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SCOTUS Rulings, Biden-Trump Debate Shake Up Political Landscape This week, the Supreme Court issued rulings affecting government power and free speech, while the Biden-Trump debate performance sparked controversy about the presidential election. By Roger Kimball

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://amgreatness.com/2024/06/30/scotus-rulings-biden-trump-debate-shake-up-political-landscape/

What a week it’s been! We started off with Justice Amy Souter Barrett writing the SCOTUS ruling in Murthy v. Missouri.  At issue was whether it was okay for the federal government (the FBI and related elements of the American Stasi) to pressure social media and data-hoovering companies (Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc.) to suppress opinions they didn’t like about things like COVID, the 2020 election, and the Jan 6 jamboree at the Capitol.

Just to be clear about this: it is not okay for the government to do this, but that’s not what Justice Souter Barrett said.  She did not quite come out and say it was okay.  She left that bizarro opinion to her colleague Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, during the oral argument phase of the case, said to plaintiff’s counsel: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the federal government in significant ways.”

Memo to Justice Jackson: “hamstringing the federal government,” i.e., limiting its prerogatives and ability to intrude upon the lives of its citizens, is the very point of the First Amendment.  That’s why we have a First Amendment.  Indeed, it is a large part of why we have a constitution: to protect citizens from the coercive power of the state.

Justice Barrett was not quite so forthright.  She argued that the plaintiffs “lacked standing.” If Louisiana and Missouri lacked standing to defend their citizens in this case, who or what would have standing?  That was part of the burden of Justice Alito’s robust dissent, in which he was joined by the other adults on the Court, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. As the legal commentator Jonathan Turley put it, “The government is engaging in censorship by surrogate… They have made a mockery of the limits of the First Amendment.”

Justice Barrett was not done making those of us who supported her nomination to the Supreme Court regret our support.  In Fischer v. United States, one of the most important cases before the Court this session, the issue was whether it was okay to use an Enron-era law that was designed to prohibit destroying evidence to go after January 6 defendants (and that ex officio perpetual defendant, Donald Trump).  This was the famous, or infamous, “obstructing an official proceeding” charge that we heard so much about while the FBI was arresting grandmothers and other tourists who were in the Capitol that day, and which official but illegally appointed bag man Jack Smith has so handsomely availed himself of in his vendetta against Trump. The case was decided Friday, 6-3, but Barrett weighed in with a dissent.

It used to be that the FBI and other members of the law enforcement fraternity would discover a crime and then pursue the perpetrators. Now, as the dragnet sparked by the January 6 protest shows, “law enforcement” means identifying people the regime doesn’t like and then combing through the statute book to see what laws might apply, or be twisted to apply, to them. It’s a refreshed, Americanized version of the venerable principle articulated by Stalin’s head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man,” said Beria, “and I will show you the crime.”

Another major case, also decided Friday, overturned the 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which in effect handed legislative power to the alphabet soup of federal agencies.  By striking down Chevron, the Court dealt an important blow to “the administrative state,” that parallel government populated by unelected, largely unaccountable bureaucrats who have increasingly been the ones who ran our lives: promulgated the rules by which we were required to live and imposed the fines and other sanctions should we fail to do so. Article One of the Constitution begins by vesting “All legislative Powers . . . in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”  Chevron bypassed that stipulation by stealth, rendering Congress more and more ceremonial as distinct from a legislative body.

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Michelle O breaks cover, and her timing is spot on By Victoria White Berger

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2024/06/michelle_o_breaks_cover_and_her_timing_is_spot_on.html

All over the media in the past two days was Michelle Obama’s “exclusive” interview, in which she dished on the Biden family dysfunction.

Such a piece of journalistic slavishness is hardly surprising. Surely the ironies have not escaped public notice: “private frustration”—no, not exactly private.

To any of us who attended the First and Second ladies’ horror shows during Barack’s first and second terms, we saw, repeatedly, strain, and certainly no love lost between Michelle and Jill. Both are ambitious, to put it mildly, vain, and love money. Both serve as expensive props for their spouse. Neither accept rivalry from any quarter.

Michelle’s abrupt garrulousness this week was not a coincidence. It is a clear sign that the faux indifference of Ms. Obama to “be” president of the United States may be about to evaporate. We can anticipate, although most hopefully not, a putative fourth Obama administration, as Michelle and her expensive, fascistic PR network further obliterates any sign of her consistent, overarching love of power and cash, “for the good of the country.” The country, mind you, that she has scorned and degraded (see her White House parties) in the past.

