Posts Tagged → constitutional
Upcoming Primary Election recommendations
Pennsylvania’s primary election (Democrat vs. Democrat, Republican vs. Republican, and sadly, no one else vs. anyone else i.e. fewer choices for voters) is coming up in a few weeks. On May 20th, Pennsylvania voters should all be going to vote for candidates they believe will best represent their interests in our self-run government.
Through voting, We, The People, select our fellow citizens to represent us, to be a voice for us, to make sound choices for us, in the giant government blob. Why more Pennsylvanians do not vote, why so many fail to vote, eludes me. Nothing is more important than casting your vote, and yet, historically, few people vote overall, and especially in primaries. Voting is not difficult. It does not take money, or good looks, or nice clothes, or a lot of time, or a fancy car. You, the voter, simply have to make it a 15-30 minute priority on one day in the Spring, and then again one day in the Fall. You go to your voting precinct and vote for those candidates who best represent your views, religion, ideology, whatever. Many elections are really close, and every vote counts. Your vote counts, so do it.
In the state-wide Republican primary races, Ann Marie Wheatcraft is the superior candidate for Judge of the Superior Court. Judge Wheatcraft is hard on criminals and supportive of crime victims, which is how good judges should be and how they used to act. Now, it seems popular for judges to themselves break the law and to also throw Americans aside in favor of hardened criminals. As if the hardened criminals are somehow victims who need the judge’s protection. That appears to be the upside down mindest of Maria Battista, Wheatcraft’s opponent. No thanks. America has had quite enough of this nonsense.
Vote for Ann Marie Wheatcraft for Superior Court.
Joshua Prince is the by far and away best possible candidate for Judge of the Commonwealth Court. Josh has distinguished himself for decades as a court room force for good and for sticking up for the little guy against government over-reach. I know from personal experience, as Josh Prince has represented me personally, and a group I am a member of (FOAC), in a Harrisburg 2A lawsuit we simply had to bring (and which we won). Josh’s demeanor in the court room is impressive, steady, clear, and really organized. I have seen him run rings around attorneys touted as the best of their kind.
I have nothing personal against candidate Matt Wolford, but like so many grass roots voters, I am frustrated by the behind-closed-doors process that got Matt Wolford into his candidacy. Matt Wolford is a product of the Republican Establishment, which across America, and especially in Pennsylvania, is one of the biggest failures of any sort of organization. This is a cookie cutter group that time and time again loses easy races and then says “Aww shucks, we’ll get ’em next time,” even though there is no next time. With the Democrat Party aggressively gerrymandering the voting map, and engaging in motor-voter registration of illegal aliens and last minute changes to voting laws, honest elections look like a thing of the distant imagination. So campaigns must be hard-fought, which is not the PAGOP’s forte.
Of all the GOP groups across America, the PAGOP is especially mostly run by election consultants, who get paid well, whether they win or lose. Pennsylvania GOP politics is all about getting political management and consulting contracts, which has yielded a bitchy and mean-spirited entitlement attitude among the consultant class. They like candidates who will bend the knee and give them consulting contracts when they win. They do not care about policy or philosophy of government; every vote to them is a question of horse trading for money.
While I am on this bitchfest, let us point out that Dauphin County was one of the few PA counties to LOSE Republican voters in 2024. While the rest of PA was moving right with increased Republican voter registrations and votes, Dauphin County regressed. And Dauphin County has been regressing for years. It is probably due to the fact that the Dauphin County GOP chairman spends all of his time on…. high paying political consulting contracts, instead of focusing on winning elections.
To me, politics should not be about making money. But then, I never won any of my election races, which were run strictly on policy. Perhaps if more people like me and Josh Prince did get elected, America would be in better shape.
Anyhow, Matt Wolford comes out of this failed insular, unprincipled, and artificial process, which always seems to yield the most tepid, boring, unimpressive candidates who then go on to lose to aggressive Democrats. Let’s not do that again.
Vote for Josh Prince for Judge of the Commonwealth Court.
Here in the county court system, we have the Court of Common Pleas, where the most basic cases are heard. This is where you, the voter, want a most stable and normal person sitting up there on the bench, judging you. Two great candidates for this role deserve your vote: Fran Chardo and Jim Zugay.
Fran is the current District Attorney of Dauphin County. A more stand-up, normal, clean hands guy you will not find in American politics, anywhere. Fran is even keeled, does everything by the book, is a great listener, and will be exactly the kind of fair-minded judge you want looking back at you when you get carted into court for making some first-time-ever stupid decision that you regretted the moment you did it. Good guy.
Vote for Fran Chardo for Court of Common Pleas.
The other candidate for the Court of Common Pleas who deserves your vote is Jim Zugay, a long-time Dauphin County steadfast functionary and do-er git-er-done kind of guy. Jim has been (I think) Dauphin County Recorder of Deeds, among several other important county roles. And let me tell you straight up: Jim Zugay does not like me, because I am a pain in the butt. Jim is a serious, level headed, by-the-books guy, and he does not like bitchfesty people like me asking annoying questions that are not about getting the job done right now. I admire Jim for that, even though he grimaces when we encounter one another at social events.
