Posts Tagged → Supreme Court
There is just one Election Day
Election Day is when democracies around the world elect their leaders.
Each free or supposedly free nation has its own Election Day, devoted to collecting and counting the people’s votes for various candidates at all levels of government. It is obviously a special day, even a sacred day, as it gives the power of running government to The People, a rare and unusual way for government to be run, if human history is our guide.
Tyranny and despotism are the usual means of governance. So electing our own leaders and representatives is a really big deal. It is a statement of freedom.
Election Day is just one day, always and for good reason, and it is so important that people take off from work in order to be able to vote. Unless you file an absentee ballot, if you miss voting on Election Day, then you don’t get to vote at all.
But Election Day is now under attack, because like almost everything else in America these days, the rules of this ‘game’ also have to be changed in the middle of the game in order for just one American political party to have a shot at winning something legitimately. And so now an entire American political party apparatus is devoted to making Election Day into Election Week, or Election Month, or even Election Forever Until We Win this damned Election.
Aside from the obvious phoniness of changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game, the problem with turning Election Day into a drawn out process is that the longer an election is drawn out, the more opportunity for fraudulent behavior and fake voting there is. And nothing undermines the value of voting than allowing false votes to be counted just like the real votes.
And again, there is just one American political party that has really gotten the fraudulent voting process down pat over the decades. Like with the new “ballot harvesting” laws in several states, why people can go out for days after the election and literally create truck loads of new votes, and voila!, their candidate miraculously wins…days after Election Day. This recently happened a bunch in California, where people kept running out to “find more ballots” until they had finally defeated various incumbent Republican officials in districts that almost always or always voted Republican. Never were enough “new ballots” found that actually favored the Republican candidates.
Funny how that works, how this rule change favors just one political party…every…single…time.
Here in Pennsylvania the state Supreme Court ruled last Friday that voting can be extended beyond Election Day, even though no court anywhere has the jurisdiction or the government role to determine Election Day. Only the state legislature and the governor have the job of setting Election Day. Here, the PA Supreme Court is engaging in just one more act of political activism in a long line of activist behavior devoid of actual jurisprudence.
Making things worse, the Pennsylvania Attorney General, Josh Shapiro, has incorrectly stated that people who vote by absentee ballot are actually voting by mail, which they are not. There is a world of difference between filing a single marked absentee ballot long before Election Day, and being able to file a flurry of multiple fake votes by mail even after Election Day, and thereby literally stuffing the ballot box to steal the election.
You would almost think that the Democrat Party majority on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and that Democrat Party member PA AG Josh Shapiro were deliberately supporting a corrupt election process that always seems to favor the Democrat Party….
Obviously Election Day must be protected, and you must help stop every attempt to corrupt the election process by extending ‘voting’ beyond Election Day.
There is only one Election Day. Vote once on Election Day, or don’t vote at all, and make sure everyone else plays by this same rule. It is just that simple and just that fair.
US Supreme Court “conservatives” abandon the American People
If you are a politico, then you watched and were amazed by the four decisions issued by the US Supreme Court this morning. If you are not a political animal, who devours everything political 24/7, then you should know that the Court is run by liberals. It is official now, in case anyone was wondering. The liberals have the majority, and so-called conservatives like Roberts and Gorsuch are no-such. They are RINOs.
Perhaps the most vexing of the Court’s decisions today was its unwillingness to pick up any of the ten gun lawsuits that have worked their way through the courts all over the country. The Court simply did not have four justices who wanted to hear any of the gun cases. Nearly all of the gun cases involve state and local laws that contradict the plain meaning of the 2nd Amendment, or lower court decisions that contradict the Court’s Heller decision. It is this second group of lawsuits and decisions that is most alarming, because every liberal lower court judge is now an open activist, issuing judicial decisions that directly conflict with Heller, rendering Heller ineffective.
If the US Supreme Court will not intervene to set lower courts straight on Supreme Court precedent, then its own decisions mean absolutely nothing. A court’s holdings are only as good as people’s willingness to abide by them. And the conundrum that law-abiding citizens face here is that we follow the law; we follow the Court’s holdings. If we lose, we shrug our shoulders and keep marching forward; win some, lose some.
Liberals behave totally differently. They never lose!
