RUTHFULLY YOURS

The landmark Supreme Court decisions are bulk-discounted this week, so here’s this hour’s. In my conversation with Hugh Hewitt yesterday, I said:

As you know, Hugh, I’m not a believer in Supreme Courts that are as supreme as America’s Supreme Court is.

But here they are redefining an institution that pre-dates the United States by thousands of years with gay abandon. Ireland held a referendum to approve same-sex marriage a few weeks ago. I would not have voted as my fellow Irishmen did, but I can respect their decision. Likewise, I can respect those legislatures from Belgium to Uruguay where the people’s representatives, accountable to their electors, have voted to introduce gay marriage by law. But a system where, in effect, Anthony Kennedy gets to decide for 300 million whether he can divine a right to same-sex nuptials that its drafters cannily left tucked discreetly in some or other subordinate clause of the US Constitution is to torture that document beyond rational meaning – even before John Roberts started doing his “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘state’ states” routine. In other words, American republican constitutionalism has itself become as meaningless as Obamacare or the definition of marriage. Why don’t we just cut to the Twitter version?

Obamacare, the great no-longer-private not-quite-public pushmepullyou of western health-care systems, lives another day. By a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court, it has been determined that the words “established by the states” now mean “established by whatever”. Boy, that John Roberts is really growing in office.

~Speaking of great moments in the life of a republic, how about this? President Barack Obama took on a heckler head-on at a gay pride month reception at the White House Wednesday, scolding the protester for being disrespectful in “my house.”

Six-and-a-half years ago, when I started making jokes about Barackingham Palace, I didn’t expect him to take it seriously. So much for “the people’s house”.

~A propos my remarks on Hannity last night, Ken Jones writes to Mark’s Mailbox:

I am 69 years old, grew up in Jefferson County, Alabama, about 20 miles out of Birmingham. My dad bought a country store and service station when I was ten years old. I well remember sample ballots being dropped off for customers to pick up if they wanted prior to elections. The Democrat ballots had “The Party of White Supremacy” printed right across the top. I also remember Democrat, Bull Conner, turning his dogs and fire hoses on blacks. All the “Jim Crow” laws, forcing segregation, were passed by Democrats. It is amazing to me how the Democrats turn history around and blame Republicans for these things, and get away with it.

They do it because Republicans let them get away with it.

As I said last night, the Democratic Party was the largest and most powerful pro-slavery institution on the planet. And its institutional support for racism continued well into our own time. On September 11th 2001, the third in line of presidential succession (after the veep and the House Speaker) was Robert C Byrd, the president pro tem of the Senate. Had it not been for the vagaries of White House scheduling and the brave men of Flight 93, America could have wound up with not just a Klansman President but a Grand Kleagle Klansman President – in the 21st century. All thanks to a Democratic Party that has never faced up to what in the English-speaking world is a uniquely evil history.

Hillary Clinton is a woman without conviction, a woman who doesn’t know. She was first lady of a southern state, she sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart from 1986 to 1992 – but is there any record of her voicing opposition to Wal-Mart’s labor practices, of her opposing the sale of the Confederate battle flag? Until recently, has there been any moment in the decades following her appointment to that board, in the many years in which she has been egregiously prominent in public life, when she led on, was prominently identified with, the issue of the flag or racial matters in general?

They say Obama’s audacious. What’s truly remarkable, though, is his potential successor’s blatant contempt for the politics of principle and conviction – her unique ability to adopt, quickly and seamlessly, the most expedient position at any moment, to flaunt her temporary stance with the righteousness and self-regard of a longtime committed activist.

‘But this Court is not a legislature.” Chief Justice John Roberts actually published that sentence in his same-sex marriage dissent on Friday . . . a mere 24 hours after his maestro’s performance in the Supreme Court’s legislative rewrite of the Affordable Care Act — formerly known as “Obamacare,” but now etched in memory as “SCOTUScare,” thanks to Justice Antonin Scalia’s withering dissent.

Roberts’s denial that the Court legislates is astonishing in its cynicism: In saving SCOTUScare, the chief justice not only usurped Congress’s law-writing role with gusto; he claimed the powers, first, to divine legislative purpose from its contradictory expression in legislative language, and, then, to manufacture legislative ambiguity as the pretext for twisting the language to serve the contrived purpose.

