RUTHFULLY YOURS

When the left sputters about the importance of getting a prompt vote on an Obama nominee, let’s just remind them about Judge Priscilla Owen.

Owen was a moderate and she was highly rated. She was also no Alito, Bork or Thomas. But when she was nominated for the Fifth Circuit in the spring of ’01, Senate Democrats denied her a vote for four years until the spring of ’05. When the vote finally came up, Obama voted against her.

That’s the length of an entire presidential term. This wasn’t running out the clock on a lame duck presidency. Senate Democrats refused the “up and down vote” they’re demanding to a nominee for 4 years. They filibustered her and threw tantrums that would have embarrassed a six-year-old.

Both Owen and Estrada were originally nominated by President Bush May 9, 2001.

“They have been waiting almost two years for a vote,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said May 1 before the vote. “Both were rated ‘well-qualified’ by the American Bar Association. That is the highest possible rating that the American Bar Association gives. It is also, according to Democrats, the gold standard that they would use to judge whether nominees were qualified.”

Democrats also are subverting “the spoken will of the people,” Land said, noting that voters gave President Bush “an unprecedented mid-term gain in the Senate and the House” in 2002.

Instead of “bowing to the clearly expressed will of the people,” Land said, the Democrats have “carried their obstructionist tactics to new lows.”

And what crime did Owen commit?

Owen is a 10-year veteran of the Texas Supreme Court who won her last re-election campaign with 84 percent of the vote. When Bush nominated her for the federal bench, the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary unanimously gave her its highest rating.

On a hot day in June, the grandson of a bank president took to the floor of the Senate to denounce the daughter of sharecroppers. “I feel compelled to rise on this issue to express, in the strongest terms, my opposition to the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit,” Senator Obama said.

Born in segregated Alabama, Janice Rogers Brown had been a leftist like Obama before becoming conservative. When Obama rose to denounce the respected African-American jurist for her political views it had been almost a full two years since President Bush had nominated her in the summer of ’03.

Obama had arrived a few months earlier on his way to the White House and was eager to impress his left-wing backers with his political radicalism. He held forth complaining that Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who had gone to segregated schools and become the first African-American woman on the California Supreme Court, was guilty of “an unyielding belief in an unfettered free market.”

And he filibustered Judge Brown, along with other nominee, trying to deny them a vote.

“She has equated altruism with communism. She equates even the most modest efforts to level life’s playing field with somehow inhibiting our liberty,” he fumed.

Brown, who due to her family background knew far more of slavery than Obama, had indeed warned about the dangers of a powerful government. “In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate — the drug of choice — for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.”

Democrats are giddy over the prospect of President Obama replacing conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal.

But Republicans are equally adamant about blocking Obama’s lame-duck appointment. “This vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president,” says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It’s rare that a president makes a Supreme Court appointment during his last months in office. But timing’s not the critical issue. The real outrage is the Democrats’ baseless claim that Obama’s promised nominee should have an automatic green light to the bench.

Party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz urged the Senate to move quickly, “as our founders intended,” and not be “twisted by politics.”

Hillary Clinton says any obstruction would “dishonor our Constitution.” Sorry, that’s not what the Constitution says.

Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders also insists it would be wrong to delay Obama’s court pick for “overtly political reasons.”

All these politicians need a history lesson. Claiming the Senate’s duty is to rubber stamp any “qualified” nominee is pure fiction.

When immigration is discussed publicly, most of the news reports and most of the statements made by politicians focus on the presence of illegal aliens in the United States while problems within legal side of the issue are ignored. Additionally, most of these discussions begin by talking about the lack of security to be found along the U.S./Mexican border while ignoring the other dysfunctional components of the immigration system.

There is no doubt that the U.S./Mexican border lacks meaningful integrity. There is also no doubt that the Mexican border must be secured- however, simply securing that border will not end the immigration crisis and not eliminate the threats posed by international terrorists and transnational criminals.

Incredibly the Obama administration has made it all but impossible for the valiant Border Patrol agents along that border to do their jobs. On February 4, 2016 the Washington Examiner posted the report, “Border agent: ‘We might as well abolish our immigration laws altogether’” in which the president of the National Council of the Border Patrol testified before a congressional hearing on the restrictions placed on the Border Patrol to make it all but impossible for them to take illegal aliens into custody or even process them for future hearings.

