Revamping the Court

Once again a tweet has inspired a blog post. This time it’s Andrew McCarthy:

SupCt argument for #Trump not doing it for me anymore. SupCt a super-legislature & conservatives should work to undo its role in our system.

— Andrew C. McCarthy (@AndrewCMcCarthy) July 24, 2016

McCarthy is spot on. Even assuming we can trust Donald Trump to appoint originalists to the bench – and I for one have strong doubts –  the entire judiciary is too far gone for those appointments to mean much of anything.

One of our major failings in looking at the political landscape is we tend to only think of the big ticket items. In other words, we spend a lot of time discussing the presidency (and I’m no less guilty) but not much on the tons of other elected positions in this country. Similarly, when we think of the courts, we only think of the Supreme Court. But there are a number of inferior federal courts, and presidents have to make numerous appointments, not just one or two Supreme Court appointments.

These inferior courts can and usually do act like super legislatures as much, if not more than the Supreme Court (think the Ninth Circus, err, Circuit). Considering how few cases the Supreme Court takes each year, these courts regularly make decisions that are as impactful as any the Supremes hand down.

Daniel Horowitz has written about this in his book Stolen Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges from Transforming America. Horowitz’s main subject is illegal immigration, and he goes over in painstaking detail the numerous court decisions – primarily at the lower level – that have disregarded both the legislative will and the plain meaning of the constitution in order to give rights to illegal immigrants and to prevent methods of deporting or punishing them.

This applies to all subject matters, however, and Horowitz believes that we have reached a point where we can no longer think that appointing the right judges will fix anything. He notes the number of Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II appointments who have been just as eager as any Carter, Clinton, or Obama appointment to ignore the plain meaning of the constitution in order to promote their own policy preferences. Even setting these aside, President Obama has appointed roughly one-third of sitting circuit and appellate judges, and it will take years to unseat these.

He digs through history and chronicles the slow evolution of how the courts have undermined our nation’s sovereignty through these decisions, slowly transforming our country in the process. The judiciary has well exceeded its constitutional mandate, basically making a fool of Alexander Hamilton and his boast that it would be the least dangerous branch.

Horowitz does not mince words, and he calls for a strict curtailment of the subject matter over which the judiciary has oversight. Essentially it would be stripped of much of its jurisdiction and could only rule over a narrow set of issues. Alternatively, the courts could be required to have super-majorities in order to declare state or federal acts unconstitutional.

This will no doubt be seen as a bridge too far by some, but I think Horowitz has provided some interesting fodder for discussion. It is an unavoidable fact that the federal judiciary has become a monster, and in effect has become a super-legislature. This is well beyond what the Framers intended, and frankly all chips must be on the table in considering what the remedies are.

Getting back to McCarthy’s tweet, some of the comments are quite revealing. This is all a pipe dream, according to many. Perhaps. But that’s beside the point – or rather, it IS the point. We can’t continue on this path where we pretend getting to nominate a few judges is going to make a difference. The problem is much more endemic, and if we lack the will to address this runaway judiciary, then everything else we discuss is what’s beside the point.

The Federalist Papers

During my time in the blogging and social media wilderness, reading the Federalist Papers was one of the primary causes of my renewed passion for writing about politics. In fact one of the plans for this blog, once my schedule normalizes, is to write a series of posts that updates the Federalist Papers, in a sense, to justify why constitutional conservatism is essential for our republic’s survival.

Over the years of my blogging I have done a paper-by-paper analysis, though I stalled out some four years ago. I’ve begun again at Almost Chosen People where I theoretically co-blog with Don McClarey, if by co-blogging one means writing a post once every presidential election season. I picked up the count at Federalist 56. You can go here to read through the series. I intend to put up a couple of posts a week, at least, otherwise I should have the series completed at roughly the same time one of my daughters is being sworn in as president.

The Anti-Role Model

As Hillary Clinton officially secured the Democrat nomination for the presidency, thus becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major party, I couldn’t help but think that as a father of four daughters, this was not a proud moment for feminism in America. In fact Clinton is the opposite of a role model for women.

