RUTHFULLY YOURS

Historically, many Supreme Court nominations made in a President’s final year in office are rejected by the Senate. That started with John Quincy Adams and last occurred to Lyndon B. Johnson.

It is critically important that the Senate hold pro forma sessions, since President Barack Obama would be able to make a recess appointment to the Supreme Court if the Senate goes out of session. Currently, there is a five-day recess this week and a two-week recess scheduled for April. There have been twelve such recess appointments to the high court. A recess appointment would last until the end of the Senate’s next session.

Historically, most presidents select a nominee within a week of a Supreme Court vacancy. However, there have been several lengthy vacancies when the Senate refused to play ball with controversial presidents or controversial nominees.

President John Tyler had a particularly difficult time filling vacancies. Smith Thompson died in office December 18, 1943. His replacement, Samuel Nelson, was in office starting February 14, 1845. That’s a vacancy of 424 days. Henry Baldwin died in office April 21, 1844. His replacement, Robert Cooper, was in office starting August 4, 1846. This vacancy lasted 835 days because Tyler could not get the Senate to work with him. During Tyler’s presidency, the Senate rejected nine separate Supreme Court nominations!

Most recently, Abe Fortas resigned May 14, 1969. His replacement, Harry Blackmun, was in office starting June 9, 1970, making the gap just longer than a year.

Several pending cases were expected to be 5-4 decisions. Crucially, the immigration (DAPA) case, United States v. Texas et al., and the mandatory union dues case, Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and the Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Burwell cases on the contraception mandate accommodation.

Decisions that are tied with a 4-4 vote have no binding precedent and the decision of the lower court is upheld. This would be good in United States v. Texas et al., because the lower court’s decision was that states have standing to sue against an Obama policy that muzzles states from enforcing immigration laws.

Congress has frittered away virtually every constitutional power save one: the power of the Senate to deny presidential appointments to the federal bench. If Senate Republicans expect conservatives to ever trust them on anything, then they must decline to consider Obama’s nominee to replace Justice Scalia.

There is precedent for this. In 1968, when Republicans were a Senate minority possessing only the power of filibuster, Everett Dirksen prevented Lyndon Johnson from appointing Associate Justice Abe Fortas to replace retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren and then appointing Homer Thornbury to take Fortas’s seat as an associate justice.

Senate Minority Leader Dirksen did not run the Senate or control any Senate committees. Republicans, in fact, held only 36 Senate seats, and several of these were leftists. Yet Dirksen was able to cobble together enough senators to prevent Johnson from filling a Supreme Court office during a heated election year. The left, of course, squealed and yelled, but it lost, because Senate Republicans and a handful of Senate Democrats stood firm.

If Everett Dirksen, who was only a moderate conservative holding a very weak hand, was able to thwart LBJ, who had been Senate majority leader before he was vice president and who knew all the ropes and all the tricks of the Senate, then Senate Majority Leader McConnell clearly has the power to do the same.

In fact, all McConnell and the Republican leadership have to do is to decline to consider any nominee appointed by Obama. State clearly that the Senate is exercising its constitutional power and, unlike Obama who presumes powers he does not have, that the power to confirm or deny a presidential appointment is at the heart of the Senate’s control of the Executive Branch.

With the passing of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia we stand at a very sober moment for our nation, a moment that finds the US Constitution – and the idea of constitutionality in general – in a very fragile state. With the make-up of the US Supreme Court existing on a razor’s edge between the conflicting ideologies of Progressivism (which views the Constitution as malleable) and Constitutionalism (which sees the document at a limitation on government) what happens in the next months will serve to chart the course for our country. The two paths couldn’t be more different: one a pathway to national demise.

I am want to recall a passage from a speech that Ronald Reagan gave in 1964:

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

Today, with the passing of Justice Scalia, the Republican and Conservative members of the United States Senate have met up with their own “rendezvous with destiny.” They will soon be presented with a nominee to the US Supreme Court from President Obama, a Far-Left Progressive who has already seated two political activists to the Court. It will be the Senate’s duty – not their option, but their duty – to deny Mr. Obama another Progressive seat on the US Supreme Court.

Progressives by their very nature believe that the US Constitution is a flawed document; something to be improved, perfected and otherwise titrated to the needs of the times. That is anathema to what the Framers intended and history bears that out. The Framers intended for the US Constitution to be the “chains” that binds government to the service of the nation, not the service to the ideological and/or the few.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying:

“The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.”

http://www.wsj.com/articles/barack-obama-promises-to-nominate-successor-for-justice-antonin-scalia-1455417127?mod=trending_now_1

RANCHO MIRAGE, Calif.—The sudden vacancy on the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia presents President Barack Obama with both a historic opportunity and one of his steepest challenges during his last year in office.

