Thoughts on Trump - When Life Gives You Lemons...

While I’ve come to despise Donald Trump, I hope he wins in November…

Donald Trump is a lying, manipulating, protectionist big government Democrat. I’ll still be voting for him, however, because Hillary Clinton is all of that and more. She will keep the welcome mat open for illegal immigrants from all sorts of 3rd world countries in order to create more Democrat voters. Donald Trump at least claims that he will build a wall along the southern border and tighten immigration from places rampant with Islamic terror.

The other critical issue is the Supreme Court. Donald Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees that has pleased many conservatives. He has stated on numerous occasions that he plans on nominating conservatives to the Supreme Court. He may not, but we know for a fact that Hillary Clinton will nominate nothing but hardcore leftists in the vein of Justice Ginsberg and Justice Sotomayor.

Together immigration and the Supreme Court are the two biggest issues on the ballot in November. Between working to turn the US into a lefty paradise of a failed 3rd world country and eviscerating the freedoms contained in the Bill of Rights, I’m not sure the country can survive another four years of the statist Obama agenda. On both issues Donald Trump claims he will do the right thing while Hillary Clinton will do the exact opposite. As a known liar we may indeed be disappointed by Trump, but at least there is a chance he will keep his word and do the right thing. With Clinton there is zero chance.

Of course, one has to wonder if Donald Trump really wants to be President. He’s been running for the job for a year – and on and off numerous times before that – but he doesn’t seem to be interested in winning. Since he secured the nomination almost three months ago, and since the convention one month ago, Trump has focused almost all of his attention on his GOP critics and the media, rather than Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is possibly the worst candidate the Democrats have ever nominated. Apart from her demonstrated incompetence, her treachery over Benghazi, her lies about her email server, her slush fund known as the Clinton Foundation and the fact that voters seem to barely be able to tolerate her, she’s a superstar. But somehow Donald Trump has figured out how to trail someone who would probably lose to “None of the Above” if that was the only other choice. Although his trip to Louisiana and his recent mea culpa were steps in the right direction, it remains to be seen if those are the beginning of a focused campaign to win or merely a feint in a long term plan to lose.

And of course it’s comical that I get emails every day from the Trump campaign seeking money. I will never send Donald Trump a single dollar. Why? Because he’s the one who brags that he’s worth $10 billion and that he’d be the only guy in the race funding his own campaign. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to help keep Clinton out of the White House, I do, but there’s no chance I would send the Trump Campaign money that they would simply use to attack Ted Cruz or the media or some other pointless ego salving debacle rather than focus on Clinton. The truth is, if I had $10 billion in the bank, I’d be more than happy to spend at least $9 billion of it winning the presidency, because while making lots money is no doubt fun – I imagine – saving the greatest nation in history is truly something exceptional.

Donald Trumps’s basic problem isn’t that he can’t attract moderates… his problem is that much of the conservative base – this writer included – pretty much hate him. While I’ll be voting for him, lots of others, particularly those in the Never Trump camp won’t be. If he can’t get his base out, he loses going away. There are simply not that many union members disaffected enough with the Democrats to make up for tepid support from the base.

My suggestion to Trump, if he wants to reengage conservatives, would be to release a list of his intended cabinet nominees, at least for those appointments conservatives care about. For Secretary of State, John Bolton, for Secretary of Defense, the slightly damaged David Petraeus, Rudy Guiliani for Attorney General… maybe. There are others too, such as perhaps Michelle Rhee for Education Secretary and others focused on streamlining government for positions in the EPA, the Department of Energy and the IRS. The ranks of the American Enterprise Institute, the Mises Institute and the American Center for Law and Justice would be great places to start.

Of course this might not be enough and those people might not accept anyway… but the reality is, Donald Trump has to get conservatives and the Never Trump people to hold their noses and pull the lever for him, otherwise it’s President Clinton all over again. And that really is the point. I’ve pretty much come to despise Donald Trump, half for everything he’s done and half for the stupidity of the GOP establishment for foisting him on us, but as much as I despise him, I love my country more, and while I’m leery of what he might do, I’m downright frightened that the country can’t survive what I know Hillary Clinton will do.

And finally, there is impeachment.  If Clinton were to get in, there is less than zero chance she would be impeached and convicted, regardless of what she might do.  She could literally set fire to the Constitution and she'd have no problem.  Trump however is a different story.  If gets into office and he steps out of line, or the Trump University comes back with a loss, there is a real possibility of impeachment and conviction as both Democrats and many Republicans would be happy to vote for both...