Looks like Matt Walsh had the same idea.

As the father of a young daughter, I’ve been thinking about that “message” quite a bit myself. And call me sexist, but I don’t look at my little girl and think, “I hope you grow up to be just like Hillary Clinton.” I shudder at the thought that any parent would wish such a fate upon their precious child. If anything, I see Hillary Clinton as a vivid illustration of the exact sort of person I don’t want my daughter to become. It’s not that I don’t want her to be successful — I just don’t want her to achieve success the way Hillary achieved it, nor do I want her to define success the way Hillary, and much of the rest of the culture, defines it.

While Walsh nails Hillary’s ethical and personality shortcomings, my objection to Hillary as any kind of role model has to do with the way she betrays any sense of true feminism. My daughters already display great independent spirit, and I want them to foster that spirit as they grow and develop. What about Hillary should be inspiring to them in that endeavor? Will she inspire them to hitch their wagon another, even more ethically challenged man? Will she teach them the value of standing by their man, through thick and thin, even if thin is that man cheating repeatedly? Perhaps she will show them the importance of not only defending your man against rape allegations, but even questioning the character of those women, or in otherwise slut shaming 12 year old rape victims.

This country and the wider world has produced scores of great female leaders, all of whom are tremendous examples of what women can achieve by their hard work. Hillary Clinton shares none of these great qualities, and is the antithesis of a female role model. Our country can do better.

The Politics of Fear

I loved this delightfully sarcastic tweet from David Freddoso:

Trump plays on fear! BTW, Repubs want to bring back Jim Crow & steal your insurance, and every gun owner is a mass shooter waiting to happen

— David Freddoso (@freddoso) July 26, 2016

Because I value my sanity I did not watch Donald Trump’s convention speech, but the common refrain was that it was “dark.” Donald Trump played on everyone’s fears, so the story went. Having subsequently read much of it, there is certainly quite a bit of negativity. But Freddoso’s tweet captures the hypocrisy of calling out Trump for playing on everyone’s fears, because that has been the Democrat playbook for years. Well, that’s not fair – it’s every politician’s playbook. And it’s not entirely wrong.

We all remember Bill Clinton marching into the 1992 Democrat convention to the cheerful notes of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” thus ruining that song for me for all time. What’s less remembered is Clinton’s acceptance speech, a tour de force in explaining why America was in an awful state. Similarly, Ronald Reagan’s “sunny optimism” was not exactly on display during most of his 1980 GOP convention  acceptance speech.

As a general rule the out-of-power party’s nominee tends not to paint a pretty picture of America. Once they have grasped the reigns of power, though, suddenly everything is wine and roses. That’s why Michelle Obama went from having never been proud of her country prior to February 18, 2008, to declaring last night “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that this country isn’t great, that somehow we need to make America great again, because right now this is the greatest country on Earth.” Hmmm, I wonder what changed so drastically during those eight years?

That’s not to say there isn’t a difference between expressing negative feelings about the trajectory of one’s country and fear-mongering. As expressed in Plato’s Politics, democracy descends into tyranny because demagogues manipulate the masses, and attain unlimited power to address perceived threats. Irrational fear-mongering is thus a deadly, but sadly potent force in politics.

But fear has always been a driving force, and in and of itself it’s not necessarily a problem. In a graduate school paper that served as one of the underlying themes of my dissertation, I wrote that fear was a primary motivation in the formation of our republic. The framers of the Constitution had a healthy fear of the masses and of government, and designed a constitution that in effect constrained both. Hamilton, Madison, and the rest were inspired by their real-life experiences to craft a document that, to the best of their ability, made some of the more troublesome abuses of mass democracy unlikely to occur. But they had no delusions about the potential evils spawned by unchecked government authority, so they put in place a number of checks and balances.