Vote for Jim Zugay for Court of Common Pleas.
No, please do not vote for Katy Kennedy-McShane for this judge role. Yes, Katy and her husband are boxers, which is cool, and yes, they work with disadvantaged minority kids, which is very very cool and meritorious. But Katy’s ideological/ philosophical perspective on legal outcomes is not Constitutionalist. Rather, Katy will be a judicial activist, trying to make herself into judge, jury and executioner, or rather judge, legislator, and chief executive, all in one. This failed approach to judicial review has created so many problems by now that America is having a tough time sorting them out. Our constitutional rights cannot withstand this ongoing leftwing assault.
America and Dauphin County need judges who rely on precedent and the Constitution to make narrowly applied decisions. That’s Chardo and Zugay. America cannot take another activist judge, and Katy Kennedy-McShane will be an activist judge. No, no, no.
Finally, Graham Hetrick is the handsomest, most debonair coroner in American history. Few men who carry a gun and badge are better looking or better dressed or nicer or smarter than Graham. For some reason, a lot of coroners are colorful characters, and Graham is the most colorful of them all, while also maintaining stellar standards. The guy had his own national TV show, and smitten lady friends from lives past in distant states would call me out of the blue to ask “Do you know Graham Hetrick? OMIGOD can you get me his autograph, Josh, dear?”
Graham probably has this same electrifying effect on the dead, too, as well as justice for the dead. Vote for him. Dauphin County needs his steady hand in crime solving.
Eye for eye, order for order
Unelected over-reaching judges driven by blatant partisan political activism are trying to thwart the will of The People by issuing decisions (“orders”) on Trump Administration activities that are far outside their courts’ constitutionally defined jurisdictions. Something like nearly 100% of these decisions in the past twenty years have been issued against President Trump alone, which shows that Democrat Party judicial tyranny is the same as Democrat Party executive branch tyranny. These people will burn down America’s constitutional norms simply to hold on to power.
Executive branch decisions that are solely the jurisdiction of the executive branch are not up for question or “orders” by the judicial branch. But this elementary separation of powers fact is not stopping these political activists in black robes, and something needs to be done to stop their power grab, to restore balance to the galaxy.
That some people, especially John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, want these outlandish decisions to be adjudicated through the lengthy, time-consumptive appellate process means just one thing: They want to stop President Trump’s agenda from being implemented by any means necessary. No matter how illegal or unconstitutional, they want the judiciary to be the sole arbiter of the judiciary’s own unconstitutional over-reach.
In other words, “We have investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing.” The judiciary is so far mostly siding with itself in hogging more power than the Constitution grants to judges, and is unlikely to stop itself from hogging even more power.
This is not an acceptable way to run the American republic, and some thing or many things must be done to fend it off. Some are talking about impeaching the most rogue, most lawless, most openly partisan of these judges, such as James Boasberg and Beryl Howell. OK, one survey I saw showed a 2:1 margin in favor of impeaching them, so get on with it, US House Speaker Mike Johnson. Impeachment will probably send a good signal, even if conviction and removal in the US Senate is not guaranteed. Impeachment hearings will tie up a judge’s work load and cause it to be re-distributed to other active judges.
Another way to end this radical judiciary’s assault on democracy is to take away their funding, and to then re-organize the courts, and then even more clearly defining their jurisdictions in the reorganization process. All of this is the sole purview of Congress, and while the Republicans have the majority, so should they act. So get on it with it, US House Speaker Mike Johnson, and do your duty.
Another way to respond to these lawless activist judges is to simply ignore their decisions. Issue blunt and stinging rebukes to their overeach, and carry on with executive branch activities as if they had never been involved. This will cause the Democrat Party’s mainstream media outlets to scream that there is a “constitutional crisis,” but again, I think there is sufficient new media firepower to over-ride that dead horse with the response that whatever “crisis” exists is solely due to the judicial branch’s inability to stay in its own constitutional lane.
However, there is a potential hybrid response the Trump Administration can make, that I am advocating here. While I have not seen anyone else write about it, I am certain plenty of politically active people have been thinking it: For every dingbat leftwing anti-America judicial “order”, such as Boasberg demanding that hardened illegal alien criminals – murderers, rapists – be returned to America from where they were legally deported to, the executive branch must issue a commensurate order in response.
For example, President Trump can issue an executive order requiring Judge Boasberg to personally retrieve all the illegal aliens he wants returned to America. With no promise that said wildman judge will be allowed back into America.
Or President Trump can issue an executive order that countermands exactly the precise wording of whatever unconstitutional order Judge Beryl “Howlin Wolf” Howell has issued.
