RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

March is when we move from winter to spring. We had days with temperatures in the single digits and others when the thermometer approached seventy. Mark Twain once wrote about spring, “I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” Perhaps we weren’t that extreme, though it did snow here in southeastern Connecticut on the third full day of spring. And there were days when Robins must have thought they came north too early. March is when the clocks advance by an hour – an anachronism from a time when family farms were ubiquitous, and more daylight hours were important. In 1920, 27% of the U.S. population lived on farms. Today, 2% do. So, why do we still change our clocks?

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The month blossomed with news, if not with flora. A terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand; the release of the long-anticipated Mueller report; the fatal crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 in Ethiopia; the fifteenth (or was it the sixteenth?) announced candidacy for the Democrat nomination for President; Brexit; a college admissions scandal that rocked Hollywood, Wall Street, law firms and some of our top universities; Nicolás Maduro gained traction in Venezuela, with help from China and especially Russia, while Juan Guaidó’s wife Fabiana Rosales visited the White House; President Trump acknowledged the reality of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and he issued his first veto (sustained) over Wall funding; the ISIS Caliphate in Syria was defeated; China enlisted a deeply indebted Italy into its Belt and Road Initiative; friends in high places, and hatred for Trump convinced the Cook County State’s Attorney to drop charges against Jussie Smollett for a feigned racial attack.

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Three events during the month said much about modern American culture – none of it positive, which should give us pause. The first was the revelation uncovered in the college admissions scandal, a scandal that said a lot about the values of so-called elites – how they lied and cheated to get their children into top colleges.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/30/the-peoples-sovereignty-is-the-found

Although I don’t believe I have ever seen so many errors in such a short essay, the principal error in Mark Pulliam’s response to my recent piece, “Don’t Read the Constitution the Way Robert Bork Did” is this: If one claims to adhere to the original intentions of the Founders, one must first understand those intentions. In that effort, Pulliam fails in every respect.

Beginning with the question of natural law and the Declaration of Independence and moving in all directions from there, Pulliam presents a blinkered understanding of the purposes and meaning of our Constitution. There is not a single prominent American Founder—not Madison, Hamilton, Adams, Mason, Randolph, Wilson or any of a host of others—who did not believe that the Declaration served as the authoritative source of the Constitution’s authority. Miss this point and you cannot understand the original intent of the Constitution.

Pulliam cites Justice Scalia as an authority. However much we may praise many of the conclusions Scalia reached on the bench, it remains that Scalia, unlike Justice Thomas, was a positivist—saying on one occasion that if the majority voted to legalize abortion, then it should be legal. Thomas, however, realizes that according to natural law principles, abortion is a violation of the natural right to life that is expressly protected by the Constitution. In the face of Thomas’ argument, Pulliam collapses: natural law—“whatever that is.” Is it really so difficult!