RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-court-after-kennedy-1530142949

Anthony Kennedy acted in the best interests of the Supreme Court and his own legacy Wednesday by deciding to step down after 30 years as an Associate Justice. The fight to replace him was always going to be titanic, and by retiring on July 31 he gives a Republican President and Senate an opening to nominate and confirm a replacement with the best chance of keeping the Court tethered to the Constitution.

The raw political reality is that Democrats will refuse to confirm any nominee likely to be chosen by Donald Trump if they win Senate control in November. They are still furious that Senate Republicans refused to confirm Merrick Garland in 2016 after the death of Antonin Scalia, and the political left would insist that they return the favor through 2020, and 2024 if they have to.

That could leave the Court with eight Justices for as long as three years or more, with a 4-4 ideological split on many contentious issues. The Court now has a chance for a full complement again by the start of its October term. The 81-year-old Justice Kennedy has done right by the country and the Court.

A Republican nominee also offers the best chance to sustain Justice Kennedy’s legacy, despite the fear and loathing you hear on the left. Democrats are already predicting the demise of abortion rights, the end of gay marriage, and no doubt we’ll be hearing about the revival of Dred Scott before the confirmation hearings on Justice Kennedy’s replacement are over. But that overlooks the entirety of Justice Kennedy’s jurisprudence, which is far richer than the cultural cases like Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Obergefell v. Hodges for which he is celebrated on the left.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rule-of-law-prevails-in-the-travel-ban-case-1530139894

The judicial “resistance” to President Trump suffered a well-deserved defeat in the Supreme Court’s “travel ban” ruling, Trump v. Hawaii. At issue was Mr. Trump’s order limiting entry to the U.S. of nationals from eight (now seven) countries that are unwilling or unable to cooperate sufficiently in U.S. antiterrorist screening efforts. The plaintiffs challenged the order on several grounds, arguing that it exceeded the president’s authority and was animated by anti-Muslim bias, violating the First Amendment. (Six of the eight covered countries are mostly Muslim.) The court upheld Mr. Trump’s order 5-4.

Whatever one thinks of the travel ban as policy, the ruling is an important victory for the rule of law. Federal trial and appellate courts have persistently enjoined Mr. Trump’s orders, defying clear Supreme Court precedent supporting his power to limit the entry of aliens. The decision has removed all doubt that the president’s orders are lawful under both the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Constitution.

The justices made short work of the plaintiffs’ statutory claims, affirming that the Immigration and Nationality Act’s plain language gives the president the power to deny “any aliens or any class of aliens” entry to the U.S. whenever he finds that letting them in “would be detrimental” to U.S. interests. This provision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “exudes deference to the President in every clause.” Mr. Trump’s proclamation, the justices concluded, was “well within this comprehensive delegation.” The court also concluded that a “searching inquiry” into the president’s justifications for the order, such as the lower courts in this case conducted, is inconsistent with both the statute and “the deference traditionally accorded the President in this sphere”—namely “international affairs and national security.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/27/it-is-dangerous-to-be-

This weekend, Sarah Sanders Huckabee and her family were thrown out of a Virginia restaurant after a vote by the staff.

Do not trivialize this as a failure of civility, or a small incident in the soap opera of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Victor Davis Hanson says it will pass. It is not passing. It is growing. This is more than an assault on the Trump Administration; it is an assault on all of us.

Everywhere, in city, town, and country, Republicans keep their mouths shut among their neighbors, at dinner parties, at community gatherings, at their workplaces. To be openly Republican is to lose old friends, to alienate neighbors, to risk losing your job or career. Everyone on the Right has experienced this.

President Trump is adept at protecting himself. His policy successes speak louder than the hysteria. What about the rest of us? Ordinary people are vulnerable.

If a highly qualified job candidate votes Republican, his or her chance of employment shrinks to 7 percent in journalism, 3 percent in Ivy League colleges, 7 percent in Hollywood, and 10 percent in Silicon Valley.

Fields that create our educational, cultural, and technological world are deprived of the talent pool of roughly half the country. It also means the country is subjected to political thought control in precisely the fields that determine people’s cultural norms and values and shape their politics.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/supreme-court-nifla-becerra-ruling-free-speech/

The Supreme Court has issued its decision in NIFLA v. Becerra, a 5–4 vote holding that the state of California cannot compel pregnancy-resource centers to advertise for the state’s abortion services. We applaud this decision, which represents a considerable victory for both the right to free speech and the conscience rights of pro-life Americans.

The case concerned California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which mandated that both licensed and unlicensed women’s-health clinics (crisis-pregnancy or pregnancy-resource centers) that don’t perform abortions must provide a pre-written notice to clients:

California has public programs that provide immediate free or low-cost access to comprehensive family planning services (including all FDA-approved methods of contraception), prenatal care, and abortion for eligible women. To determine whether you qualify, contact the county social services office at [insert the telephone number].