Perhaps because our fear of pure democracy and unchecked government power have waned that the carefully crafted balance of our constitutional order has been knocked out of whack. I’m not suggesting that the Trumpian or Democrat approach is one we need to adopt as a counter-balance, but it’s not wrong per se to be aware of and alert your fellow countrymen of impending threats.

Ill Communication

As conservatives stare off into the electoral abyss, we’re left wondering what we must do to elect people who reflect our values. The Democratic party long ago stopped serving as a remotely viable vehicle for conservatism of any kind, and now the Republican party of Donald Trump is also a less attractive option – and it’s not like Trump’s ascendancy is the first or even primary event to cause conservatives to question their allegiance to the GOP.

One can overdo the wallowing, of course. Conservatism is hardly dead, even electorally, in most states in the country. On a national scale there are fine individuals serving as Senators and Representatives. And hey, at least Alito and Thomas are still on the Supreme Court. For now.

Culturally, it’s another matter. Sure, there some positive indicators. The abortion industry’s continued efforts to mask what they truly do, including the constant drumbeat of “choice” and “reproductive rights” signifies we’re still uncomfortable – at least – with abortion. And yet, despite some dips in the number of abortions being performed, there’s no end in sight to the legal regime of state sanctioned killing. And while there’s been a pushback against some of the more noxious elements of our politically correct culture, the counter-pc movement is sadly littered with individuals who seem to revel in the crude stereotypes of conservatives.

Long story short, I don’t think too many rational conservatives are taking a look around the electoral and cultural landscapes feeling very triumphant. No matter who wins the presidential election, we will be pushed further towards statism – it will just be a different flavor of statism depending on who ultimately wins. Meanwhile, state legislative victories will just be subverted by the courts, and that will continue to happen even if Antonin Scalia is ultimately replaced by one his clones.

So why are our prospects so seemingly dim? Why has a majority of the republic embraced, to one degree or another, anti-conservative ideals, rejecting many of the principles held so deeply by the founders and early Americans?

There are many reasons, and I’ll get to those in future blog posts, but a large factor is less our inability to not just articulate our principles forcefully, but rather to explain them well.

R.R. Reno’s First Things article is a case in point. Reno describes Ted Cruz’s convention speech as a swan songs of sorts of “rotting flesh conservatism.” Reno believes Cruz’s repeated invocation of “freedom” as the central theme of his speech represents his disconnect from the average American. As Reno puts it”

That all made sense in 1980, a great deal of sense. But we’re in 2016 now, and we’re no longer suffering under suffocating collectivism and clotted, complacent capitalism. Most important, ordinary Americans today are much more vulnerable. The politics of freedom is losing its salience.

Black Lives Matter, Dallas, and Baton Rouge: They suggest a society that is coming apart. The same goes for student protests at elite universities. We don’t need freedom. We need solidarity, as ordinary people sense.

In a certain sense Reno has a point, though perhaps not much of one. I thought Cruz’s repetition of “freedom” was overly simplistic, and failed to convey the essential truths behind the conservative philosophy, but ultimately the message he delivered is as important now as during Reagan’s time, because it represents the central underpinning of conservatism.  At its core conservatism rejects the centralizing tendencies of most modern ideologies, and is especially hostile to the notion  that utopian ideals of a perfect society can be achieved through social engineering. The freedom that conservatism is about is freedom of the individual from the constraints of a stultifying state determined to regulate every aspect of our life because it knows better. It’s freedom from the silliness of soda taxes and other attempts to domineer over individuals because the fatherland knows best.

It is true that conservative emphasis on “limited government” has been ineffective, because it both conveys too much and too little. The “limited government” moniker over-reaches because it implies implicit hostility to the state, as though all state action is ipso facto bad. On the other hand, it conveys too little because it does not fully explain why big government is bad. It’s the same problem with conservative emphasis on government spending: it mistakes the symptom for the disease.

The reason conservatives oppose big government and prefer limited government is not because government is itself bad, but because government solutions often throw out the good with the bad, radically overhaul and ignore traditions, depress individual initiative, and violate the principle subsidiarity.