Thus, this whole “crisis” becomes a battle of equal orders, from the rogue judiciary against the executive branch, and from the executive branch back against the power-hogging judiciary. This “eye for an eye” order-for-order response will flesh out the visible constitutional symmetry that President Trump’s administration needs the public to see. No longer will this situation be cast as “The courts have spoken…,” which always goes against the Republican president, but rather, it will be two co-equal branches of government issuing co-equal orders against one another, each order cancelling out the other.
An eye for an eye, an order for an order. And if the judiciary refuses to follow the executive orders, then so shall the executive branch be free to ignore the wild judicial orders, as well. True constitutional parity restored.
Dear GOP, it’s not about the economy, stupid
If you want to determine a person’s mindset, ask them tough questions. If they dodge those questions, or avoid them altogether, it is a clear signal where their mind is, and is not.
And thus we find the GOPe (Republican Party establishment) folks talking very loudly about the economy. As if that matters when a free America is being burnt to the ground, economy and all, by the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party’s anarchic friends like BLM, the anti-Republican so-called Lincoln Project, RINOs, and Antifa.
America’s most defining characteristic, the rule of law/ equal protection under the law/ equal accountability under the law regardless of station in life, has been utterly blown to smithereens in the past three months by the Biden Administration in coordination with the Washington, DC, administrative state like the FBI, DOJ, BATFE, etc.
Totally innocent Americans across the nation are having their front doors kicked in at 4:00am by heavily armed SWAT teams of FBI agents on made-up charges, brandishing search and seizure warrants out of a Cracker Jack box. These so-called “law enforcement agents” then steal everything of value or of necessity to the family in their home, lock down their bank accounts, and whisk these innocent people away to solitary confinement in jails without access to attorneys or prompt judicial hearings. These people are law-abiding patriots who had the temerity to lawfully assemble and petition their government for one main grievance: The Democrat Party’s theft of the 2020 election, and well, then about the two stolen senate seats in Georgia.
In doing these ultra-violent, over-gunned, unnecessary arrests, the corrupt, un-American, totalitarian message the corrupt Biden Administration and their corrupt administrative state allies at the FBI are sending is Don’t mess with us. We will destroy you. And they mean it, because while none of these innocent political prisoners the FBI is taking away and locking up in darkness have been accused of financial crimes, their bank accounts are being frozen. Which renders the family unable to pay bills, pay their mortgage, pay an attorney to defend them.
And while rifling through these people’s personal things inside their homes, the FBI agents are also taking family computers and tablets used for their small businesses and managing health medications that have zero to do with someone protesting at the US Capitol (The People’s House) on January 6th. The FBI is simply acting in a punitive way, using its huge law enforcement powers to abuse and hurt people because of basic political differences.
I don’t know why it is so hard for the GOP/GOPe to say this, but this FBI & DOJ detonation of the rule of law is the issue in America today. Everything else pales in comparison. Nothing else matters if your own government is using its huge police powers (given to it by We, The People to protect We, The People) to round up innocent citizen We, The People political prisoners, deprive them of their liberties, deprive them of due process, steal their personal property and never return it, and destroy their lives out of a vindictive political difference. Which should never matter to an impartial law enforcement agency, which of course the FBI and DOJ have shown themselves to no longer be; these two rogue agencies are strictly a domestic terror arm of the Democratic Party, used to punish its political enemies.
So hello, earth calling to GOPe, please stop sending out emails about how Joe Biden’s crappy economy is going to cause inflation. Of course Biden’s economy is going to be a disaster. How else do you think the Democrat Party will put as many Americans on the government dole as possible, if not by depriving us of an honest day’s living? Dependency on government handouts is a cornerstone of all tyrannies, as is the dependence on government leniency in law enforcement areas. The Democrat Party and its Washington, DC, minions want us all groveling on our knees, begging for bread and to not be beaten again.
America as we knew it since 1787 ended on January 20th 2021, and now it is up to Americans to re-assert their ownership of the government apparatus that is quickly making a mockery of the most basic tenets of democratic self-rule. We would like some help from the Republican Party in this undertaking. The people who work at the FBI and DOJ are paid by us, the US taxpayers, and they are supposed to work for us, not against us; not as some hired gun meant to terrorize the countryside and bring the population to heel, to get into line and do as we are told by our masters in DC. The FBI’s blatantly unconstitutional behavior does require some political pushback, by someone.
Dear GOPe, it is not about the economy, stupids. Rather, our present situation is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the very core of being an American, all of which constitutional rights are under direct violent assault by the Biden administration and its taxpayer-paid henchmen at the FBI/DOJ/ US Postal Service/ BATFE etc. Could you Republicans please lend a hand, and help us citizens out of this un-American situation? Or are you guys all in such serious avoidance about the giant alligator that is not yet eating you, but which Sir Winston Churchill once warned will eventually get to you, too?
Months later the actual facts with this FBI-inspired violence remain unknown. Given that the Biden Administration is aggressively facilitating border crossing by criminals and child traffickers, why would the Biden FBI suddenly go after them inside America? This victim was probably a pro America patriot, defending himself against a lawless, politicized FBI assault.