RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/media-bias-annapolis-shooting/

The shooter’s identity had not even been released when many prominent voices on the left began blaming Trump for the attack.

If you’re at all normal, which is to say not hysterically progressive, your reaction to initial reports of a horrific newsroom shooting in Annapolis, Md., was probably to assume it was the act of a disgruntled ex-employee. That is, after all, the usual back story to workplace massacres. Or your mind might have turned to other common motivators for such acts — psychosis, unrequited male affection. If you’re conversant with local newspapering specifically, you might have considered the special worry that accompanies this job: the danger of one of your readers being enraged by your coverage of a micro-feud involving zoning permits or construction detours or school-board composition or some other niche matter in which passions run inversely proportional to historical importance.

On the #Resist left, though, a faction increasingly prone to put emotions before reason, indeed to mistake the former for the latter, the immediate response was: This is on President Trump. Trump is up to his wrists in blood. Hasn’t Trump been railing at the press this week and for three solid years since he first announced his presidential candidacy? Did he not dub the media the “enemy of the people” on Monday night in South Carolina?

The shooter’s identity had not even been released when many prominent voices on the left began blaming Trump for either directly or indirectly inspiring the attack. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten tweeted, “The demonization of the press leading to a shooting of the Press . . . Just horrible!!!!” Feminist writer Lauren Duca said on the same medium, “The shooting . . . cannot reasonably be separated from the President’s mission to villainize [sic] the press.” Reuters editor Rob Cox wrote, “This is what happens when @RealDonaldTrump calls journalists the enemy of the people. Blood is on your hands, Mr. President.” The Wire mastermind David Simon, a longtime Maryland newspaperman, tweeted at the president, “Blood today in an American newsroom. Aren’t you proud, you vile, fascist son of a bitch,” adding later that “Trump’s direct language was to blame.” Leftist commentators Jessica Valenti and Shaun King expressed similar sentiments. (Trump’s “enemy of the people” crack Monday was such a glancing aside that Chris Cillizza of CNN didn’t even include it in his exhaustive retrospective piece, “The 55 most over-the-top lines from Donald Trump’s South Carolina Speech.” Nor did the New York Times writeup of the rally mention it.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-nomination-fight-would-provide-political-lessons/

The fight to confirm Barrett would contain edifying political lessons.

The mental relief that one will never again have to read an opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy is enough to satisfy for weeks. Just be glad for this, I’m telling myself. We never have to hear this man explain that his job is to “impose order on a disordered reality.” In an America of 300 million people, the likelihood of finding a new justice with Kennedy’s self-regard is near zero. After all, Donald Trump is unlikely to appoint himself.

But we must refuse the natural complacency that should settle on a normal and well-adjusted people who have survived the rule of Anthony Kennedy. We must press ahead. To do so, Donald Trump should appoint Amy Coney Barrett to the highest court in the land.

There are many good and fine people rumored to be on President Trump’s short list of candidates for the Supreme Court, including Amul Thapar and Senator Mike Lee. But Barrett’s qualifications match them all.

And her appointment, in particular, has several political advantages. Millions of Republicans held their noses and voted for Trump because they felt it was necessary to protect the liberty to practice their faith. The fight over Barrett’s confirmation would almost certainly build trust between President Trump and social conservatives. It would energize Republicans ahead of the midterm elections.

The facts of Barrett’s life — that she is a mother of seven children, and that when she speaks about her Catholic faith, she speaks about God as if she really believes in His existence — will provoke nasty and bigoted statements from Democratic senators and liberal media personalities. Again.

https://spectator.org/the-collapse-of-the-never-trump-conservatives/?utm
They’ll always have Twitter and MSNBC.

With the installation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and a yet-to-be-named reliable replacement for the unreliable Anthony Kennedy, Donald Trump will have confirmed himself as the most consequential conservative president of the modern era (or a close second to Reagan if you’re nostalgic). This will be complete vindication for Trump supporters, which means it’s really the end for the so-called Never Trump conservatives. Of course, there have been so many humiliating defeats for that crowd that we are spoiled for choice. What was your favorite blunder, or blown prediction, which marked their ignominious end?

For some, it must have been in March when Bill Kristol, longtime editor of the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, showed up in New Hampshire telling people he would run against President Trump in 2020. Or in April when the conservative website RedState was taken over and purged of writers who were “insufficiently supportive” of the president. Some go back to October 2017 when a Twitter spat broke out between Stephen Hayes and Brit Hume of Fox News over the Weekly Standard’s anti-Trumpeditorials. With the death last week of Charles Krauthammer, the revered neocon commentator and prominent Trump skeptic, the eclipse of the neocon intellectuals is complete.