I am a native of the District of Columbia. When Barry bought the Kalorama Obama Mansion (one of three, now, hither and yon, or is it four?) in a D.C. ambassadorial neighborhood, some in town knew he was planning on a continuation of his reign (come hell or high water—well, both came).

It was an historic precedent that an immediately past U.S. President would stay on in the District, even if “for our girls”—uh huh.

Then, immediately following Michelle’s typically narcissistic whine session of this week, we get the debate last night. Biden did not disappoint—he really blew it, by just being what half of the country, at least, has known he is for a very long time.

Michelle has not disappointed, either. The photographers, stylists, fashionistas, speech writers, ghost writers, and make-up artists, and pollsters, are all on alert. Look for more “exclusives”  and “private” dishings from the Obama East (to be West?) Wing-soon.

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How DEI Corrupts America’s Universities The ideology of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is not what it purports to be. Christopher Rufo

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=

The idea of public universities in the United States originally rested on a compact between the citizen and the republic. The agreement was that the citizen would provide funding for the university in order to train young people to advance the public interest and the common good. In recent years, however, this compact has shattered, and considerable efforts will be needed to rebuild it.

The clearest expression of what has gone wrong is DEI. At first glance, a commitment to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” might seem laudable. But DEI employs a propagandistic language to conceal its real intentions. It is, in fact, the opposite of what it appears to be.

We can review the acronym in parts. First, “diversity.” The initial connotation of the word suggests a variety of people, experiences, and knowledge. But in practice, universities use diversity to justify a policy of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, racial discrimination: a total inversion of the principles of colorblind equality and individual merit.

Second, “inclusion.” In kindergarten, teaching kids to be inclusive means encouraging them to share and be polite to classmates. But in the context of a university, inclusion is used as justification for excluding people and ideas that are seen as a threat to prevailing ideologies and sentiments. 

Finally, “equity.” The immediate association is with the principle of equality. But equity is actually a radically opposed idea. Equality is the principle that every man or woman should be judged as an individual, neither punished nor rewarded based on ancestry. Equity demands the opposite: categorizing individuals into group identities and assigning disparate treatment to members of those groups, seeking to “equalize” what would otherwise be considered unjust outcomes.

What this means in practice is that members of certain groups get favored, others disfavored: in short, inequality justified under the ideology of “equity.”

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Samuel Gregg China’s Cash for Power A new book examines the Communist Party’s state-backed investment funds.

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://www.city-journal.org/article/chinas-cash-for-power

Sovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions, by Zongyuan Zoe Liu (Belknap Press, 288 pp., $39.15)

Sovereign wealth funds (SWF) have long been an anomaly in market economies. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury Department defined SWFs as “government investment vehicles funded by foreign exchange assets, which manage those assets separately from official reserves.” Such funds blur the traditional distinction between the state, which serves as market regulator and guarantor of rule of law and property rights, and the marketplace, in which private actors freely compete within parameters established by law and morality.

Countries’ reasons for creating such vehicles vary. Norway established its Government Pension Fund Global to invest tax and license revenue generated by its oil sector and grow its national pension funds. Other nations have used SWFs as instruments for pursuing industrial policy at one remove from direct government control.

These funds’ intrinsically political character raises questions about their marketplace operations. As state-owned entities, they will not have the same incentives and priorities as private actors. For example, SWFs are less likely to prioritize profit-maximization, and may not even be required to do so. Some, for instance, primarily function as another macroeconomic tool for governments to try and smooth the business cycle’s ups-and-downs. SWFs are also subject to political pressures, encouraging investment based on the regnant government’s current needs, which may not be the same as pursuing long-term economic growth.

Then there are concerns about these funds being weaponized by their government owners. What happens if a SWF decides, at the behest of its controlling government, to use its stake in a publicly traded corporation in another country to pursue specifically political goals in that nation? And what if the SWF’s owner also happens to be an authoritarian regime that does not consider itself bound by Western norms of government accountability and transparency? And what if that same government uses the SWF to serve geopolitical ends that clash with other states’ national-security interests?

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The Plot Thickens by Mark Steyn

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://www.steynonline.com/14399/the-plot-thickens

EXCERPT:

Was there anyone else on the stage? Not so’s you’d know from the headlines. Biden lost to himself. And considering that the object was to make the debate all about Trump that’s quite an accomplishment.

So what’s going on? Why did whoever’s running the show allow this to happen?

