RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/roe-was-never-law/

A controversial subject that should never have been wrested from the people in the states has now been returned to them.

There is no mincing words: The Supreme Court’s historic Dobbs ruling made Friday a great day for life.

A great day for the restoration of American constitutional law, too. And a great day for democracy in our republic. It marks a high moment for the United States Supreme Court, which has been tested as never before. It stood firm and yet restrained, acknowledging that the great public-policy decisions in our society are to be made by free, self-determining people, not unelected judges.

Barack Obama, perhaps the nation’s most solipsistic politician and ideologue, took only moments after the issuance of Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion to wail that the Supreme Court had relegated the most “intensely personal decision someone can make to the whims of politicians and ideologues.” If you’re keeping score, yes, this would be the same Barack Obama whose signature presidential “achievement” was radically expanded government control over the health sector, leaving more and more intensely personal decisions — decisions about actual health care, as opposed to the taking of unborn life under the guise of health care — at the whim of partisan Democrats and progressive bureaucrats.

The main point here, though, is not hypocrisy. It is hard-edged politics. The former president went directly to politics because, for abortion crusaders, there has never been anything else.

In Roe, seven willful politicians in robes usurped the power of the putatively sovereign states to regulate abortion. Unless a constitutional right was at stake, the federal judiciary had no business intruding on the internal governance of the states, particularly over matters of health and safety that are the traditional domain of the states. But the Constitution does not speak to abortion.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/bons-mots-and-bad-money-inflation/

I have often been struck by the number of pithy observations — revelatory, pointed or simply true — that were not said by the person to whom they are attributed. Vladimir Lenin apparently never said (in Russian or in English) that “the way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.”

Mark Twain, to whom many amusing remarks have been falsely attributed, apparently did not contend that reports of his death had been greatly exaggerated. Edmund Burke neither said nor wrote that evil would triumph if good men did nothing.

Churchill, like Twain a magnet for orphaned mots seeking parents, did not say that “the idea that a nation can tax itself into prosperity is one of the crudest delusions which has ever befuddled the human mind.”

Tocqueville, yet another favored repository of crisp admonitory apothegms, did not point out that “the American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”

One thing to note about these pairings of putative author and scintillating observation is how plausible the linkage always is. Lenin certainly could have made that remark about grinding the bourgeoisie: he was keen on deploying any available millstones to destroy the class he abominated. Unlike Chief Justice John Marshall, who pointed out during the economic crisis of 1819 the great danger that “the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” Lenin thought of its destructiveness as an advantage.

As for inflation, has anyone improved upon Ronald Reagan’s warning that “inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hitman”?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-progressives-get-wrong-about-overturning-roe-now-its-citizens-who-will-decide/ar-AAYPQUi

With the release of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, politicians and pundits went public with a parade of horribles – from the criminalization of contraceptives to the reversal of Brown v. Board of Education. In reality, the post-Roe world will look much like the Roe world for most citizens.

While this is a momentous decision, it is important to note what it does and does not do.

The decision itself was already largely known. It did not dramatically change since the leak of an earlier draft. The conservative majority held firm in declaring that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided: “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives.”

In the end, Chief Justice John Roberts cut a bit of a lonely figure in the mix of the court on the issue. His concurrence did not seriously question the majority view that Roe was not based on a good law. However, he would have stopped short of overturning the decision outright. It is the ultimate call of an incrementalist detached from the underlying constitutional interpretation.

The court now has a solid majority of justices who are more motivated by what they view as “first principles” than pragmatic concerns. From a court that has long used nuanced (and maddeningly vague) opinions to avoid major changes in constitutional doctrine, we now have clarity on this issue. It will return to the citizens of each state to decide.

The court anticipated the response to the opinion by those who “stoke unfounded fear that our decision will imperil … other rights.” The opinion expressly does not address contraception, same-sex marriage or other rights. 

That claim has always been absurd but has become a talking point on the left. After the leak of the draft opinion, the New York Times opinion editors warned that some states likely would outlaw interracial marriage if Roe v. Wade is overturned: “Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t.”

It takes considerable imagination because it is utter nonsense, though it must come as something of a surprise to Justice Clarence Thomas, given his interracial marriage, or to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, given her own interracial family.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/06/abortion-politics-at-a-late-stage/

“The Supreme Court’s decision to accept Alito’s draft has handed a lot of painful moral decisions to all the voters and legislators in fifty states. Many surprises lie ahead. But most Americans seem unlikely to endorse post- and partial-birth abortion with the nearly unanimous alacrity of the Senate Democrats.”

