RUTHFULLY YOURS

Forget Marbury v. Madison. Judicial supremacy is mostly an invention of the Warren Court.
The Supreme Court this morning declared that states cannot limit marriage to one man and one woman. But this is not the last word on the question.

Article VI of the Constitution reads: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . ” The idea that Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land is a very recent contention.

When the Constitution was written and for a long time thereafter, many doubted that the Court had the authority to interpret the Constitution at all — in other words, they believed that the Court had no power of “judicial review.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 78, made the classic argument that, given a written constitution established by the sovereign people, the Court had no choice but to maintain the supremacy of the people’s Constitution when it was alleged to be in conflict with an ordinary law passed by their representatives.

This week, we have twice seen Supreme Court justices violating their judicial oaths. Yesterday, the justices rewrote Obamacare, yet again, in order to force this failed law on the American people. Today, the Court doubled down with a 5–4 opinion that undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government.

Both decisions were judicial activism, plain and simple. Both were lawless.

As Justice Scalia put it regarding Obamacare, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ . . . We should start calling this law SCOTUSCare.” And as he observed regarding marriage, “Today’s decree says that . . . the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”

Sadly, the political reaction from the leaders of my party is all too predictable. They will pretend to be incensed, and then plan to do absolutely nothing.

On June 4, the media reported that for the second time in a year, the Office of Personnel Management’s computer network was the target of a successful penetration by the People’s Republic of China. It now appears that OPM was aware of the cyber-espionage attack for more than a year without remedying its vulnerability.

That OPM had left itself vulnerable to cyber-espionage by China (and the rest of the world) for so long was evidence of an extreme level of incompetence and negligence. Last year, an OPM contractor — a company called USIS that had been doing background investigations for security clearances under contract with OPM — had its records invaded by cyberattack. (USIS apparently fit in with OPM’s evident incompetence. It had vetted and passed for security clearances both infamous National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden and Aaron Alexis, who shot and killed a dozen people at the Washington Navy Yard).

Despite Shavit’s eloquence, his message was nonsensical, myopic and logically inconsistent –heavily tinged with the soft bigotry of low expectations from the Palestinians.It is no secret that AJC believes in the two-state solution as a better, more practical alternative than all the others that have been proposed – Michael Tichnor, AJC executive council member, June 2015

Earlier this month the American Jewish Committee held its annual Global Forum convention with an impressive lineup of prominent international personalities.

The three-day event in Washington provided a wide range of lectures on an equally wide range of topics, both worthy and weighty.

‘The best of the Left’

One of the annual program’s highlights is the Forum’s Great Debate, which this year featured The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline B. Glick and Haaretz’s Ari Shavit, on whether the two-state formula offers a constructive solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, or is merely a dangerous delusion.

If the US fails to reverse Obama’s policies toward Iran in the next two years, it is hard to see how it will be able to rebuild its strategic posture in the future.
Under President Barack Obama, the US has implemented policies toward Iran that are catastrophic for Israel specifically, for US Middle East allies more generally and for US national security itself.

Consider, first, the known details of the soon-to-be- concluded nuclear deal.

In an article published by The New York Times this week, Prof. Alan Kuperman explained that Obama’s central justification for the agreement – that it will lengthen Iran’s breakout time to the bomb from the current two months to 12 months – is a lie.

Many on the Right side of the aisle are outraged. Gay marriage – a social issue at its core – has been validated by the US Supreme Court. The outrage is palpable. And while there is legitimacy to this outrage – especially with regard to the Court’s transgression of the 10th Amendment – the decision on gay marriage is a “bright shiny thing” that serves to quickly file us past an earlier decision that directly threatens the constitutional structure of our government: The Court’s ruling on King v. Burwell; the Obamacare subsidies.