I’ve been of the view, ever since the 2020 primary season, that Biden is the Permanent State’s conscious response to Trump: in 2016, Trump was all candidate and no minders; Biden is all minders and no candidate. In that sense, the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet is the perfect embodiment of American politics. We can do all the cracks about “Obama’s third term” or “the Manchurian candidate”, but the truth is that, in a supposedly self-governing republic of 350 million people, we have absolutely no idea who’s actually running the show – other than the fact that, out of those 350 million, the only one we can definitively rule out of having anything to do with it is the purported head of the executive branch.

You have to figure that that’s greatly to the advantage of the Deep State, and that’s why they’d like to keep it that way. It’s quite something to teach the people the lesson that representative politics is just a meaningless joke, third-rate dinner-theatre in which all the faux-combat is an obvious sham. In the Soviet Union, the point wasn’t to persuade you to believe the lie but to force you to live with the lie. Reducing the two-year US election cycle to the same state inflicts an even more brutal humiliation on the masses.

So why weren’t they able, after a week-and-a-half of dosage experimentation, to shoot the stiff enough of the juice to pass him off as being back in his State of the Union top-of-the-game mode?

As my former GB News colleague Neil Oliver observed long ago on The Mark Steyn Show, formulating a useful rule of contemporary politics:

This is happening because they want it to happen.

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In Search of an American Aristocracy By Micah Meadowcroft

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://tomklingenstein.com/in-search-of-an-american-aristocracy/

Editor’s Note: The first step in winning a war is to recognize the fact that you are in one. This means, first and foremost, to come to know your enemy and his goals. In a recent essay for this site, Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards of the Claremont Institute make a compelling case that the present enemy—the “woke” or group quota regime—is a totalitarian threat, and that its aims are nothing short of revolutionary. While our own troubles may seem far removed from the hard totalitarianism of the twentieth century, Ellmers and Richards argue that the six traditionally accepted elements of totalitarianism are already present in woke America. What’s more, they identify three factors that are unique to the tyranny of the present day.

The American regime was founded by intellectual giants: men like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson who, even in their devotion to equality, recognized the necessity of great men for the preservation of a republic. In an important way, argues Micah Meadowcroft, the regime change underway has been defined by the replacement of this natural aristocracy with a “global elite” untied to America or its constitution. This is the seventh in a series of nine contributions by leading experts on the nine defining elements of what Ellmers and Richards dub “Totalitarianism, American Style.”

When in 1813, early in the epistolary reconciliation of their twilight years, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson shared their mutual preoccupation with the idea of a natural aristocracy, they could not set aside biography entirely. As Jefferson concluded, despite their abiding differences of opinion, “We acted in perfect harmony thro’ a long and perilous contest for our liberty and independence. A constitution has been acquired which, tho neither of us think perfect, yet both consider as competent to render our fellow-citizens the happiest and the securest on whom the sun has ever shone.” 

Regardless of whether, as Jefferson proposed, autochthonous aristoi were the source and summit of republican liberty or, as Adams worried, lions and eagles whose ambitions must be bound by the chains of a mixed regime, they had both been as younger men the best of their colonies and come together with others like them to bring forth a new nation. They were our Founding Fathers and, without hereditary title, an American aristocracy.

Today, there is no American aristocracy worth the term, and despite breathless liberal fantasies about President Trump, no lions or eagles either. We do not even have an American elite, except in the most basic social science sense. Instead our civic life is managed by a global elite, functionaries of what, as Glenn Ellmers and Ted Richards described in the opening salvo of this series, an international order “in which American sovereignty becomes insignificant.” 

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This Energy Transition Thing Really Is Not Happening Francis Menton

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-6-25-this-energy-transition-thing-really-is-not-happening

From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.

For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”

Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.

But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.

That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.

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How Did The Army Of Debate ‘Fact Checkers’ Miss This Biden Whopper?

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/06/29/how-did-the-army-of-debate-fact-checkers-miss-this-biden-whopper/

Not surprisingly, the self-appointed “fact checkers” in the media went to town on Donald Trump’s remarks during Thursday’s debate, picking apart every utterance and rating them false even if they were mostly true. Also not surprising, President Joe Biden got a relative free pass. (Although to be fair to fact-checkers, it was often hard to tell what Biden was trying to say.)

But what’s truly mind-boggling is that they missed the biggest lie Biden told all night. A lie that came out of his mouth as soon as he opened it. A lie that he then used to blame Trump for everything bad that has happened in the past three-and-a-half years.

Let’s roll the tape.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, to his credit, started the debate with a hardball question for Biden.

TAPPER: Let’s begin the debate. And let’s start with the issue that voters consistently say is their top concern, the economy.