Now that the US Supreme Court has adopted Justice Alito’s leaked draft judgment and overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade precedent that found a constitutional right to abortion in the ‘penumbras’ of the US Constitution, it will be a revolution in American life. It will be a democratic revolution too, because it won’t outlaw abortion—as pro-choice protesters angrily claim—but instead transfer decisions on it from the US federal judiciary to the voters and legislators of the fifty states.

Doubtless that will bring us many, various and unpredictable legal surprises. For, though you would never guess it from the media, neither most Americans nor other Westerners think or know a great deal about abortion law. Sixteen years ago, I described my experiences when the topic was raised over dinner tables in Washington and Paris:

Washington liberal: “Mr O’Sullivan, our American obsession with abortion is so embarrassing. Why can’t we be like Europe? They’re much more sophisticated. It’s not even a political issue there. Please pass the blue sweetener.”

Myself: “Well, that may be because the laws in most European countries are much stricter than those in the US. Women have no constitutional right to an abortion. In Britain, for instance, except in cases of severe handicap, abortions are not permitted after the twenty-fourth week of pregnancy.”

Washington liberal: “What! That’s barbaric.”

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-6-23-progressive-utopian-vision-versus-the-constitution

It’s already been a bad week in the Supreme Court for progressive shibboleths. Just today, the key provision of New York’s gun restriction regime — under which the authorities had discretion to deny you a gun permit if they thought the reason you gave for wanting one was not good enough — got struck down under the Second Amendment. For what it’s worth, I’ve long thought that that provision was obviously unconstitutional, and that the Second Circuit’s decision upholding it was not a good faith application of existing Supreme Court precedent. In practice, the authorities denied almost all requests for gun permits except from politicians, big political donors (to Democrats) and celebrities. The decision has caused a good deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth over in the precincts of the Left.

And there’s plenty more to come. Without doubt you are already familiar with the case involving Mississippi’s abortion law, likely to spell the end of the long reign of Roe v. Wade. But today I’m going to focus on another high-impact case, West Virginia v. EPA. This one was argued back in February, but the decision still has not been issued. They tend to issue the decisions in the most important cases at the very end. In the West Virginia case, there is significant potential that the Supreme Court could significantly rein in the regulatory assault that the Biden Administration is currently waging against the fossil fuel industries, and maybe some other regulatory assaults as well.

You can tell that there is concern over this one because the New York Times is not waiting around for the decision to start its parade of hit pieces. On Monday, the lead story, occupying about half of the front page, dealt with this case, with the headline “Republican Drive to Tilt Courts Against Climate Action Reaches a Crucial Moment.” The byline is Coral Davenport.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3535437-bidens-war-on-oil-is-funding-putins-war-on-ukraine/

President Biden’s bizarre and implacable hostility to U.S. oil producers is helping Russia win its war against Ukraine.

No joke, as Biden might say. Not only has the president’s unswerving effort to squash domestic oil and gas production caused higher prices for consumers, a looming recession as the Federal Reserve struggles to dampen inflation and disastrously low approval ratings, it is also funding Russia’s destruction of its neighbor.

The U.S. is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. Because of the COVID-19 shutdowns, but also because of the many restrictions and costs piled onto domestic producers by the Biden administration, and in recognition of those likely to follow, U.S. output has declined from 13.1 million barrels per day in February 2020 to 11.9 mb/d today.

Taking over 1 million barrels per day off the world market amid what was until recently a global economic expansion has helped boost prices. And higher prices are funding Putin’s war with Ukraine.

Consider: On June 10 the central bank of Russia dropped its key lending rate by 150 basis points, the fourth such cut in the past few months.

This even as financial authorities around the world, including in the U.S., are pushing rates higher to dampen demand and squash inflation.

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/at-the-supreme-court-with-pro-life-democrats/

When Cockburn took a rainy-day stroll past the United States Supreme Court on Thursday, he didn’t expect to see many people. To his surprise, there were several protesters outside, anticipating a decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could overturn Roe v. Wade.

Cockburn decided to stop and chat with both pro-life and pro-choice demonstrators, briefly catching interviews between shouting matches laced with obscenities and references to genitalia.

