RUTHFULLY YOURS

House Democrats made complete fools of themselves with their sit-in temper tantrum this week. Shouting their demands for an immediate vote on gun control legislation – apparently their only “serious” answer to global Islamic jihad – the Democratic disrupters caused pandemonium on the House floor on Wednesday. They sought to paralyze House proceedings with shouts of “No bill, No break!” Representative Maxine Waters of California proclaimed, “I’m prepared to stand here until hell freezes over.” Civil rights hero Representative John Lewis of Georgia declared, “we have to occupy the floor of the House until there’s action.”

The anarchist spirits of Occupy Wall Street and student campus occupations are alive and well in the House Democratic caucus. They shed their responsibilities by flagrantly violating the rules of the institution to which they were elected, intent on creating a media spectacle. They went so far as to use social media video tools to broadcast their sit-in, after the chamber’s official cameras had been turned off.

Even when the House Republican leadership called it a day and adjourned the House until after the 4th of July weekend, the Democrats pressed on with their occupation. Before that, as the real adult leader in the room, Speaker Paul Ryan had managed, despite the mayhem, to push through a major appropriations bill that included funding for combating the Zika virus. At least one of the House leaders was thinking of the welfare of the American people. It certainly was not the Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who even refused to leave the House floor temporarily when politely asked to do so by an officer so that the daily security sweep could be conducted.

Any day now the Supreme Court will rule on President Obama’s go-it-alone executive action protecting millions of undocumented persons against deportation. However it comes down, the decision will again inflame this bitterly divided nation; it will also remind moody Republicans why they must absolutely vote for Donald Trump.

Heads-up to Republicans queasy about Trump: there is no question – none at all – that Hillary Clinton’s picks to fill the seat of deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and other judges who may shortly retire would embed and extend President Obama’s progressive agenda for decades to come. If voters don’t like Obama’s single-handed upending of our immigration laws, his push towards Big Labor, or if they disagree with his purposeful extermination of U.S. fossil fuels industries, Donald Trump is their only choice.

Related: Here’s Why the GOP Dug in Its Heels on SCOTUS Nominations

Justice Ruth Ginsberg is 83 years old, Anthony Kennedy is two months away from turning 80, Clarence Thomas is nearly 68 and Stephen Breyer is 77. All could retire in the next four to eight years. Including Scalia, 3 right-leaning or conservative justices are likely to leave the court; were Hillary Clinton to nominate their replacements, there would be a 7-2 leftist majority on the court. Only Samuel Alito (age 66) and Chief Justice John Roberts (61) would tilt right. If Clinton picks candidates in their fifties, we’re talking decades of liberalism spilling from the bench.
Supreme Court Nominations By President | InsideGov

Over the past seven years, the Supreme Court has proved critical in confining an overreaching president. A Republican majority in the House and Senate has barely slowed President Obama’s legacy quest. Nor has the unpopularity of many of his priorities. Twice – in 2010 and 2014 — Obama was rebuked at the voting booth, in historic numbers. It deterred him not a whit.

The only brake on his go-it-alone presidency has been the Supreme Court. When Obama used a faux senate recess in 2012 to appoint three liberal commissioners to the National Labor Relations Board, the Court unanimously ruled (two years later) that he had violated the Constitution. This was a serious slap on the wrist, but also a speed bump, preventing that board from rapidly tilting our labor laws in the direction of France – that is, making our country all but uncompetitive.

Every drop in the polls or bit of blunt talk from Donald Trump ignites another explosion of Trump Derangement Syndrome from Republican pundits and politicians. And every time such Republicans open their mouths, they strengthen the perception that they are an out of touch elite having more in common with the Democrats with whom they share the same university credentials and tony zip codes. So they confirm the very suspicions that have driven much of Trump’s support.

It doesn’t help that too many Republicans use the same loaded language and share the same assumptions of the progressives. For example, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens wrote a whole column on the historical parallels with the 1930s, linking Trump to Italian fascism. In the Washington Post, the Brookings Institute’s Robert Kagan explained “this is how fascism comes to America.” More recently, NRO’s Jay Nordlinger meditated on whether the “F-word” applies to Trump, and concluded, “I’m not sure.”

The remoteness of the chance that America could move that far right leaves the topic of Trump’s fascistic tendencies a mere device for tarring Trump with the fascist brush. Everyone knows that “fascist” is the left’s favorite insult, and its use depends on massive ignorance of historical fascism, the differences between authoritarian and fascist regimes, and the distinctions between Italian fascism and German Nazism. But it’s an effective smear, at once tainting the target with the excesses of Nazism, but containing little content other than the speaker’s ideological dislike of whatever he is branding “fascist.” It should be a tenet of conservativism to respect the integrity of language and history, and not to indulge the linguistic dishonesty that defines progressive propaganda.

Then there’s the flap over Trump’s remarks about the judge who is hearing the suit over Trump University. House Speaker Paul Ryan, currently the lodestar of anti-Trump Republicans, called Trump’s charges that the judge might be biased toward him “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Sure it is, if your “textbook” is the Progressive Lexicon of Orwellian Smears.