President Biden, inflation has slowed, but prices remain high. Since you took office, the price of essentials has increased. For example, a basket of groceries that cost $100, then, now costs more than $120. And typical home prices have jumped more than 30%.

What do you say to voters who feel they are worse off under your presidency than they were under President Trump?

BIDEN: We’ve got to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me.

We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic was so badly handled. Many people were dying. All he said was it’s not that serious, just inject a little bleach in your arm. You’ll be all right.

The economy collapsed. There were no jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 15%. It was terrible.

And so, what we had to do is try to put things back together again.

Later Biden repeated the claim:

There was no inflation when I became president. You know why? The economy was flat on its back. 15% unemployment, he decimated the economy, absolutely decimated the economy. That’s why there was no inflation at the time. There were no jobs.

And then later: “Look what I’ve done. Look how I’ve turned around the horrible situation he left me.”

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The Obama and Biden Administrations: Paving the Way for a Nuclear-Armed Iran by Majid Rafizadeh

Posted By on June 30th, 2024

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20735/obama-biden-nuclear-armed-iran

America’s “diplomatic efforts,” instead of putting a stop to Iran’s nuclear program, have only resulted in a series of concessions that have empowered the Iranian regime. The lack of stringent enforcement and verification measures, and especially lifting secondary sanctions — by which any country that does business with Iran is prohibited from doing business with America — have allowed Iran to accelerate its nuclear activities “under the radar.”

Iran’s continued development of ballistic missile technology and its persistent test firings of missiles, both in clear violation of UN resolutions, were largely overlooked. In addition, the growing bellicosity of Iran’s huge militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), as well as the nuclear program itself, were apparently never addressed with the seriousness they warranted — thereby allowing Iran to expand its military capabilities and regional aggression unchecked.

The Iranian regime strategically allocated these funds to support and expand its own proxy presence throughout the region, including, among other spots, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Burkina Faso and the Gaza Strip.

The Trump administration implemented a “maximum pressure” policy aimed at curtailing Iran’s economic capabilities by particularly focusing on reducing the country’s oil exports, and, most importantly, establishing “secondary sanctions” that banned any country doing business with Iran from doing business with the US.

The Biden administration’s passive approach of trying to use what might look like “protection money” to try to bribe Iran into compliance has simply backfired. Iran took the billions and, unsurprisingly, appears to have fungibly used them to finance several wars in the region — Hamas and Hezbollah’s war against Israel, the Houthis’ war against Israel and the US, and Iran’s own April 13 missile- and drone-attack against Israel — as well as Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The Biden administration, sadly, seems to have been the enabling factor in Iran’s continued regional assertiveness and nuclear advancement. The administration’s series of policies favorable to Iran significantly strengthened the regime to the point where Iran and its proxies are now actively engaged in a comprehensive war against Israel, the Sunni Arab Gulf States and, since October, more than 150 attacks on US troops in the region.

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The presidential debate: what you see is what you get Both candidates filled the air with hyperbole Charles Lipson

Posted By on June 28th, 2024

https://thespectator.com/politics/presidential-debate-see-get-trump-biden/

These weren’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates. They weren’t Kennedy-Nixon. If those were graded “A,” then this was “C-minus,” at best. The low point was who is the better golfer? I’ll go with Lincoln.

Both candidates filled the air with hyperbole. Trump led the way, as usual, calling everything he did “the best ever,” and everything Biden did “the worst.” He doesn’t favor shades of gray.

Biden responded in kind. He was right to emphasize Trump’s hours of silence during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But he didn’t stop there. He went on to repeat what he surely knows is a lie about Trump’s comments after Charlottesville. And he kept going, trying to link Trump directly neo-Nazis.

It could have been worse. The CNN format was far better than previous debates. Keep it. Ditch the audience and allow only one mic at a time. The moderators’ questions were fair and tackled the big topics, as they should have. The debate would have been more informative if each candidate had time for a second rebuttal. That would have encouraged more debate over several major issues. Perhaps they can make that change next time.

What will stick in voters’ minds?

First, Trump is the same guy they either loved or hated the last time around. He hurt himself with inflated self-praise, bombastic language and turning his criticism of Biden up to eleven each time he spoke. Still, his performance was far better than his first debate in 2020, when he repeatedly interrupted Biden and came off as a bully. He avoided that trap this time, partly because of the format, partly because he didn’t disregard the rules. Trump’s major plus was that he drove home his main points about inflation, immigration, the economy and foreign wars.

For Biden, the message is far darker. Frankly, it must have been painful for many viewers to watch.