Forget Marbury v. Madison. Judicial supremacy is mostly an invention of the Warren Court.
The Supreme Court this morning declared that states cannot limit marriage to one man and one woman. But this is not the last word on the question.

Article VI of the Constitution reads: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . ” The idea that Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land is a very recent contention.

When the Constitution was written and for a long time thereafter, many doubted that the Court had the authority to interpret the Constitution at all — in other words, they believed that the Court had no power of “judicial review.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 78, made the classic argument that, given a written constitution established by the sovereign people, the Court had no choice but to maintain the supremacy of the people’s Constitution when it was alleged to be in conflict with an ordinary law passed by their representatives.

This week, we have twice seen Supreme Court justices violating their judicial oaths. Yesterday, the justices rewrote Obamacare, yet again, in order to force this failed law on the American people. Today, the Court doubled down with a 5–4 opinion that undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government.

Both decisions were judicial activism, plain and simple. Both were lawless.

As Justice Scalia put it regarding Obamacare, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ . . . We should start calling this law SCOTUSCare.” And as he observed regarding marriage, “Today’s decree says that . . . the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”

Sadly, the political reaction from the leaders of my party is all too predictable. They will pretend to be incensed, and then plan to do absolutely nothing.

On June 4, the media reported that for the second time in a year, the Office of Personnel Management’s computer network was the target of a successful penetration by the People’s Republic of China. It now appears that OPM was aware of the cyber-espionage attack for more than a year without remedying its vulnerability.

That OPM had left itself vulnerable to cyber-espionage by China (and the rest of the world) for so long was evidence of an extreme level of incompetence and negligence. Last year, an OPM contractor — a company called USIS that had been doing background investigations for security clearances under contract with OPM — had its records invaded by cyberattack. (USIS apparently fit in with OPM’s evident incompetence. It had vetted and passed for security clearances both infamous National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and Aaron Alexis, who shot and killed a dozen people at the Washington Navy Yard).

Despite Shavit’s eloquence, his message was nonsensical, myopic and logically inconsistent –heavily tinged with the soft bigotry of low expectations from the Palestinians.It is no secret that AJC believes in the two-state solution as a better, more practical alternative than all the others that have been proposed – Michael Tichnor, AJC executive council member, June 2015

Earlier this month the American Jewish Committee held its annual Global Forum convention with an impressive lineup of prominent international personalities.

The three-day event in Washington provided a wide range of lectures on an equally wide range of topics, both worthy and weighty.

‘The best of the Left’

One of the annual program’s highlights is the Forum’s Great Debate, which this year featured The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline B. Glick and Haaretz’s Ari Shavit, on whether the two-state formula offers a constructive solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, or is merely a dangerous delusion.

If the US fails to reverse Obama’s policies toward Iran in the next two years, it is hard to see how it will be able to rebuild its strategic posture in the future.
Under President Barack Obama, the US has implemented policies toward Iran that are catastrophic for Israel specifically, for US Middle East allies more generally and for US national security itself.

Consider, first, the known details of the soon-to-be- concluded nuclear deal.

In an article published by The New York Times this week, Prof. Alan Kuperman explained that Obama’s central justification for the agreement – that it will lengthen Iran’s breakout time to the bomb from the current two months to 12 months – is a lie.

Many on the Right side of the aisle are outraged. Gay marriage – a social issue at its core – has been validated by the US Supreme Court. The outrage is palpable. And while there is legitimacy to this outrage – especially with regard to the Court’s transgression of the 10th Amendment – the decision on gay marriage is a “bright shiny thing” that serves to quickly file us past an earlier decision that directly threatens the constitutional structure of our government: The Court’s ruling on King v. Burwell; the Obamacare subsidies.

No matter how you feel about the issue of gay marriage, the Court’s ruling on this social issue is an attack on the 10th Amendment, the rights of States to have authority over all things not enumerated in the US Constitution. But comparatively, the Court’s decision on Obergefell v. Hodges is a “mosquito bite” to yesterday’s “beheading” of our balance of powers at the federal level. We are being led away from what is tantamount to a “genocidal slaughter” of the Separation of Powers to gawk at a “highway accident.” With yesterday’s decision we are all – Liberal and Conservative, Republican, Democrat and Libertarian – losing our government to a transformative end stage; a commingling of constitutional branches and a centralized governmental authority in the federal government; something uniquely anathema to our basic governmental structure.