Though the law related specifically to abortion, free speech was the fundamental issue at stake. This being so, the vote should not have been a narrow one. Alas, four of the Court’s justices were so hell-bent on promoting the manufactured right to abortion that they were prepared to jettison a real, preeminent, foundational liberty.

Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion cast the case more clearly, noting that there exists no such category in America as “professional speech” and concluding that to invent one would “give the States unfettered power to reduce a group’s First Amendment rights by simply imposing a licensing requirement.” In a short concurrence, Justice Kennedy dispensed with the idea that the First Amendment is outmoded. The viewpoint discrimination inherent in the FACT Act was “a matter of serious constitutional concern,” Kennedy concluded, and the law served as “a paradigmatic example of the serious threat presented when government seeks to impose its own message in the place of individual speech, thought, and expression.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-va-continues-a-centuries-long-history-of-scandal-1530052942

When Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin was ousted earlier this year, most of Washington wrote it off as another result of President Trump’s chaotic management style. Perhaps, but the change also reflects the state of pandemonium long associated with the VA. Caring for veterans has never been a straightforward task in the U.S.

Since its elevation to a cabinet-level department in 1989, the VA has shed secretaries faster than the Praetorian Guard knocked off Roman emperors. Seven of its nine confirmed secretaries have resigned out of frustration or over scandal. The secretary’s employment background hasn’t made a difference. Whether he came from the military, medicine, the corporate world or Congress, the result has largely been the same: Exit stage right, with little applause from veteran-service organizations or the broader public.

Scandals plagued veteran affairs before an official agency even existed. Fraud, overspending and waste nearly ended the relatively modest veterans pension program in 1820. The same trio of ills showed up in post-Civil War veterans programs. By 1921 Congress established the Veterans Bureau, which consolidated the majority of existing veterans programs. President Harding nominated Col. Charles Forbes to lead the bureau, and Congress tasked him with building hospitals. Forbes promptly squandered the bureau’s budget, was relieved of his duties, and served time at the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan., for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government.
A Department of Veterans Affairs health-care center in Ann Arbor, Mich. Photo: istock/getty images

In 1924 Brig. Gen. Frank T. Hines attempted reform, reorganizing the Veterans Bureau into six services—medical and rehabilitation, claims and insurance, finance, supply, planning, and control. By 1930, feeling political heat from the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars, President Hoover decided that more was necessary to “coordinate Government activities affecting war veterans.” He created the Veterans Administration as an independent federal body, replacing three bureaus then separately overseeing all veterans programs. Two years later tens of thousands of veterans protested at the Capitol in what became known as the Bonus March. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.thepostemail.com/

In Hillary’s cringe-producing appearances over the past year and a half––since she lost the U.S. presidency in 2016 to Donald J. Trump––she has offered upward of 38 excuses to rationalize her loss, which Amanda Prestigiacomo has documented here exquisitely.

Among those excuses were sexism, the mainstream media, the electoral system, the Democratic National Committee, the Democrat Party, suburban women, stupid Americans, technology, deplorables, and, laughably, that she was “too honest.”

You get the picture––a classic, clinical case of paranoia and delusional thinking.

Oops…did I say 38 excuses? Make that 39! At a Shared Value Leadership Summit in New York City this past April, Hillary told the audience that she lost because she was a capitalist!

Right…and Donald Trump won because he’s a Communist!

Oops…did I say 39 excuses? Here, lawyer and Fox News commentator Gregg Jarrett lists 56 of Hillary’s excuses…and counting!

Among that Mt. Kilimanjaro of Hillary’s excuses, Jarrett lists: racism, misogyny, James Comey, the FBI, Russians, Vladimir Putin, WikiLeaks, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Twitter, Netflix, Chief Justice John Roberts, and The Drudge Report.

You get the picture––a classic case of Hillary’s pathological inability to look in the mirror!

Actually, the genuinely pitiful and self-deluding Hillary is so blind to her own behavior and so clueless about even the concept of accountability that she has spent her entire adult life not seeing what is obvious to literally everyone in the world!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-supreme-court-rises-above-1530054005

Donald Trump is so polarizing that a test of his Presidency is whether American institutions can keep their bearings and hold to principle despite the passions of the moment. Five Supreme Court Justices did the country a service on Tuesday by sticking to the Constitution and rule of law on executive power rather than succumb to the temptation to rebuke an unpopular President’s dubious policy.