If a private company dumped three million gallons of toxic sludge into Colorado waterways, we’d be flooded with daily media updates for months. Yet the press has by now forgotten the disaster unleashed in August when EPA contractors punctured an abandoned mine. New evidence suggests the government isn’t coming clean about what happened.

The House Natural Resources Committee last week released a report detailing EPA’s cascade of failures that resulted in the Aug. 5 blowout of the Gold King Mine, which unloaded 880,000 pounds of metals into the nearby Animas River and other waters.

EPA planned its disastrous investigation of the mine for years, not that you’d know: The agency assumed a layout of the area that contradicted public records, including the remarkable conclusion that a drain ran near the ceiling of the mine’s entrance. This led EPA to believe that water backed up only about half the tunnel. The agency didn’t test the water pressure, a precaution that would have prevented the gusher. EPA hasn’t explained this decision, and emails obtained by the committee show the on-site coordinator knew there was “some pressure.”

The crew made more bad decisions than characters in a horror movie. About a week before the blowout, the on-site coordinator went on vacation and left instructions that his replacement seems to have ditched. For example: Don’t dig toward the tunnel floor unless you have a pump handy. The crew pressed downward without a pump and intentionally unearthed the mine’s plug. “What exactly they expected to happen remains unclear,” the report concludes. The Interior Department now euphemistically calls this series of events an “excavation induced failure.” READ MORE AT SITE

US Marshals Service arrested a Houston man for allegedly failing to repay a $1500 federal student loan that he had received in 1987. According to Paul Aker, he was arrested at his home last week by a group of seven armed deputy US Marshals. He was then taken to a local federal court, where he signed a payment plan for the nearly 30-year-old loan.

U.S. House Rep. Gene Green (D-TX) said that the federal government is recurring to private debt collectors to hunt down debtors. The collectors are obtaining judgements in federal courts and are thus enabled to seek debtors’ arrest by federal marshals. Green said “There’s bound to be a better way to collect a student debt.”

Media reports contend that federal marshals deliver between 1200 to 1500 warrants per year throughout the United States to persons who have not repaid their federal student loans.

According to a reporter for Fox 26 news, the marshals arrived at Akers’ home in “combat gear and automatic weapons.”

Aker expressed incredulity that he had to repay his loan. He said, “I’m home. I haven’t done anything. Why are there marshals on my door?” When he was brought before a federal judge in Houston, Akers said it was “mind-boggling” that he was required to make a payment agreement for the money he owed. He also claimed that he was not read out his Miranda rights nor offered any legal representation. Akers claimed that he had never received a notice of default on the loan for 30 years.

I’m sorry that the crucial importance of Justice Scalia’s now-vacant seat on the Supreme Court meant that the heated battle over filling it was already well underway while most of us, reeling from the profound loss, craved a respectable interval to console his loved ones and reflect on his epic legacy. Yet when I groused to a friend about the unseemliness of it all early Saturday evening, I was gently admonished with this thought: Antonin Scalia loved America, lived to preserve what was great about America, accomplished more in that regard than almost anyone in our history, and would have hoped that we’d follow that example — not just honor his legacy but act on it.

So right.

Thus, a few thoughts about the nomination battle that should not happen.

Of course President Obama is going to propose a nominee. It is a legitimate exercise of his authority to do so. But it is also a legitimate exercise of the Senate’s authority not to entertain the nomination. That is clear from the Constitution’s plain language and attested to by the history of Democratic obstruction of judicial nominees by senators named Obama, Clinton, Schumer, Leahy, et al.

The presumption that a president is entitled to his nominees if they satisfy basic criteria of competence and probity applies to executive-branch officers, not judges. Officers of the executive branch exercise the president’s power and are removable at the president’s pleasure, so naturally the president is entitled to deference in this area — although (a) not if the nominee has a history of misconduct (see Eric Holder), (b) not if he nominates someone who says she will support executive-branch lawlessness (see Loretta Lynch), and (c) there cannot be unilateral surrender — if Democrats reject executive nominees for philosophical reasons, Republicans would be foolish not to respond in kind.

Judicial nominations are a different matter entirely.

Even in traditional, pre-Bork times, the courts were a discrete branch of government. Judges get lifetime appointments that stretch well beyond the presidency in which they are nominated, and far from wielding the president’s power, they are often a check on the president’s abuse of that power. So clearly, even before 1987, the president would not be entitled to the kind of deference that he deserves on executive appointments.