One thing’s for sure: it wasn’t really a war so much as a rout. The Never Trump intellectual crowd has no momentum and no popular following these days. Consider the trajectory of their would-be leader Kristol, who appears to be indulging in a personal fantasy by putting himself forward as a candidate, as his rapport with GOP voters includes trying to run Evan McMullin in Utah to throw the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. When that stunt failed, Kristol personally insulted the pro-Trump writer Michael Anton for his influential essay “The Flight 93 election.” Then Kristol’s commentator gig with Fox was not renewed, and he was soon accusing Tucker Carlson of “ethno-nationalism” and “racism.” Overshadowing all of these breaks was Kristol’s personal history of being the conservative’s answer to Bob Shrum, a political “pro” who was always very wrong about politics.

https://www.city-journal.org/html/anthony-kennedy-15994.html

For conservatives, the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s longest-serving justice, offers an opportunity not seen in generations. If President Trump nominates, and the Senate confirms, a principled textualist and originalist—as he did with Justice Neil Gorsuch, a home-run appointment—the Supreme Court will have a solidly conservative majority for the foreseeable future.

Approaching his 82nd birthday, Kennedy has served on the Court more than 30 years—one of only 15 justices to reach that milestone. He has left his mark in many ways, in no small part because he has served as a “swing” justice between the Court’s conservative and liberal factions for much of his career, essentially holding the fate of the nation’s highest law in his hands.

Conservatives upset with certain results at the Court tend to focus on those areas where Kennedy leaned left—which were often civil rights cases involving groups traditionally facing societal discrimination. Kennedy will probably be best remembered for authoring each of the Court’s major opinions expanding constitutional rights for gay and lesbian Americans (Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), United States v. Windsor (2013), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)). In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), Kennedy also teamed with fellow GOP-appointed justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter to write a joint opinion that preserved the basic abortion-rights holding of Roe v. Wade (1973). And he ultimately wrote the opinion that preserved much of higher education’s race-based affirmative-action apparatus (Fisher v. Texas, 2016)—even though he had argued against such programs for most of his judicial career, including in his withering dissent in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

But it would be a mistake to focus on these civil-rights decisions to the exclusion of Kennedy’s broader, and fundamentally conservative, jurisprudence. Along with his fellow Reagan-appointed Westerners Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist (named chief justice by Reagan), he was a fairly reliable vote for constitutional federalism, prodding the Court back toward the Founders’ structural limits on Congress. Kennedy, unlike Chief Justice John Roberts, was ready to strike down Obamacare’s individual mandate on federalist grounds in NFIB v. Sebelius (2011).

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12615/replacing-justice-kennedy-what-kind

They [potential nominees to the Supreme Court] should be asked about the criteria they apply in determining whether to be bound by past decisions.

As the late Justice Antonin Scalia frequently pointed out, his oath of office required him to apply the Constitution, not the decisions of his predecessors on the bench, if those past decisions were wrong.

The second position is that Roe v. Wade was wrong when decided but it has been the law for 45 years, and the nation has come to rely on it as governing law. Accordingly, it should not be overruled, but nor should it be expanded. This is the most likely position that a successful nominee might take.

The two key words in assessing the President’s nominee to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy are stare decisis. This ancient Latin phrase, which means let the decision stand, represents a conservative approach to judging: that precedent imposes constraints on judicial innovation. Put another way, that judicial innovation should be balanced against the need to maintain stability in our legal system. But like most legal terms, stare decisis can easily be manipulated to benefit both conservatives and liberals. Traditionally it has been conservatives who have embraced stare decisis, allowing the dead hand of the law to constrain the living constitution. But liberals, too, embrace the concept when they seek to preserve old precedents that are important to them.

Today, liberals want to use stare decisis to preserve Roe v. Wade, gay marriage and other iconic liberal decisions of the past. Many conservatives would like to see these decision overruled. When the President interviews potential nominees, and when the Senate advises and consents on the nomination, these nominees will be questioned about their positions on important cases of the past and their likely votes in the future. They will decline to be specific claiming the need for judicial independence. But one area of legitimate inquiry will be their institutional views regarding stare decisis.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/270589/mueller-targets-trump-over-russian-billionaires-daniel-greenfield

Hillary Clinton’s bag boy is really getting desperate. And the hypocrisy from Team Mueller is becoming radioactive.

