RUTHFULLY YOURS

//www.nationalreview.com/2022/04/thomas-and-gorsuch-probe-american-citizenship-race-and-the-territories/

Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch ask us to revisit old mistakes in understanding the rights of American citizenship.

The Supreme Court decided an easy case this morning — a case so easy that only Justice Sonia Sotomayor could get it wrong. Nevertheless, it still had Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in the mood to raise long-standing questions about race and American citizenship.

The question in United States v. Vaello Madero was whether Congress is permitted to exclude residents of Puerto Rico from the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program and other federal benefits programs — just as it exempts Puerto Ricans from most federal taxes. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion easily concluded, in a brisk six-page 8–1 decision joined by every justice but Sotomayor, that long-standing law allowed Congress to treat Puerto Rico and other territories differently:

The Territory Clause of the Constitution states that Congress may “make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory . . . belonging to the United States.” Art. IV, §3, cl. 2. The text of the Clause affords Congress broad authority to legislate with respect to the U. S. Territories. Exercising that authority, Congress sometimes legislates differently with respect to the Territories, including Puerto Rico, than it does with respect to the States.

The territory clause was likewise the basis for the Court’s decision in 2020 in Financial Oversight & Mgmt. Bd. for Puerto Rico v. Aurelius Inv., LLC, which held that the appointments clause does not require Senate approval for territorial officials exercising the sorts of local powers that, in a state, would be exercised by the state. In today’s case, Kavanaugh observed that, if Congress were constitutionally mandated to provide federal benefits in Puerto Rico, there would be political pressure to apply federal taxes there as well — “with serious implications for the Puerto Rican people and the Puerto Rican economy. The Constitution does not require that extreme outcome.”

The Dissenter

Sotomayor, a daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants to New York and a longtime board member of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, wrote separately in Financial Oversight & Mgmt. Bd. v. Aurelius on Puerto Rico–specific grounds. In today’s decision, paying no attention to the constitutional text or the history of territorial regulation, Sotomayor argued that “there is no rational basis for Congress to treat needy citizens living anywhere in the United States so differently from others” because the program “establishes a direct relationship between the recipient and the Federal Government. . . . Under the current system, the jurisdiction in which an SSI recipient resides has no bearing at all on the purposes or requirements of the SSI program.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/21/defund-the-capitol-police/

The new intelligence chief of the U.S. Capitol Police is off to a rough start.

Ravi Satkalmi, a former high-ranking NYPD official, took over the Capitol Police’s expanding intelligence unit this month. But his agency suffered a major humiliation Wednesday night after it forced the evacuation of the Capitol and surrounding buildings after spotting “an aircraft that poses a probable threat.” Staff scrambled to exit the buildings in a panic, and news outlets interrupted coverage with “breaking news” bulletins about the suspicious aircraft.

Roughly 15 minutes later, Capitol police backtracked and announced there was no threat; the aircraft, it turned out, was a U.S. Army plane preparing to perform a parachute stunt at the Washington Nationals baseball game. After issuing an “all clear” notice, a USCP senior security official told Fox News, “This is not supposed to happen. It looks bad.”

While the gaffe was heavily mocked on social media, the Capitol Police’s most ardent defender came to the rescue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) quickly released a statement commending Capitol Police’s “heroism” and “exemplary service.”

Blaming the Federal Aviation Administration for allegedly failing to notify Capitol Police about the event, Pelosi promised to investigate what happened. “The unnecessary panic caused by this apparent negligence [by the FAA] was particularly harmful for Members, staff, and institutional workers still grappling with the trauma of the attack on their workplace on January 6th,” she said in a written statement.

Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues—who in 2020 readily took a knee in the Capitol building to honor George Floyd—have found the one police department they not only routinely describe as “heroic” but deserving of billions of new dollars courtesy of American taxpayers: the U.S. Capitol Police.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/black_americans_commemorating_confederate_history.html

In the small town of Livingston, Tennessee, Mayor Curtis Hayes recently signed a citywide proclamation declaring April 2022 as ‘Confederate History Month.’ According to the county news website, Hayes’ intention was to serve as an impetus to “all citizens to avail themselves of the opportunities to increase their knowledge of this important era of Tennessee’s history.” A striking photo op to disrupt the Left’s narrative and modus operandi of revisionist history, Hayes, a Black American, signed the proclamation with some of his townsfolk behind him — white descendents of Confederate military members.