These are difficult concepts to explain, as even here I haven’t even scratched the surface of conservative philosophy. And though Reno misses the mark in his criticism of Cruz, he is at least partially correct in his analysis of what distresses Americans, particularly middle-class Americans. They are not necessarily looking to hear peons to tax cuts and less regulation, and if this is all conservatives had to offer, we would deserve to lose every election we’re involved in. But conservatism is so much more than this, and it ultimately offers the most sensible solutions.

So how can we reach the broader public more effectively? I don’t know that I have the answer, but this little blog is meant to be the beginning of me working through the issues that we all face collectively. I suppose in a sense one answer is better communication – not just the speaking/writing part, but listening – truly listening to people express their frustrations, understanding where they are coming from, and addressing those problems in ways that speak to them.

The Not So Fantastic Four

There have been a number of writers, politicians, and other conservative (or right-leaning) media personalities who have backed or at least given warm support to Donald Trump. Frankly most of these individuals – think Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge, Alex Jones, the shell of a website Breitbart left behind – were not exactly darlings of the right to begin with, so their bootlicking behavior is frankly not that surprising or dispiriting. A few individuals, however, were people I once greatly respected, but unfortunately they have lost that respect over the past few months. Here are the four biggest figures on the right whose star has fallen.

4. Scott Walker – Of the 17 people who ran for the Republican nomination. Governor Walker was right at the top of my preference list initially. His campaign went nowhere, sadly, as the man who I really thought would be the next president floundered out of the gate and never recovered.

Though he endorsed Ted Cruz and was one of the Republicans who was initially unafraid to point out the Donald’s flaws, Walker nonetheless not only agreed to speak at the Republican convention and endorse Trump, he has been belaboring the mathematically and logically incorrect notion that if you refuse to vote for Trump, you’re essentially voting for Hillary Clinton. As though he were not content to simply embarrass himself with this nonsense,  he also joined in the establishment GOP chorus attacking Ted Cruz. I suppose Walker, having decided that principles don’t really matter after all, was just mad another one of his fellow candidates still abided by his.

3. Rick Santorum – I was a fervent Santorum supporter in 2012, and though he wasn’t my first pick this time, I would have been more than happy to see him get the nomination. This time his campaign did not pick up steam, which is not surprising considering the number of viable contenders (iunlike last time). Unfortunately Rick was one of the first of Trump’s rivals to more or less embrace him, even before he was no longer officially a candidate, appearing with Donald and Mike Huckabee at Donald’s I don’t want to face Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and all those other candidates so I’m not going to attend the last Iowa debate and instead I’ll just pretend to raise money for troops event. Like Walker, Santorum has criticized Ted Cruz’s refusal to surrender his dignity.

2. Ace of Spades – I’ve been reading Ace of Spades since Bush’s re-election. Ace has been one of my favorite bloggers, and the site itself has been  a bastion of great humor, snark, and even insight, both from Ace himself and the commenters.

The site itself has been mixed, with a chorus of Trump backers but also Trump bashers. The email listserve seemed to be a Donald Trump rally message board, while the facebook page is generally anti-Trump. I suppose this reflects the attitude of the proprietor of the blog himself, who was sympathetic to Trump at the beginning, decidedly anti-Trump when things got serious, then somewhat accepting to him. Unlike others who have been content to repeat the Walker formulation, Ace flat out implies that conservative Never Trumpers are affirmatively pro-Clinton. His strawman laden rants on this are nothing new for Ace, but he has lashed out at even his co-bloggers (or I guess former co-bloggers) on twitter. Heck, he even blocked me on twitter.*

I can respect Ace’s feeling that Clinton is a far bigger threat than Trump, but his irrational behavior on this subject has been such that I have had to stop reading the blog, which is a shame.

*To be clear, this doesn’t bother me. I have no problem blocking people on social media or banning commenters. If someone is trolling you, or is simply a pest, go ahead and block away. In this case I mention it to note how short Ace has become.