Several billionaires with deep ties to Russia attended exclusive, invitation-only receptions during Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities, guest lists obtained by ABC News show.

These powerful businessmen, who amassed their fortunes following the collapse of the Soviet Union — including one who has since been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department — were ushered into events typically reserved for top donors and close political allies and were given unprecedented access to Trump’s inner circle.

Their presence has attracted the interest of federal investigators probing Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election, three sources with knowledge of the matter said.

But… Team Mueller doesn’t leak.

Now who was that mysterious sanctioned Russian billionaire?

Names on the guest lists of the Candlelight Dinner included Victor Vekselberg, the billionaire head of the global conglomerate Renova Group, who was later sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury “for operating in the energy sector of the Russian Federation economy.” Late last year, Vekselberg and his American cousin and business partner, Andrew Intrater, were stopped at a New York airport by federal agents working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller and questioned, according to the New York Times.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/06/27/the-tawdry-and-dumb-nazi-charge-218932

he Nazi analogy has long been recognized as the crudest and dumbest form of argument, but it is enjoying a renaissance.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden notoriously and unapologetically tweeted a photo of Auschwitz-Birkenau as a response to family separations at the border. Upon a report that parents at the border were being told that their children were being taken to get bathed and disappearing, Chris Hayes of MSNBC tweeted, “What does this remind you of?” Soledad O’Brien chimed in, “Welp, I guess we’ve put to rest the question: ‘Nazi Germany: Could it happen here in America?’”

I have a relaxed attitude toward harsh political rhetoric, but Nazi analogies are over the line, and combined with the left’s taste for personally confronting Trump officials and supporters, they portend greater civil conflict and, perhaps, violence.

You don’t deal with Nazis, you don’t talk to Nazis, you don’t tolerate Nazis. You do to Nazis what happens to them, gruesomely and often, in the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds.” To consider your domestic political opponents Nazis is to place them beyond the pale and beyond the ambit of civil society. They must be confronted and crushed, by means fair and foul.

As Democrats have (another) collective meltdown over this week’s Supreme Court rulings and the impending retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, President Trump’s supporters are venting their own rage at another target: NeverTrump Republicans. https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/29/nevertrump-is-now-neverscotus/

Minutes after Kennedy announced he would step down later this year, Washington D.C. talk-radio host Larry O’Connor tweeted that NeverTrumpers “should be spending the day explaining their decision” not to vote for Donald Trump.

Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham reminded folks that none of the recent Supreme Court decisions “would have been possible if the #NeverTrumpers had their way.” Her colleague, Sean Hannity, roasted NeverTrumpers in his opening monologue Wednesday night: “For all of you NeverTrumpers, if you would have had your way . . . Hillary Rodham Clinton would have been making now a second appointment.”

And an Investor’s Business Daily editorial posed the question: “Conservatives are celebrating a number of important victories at the Supreme Court, as well as the chance to replace moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy. But none of these wins would have been possible if the Never-Trump crowd had its way. How about a mea culpa?”

I’ll go a step further: If NeverTrumpers had their way, we would now be contemplating the possibility of Associate Justice Barack (or Michelle!) Obama.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-trump-supreme-court-coming-democrats-weigh-strategy-1530209462?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=1&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Republicans and Democrats readied for the battle to choose Justice Anthony Kennedy’s successor, with the White House dusting off the plan it used to win last year’s Supreme Court fight and Democrats searching for a way to derail President Donald Trump’s nominee amid a heated midterm election campaign.

The White House again has enlisted Leonard Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers network, to assist in a selection process that already is focusing on fewer than a half-dozen candidates. Within hours of Justice Kennedy’s retirement announcement Wednesday, Mr. Leo took a leave of absence from the Federalist Society to serve as Mr. Trump’s outside adviser on the nomination.

People close to the White House selection process anticipate that a nominee will be announced before Mr. Trump departs for the coming NATO summit, which begins in Brussels on July 11, with Republicans hoping for confirmation hearings in mid-August and a full Senate vote ahead of the November midterm elections.

The pick presents the Republican president with the opportunity—and challenge—of seeking to replicate an early success of his presidency, the nomination and swift confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch to succeed the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Marc Short, Mr. Trump’s legislative affairs chief, said in an interview that he “would like to believe that Republican senators recognize” the opportunity to fulfill a longstanding GOP campaign pledge to remake the court.