RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://fedsoc.org/commentary/publications/the-future-of-the-federal-judiciary

To understand better the future of the federal judiciary—and why it matters—we should first look to the past. Let’s consider where our judiciary began and how it has gotten to where it is today.

A

I begin where any judge should: with the text, of course. Article III of the United States Constitution established the federal courts and vested in them “the judicial Power of the United States.”[1] But, in contrast to the detail it provides for the powers vested in the other branches, the Constitution’s description of the judicial power effectively stops there. The Constitution identifies those categories of “Cases” and “Controversies” that will be subject to the judicial power of the United States.[2] But it says little about what such power is or how it ought to be exercised.

The concept was not novel to the framers of the Constitution, however. Rather, the general nature of the “judicial power” should have been well known to the founding generation from centuries of experience in England. This included, in the words of Professor Philip Hamburger, the central duty of English judges to “decide [cases] in accord with the law of the land.”[3] That the “judicial Power” was left largely undefined in the new Constitution may simply reflect the fact that its general meaning was already understood.[4]

The traditional conception of the judicial power embodied two related ideals. First, because judges would be deciding cases according to the law, they would not be deciding cases according to their personal values. The law alone was to supply the basis for decision. Legal historians have debated the degree to which this was true in England, disagreeing, for example, over the extent to which English judges would stray beyond the text of a law in the service of more ambiguous principles like equity.[5] But in Federalist 78, Alexander Hamilton defended the proposed Constitution on the very ground that an independent judiciary would help ensure that “nothing would be consulted [in the courts] but the constitution and the laws.”[6]

This critical facet of the judiciary is derived from the unique structure of our government.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=e18d8e30b7

On October 6, I put up two posts calling the Bidens, Joe and Hunter, “stone cold crooked.” The basis for the label was a series of factual assertions listed in the first of the posts, none of which had received any meaningful refutation in any source I could find. The short version is that it was essentially conceded by all that Hunter Biden had taken a position as director of a large Ukrainian gas company (Burisma) within days of his dad Vice President Joe getting appointed “point man” for U.S. diplomacy in that country; that Hunter did not have relevant business experience, and yet was paid $50,000 per month for the gig; that Joe had bragged (on a widely available video) of then using the leverage of threatening to withhold $1 billion of U.S. aid to get a prosecutor fired; and that the fired prosecutor had stated publicly that he was investigating Burisma. These are facts from which most reasonable people would easily conclude that something here stinks to high heaven. To reach that conclusion, the readily available facts are plenty of “evidence”; there is no need for any actual individual to step forward and admit that “yes, we paid Hunter to buy influence with his dad.” Of course that’s why they paid Hunter that kind of money.

Since the October 6 posts, facts keep coming out that, as far as I can see, only make the Bidens’ position more and more indefensible. Simultaneously, organs of the progressive press keep doubling down on the narrative that there is “no evidence” of wrongdoing of the Bidens in Ukraine, and any assertion to the contrary is a “conspiracy theory.”

Suppose that you are one of those hard-to-sway skeptics who think that there is not yet enough evidence to demonstrate the crookedness of the Bidens. The funny thing is that there is a place you could go to really nail this down: Ukraine! Shouldn’t somebody be doing that?

Let me list some facts that have at least come to my attention since those prior posts:

It looks like the amounts paid by Burisma to Hunter Biden and his business colleague Devon Archer were not $50,000 per month each, but rather $83,333 per month each. Reuters has that figure in an October 18 piece here, confirming Peter Schweizer’s assertion in this Fox News piece from September. $83,333 per month would come to a nice round $1 million per year.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/27/our-bankrupt-nomenklatura/

Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And then ask whether they enhanced our diminished such inheritances?

Donald Trump is now in the midst of another coup frenzy that has the Left accusing him of being crazy. But he already took the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test. It was a simple cognitive exam and he aced it, as would most people. The Left, remember, had called in a Yale psychiatrist to testify that Trump was demented, during the lulls between the first impeachment, the serial “Russian collusion” hoaxes, the emoluments clause psychodrama and Robert Mueller’s “walls-are-closing-in,” “turning-point,” and “bombshell” investigation.

Perhaps the wrong public figures took the test.

At times, former Vice President Joe Biden is unaware of which town, indeed which state, he is in. He slurs his words often. Biden strings together unconnected thoughts that result in utter incoherence—not alleviated by his near shouting emphatics or fits of pique at reporters.

Sometimes, Biden forgets names, and referents, and appears befuddled generally. His biography is mythical. He cannot address Ukraine and the role of his son, Hunter Biden, because, after all, what would a truthful person say? That the vice president of the United States allowed his wastrel son to become a multimillionaire by leveraging his father’s office with foreign corrupt governments? And was Biden’s moral lapse atypical, or rather reflective of prior ethical laxities that destroyed his two earlier presidential bids when he variously lied about his bio, plagiarized, and used a variety of racially insensitive remarks of the sort that would have characterized most others as racists.

Shouldn’t Hillary Clinton also take the MoCa Test? At times she seems completely delusional—or is she a bit unhinged?