1. Rush Limbaugh – My feelings on Rush were well-expressed here in a post that received quite a lot of attention. I’m not going to repeat it, but will add Susan Wright’s post noting how Rush shredded the last bits of his dignity on Friday. Of all the conservative media personalities Rush is the only one I really continued to listen to after all these years, defending him from what I perceived as unfair attacks on his character. Looks like I wasted a lot of time.

Send in the Clowns

Being away on vacation during the dumpster fire that is the convention in Cleveland has alleviated some of the despair I’m feeling right now. Putting on the Hamilton soundtrack while preparing burgers for the grill has allowed my mind to escape to a time when America had a much brighter future.

Nevertheless, I haven’t been able to completely avoid everything going on right now. My brother-in-law was watching the convention – for his own amusement – and who should I see addressing the GOP convention but none other than Scott Baio. Scott. Baio. Yeah.

Yet of all the madness taking place in Cleveland, for some reason it was the news of Stephen Colbert crashing the stage dressed as Caesar Fickerman from the Hunger Games that somehow annoyed me most of all. To be blunt my reaction when I read about this was “What a fucking douche.” It’s not that his appearance makes the festivities any more of a clown show than it is – in fact he fit right into the absurdity. No, what frustrates me is the knowledge that this was less of a brilliant piece of political satire than the pathetic attempt of a failing light night talk show host to remain relevant.

Colbert and his former partner in crime at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, represent some of the very worst aspects of our culture. They are the heroes of people whom I would designate as smugnorant – the noxious combination of smug and ignorant. They’re the types of people who will take to social media to decry those illiterate yokels in the hinterlands while displaying a keen lack of any depth of understanding of who their “opponents” are or what drives them as well as a deeply flawed (if that) grasp of American history. For years these two have taken to the airwaves to peddle a brand of humor based on ironic detachment and one-line snark meant to demonstrate the utter foolishness of the other side. They are the forerunners of generation meme, who think one-line slogans slapped onto funny pictures are genius insights that can shut down any argument. It’s the bumper sticker mentality given a new face in the information age.

What’s simultaneously amusing and infuriating is how much this subculture detests Donald Trump. While we can share this one surface-level similarity, their resentment comes from a different place than mine. What’s more, they seem blind to how much they contributed to Trump’s rise.

There have been some 7,546,333 articles written about what “caused” Trump’s nomination, give or take 5. Many of them contain some element of truth. The ultimate “I am Spartacus” equivalent of our times is how fast each of us is to proclaim what share of the blame in Trump’s rise we can claim. But if you want to know who can take the most credit for these developments, look no further than the American left, and particularly its most obnoxious adherents.

Every SJW attending a Trump rally, trying to shut it down, motivates the Trump forces. College kids literally crying because a Trump supporter has expressed said support through chalk fuels Donald Trump’s minions. Semi-talented hack comedians hijacking a party convention to make some vaguely ironic point only further motivates the Trump movement.

Trump may be the very worst figure to represent the backlash against the left and the so-called establishment, but that doesn’t negate the very real antipathy brewing against the politically correct SJW crowd. A large segment of American society has grown weary of Generation Snark and the values they represent. The counter-reaction may be over-the-top, but it based on very real and frankly legitimate frustration. Stephen Colbert’s schtick thus does nothing to advance an agenda except the very one he’s hoping to frustrate. And so we continue this cycle of idiocy, until it brings down the republic.

Such happy thoughts. Now back to sitting poolside.

Independence

On the morning of my 18th birthday, I marched cheerfully to my nearest post office, which helpfully was located right next to the DeKalb Ave. station on the L-line in New York. Finally, I was eligible to vote and my first official act as an adult would be to register – as a Republican.

But the line was really, really long, so I just went to school instead, and I wouldn’t actually register for a few more months.

My first ballot was cast absentee a year later, as I was still in college during the 1996 election. My lifetime political passion got its start during the 1988 election. One of my formative memories was my fifth grade teacher, on the morning of Super Tuesday, writing “Today belongs to Bush!” on the chalkboard. Today I’m sure he would have been fired for such an act.