Mr. Obama quickly sought to lay down his marker in what had already become a pitched political debate over Mr. Scalia’s successor in the hours after his death was announced Saturday.

The president stepped before the cameras during a golf vacation in California to make clear he wouldn’t leave Mr. Scalia’s vacancy for his successor to fill, as some Republicans have suggested. By addressing the matter immediately, Mr. Obama underscored how fiercely he intends to mount a public campaign to pressure the Senate to confirm the third Supreme Court nominee of his presidency.

“I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” Mr. Obama said Saturday. “There will be plenty of time for me to do so, and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.”

Mr. Obama will be the first president since Ronald Reagan, who nominated Mr. Scalia, to be tasked with filling three Supreme Court vacancies. He now faces a decision on what type of nominee to choose: a liberal, as desired by his Democratic Party base, or a moderate who may have a better chance of winning the 14 Republican votes needed to meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to secure confirmation. READ THE ENTIRE COLUMN AT THE SITE

UPDATE: CBS News is reporting that the FBI is investigating the incident as a lone wolf terror attack. Suspect is a Somali, Mohamed Barry:

CBS News has identified the suspect as Mohamed Barry, however neither 10TV nor Columbus Police have confirmed the suspect’s name. CBS News also reports Barry has a Somali background and may have traveled to Dubai in 2012.

Law enforcement tells them the incident appears to be the type of “lone wolf terrorist attacks they’re trying to stop.”

The FBI is assisting in the investigation.

Original post:

A suspect who attacked patrons and staff at the Nazareth Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, with a machete last night was shot and killed by police minutes later, and there are some indications that the attack may have been motivated by the owner’s Israeli heritage.

Four people were transported to the hospital, one critically injured. Victims were able to get video of the suspect’s car and a partial license plate. Police were able to locate the suspect’s vehicle and gave chase. After spinning the car out, the suspect emerged with both a machete and a knife and lunged at police, at which point the suspect was shot and killed.

We have a name of the suspect, but police so far have refused to confirm so we are holding it at this time.

At a press conference late last night, a police spokesman was asked by reporters about claims the suspect was on the terror watchlist:

A television ad for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign now airing in South Carolina shows the candidate declaring that “too many encounters with law enforcement end tragically.” She later adds: “We have to face up to the hard truth of injustice and systemic racism.”

Her Democratic presidential rival, Bernie Sanders, met with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday. Mr. Sanders then tweeted that “As President, let me be very clear that no one will fight harder to end racism and reform our broken criminal justice system than I will.” And he appeared on the TV talk show “The View” saying, “It is not acceptable to see unarmed people being shot by police officers.”

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally. CONTINUE READING AT THE SITE

Facebook soon to ban Gatestone? What you can do. Dear Friends, Last week, an important article, “Facebook’s War on Freedom of Speech” by Douglas Murray, detailed a new initiative by Facebook in Germany, to remove supposedly “racist” comments from Facebook. This initiative by Facebook at the moment appears to include anything critical of the EU’s […]

The mosquito species Aedes aegypti transmits viral diseases, including Zika, dengue, chikungunya, West Nile, and yellow fever, between human hosts. For most of these viral diseases, there are no vaccines and no effective medicines. So until recently, public-health officials have had to use old, low-tech approaches to controlling the mosquito vector and reducing the incidence of infections: pesticide sprays, public education about exposure (DEET, mosquito nets, and clothing that covers as much skin as possible), and control of breeding areas (water in flower pots, tires, drains, etc.).

Oxitec, a British subsidiary of the American company Intrexon, has created a new way to control Aedes aegypti. Male mosquitoes are bred in the laboratory with a specific genetic mutation that, in the absence of a certain chemical, causes their offspring to die before reaching maturity. Male mosquitoes do not bite, so their release presents no health risk, and, because their progeny die, the genetically engineered mosquitoes do not persist in the environment. Releasing the males over a period of several months causes a marked reduction in the mosquito population.

In field tests conducted in Brazil, the Cayman Islands, Malaysia, and Panama, Oxitec has shown that the release of these genetically engineered male mosquitoes has consistently reduced wild populations by more than 80 percent, and the most recent field trials show greater than 90 percent reduction. In 2014, on the basis of these field trials, Brazil’s regulatory authority approved the commercial release of these mosquitoes. Brazil approved Oxitec’s approach because the traditional approaches to mosquito control were failing to protect the country’s inhabitants from A. aegypti–borne viral diseases. The apparent association of Zika-virus infection with microcephaly in babies born to infected mothers has only added to the urgency.