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.  Donald Trump is lemonade.  Hillary Clinton is lemonade laced with strychnine... I'll take the regular lemonade, please.

With Prop 8 the cowardly Supreme Court eviscerates citizen's rights

Louisiana is a great state. Home to Bourbon Street, jazz, and perhaps most importantly, the antics of the Robertsons of Duck Dynasty fame. On a less positive note the state is currently the home of the nation’s highest rate of births to unwed mothers, currently at 54% of all births. Sadly, the rate has exceeded 50% for years.

Let’s imagine that many of those babies are born malnourished and as a result are born prematurely. Looking at the staggering costs associated with premature births and the negative health consequences for the children themselves, a citizens group decides to do something about it. They get a measure put on the ballot that would amend the state’s constitution to state that basic healthcare for babies is a right and that hospitals must provide free neonatal care and nutrition to all expectant mothers if requested. The ballot passes with a majority of the vote.

One New Orleans hospital doesn’t like the mandate and sues in federal court claiming it’s unconstitutional based on the Takings clause of the US Constitution. A federal judge agrees and throws the legislation out. The governor agrees with the judge and decides not to appeal the ruling. Suddenly, the state where the citizens have decided that they want to put the health of children ahead of the profits of rich corporations is suddenly unable to do so. Now the supporters of the referendum have no choice to appeal the ruling to the US Supreme Court. The Supremes agree to take the case… only to decide that the plaintiffs don’t have standing, saying: “We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to,”… “We decline to do so for the first time here.” Now, this story of course is fiction, but the ruling by the Supreme Court is not. This is the exact language the majority used in their ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the Prop 8 case where a federal judge threw out a constitutional amendment to the California constitution stating that marriage is between a man and a woman. While this Louisiana scenario was hyperbole, the reality is, that is the exact situation that could be seen in any state. A majority of citizens of a state can change their constitution to address any issue they deem appropriate, but if the governor claims that it’s unconstitutional vis-à-vis the US Constitution and a federal judge agrees with him, tough luck for the citizens.

Sound crazy? Not really. Remember, the Supreme Court did not judge Hollingsworth on its merits, but rather simply dismissed it based on whether or not the party that appealed had standing. If their goal was to uphold the unconstitutionality of Prop 8, which this decision does by default, they should have had the courage to decide as much and let the American citizens react. If they wanted to preserve state’s rights they should have thrown out the federal court’s decision and let California’s voters handle it at a state level. What they have done with this cowardly ruling is neither.

The court has said in Hollingsworth is that 1 person can sue to challenge the constitutionality of a state action but not a single one of the 7 million California citizens who voted to pass it can sue in support of it since the state chose not to. There seems to be a disconnect there, particularly as one could make the argument that citizens are somewhat the equivalent of the states in terms of their relationship with the federal government. The 10th Amendment states: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. That suggests some level of equality between the two, and the Supreme Court choosing to not allow citizens to seek the enforcement of lawfully implemented rules while allowing other citizens to sue for their destruction is arbitrary and capricious.

Tthe whole point of popular referendums like Prop 8 is for a population of a state to have some control over their governments. From back room dealing to bureaucratic overreach to election manipulation, state governments can become unwieldy and corrupt and at times very unresponsive to the wishes of their citizens. Prior to Prop 8, 1978’s Prop 13 was probably the most famous ballot measure of modern times. That, like many propositions, was a response to an out of control government addicted to increasing property taxes to fund… everything. Prop 13 became a watershed event in the empowerment of citizens against the corrupt bureaucracy of their state governments. By arbitrarily suggesting that citizens cannot defend the constitutionality of their own laws the Supreme Court has eviscerated one of the most powerful tools citizens have to control their sometimes uncontrollable legislatures, executives and judiciaries. They have needlessly neutered the citizens of California and every other state with this cowardly and disingenuous ruling.

There is no silver lining: Justice Roberts' despicable Obamacare decision

In March of 1937, in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish erstwhile conservative Justice Owen Roberts suddenly began voting to support New Deal legislation. His change of heart was the beginning of what became known as “The switch in time that saved nine.” His sudden reversal was in direct response to FDR’s threat to pack the Court in the face of the Court’s resistance to the President’s sweeping progressive agenda. From that point forward the Constitution ceased to be a significant barrier to anything FDR wanted to do.