I became such a political geek that I watched all broadcast portions of BOTH the Republican and Democrat conventions in 1988. Yeah. Really. Even the tedious snoozefest of a keynote delivered by the governor of Arkansas, whose name I quickly forgot.

My passion for politics only grew from there, as well as my identification as a conservative Republican.

So on that Tuesday morning in November, when my paper ballot finally I arrived, I got to cast my first ever vote for . . . Bob Dole.

It would not be the first time I had to vote for a nominee I didn’t care for. In fact, other than in 2004 – and that was uncontested – I never voted in a primary or caucus for the man who became the eventual nominee.* In 1996, in fact, I had traveled in the dead of night from Atlanta to New Orleans (in what was assuredly way less time than it should have taken) to help caucus for Alan Keyes. I even was there to support Alan Keyes later on that Spring when he protested not being allowed into the Republican debate in Atlanta, and saw the man being led away in handcuffs. Sadly, perhaps, there was no white coat.

*I did actually cast a ballot for McCain in the 2008 Maryland primary, but by that time he was the presumptive nominee, and I just hated Mike Huckabee that much I felt like making the margin of his defeat that much bigger.

I’ve suffered through many disappointments, and a few happy occasions. 1994, 2010, and 2014 were definite highs, but there were plenty of lows, including that November of 1996 (although I had to remind my gloating girlfriend at the time that the GOP still maintained control of Congress).

So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the 2016 presidential election. I felt the Republicans had a deep bench of magnificent candidates. I would have been quite happy if any of Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Rick Santorum garnered the nomination. Sure there were a few duds, but they didn’t seem to have much of a chance. As for the dreaded Jeb Bush, I was fairly confident early on that there was simply no way in this atmosphere he could possibly win the nomination. At least I got that one prediction right. What’s more, considering the likelihood of charisma vacuum/felon/congenital liar Hillary Clinton getting the Democrat nomination, and I was confident any one of those men would easily defeat her in a general election.

Enter Donald Trump.

I have spilled enough digital ink over the past 12 months on Trump, and am in no meed to go through all of his many ideological, character, and temperamental faults. If you are reading this post right now you already know how I feel about the man.

So Donald J. Trump naturally secured the nomination.

I considered leaving the party the day after the Indiana primary, but thanks in part to the Maryland board of election site being a bit wonky that day, I was unable to. I decided I would wait until the convention to make it official.

But then I didn’t need to wait. The power brokers of the GOP decided they would not even deign to permit the delegates to vote their conscience. They had made their decision – Trump would be the nominee, and the grassroots could go pound sand.

I have always rationalized that the so-called Establishment was basically conservative, but they were so fearful of losing elections they always played it safe, throwing whatever roadblocks they could to deter the true conservative candidate(s). Their behavior around Trump proves my naive hope was a false one. Just about any sentient being with an R next to his or her name polls more favorably against Clinton than Trump, and yet the GOP leadership won’t even consider the possibility of letting the delegates pick someone – anyone else. Clearly electability is not what has driven GOP establishment mushiness all these years.

No, it is now clear that the GOP establishment truly is anti-conservative. We can go into the myriad reasons why – and in fact this blog has been (re)established in order to explore such issues, but it suffices to understand right now that conservatives have no place in the Republican party. If the party is going to reject conservatism, then conservatives have an obligation to reject it.

So last night I finally went and changed my registration status to unaffiliated. I am, at long last, one of those precious independents.

Now, let’s be honest. I am an “independent” who will, while the Republican party remains viable, be someone who associates more closely with the GOP. In other words, like just about every other independent, I will be unlikely to cast many ballots for one of the major political parties. While the Republican party is no longer a true home to conservatives, the Democrat party is not even close to a viable option.

This does mean, however, that downballot Republicans will have to earn my vote this November. Just being “not a Democrat” will no longer suffice. I am done casting my lot with the lesser of two evils.

So where do we go from here? That will be the central question this blog site will seek to answer.