If they don’t agree with it, they simply ignore the Court’s holdings at every level of government and at every level of court. Liberal judges have become such aggressive activists that they issue decisions they claim apply nationwide, when in fact their own jurisdiction only covers one state. Liberal judges and liberal bureaucrats keep pushing their own agenda, the law be damned, court decisions be damned.
What happens to a society where some of the people follow the law and the other people don’t follow the law, but instead use it to both simultaneously suppress and oppress their political opponents, and never apply it to themselves?
Is this situation sustainable? Can any nation that is constituted like America have a permanent imbalance wherein one side repeatedly gets away with political murder, and the other side can’t even make the smallest mistake without having their lives, careers, and families destroyed? Well, the easy and correct answer to this question is No, no nation can carry this operation for long. Not even America. We are not too big, nor too rich, nor too powerful to fail. What is happening now with the US Supreme Court’s decisions is a guaranteed hard-wire of FAILURE into the nation.
Oh, and in case you didn’t know it, the Court majority also engaged in tons of legislating from the bench, on gay and transgender issues that the larger society is wrestling with through the political process. The Court majority, including a bunch of “Republicans,” just threw America’s constitutional and legislative process out the window and issued their own updated policy versions of “Roe v. Wade.”
Which brings me to the end of this sorry tale. So many people wondered aloud why I ever ran for office. They could see that my heart was in it, but that I really did not feel like making it into a career. I ran for the policy issues, for the jolt I could help give to the public. I feel even more strongly now, after this morning’s Court decisions, that America is in serious trouble.
It is not enough for people to vote. Yes, you must vote in November. But you are also needed as a volunteer for President Trump’s campaign, as a campaign volunteer for good local and state candidates. You yourself should run for office. Run against an entrenched politician, especially the RINOs that plague us unto death, like justices Roberts and Gorsuch do on the Court.
From tonight until November, every day counts. Lend a hand to the Trump campaign. Put up signs, distribute literature door-to-door, make phone calls. Etc. Every thing you do helps bring America one step back from the edge it now teeters on. Do not expect “other people” to take care of these problems. Both political parties have abandoned the American people, and now so have the supposed conservatives on the US Supreme Court.
We, the People, are all that we have left. Just us, ourselves. Either we fix this problem ourselves, or America is destined for real problems. Unimaginable problems. Don’t let that happen.
“Red flag” laws are just legalized “swatting” of neighbors we hate
All this talk about “red flag” laws is simple nonsense, addressed months ago in-depth here in an essay that was borrowed from by people who care. I put a lot of effort into researching the subject and then wrote extensively about it. But it won’t matter to the anti-gun prohibitionists, who are on a single-minded jihad against legal gun ownership.
Red flag laws don’t solve crime, they actually create crime, in particular official violence against innocent Americans. In the form of uninformed, misinformed, hyped up SWAT police kicking in the doors of innocent, unsuspecting citizens who then get shot while reaching to put down the book they were reading. To gun haters, this is all fine and dandy; anything they can do to hurt and intimidate law abiding gun owners is good. The more bloody bodies, the better.
“See, if he hadn’t had those old guns in the first place, he would not have been shot by the police,” they say, gleefully chuckling over the well-deserved misfortune of one of the many innocent law abiding gun owners to fall victim to red flag laws. This is called “swatting,” where someone calls the police and makes an anonymous complaint or warning about a supposedly violent or dangerous neighbor. Innocent people die, and that is OK to the anti gun jihadis.
Anti gun advocates do not care about solving crime. If they did, they would look at all of the failed gun control nonsense across America, particularly in the big urban areas, and reach for a different approach, a different set of policies. But dead black kids don’t mean anything to anti gun activists, if those kids were shot by other black kids. In fact, the perverse reverse is true: Dead black kids are welcomed and cultivated by anti gun advocates, because those bleeding bodies in the street give them more ammunition to complain about “guns” and how evil they are blah blah blah.
So here we go again. The careerist Republicans in congress appear to be ready to capitulate on this, just to get the Democrat press off their backs for a minute, even though they know that as soon as they give in on red flag laws, the anti-freedom crusaders will be right back with even more demands for our rights. Just look at how US Senate Democrats today threatened the US Supreme Court! ‘You had better stop voting for individual rights, or we are going to take you over.’
