of the legal mistakes of recent decades. It has sent abortion policy back to the states (to the political benefit of Democrats in most places), expanded protections for the Bill of Rights, and is slowly restoring constitutional guardrails on the administrative state. Most of all, the Court is no longer a backstop legislature for progressives to impose policies they can’t get through Congress.