In a time of absolute historical and intellectual illiteracy, mobs of “misinformed lawless miscreants” who are “wet behind the ears with a sledge hammer” demand the destruction of monuments honoring the Confederate greats. Fledglings of modern academia, well-educated in the tenets of Marx and Engels, and emulating the Ministry of Truth, are altering history while being wholly ignorant of it, smearing the character of distinguished Americans. As Orwell puts it: “…. every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”

Empowered by their indoctrination, these degenerate misfits decry the “racism” of the Confederacy, and perpetuate the lie that the American Civil War was solely a war over slavery, eventually settling on assuming the roles of arbiters of social and racial “justice.” Operating within this context, they take after spoiled children, throwing tantrums to get what they want — the erasure of history. They even developed the Orwellian phrase, “Unsay Their Names.” These statues paid homage to racial bigotry, so they became the “people who stand up against monuments to White supremacy.”

So if the character of the Confederacy was purely racist, why would a Black American acknowledge the importance of its heritage and history?

Because history is just that: history.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/putin_is_not_hitler_zelensky_is_not_churchill_and_biden_is_not_fdr.html

Western politicians and commentators who support doing more to defend Ukraine’s independence frequently invoke World War II analogies to justify their policy preferences.  They compare Putin to Hitler, Zekensky to Churchill, and less frequently Biden to FDR.  Putin, they contend, is a war criminal who is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people.  Zelensky, they claim, is defiantly and courageously standing “alone” against Russian aggression, defending “democracy” against autocracy.  Biden, some say, is making America once again the “arsenal of democracy” by providing weapons and supplies to Ukraine.  None of these claims, and none of these historical comparisons, is justified.

Putin, to be sure, is the aggressor in this war, but accusations of war crimes and genocide are as yet unproven.  Civilian casualties are unfortunately common to all modern wars.  And we do not know if Putin has a master plan to wipe out Ukrainians as a race, the way Hitler did with respect to the Jews.

Zelensky has undoubtedly demonstrated courage in leading Ukrainians to fight for their independence, but his portrayal as a champion of democracy and freedom is at best premature.  Prior to Russia’s invasion, Ukraine was not high on anyone’s list as a model democracy.  As Ted Galen Carpenter of the CATO Institute recently noted, “Ukraine is far from being a democratic-capitalist model” and “has long been one of the more corrupt countries in the international system.”  Freedom House categorizes Ukraine as “partly free.”  Carpenter notes further that even before Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian officials “harassed political dissidents, adopted censorship measures, and barred foreign journalists whom they regarded as critics of the Ukrainian government and its policies.”  Ukraine was criticized by groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.  And since the war, Zekensky has further cracked down on opposition political parties and media outlets.

https://www.city-journal.org/federal-court-vacates-cdc-mask-mandate-for-travelers

In the latest of a long line of judicial rebukes to the Biden administration’s expansive view of administrative-agency power, a federal district court in Florida has vacated the CDC’s mask mandate for travelers. The court concluded that the CDC had exceeded its statutory authority, violated the notice and comment procedures required for rulemaking under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), and acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

The ruling comes one week after the CDC had, once again, extended the mandate, this time until May 3. The mask mandate was one of the first actions taken by the new Biden administration. One day after his inauguration, President Biden issued Executive Order No. 13998, directing executive-branch agency heads to require “masks to be worn in compliance with CDC guidelines in or on” airplanes, airports, trains, intercity buses, boats, and on other forms of public transportation.

Two weeks later, the CDC published the “Requirement for Persons To Wear Masks While on Conveyances and at Transportation Hubs.” The order stated that mask wearing is “one of the most effective strategies available for reducing COVID-19 transmission” and required masks when traveling on any type of conveyance into or within the United States and at transportation hubs.

The CDC claimed that it was relying on Section 264(a) of the Public Health Service Act, which empowers it to issue regulations “to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries,” and from state to state. Last year, the agency claimed the same section gave it authority to issue a nationwide eviction moratorium. The Supreme Court struck down the moratorium on the grounds that the CDC had exceeded its statutory authority, since the statute narrows the types of measures it can implement to limit the spread of disease to fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, and pest extermination.