Did the left-wing “climate of hate,” which has been plaguing Donald Trump and his supporters for many months, incite an autistic British man to take extreme measures to “stop” him? If Sarah Palin and the tea party could be blamed for the assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords in 2011, then it’s fair to question if Donald Trump’s critics can be blamed for the attempt on his life.

A few days ago, 20-year-old Michael Steven Sandford attempted to kill the Republican presumptive nominee at a rally at the Treasure Island Casino. Sandford tried to take a gun from a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department officer in order to assassinate Trump but failed in his attempt, according to court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Nevada.

The British national, who was living in the United States illegally on an expired visa, now faces up to ten years in prison after apparently making a confession to a Secret Service agent. Media coverage of what should be a major story has been somewhat less than wall-to-wall. Would the media be this curiously disinterested if the assassination attempt had been on Hillary Clinton?

The same could be said if it had happened with Barack Obama in the summer of 2008. Questions would be debated on air for weeks on end about the evil lurking in the hearts of men and why someone would be so desperate to prevent the election of the first black or female president. But when someone plots for more than a year to kill Trump, travels across the country to find an opportunity and then launches his attempt, it creates barely a ripple in the media pond.

Protests at Trump rallies have become increasingly violent in recent weeks, with the media often blaming the GOP candidate himself for inciting the violence. Of course, the only ones to blame for violence at a Trump rally are the people behaving violently. The same could be said for young Mr. Sandford, but since “right-wing rhetoric” and a “climate of hate” were blamed for a lunatic’s misdeeds five and a half years ago, perhaps it is worth examining the possibility that left-wing rhetoric and an anti-Trump “climate of hate” are to blame for the assassination attempt on Trump.

There’s not a lot that supporters of Donald Trump, supporters of Hillary Clinton, and supporters of a bright future for the United States of America agree about. Following my usual policy of fostering comity and mutual understanding, however, I am happy to have isolated one important bit of common ground that partisans of all stripes can agree on: this has been a very odd campaign season.

While that may not seem like much to work with, recognition of that oddity does contain a potentially fecund seed. Much depends on the exact valence of the relevant tense: it has been a very odd campaign. But does the oddity continue?

There is something about the disposition of most humans that encourages the belief that what is will continue to be. Our lives, we believe, will continue on tomorrow pretty much as they did today and the day before that. This election season was plenty odd — the rise but not (yet) the fall of Donald Trump, the persistence of Bernie Sanders, the steady march forward of the scandal-encumbered wife of Bill Clinton. Amazing, isn’t it?

But every step along the way the larger narrative has operated like a self-sealing fuel tank. No matter how seriously it was punctured, a gelatinous ooze of conventional wisdom was excreted to preserve the story we’d all agreed upon (didn’t we?) before.

No matter how many primaries Bernie Sanders won, no matter what breaches of national security the FBI uncovered, Hillary was the agreed-upon nominee. Nothing was going to change that. Unless, of course, something does.

Whatever the outcome of the “Brexit” vote—the U.K.’s referendum Thursday on remaining in the European Union—an era of Western history is ending and a new one is struggling to be born. The liberal internationalist project of the past seven decades is on the defensive, while ethno-nationalism (often illiberal) is surging.

The optimistic assumption that history’s arc is linear and progressive is being challenged by the older, darker view that order is locked in a perpetual struggle with chaos, security with danger. If liberal means are no longer adequate to guarantee order and security, say the challengers, they become niceties we can no longer afford.

In the U.S., support for the country’s postwar role as the lead guarantor of peace and the liberal international economic order is weakening. The Republican Party’s presidential nominee has rattled governments around the world with his frontal challenge to America’s military alliances.

Leaders in both parties have rejected the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, despite President Obama’s compelling geopolitical argument that if the U.S. doesn’t write the rules for East Asia in the 21st century, the Chinese will. Long-suppressed ethno-nationalist sentiments within America’s aging, shrinking white majority have found their public voice, blocking long-overdue immigration reform and questioning the loyalty of American Muslims.

In Europe, illiberal majoritarianism is on the rise. Hungary’s Viktor Orban was the earliest example of this trend, which intensified with parliamentary inroads last year by the extreme-right Jobbik party. Many other countries have followed in Hungary’s wake.

Meanwhile, support for the EU, the world’s most conspicuous example of liberal internationalism, is waning. A survey released this month by the Pew Research Center found that the share of French citizens with a favorable view of the EU has declined to 38% from 69% during the past decade, lower than even the U.K.’s 44%. In Germany, the linchpin of the European project, support has declined to 50%, while disapproval has risen to 48%.

There are specific complaints behind these trends. Overwhelming majorities throughout Europe fault the EU’s handling of the refugee crisis and its response to the aftermath of the Great Recession. But the objection goes deeper.

The founding document of what became the EU pledged signatories to “lay the foundation of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe.” For decades, leaders believed that the cure for the continent’s ills was “more Europe”—the progressive deepening of economic and political integration. CONTINUE AT SITE