Which is really what the red flag junk is about: Political control, control of individuals, the desire to make American citizens just get in the damned PC line and stay there until we smart people tell you to take your next step.
The Democrat Party has become a lawless mafia, always trying to change the rules of the game if they lose by the old rules we all agreed to over the past two hundred and some odd years: Get rid of the Electoral College, get rid of the Supreme Court, get rid of guns, get rid of free speech, get rid of the US House of Representatives rules, give away your Social Security benefits to illegal aliens and make us taxpayers wait until we are 72 to start collecting what we put in, and so on…it boggles my mind that any intelligent adult can vote for this nonsense.
But then again, I am always amazed at how sadistic and cruel people can be, and now I recognize and accept that there is an American political party dedicated to just that kind of person. To paraphrase another former Democrat, I didn’t leave the Democrat Party, they left me.
But as I walk out the door, I am throwing the red flag at the Democrat Party – You are out of bounds and out of the game! Get out!
UPDATE! Even as I wrote this post last night, a long-time Philadelphia criminal, Maurice Hill, was engaged in a shoot-out that injured six police officers. Hill has been arrested at least a dozen times, most often for serious violent firearm laws violations. Hill had served jail time. The question is why was he out of jail at all, and why was he repeatedly allowed to get out of serious criminal situations that would end the career of any otherwise law-abiding citizen?
America has developed a two-tiered law enforcement system: Typical law-abiding citizens who make a mistake or a single bad decision and run afoul of some law get the whole book thrown at them; their lives and professional careers are over for all intents and purposes. But on the other hand, ultra violent career criminals like Hill are caught and released time and time again, despite violating all kinds of gun laws any one of which should have put him behind bars for decades.
No gun laws anywhere will stop dangerous people like Hill from committing bad crimes, and we see that gun control laws are not designed to end or stop crime. Gun control laws are only designed to remove guns from private ownership, especially from the hands of law abiding citizens. These laws are aimed at taking away guns from good people like you and me, and leaving them in the hands of hardened criminals like Maurice Hill.
Think about that.
PA Supreme Court Magically Turns Itself into Legislature
In an anticipated 4-3 partisan decision today, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court majority rejected the original and heavily gerrymandered map submitted by the PA Senate Republicans, as well as three heavily gerrymandered maps subsequently submitted in the past week by the PA House Democrats, PA Senate Democrats, and even PA Governor Tom Wolf.
Instead of declaring none of the legislative district maps to be constitutional, because theoretically none of them have met the constitutional tests for compactness and adhering to existing political boundaries, and instead of declaring the governor’s map completely unwelcome because it is not his role to draw voting district maps, the PA Supreme Court has actually drawn its own redistricting map.
No court anywhere has the constitutionally derived role of drawing voting district maps, and no court anywhere can justify doing so. According to the US Constitution, drawing voting district maps is specifically a state legislature role.
I will say that the latest map, drawn by the PA Supreme Court majority, looks better in some ways than the other four maps recently submitted for review. This map is certainly tighter and breaks fewer county lines than the others. In that sense, it is a more reasonable map.
But that is not the question.
The first question is, should Pennsylvania just get on with voting, as we are now running out of time for the primaries, and just use the established map, deficient though it may be?
The second question is, should the US Supreme Court allow the PA Supreme Court to, in effect, turn itself into a legislature, by performing a key function that is specifically relegated only to the state legislature by the US Constitution?
Hopefully, the US Supreme Court will deny the lower court’s power grab, and direct Pennsylvania to go on with the previous voting district map, flawed though it was, the greater interest being in letting voters have a say at all, as opposed to political elites pulling strings to keep themselves in power.
As imperfect as the legislative process is, and as distasteful as the gerrymandering process is, it is what it is, meaning that this is what we’ve got. No court can magically turn itself into another branch of government. So let’s go with the existing map we had six weeks ago, and get on with elections.
Relishing the win over GOP machine politics
Four years ago, I ran in the US Congressional Republican primary for the Congressional seat held by then congressman Tim Holden. It was a four-way race, between me, state senator Dave Argall, Frank Ryan, and Baptist Pastor Bob Griffiths. From the get-go, different Republican leaders tried to get me to bow out. Dave himself met with me at GOP headquarters and asked me to step out (Ah, the irony…I had asked him to chair my campaign). Lots of heartache along the campaign trail as GOP insiders tried again and again to give Dave an artificial boost, an unfair advantage, and unequal opportunity. Lebanon County GOP tried to endorse him, and the committee disintegrated as a result of the infighting that ensued. Schuylkill County GOP did endorse him, and immediately afterwards lost its chairman and underwent radical changes.