“Roe is a barbaric remnant of a eugenic past. [It’s] responsible for the murder of 60 million babies,” said Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder and executive director of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.“I believe in equity, nonviolence, and nondiscrimination. We can’t build a better world on top of dead babies.” Bukovina was one of two women who recently took home a box that was being shipped away from a Planned Parenthood clinic and found five dead babies inside.

Cockburn was astonished to see that a plurality of pro-life protesters were openly progressive or waved banners touting the Democratic Party. One of them, John Quinn, a 26-year-old affiliate of Democrats for Life, said, “We want to have a secular conversation. It is important to support women, but abortion is a violent solution, and it doesn’t solve poverty.”

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/roe-v-wade-gone-now-what/

With the recent ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Cockburn figures it’s time to draw lines in the sand… or at least around the states. Following the decision, some states will serve as sanctuaries for the unborn, while others will be sanctuaries for women seeking abortions, sometimes right up until the moment of birth.

Let’s start with the states that have “trigger laws” to ban abortion if Roe is overturned. They are Arkansas, Kentucky, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming and Utah.

The states that codify abortion into law irrespective of the Supreme Court are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Washington, DC.

In other words, abortion states outnumber pro-life states eighteen to thirteen, while the rest have neither an immediate ban nor a codification in place. For these states, the heightened tensions will make for a vibrant debate in the coming days. People on both sides of the issue will be fighting vehemently, and abortion will become a much larger political issue in elections to come.

There are others among the nineteen states without “trigger laws” that may soon restrict abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a Planned Parenthood-funded pro-choice “think tank,” states that may act against abortion in the coming days are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Some of these states have pre-Roe legislation that will come back into effect, such as Arizona and Michigan, while others have laws that prevent abortions six weeks after pregnancy, such as South Carolina and Ohio

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/06/biden_declares_war_on_nicotine_while_giving_addicts_crack_pipes.html

As Americans grapple with sky-high prices at the pump, the worst rate of inflation in more than four decades, increasing crime, a wide-open southern border, a surge in fentanyl deaths, a baby formula shortage, a looming food crisis, a plunging stock market, rolling brownouts, and many other pressing problems, the Biden administration has set its sights on waging war on nicotine.

This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it “plans to develop a proposed product standard that would establish a maximum nicotine level to reduce the addictiveness of cigarettes and certain other combusted tobacco products” and that it has “issued marketing denial orders (MDOs) to JUUL Labs Inc. for all of their products currently marketed in the United States.”

For those keeping track, these anti-nicotine measures follow the Biden administration’s proposal to ban menthol cigarettes, which was announced by the FDA in April.

This makes me wonder if the FDA will also ban sugar-laden foods and drinks, seeing as how sugar is extremely addictive and too much sugar intake leads to obesity, diabetes, heart problems, and all other types of medical maladies.

Interestingly, as the FDA seeks to minimize nicotine content in cigarettes and outright ban all JUUL vaping products, it admits that, “While nicotine is not what makes smoking cigarettes so toxic, it’s the ingredient that makes it very hard to quit smoking.”

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/23/the-accelerating-purge/

One week after a team of thugs working for Democratic Party activist Stephen Colbert were arrested for illegally entering a Capitol building in order to record themselves stalking Republican congressional leaders, news coverage of the incident has all but disappeared. Neither the U.S. Capitol Police, the arresting agency, nor the Department of Justice has produced any details of the gang’s unauthorized incursion into two Capitol buildings with the blessing of Representative Adam Schiff (R-Calif.) and two other Democratic House members.

It appears the Capitol Police chief has not yet responded to a demand by Reps. James Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) for all footage, photographs, and witness statements documenting the crew’s activities on June 16 including accusations they banged on the doors of female legislators such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.); it further appears that no one is demanding a congressional ethics investigation into Schiff’s participation in leading a “tour” of Colbert’s insurrectionists through the buildings, including after hours. Following a brief detainment, Colbert’s thugs went home, spared pre-dawn raids by armed FBI agents and days, if not months, of incarceration while a federal judge determines whether they should stay behind bars awaiting trial.

In fact, Colbert’s insurrectionists will avoid the kangaroo court known as the D.C. District Court overseeing hundreds of similar charges related to the January 6 protest on Capitol Hill. Fox News reported on Thursday that the defendants associated with Colbert’s show will appear in D.C. Superior Court in late July. (The court’s website contains no information about the case.) Simply put, every January 6 case is handled as a federal crime while the conduct of Team Colbert is considered a local offense, even though it occurred in the exact same venue.