Fast forward 65 years and another erstwhile conservative Justice Roberts makes the same switch. For similar reasons – although President Obama has not yet called for a modern day “Court Packing”, he has frequently assailed the Court for its Citizen’s United decision, and strongly implied that the court would be guilty of judicial activism were it to overturn Obamacare, stating: “I am confident the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically-elected congress.”

In the face of such attacks, Chief Justice Roberts voted to preserve the legitimacy of the court by voting to support Obamacare. To support his decision, Chief Justice Roberts chose to reached back 85 years to Blodgett v. Holden so that he can quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “the rule is settled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.” For it to have been so compelling for Justice Roberts to depend on it so strongly, one might expect that Justice Holmes’ edict must surely have come straight out of the Constitution, or at a minimum must have been simply “codifying” some long settled precedent reaching back to the time of the Founding Fathers. Actually, not so much. Justice Holmes was really only drawing on decisions that had been around for less than 20 years, starting with US v. Delaware & Hudson in 1909. In other words, Justice Holmes was claiming his actions were supported by settled law when in reality they were nothing of the sort.

This leads to something of a detour… The left is constantly suggesting that the country cannot possibly be governed by the words in a document that was written by a bunch of rich white guys 225 years ago. Imagine, television didn’t even exist then… The Constitution said slaves counted for only 3/5 as much as free men for taxation and representation purposes. Most people worked for themselves on farms and got their water out of wells and Virginia, the most populous state in the nation had a mere 747,000 people, 30% of whom were slaves. No way those old guys could have known anything about modern America.

The question I see in this case, however, is thus, if the 225 year old Constitution, which was ratified by each of the original 13 states, cannot be counted on to determine the limits of government power, what makes an 85 year old precedent voted on by 4 guys in 4 to 4 decision that much more compelling? Maybe because the world was so much more modern by then? Except that television still didn’t exist and most people were still living on farms, getting their water from wells and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet. Maybe precedent trumps everything... Except it doesn’t: Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson after a mere 58 years.

At the end of the day, Charles Krauthammer’s suggestion that Justice Roberts’ decision is “one of the great constitutional finesses of all time”, the reality is that it is nothing of the sort. It is at its base judicial activism in its most despicable form. In the face of explicit and frequently and vociferously stated opinion of the President and the legislators who passed Obamacare, the law was not a tax. It passed with its advocates telling the American people stating that the power to pass it came from the Commerce Clause. Regardless, Chief Justice Roberts decided that the stated constitutional grounds upon which the law was passed were in fact unconstitutional. But in a pretzel like logic he stated that the legislation was indeed constitutional after all because Obamacare was really a tax after all.

What’s worse, while the Chief Justice had to reach back almost a century in order to find even the thinnest of grounds to find Obamacare constitutional, he had to compound his legislative contortion by suggesting that the mandate penalty was not a tax for the purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act – which states that a tax must be paid before it can be challenged. This was critical because none of the penalties would be due before 2014 and thus there would be no standing to sue to overturn Obamacare until then. He then immediately declared the penalty a tax for constitutionality purposes.

The Chief Justice had many options available to him in this case. He could have, as it appears he originally did, voted to declare Obamacare unconstitutional on the grounds that Congress does not have the power to compel anything like it under the Commerce Clause. He could have declared the mandate a tax and stated that there was no standing to sue until someone actually paid the tax. Each of these options would have been a straightforward constitutional approach that most citizens could have understood, even if they didn’t agree with it. Instead the Chief Justice chose to engage in the worst form of judicial activism. It wasn’t that he was supporting the legislative or executive branch when they suggest some flawed reasoning about how the Constitution gives them the power to do something. No, more disturbingly, he became an advocate for a piece of legislation and contorted its language and intent for the specific purpose of finding it Constitutional.

Those suggesting that the Chief Justice created some new Commerce Clause line in the sand across which Congress cannot venture are deluding themselves. He has just as quickly provided a roadmap for any marginally intelligent legislative aide to find a way around any such limits… “We can’t pass a law forcing them to eat broccoli or buy a planet saving electric car or limit them to one gun per household, but we can certainly tax the hell out of them for not complying.”

The first Justice Roberts’ change of heart opened up the floodgates to a tidal wave of government intervention and regulation that would not be matched until LBJ and Richard Nixon sat in the Oval Office. And we all know how that has turned out. One has to wonder what this second Justice Robert’s legacy will be... maybe it will be something like this: A judicial branch advocate for the legislative and executive branches against the Constitution and American people. That can’t turn out well. It makes me wonder if we may be finally testing Benjamin Franklin’s words about what the Constitution provided: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

Commerce Clause frivolity: Obamacare, NASA and your unwed pregnant daughter...