It was a great race, we did very well (26% overall in a four-way race, with about $20,000 spent, and the highlight being the 51% we got in rural Perry County, which has my kind of people), and we got kudos all around for the excellent pick-up campaign we ran. Dave went on to win that primary by a few hundred votes, and then he got crushed by Tim Holden. All of the smart GOP consultants and insiders who told me that Dave would win, and that I should get out, well, they never called me to acknowledge they were wrong. Apparently losing races is OK so long as it is a GOP insider, but the consultancy insider class is terribly afraid of grass roots candidates losing.
In 2012, I ran in the GOP primary for the PA 15th state senate district, but only after I had cleared a bunch of artificial hurdles the GOP set up to keep me out of that race. First, the new district was not released until very late in 2011, and only then after former state senator Jeff Piccola had retired one week into the one-year residency requirement period (imagine that!), so that I could not get an apartment over the new district line just a mile from my house and thereby qualify as a resident of the district.
In January 2012, the PA state supreme court threw out the GOP redistricting plan, calling it unconstitutional and deeply flawed, and I found myself back in the old district. But even then, we were several days into the ballot petition process, with no volunteers, no committee, no paperwork, no money, up against two establishment candidates, one of whom was hand picked by the party, John McNally, our Dauphin County GOP chairman.
We got 850 signatures, got on the ballot, and started campaigning, grass roots style. Within weeks, the GOP-controlled PA senate had developed a new redistricting map and presented it to the court. Not surprisingly, I was once again outside the senate district. Making things worse, the GOP establishment staff began telling voters that I might win, but then be outside the district, and therefore unable to serve the people who had voted for me. Thankfully, the PA supreme court rejected the map as just as flawed as the first one, and the GOP had to live with my candidacy, which proved to be incredibly popular.
In other words, I know exactly what senator-elect Scott Wagner went through until this week.
What was refreshing to me as I worked Wagner’s district’s largest poll (Manchester 5 & 7) was the voter sentiment that came pouring out as they poured in to the polling place to write in Wagner’s name on the ballot. Voters were vociferously rejecting the contrived hurdles that the GOP had arranged to stop Wagner, they rejected the artificial support the GOP had thrown behind milquetoast career politician Ron Miller, and they strongly opposed the $700,000 in negative ads run against Wagner. That was $700,000 that the GOP could have spent, should have spent, to beat liberalism.
I do intend to run for the 15th state senate district again in two years. And I guess I will be facing a GOP hand-picked cookie cutter empty suit of a candidate, someone the party expects to be a rubber stamp, who will not pursue right-to-work legislation. And folks, I intend to win this one. Hope to see you there with me at the barricades.
What to do with Republican “Moderates”
By a 5-4 decision, the US Supreme Court has upheld Obamacare “as a tax.” Because Congress has the authority to levy taxes, Obamacare’s mandate is held not unconstitutional. It stands.
Obama sold Obamacare as “not a tax.” Obama lied. You are now even more greatly taxed by the Federal government.
Two takeaways:
1) Republican “moderates” are in fact liberals with a conscience, meaning that on big issues of vision and founding principles, moderate R’s are not on your side. SO: Actively support and vote for conservatives only. Moderates will sell you out on the key issues.
2) Republican senators have always allowed Marxists and other unqualified nominees to the Supreme Court to be confirmed for a hodgepodge of technical reasons. These R senators are always lauded by the press as being “high minded.” Democrats always argue that conservative nominees are “out of the mainstream,” and they fight them tooth and nail.
The result is that we get a Supreme Court stacked with justices who do not share the views of America’s founders, who think that the US would be better served with a Constitution like that of South Africa (Ginsberg), and that requiring US citizens to buy something is just fine and in keeping with the way America has always been run.
SO: Encourage US senators to fight liberal nominees to the US Supreme Court on the grounds that they are out of the mainstream and therefore unqualified.
Take back your country, folks!