A 5-4 majority upheld Mr. Trump’s third “travel ban” from 2017 that restricted entry to America from eight countries. The ban in our view isn’t necessary, and the Court made no judgment on the policy merits. But Chief Justice John Roberts and four conservative Justices found that the ban falls well within the President’s core national-security powers. This is less a victory for Mr. Trump than for the ability of future Presidents to defend the country.

Hawaii (Hawaii v. Trump) argued that Mr. Trump exceeded the authority delegated to him by Congress in the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and that his order was a pretext for excluding Muslims. But the Chief Justice ruled that the INA grants the President broad discretion to restrict the entry of aliens whenever he finds it “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

https://spectator.org/unmasked-americas-real-fascists/
From the Red Hen to Hollywood, the mask comes off.

They come in all different disguises.

* Protesters disrupting the Mexican restaurant meal of a Cabinet Secretary, forcing her to leave.

* The owner of an innocent-sounding “Red Hen” restaurant in Lexington, Virginia boasting that she refused to serve the presidential press secretary Sarah Sanders and asked her to leave. Sanders quite politely did. Now we learn from Sanders’ Dad, Governor Mike Huckabee, that when Sanders did as requested and went to another nearby restaurant — the angry Red Hen owner followed and kept harassing her. (Note: At press time I had heard that Sanders herself was present at another restaurant when harassed again by the owner of the Red Hen. This was later clarified. So to update correctly: Sanders and husband went home after the incident at the Red Hen, but the family with her stayed and it is they who were harassed a second time, not Sanders.)

* A Florida Democratic Party activist threatened Republican Congressman Brian Mast’s children, saying to one of the Congressman’s interns: “If you are going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids.” News reports note that the man had called the Congressman’s office 478 times.

http://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/394173-supreme-court-hands-trump-predictable-win-on-travel-ban

The Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Hawaii today was more than a predictable reversal of the 9th Circuit appeals court in its dubious ruling that the travel ban was unconstitutional. As some of us noted from the outset of this litigation, the precedent heavily favored President Trump.

What was unprecedented was the degree to which courts relied on campaign statements and tweets by Trump to rule that the entry limits were based on religious animus. The ruling properly returns the courts, and others, to basic principles of legal process. Call it “The Red Hen moment” for the courts, where judges, appalled by Trump’s inflammatory and reckless comments against Muslims, refused to extend him the same deference shown to predecessors like former President Obama. The response from judges, however, seemed more visceral than analytical in ignoring the nondiscriminatory rationales cited by agencies for the policy.

The Supreme Court’s decision is, obviously, a major win for Trump, but it also is a major victory for those who believe courts must rule within the confines of the traditional record of review. CNN was quick to declare that this presidential order was “very different” from the original order. Despite my criticism of the original order — which was poorly drafted, poorly executed and poorly defended — it is not true that this decision was based on different questions. The challengers emphasized that the third order was based on the same threshold questions raised in the first order. The Supreme Court specifically hit the same flaw found in the first, second and third opinions, which was the reliance on the statements made by Trump on the campaign and over Twitter.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/a_double_injustice_throws_a_scare_into_the_nations_judges.html

The June 5 voter recall of Judge Aaron Persky once again brings the Brock Turner 2015 rape case fiasco into the news. Turner, a student-athlete at Stanford, was prosecuted and sentenced for sexually assaulting a young woman at a drunken frat party. The particulars of the case were ambiguous from the start. Both participants in the sexual encounter were heavily intoxicated, and the woman claimed not to remember what had happened. No one saw the two leave the fraternity house. Turner was fully clothed when he was spotted lying on, and presumably molesting, the woman, AKA “Emily Doe,” by two passing Swedish bicyclists in the early hours of the morning – not an especially good time, given the hour and a nocturnal peloton, for accurate observation.

Many other elements of the case were equally problematic: the woman was already in a state of partial inebriation when she was driven – irresponsibly, in my opinion – by her mother to the party; she chatted to her boyfriend on her cell phone just prior to leaving with Turner on their midnight rendezvous, indicating that she was still more or less compos; the police report swarmed with lurid assumptions that could not be proven or were merely inferential; and much more, detailed both in my previous article and my wife Janice Fiamengo’s video on the subject.

Anyone interested in the truth should examine the court documents, all 471 pages, replete with inconsistencies, unverifiable interpretation, bias, conjecture, and twisted logic, before rendering judgment. Here is where the crux of the issue resides, not in the stanchless profusion of articles, blogs, reports, tweets, and Facebook postings that minister to unfounded righteous indignation and accusations of rape or assault. The lede in The Independent, to take just one example among many, already assumed Turner’s guilt and the judge’s complicity, calling the sentence “lenient” and Turner a “rapist” – the first a matter of opinion and the latter provably false.