Two weeks ago the Supreme Court agreed to decide the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

In a surprising act of courage, the Court agreed to decide the divisive case in the midst of what will certainly be one of the most viscerally contentious elections in a century. To their credit, when they could have easily kicked the can down the road and waited until after the election to take the case, they did not. Not only did they accept the case, but they allotted an unprecedented 5 ½ hours of oral argument for it. They fully recognize that their decision will have significant political implications. Not in the sense that it will sway voters one way or another (which it will certainly do) but in that it gives voters the opportunity to take into account the consequences of their 2008 votes when they walk into the booth in November.

However the Court decides, the consequences of that election will be laid bare. It’s not often that voters get such a clear, definitive beginning, middle and potentially end of such a consequential piece of legislation – at least from a legal perspective – within one election cycle.

The central question in the case is a relatively straightforward one: Does the federal government, under the Commerce Clause, have the power to force Americans to purchase health insurance?

Article I, Section 8, Clause 3

(Congress shall have Power) To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

The foundation for the administration’s argument that it does indeed have that power lay in a case handed down by the Supreme Court in 1942, Wickard v. Filburn. That case gave the stamp of approval to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which allowed the federal government to regulate economic activity:

In 1940 an Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn grew more wheat than the government allotment allowed. They fined him. He sued, stating that his wheat was for his own use on his farm and therefore was beyond Congressional reach. In a legal gerrymander that would put any politician to shame, the Court decided that as Filburn’s exceeding his quotas would result in him buying less wheat in the local markets, which in turn led to less wheat traded in those markets, he was impacting interstate commerce; therefore Congress did indeed have the power to limit his production.

Twisting Fillburn’s already tortured logic, the Obama administration has decided that now it can force all Americans to purchase healthcare. The why is that society has to pick up the tab when uninsured people go to the emergency room. The how is where Filburn comes in. By virtue of the fact that the money people spend on healthcare for the uninsured (through higher taxes and higher insurance premiums) cannot be spent to purchase goods and services they might otherwise purchase, healthcare therefore impacts interstate commerce. As such, Congress has the power to regulate healthcare and can compel people to purchase health insurance.

That is the logic the Democrats used as they force fed Obamacare down the throats of the American people.

If this logic is acceptable, the question becomes, is there literally anything the government cannot do? For example, perhaps a future Congress might want to ban premarital sex? What? No way! Really? How? Here’s how: The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year capturing, trying and keeping criminals locked up. Seventy percent of prisoners come from households without fathers. Given that the single biggest contributor of kids growing up without a father is out of wedlock births, the most straightforward way to ameliorate that problem is simply banning premarital sex. As the progeny of premarital sex drive expenses in the criminal justice system, which in turn reduces the amount that can be spent on airline tickets or pencils or hotel rooms, or bingo games, Congress can legislate it.

Sure, that sounds like a stretch, but then the history of the Washington borg is legion. The EPA was set up to clean the air and water and now it fines farmers for spilling milk and wants to regulate the stuff we exhale. The Department of Energy was established as a result of OPEC bringing the country to its knees with oil in 1973 and today it’s pretending to be a venture capital firm as it pours tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars down politically connected green energy rat holes like Solyndra and Beacon Power. How about NASA? The National Aeronautical and Space Administration used to be about putting men in space and on the moon but today we pay Russia to send our astronauts into space and the agency’s number one job is to: “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering”. Obviously the notion of banning premarital sex to save money on prisons is ludicrous, but based on Washington’s track record that doesn’t even matter.

The outcome of the administration’s logic suggests that there is nothing in our $14 trillion economy that could not be said to impact interstate commerce. Nothing. Growing tomatoes in your back yard rather than buying them in the supermarket; staying at home instead of going out to the movies; sewing the hole in a child’s pants rather than buying a new pair; sending your kid to a private or religious school rather than the dysfunctional public school down the street. If this expansion of the absurd logic of Filburn is allowed to stand, there will be literally nothing the government cannot make you do or keep you from doing. At that point there will be no freedom left in America. First to go will be what’s left of economic freedom, followed shortly thereafter by political and then religious freedoms. Once those are gone, how much is really left of America at all?