No matter how you feel about the issue of gay marriage, the Court’s ruling on this social issue is an attack on the 10th Amendment, the rights of States to have authority over all things not enumerated in the US Constitution. But comparatively, the Court’s decision on Obergefell v. Hodges is a “mosquito bite” to yesterday’s “beheading” of our balance of powers at the federal level. We are being led away from what is tantamount to a “genocidal slaughter” of the Separation of Powers to gawk at a “highway accident.” With yesterday’s decision we are all – Liberal and Conservative, Republican, Democrat and Libertarian – losing our government to a transformative end stage; a commingling of constitutional branches and a centralized governmental authority in the federal government; something uniquely anathema to our basic governmental structure.

Senator Mike Lee’s June 11 religious liberty proposals at Hillsdale College’s Washington, DC, Kirby Center will have limited effect against increasingly aggressive LGBT agendas. Countering viciously self-righteous LGBT orthodoxy will demand exposure of this movement’s bankrupt, inverted sexual morality and a more critical tone than suggested by an overly generous Lee.

Lee noted America’s “monumental achievement” of religious freedom, a “radical departure” in human history. America’s founders had considered “religion…too important—too central to human happiness and social flourishing—to be managed by, and subject to, mere politicians.” Lee grounded religious freedom in natural law while citing James Madison’s classic 1785 formulation against Virginia’s established church.

I am convinced that Barack Obama’s strategy to swamp America with immigrants Muslim and Mexican was inspired by his watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was broadcast between 1987 and 1994. What he likely took away from the series was a plan very similar to that of the Borg. As Jean-Luc Picard, commander of the Enterprise, said of the Borg: “In their collective state, the Borg are utterly without mercy; driven by one will alone: the will to conquer. They are beyond redemption, beyond reason.”

You know what the Borg are, don’t you? That interstellar beehive of conquered worlds, using the enslaved as disposable pawns in that will to power? “Resistance is futile.” Resist, and you die. Submit, and you survive as a numbered cipher in service to the Collective.

That was a good plan, Obama must have thought, while he was “community organizing” in Chicago and teaching – or maligning or mis-teaching with tongue in cheek – constitutional law at the University of Chicago, as a “visiting fellow.” He was going to “fix” this country. It was too “white.” Too beholden to the “flawed” Constitution. Too European. He had a plan to swamp the country with Muslims and Mexicans, that is, with any real Mexicans or Central Americans passing through Mexico to enter the U.S.

As long as the “immigrants” were brown or black or fifty shades of gray between those hues, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if they wore burqas or niqabs or baseball caps or Pancho Villa hoodies, one and all were welcome to come and overwhelm Honky. He certainly wasn’t going to encourage and enable the invasion of the U.S. by white Europeans who wished to flee their looting welfare states, as I’m sure many want to. Use the Muslims and Mexicans as one would use salt and sand on icy roads. Salt will break up the ice, sand will give traction. After all, grains of salt or sand have no individual identities. Being Muslims, Mexicans, and assorted varieties of manqués and ciphers in between those hues, their “selves” are inextricably linked to the tribe, the Umma, the Cube, the race, La Raza. You don’t give them dirty looks or they’ll hit you.

If colonialism were the main problem, Muslims, too, still are, colonizers — and not particularly “humanitarian” ones, at that.

Islamic jihad and Islamic violence; the sanctioning of sex slavery; dehumanization of women; hatred and persecution of non-Muslims have been commonplace in the Islamic world ever since the inception of the religion. Deny everything and blame “the infidel.”

But is it America that tells these men to treat their wives or sisters as less than fully human? If we want to criticize the West for what is going on in the Muslim world, we should criticize it for not doing more to stop these atrocities.

Richard Kemp, a retired British Army colonel, is former Commander of British Forces in Afghanistan.

As a British officer who had more than his share of fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, it pains me greatly to see words and actions from the United Nations that can only provoke further violence and loss of life. The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s conflict in Gaza, prepared by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, and published on Monday, will do just that.

The report starts by attributing responsibility for the conflict to Israel’s “protracted occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” as well as the blockade of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago. In 2007 it imposed a selective blockade only in response to attacks by Hamas and the import of munitions and military matériel from Iran. The conflict last summer, which began with a dramatic escalation in rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians, was a continuation of Hamas’s war of aggression.