No. 1: No nominee for the high court can get through the Senate before the election. No one.

No. 2: President Obama and the Democratic candidates for president know that. So do Republicans. All God’s children know it.
No. 3: Since the nominee will not be approved, Obama will use the opportunity to advance other goals. He will propose someone who burnishes his own progressive credentials and shows why control of the court depends on the November election. Putting Senate Republicans in an awkward position would be a nice bonus. But the target is November.

No. 4: Obama will nominate someone whose demographic characteristics help in the contests for president and U.S. Senate. That is not just his main criterion. It is his only one. The candidate could be from a purple state. Or a Latino. Or openly gay. Having finished law school would be a plus.

Hillary Clinton had endorsed forcing women to register for a draft. Now the issue is taking on new urgency. Despite the left’s anti-draft posturing, it has fond memories of its protests during the Vietnam War and it is the biggest supporter of bringing back the draft. Proposals to move to a draft army invariably come from Democrats in Congress and left-wing pundits who believe that a draft will create a higher barrier to any future conflict. Forcing women to register raises the barrier even higher.

And anything that makes it harder for the military to function properly is also part of that agenda.

But the debate over the role of women in the military is also a subset of the bigger debate about the role of our military. The military no longer exists to win wars or even to fight them.

Nobody thinks that Obama will fight China if it tries to take Taiwan or even Japan. If North Korea attacks, our people will have no air support while Kerry pleads with Kim Jong Un to allow them to be evacuated. Obama refused to provide military equipment to Ukraine. If Russian troops march into Poland, Putin knows quite well that NATO or no NATO, we won’t be there.

A global warming treaty, no matter how invalid and unenforceable, will be zealously followed by the White House to the letter. But security agreements and defense pacts are utterly worthless.

Obama is not going to stand up to any major power. That’s a given. He’ll deliver another speech explaining that they’ve isolated themselves and are on the wrong side of history. But that fighting them would only make matters worse. Unless Europe starts deporting Muslims, we are not going to be fighting any world powers or even any countries with any military capabilities worth mentioning.

The sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia has sharpened the divide between the progressives’ idea of technocratic federal power, and the Constitution’s limited government that Scalia eloquently championed for almost 30 years. This division has a long history that transcends the failed presidency of Barack Obama.

The Democratic Party grew out of opposition to the elitist Federalists, whose president John Adams was known as “His Rotundity” for his girth and alleged aristocratic tendencies. James Madison in 1792 established the contrast between the two parties that persists to this day: the Federalists were “more partial to the opulent,” and believed that “government can be carried on only by the pageantry of rank, [and] the influence of money and emoluments.” Those who would become Democrats, Madison wrote, believed “in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves,” and he charged that power lodged “into the hands of the few” is “an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” In short, the Democrats were about power to the people rather than to privileged elites.

Two centuries later, the Democratic Party still uses the rhetoric of democracy, and castigates the Republicans as the tools of greedy corporations and crypto-fascist plutocrats––“Wall Street” and the “Koch brothers” being the shorthand for this nefarious cabal. Yet in their policies and practices, the Democrats are now the true elitists who have narrowed government “into the hands of the few,” even within their own party. Consider the recent two presidential primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire. In the popular vote Bernie Sanders tied Hillary in Iowa and wiped her out in New Hampshire. Yet Hillary ended up with more delegates––394 to Sanders’ 44. Why? Because there are 712 “superdelegates,” Congressmen, governors, some mayors, and certain party apparatchiks. Each superdelegate is worth about 10,000 of one citizen’s vote. So much for believing “mankind are capable of governing themselves.”

Much more dangerous for the country has been the consolidation and concentration of power in the federal government, and its metastasizing regulatory agencies and expansive presidential reach, a goal of progressive ideology starting with Theodore Roosevelt. Of course, early progressives continued to use democratic rhetoric to mask this undemocratic inflation of the chief executive’s constitutional authority, and their tyrannical assaults on the people’s autonomy and freedom. Roosevelt spoke of the “triumph of a real democracy,” and Woodrow Wilson touted the “sovereignty of self-governing peoples.” Opposed to this “people” were the “sinister special interests” that “beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice,” as Roosevelt put it, and the “invisible empire” of “bosses and their employers, the special interests,” in Wilson’s words. Sound familiar?