Leftists Are Convulsing Over A Conservative Court. It Doesn’t Get Better. OK, Maybe It Will.

Conservatism, Constitution, Law, Republicans, The Courts

Quite correct: Republicans have had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and … FAILED, REFUSED, or chose to break bread with the opposition, rather than keep the faith with the base and the original Constitution. As the author of this New York Times Review of Books essay suggests, the “mishaps” of previous republican presidents in appointing justices to the SCOTUS suggest “something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part.”

… In retrospect, it is remarkable that a strong conservative majority on the Court has not emerged before now. Since 1980, Republicans have held the presidency for twenty-two years and Democrats for sixteen. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on the platform of choosing conservative judges, appointed three justices—Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennedy—and elevated William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship. That should have established conservative control. Yet O’Connor turned out to be a centrist, controlling the Court for a quarter-century by casting the decisive fifth vote in controversial cases. When she retired in 2006, Kennedy assumed her position as the swing justice and unexpectedly emerged as a liberal hero, voting, for example, to extend constitutional rights to detainees in Guantánamo Bay and marriage rights to same-sex couples.

George H.W. Bush also had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority. He appointed Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall but also replaced William Brennan with David Souter, who underwent a subtle yet significant evolution from Burkean conservative to Burkean liberal. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each got two justices confirmed, which maintained the Court’s balance. That conservative control has been so long in coming reflects either miscalculation by Reagan and George H.W. Bush or (more likely) something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part. …

… THE REST IN “Tipping the Scales by Noah Feldman.”

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UPDATED (8/15/018): Poland Has Enacted A REAL Muslim Ban. It Does Not Accept Muslim Migrants. Period.

Christianity, Crime, Europe, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Terrorism, The West

Unlike the nonsensical, watered-down Muslim ban America has been grudgingly permitted to enact (“Big Con,” naturally, defend it); Poland, a country that shares a culture, has a real ban. Simple: Poland does not accept migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Daniel Pipes traveled to Poland to trace the roots of this ban; and “understand why Poland differs so sharply from Western Europe and what this implies.”

Essentially, the rather homogeneous polish people have united around the idea of re-Christianizing their country. This impetus emanates from “the country’s civilizationist … party, called Law and Justice (PiS, pronounced peace).

In the telling of the PiS,

a steady diet of news from Western Europe of jihadi violence, taharrush, “grooming” gangs, honor killings, female genital mutilation, criminal activity, welfare fraud, and cultural aggression prompted a demand from below for the party to adopt an anti-immigration and -Islamization platform. The Merkel Tsunami of 2015-16, with its million-plus Muslims walking through Europe, frightened Poles. Accordingly, some 75 percent of them reject Muslim immigration. So, even if PiS’ main rival reaches power, they note, the Muslim ban will stay.

“Of these two interpretations,” [Dr. Pipes] “finds the second far more convincing. PiS is no more responsible for the fears of immigration and Islamization than Europe’s other civilizationist parties, such as Austria’s Freedom Party or Italy’s League. They all respond to a growing unease, mainly from the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum. They represent Europeans who fear for their civilization.”

READ “Poland’s Muslim Ban” by Daniel Pipes.

UPDATE (8/15/018): Now Austria:

Maybe Poland and Austria don’t want to become The Netherlands:

Those “Swedes” are rioting again:

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TRUMP Trade Tactics Are About WINNING Negotiations

Canada, Free Markets, Labor, Taxation, Trade

I love Canada, am a Canadian (and American) citizen, have Canadian loved-ones. I don’t want to see Canadians hurt.

It’s true, however, that, in the artificial universe of trade agreements, previous US leaders have shown they don’t care about US workers. Trump’s the opposite. He’s using American power to muscle deals he believes are beneficial to American workers.

Canada taxes purchases of American goods starting at $20, whereas America starts taxing Canadian goods at $1000. Trump has said he’d love for trade to be entirely and mutually without tariffs:

“No tariffs, no barriers. That’s the way it should be. And no subsidies. I even said, ‘no tariffs’,” the US president said, describing his meetings with fellow Group of Seven leaders as positive “on the need to have fair and reciprocal trade”. “The United States has been taken advantage of for decades and decades,” he continued, describing America as a “piggy bank that everyone keeps robbing.”

But since that’s not going to happen …

“Canada is going to have to make some concessions,” says Laura Dawson, head of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, DC. Among them might be raising the threshold at which Canada taxes purchases of American goods from C$20 to around C$1,000, the American level. Canada might consent to more onerous conditions for a vehicle to be imported duty-free within NAFTA, including on wages and the amount of North American content.

And of course, the American market is enormous. Trump knows it. Leaders before him no doubt knew the power of American markets but refused to use it:

Canada gamely argues that the United States would also be hurt in a trade war. Canada is the biggest destination for exports from 36 of the 50 American states. Bilateral trade in goods and services is immense: $674bn in 2017. It is also, despite what Mr Trump says, balanced. In 2017 the United States had a small surplus with Canada, of $8.4bn. Yet Mr Trudeau’s bargaining position is weak. “We absolutely need them, but they could live without us,” says Philip Cross, an economist.

BESIDES,

Canada’s system of supply management, which sets limits on the production of dairy, poultry and eggs, has long irritated the United States (and should anger Canadians, who pay more for food than they need to). Canada subjects imports of those products beyond a ceiling to punishing tariffs (298% in the case of butter). Mr Trump has been angry about this since he met dairy farmers from Wisconsin in April 2017.

The article is “Canada: Breaking a few eggs: The economy is already feeling the effects of Donald Trump’s trade war,” courtesy of The Economist.

TV Judge Napolitano’s Nonsensical Indictment Of Trump Border Policy

IMMIGRATION, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Natural Law, UN

Judge Napolitano is a left-libertarian. Always said so. On this site, I have often  exposed and argued against  his lefty exploits. Here he essentially asserts that if X trespasses into your home, you can’t, in natural law, remove him. Crap. I hazard that, were you to research this bit of Napolitano legalism, you’d find he’s hiding/finessing certain aspects of due-process jurisprudence.

UPDATE (7/2): I might not have phrased my words above well. Responses on Facebook certainly indicate so. My bad. I am a huge proponent of natural law. However, I think Napolitano here is not articulating natural justice at all, but is full of it. His is more legalism than natural law. I am sure there is a state-passed law somewhere that judges like him can use to criminalize what President Trump is doing. I doubt it’s natural law. Where in natural law does it imply that trespassers have to be kept in their natural clans and formations? That nonsense would be the purview of the positive law, most certainly “international law.”

Of course, “Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever.”—ILANA (May 1, 2009)