“Even in an emergency,” wrote Judge William Stickman IV, of Pennsylvania’s Western District Court, “the authority of government is not unfettered. The liberties protected by the Constitution are not fair-weather freedoms — in place when times are good but able to be cast aside in times of trouble.”

His eloquent summation continued, “(T)he solution to a national crisis can never be permitted to supersede the commitment to individual liberty that stands as the foundation of the American experiment. The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a ‘new normal’ where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended mitigation measures.

“Rather,” Stickman wrote, “the Constitution sets certain lines that cannot be crossed even in an emergency. Actions taken by the defendant crossed those lines.”

This isn’t just empty rhetoric, they mean it. And packing the court with at least two additional seats—one for Ginsburg and one for Merrick Garland, whom Democrats feel is entitled to a seat simply because President Obama nominated him—is just the beginning of what Democrats will try to do if Biden wins the election. Schemes are now afoot to pack the court, abolish the Senate filibuster, and grant statehood to Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

What all these moves have in common is that they would erode the constitutional mechanisms in place that Democrats see as impediments to their complete control over the levers of government power.

Expanding the number of states, for example, is a work-around for what they would like to do but can’t quite bring themselves to say outright: abolish states’ equal representation in the Senate. Why, they ask, should sparsely populated conservative states like South Dakota get as many votes in the Senate as California and New York? By adding what Democrats believe would be permanently blue states, they could cement their control over the Senate and stop worrying about what Americans in South Dakota or Wyoming think.

The same logic applies to getting rid of the Senate filibuster. Once Democrats are in control of the Senate, why should a minority of GOP senators be allowed to stop them from carrying out their designs? The common thread here, from court-packing to new states to ending the filibuster, is that Democrats believe they have an obligation, once they gain power, to ensure they never lose it again. If that means shredding the parts of the Constitution that have held them back in the past, then so be it.

That, in turn, means there’s more at stake in November than the electoral fortunes of one Donald J. Trump. The Constitution itself is on the ballot.

One hundred years ago, the United States faced an ugly reality that anticipated ours in 2020. The aftermath of World War I included economic depression and turmoil. A flu epidemic added to the chaos and struck down hundreds of thousands of Americans in the space of a few months.

Wages for working men had remained stagnant during wartime, but the removal of wartime controls meant prices of regular goods and services were skyrocketing. The popularity of communism and anarchism appeared to be growing. Riots and strikes in major American cities — from Boston to Seattle — were described with horror in the daily newspapers. //

In such a moment, Calvin Coolidge’s firm opposition to lawlessness as governor of Massachusetts made him famous. Voters rewarded his resiliency during the Boston Police Strike of 1919, along with his combination of courage and integrity. In two years, he was vice president. Two years later, he was president.

The parallels between his time and our own are instructive. If ever there were a need to recover his constitutional and political vision and apply it to our own day, that time is now. Constitution Day is an appropriate time to start. By recovering Coolidge’s understanding of the Constitution, we can begin to move in the right direction. //

Coolidge responded to such critics indirectly. Rather than quibble about economic data or dispute the endlessly disputable details of the Constitution, he underscored its religious foundation. It was important to remember these facts, he explained, because “No people can look forward who do not look backward. The strongest guarantee of the future is the past.”

According to Coolidge, America’s political principles were logical developments from its history, and at the center of American history is the story of religion. The earliest colonies were carved out of the wilderness so the colonists might worship God according to conscience. They were born in a desire for freedom, and this desire matured with time. //

Coolidge asserted that the Great Awakening was influential in expanding the American view of individual liberty and rights. The Awakening and its truths were essential in the success of the American Revolution and the formation of the Constitution. He explained: “The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.”

For Coolidge, it was the Constitution that brought the principles of the Revolution to full maturity and practical significance. The adoption of the Constitution of 1787 opened the doors to American progress such as the world had never seen. //

“That which America exemplifies in her Constitution and system of government is the most modern, and of any yet devised gives promise of being the most substantial and enduring.”

Coolidge, however, was careful to caution against trusting the Constitution to do more than it promised. It was not “a machine that would go of itself”—quite the contrary. Coolidge was well-aware of the fact that the Constitution imposed the duties of self-government upon every generation of Americans.

While “the men who founded our government” had built carefully and well, “we should be deluded if we supposed [our institutions] can be maintained without more of the same stern sacrifice offered in perpetuity,” he said. Free self-government requires sacrifice, requires recurrence to first principles, requires Americans to know, understand, and defend their way of life and form of government.

McConnell relied upon the very checks and balances built into our Constitutional Republic. The people had given the power of the Presidency to the Democrats and the power of the Senate to the Republicans. As a result, the true intentions of the people were clouded. On one hand, had he confirmed Garland, Republicans would have squandered the power with which they had been trusted. With the denial of the confirmation of Garland, McConnell made Democrats angry, but the Democrats’ power in that regard ends at the nomination. The issue is that McConnell’s actions aren’t hypocritical at all. He took his case to the people. Not to delay the vote for the sake of delaying the vote, but rather to clarify with the people, what they wanted to be done with that seat. The people chose Trump, Republicans, and the path to a different nominee. The Republic functioned exactly as it is intended.

Democrats want to make this hypocrisy, but it isn’t, as the people HAVE spoken. There is no longer any question as to the intention of the people. They gave Republicans the control of the Senate and the Presidency. When the people granted that power, they were aware of the potential consequences of that decision. They were aware that that power in the hands of both Trump and McConnell could lead to the confirmation of any judges Republicans deem acceptable. They knew this and yet, they still gave that power. If, as the Democrats want to believe, people are opposed to this move, why would they have given that power to Senate Republicans, not once but twice since 2016?

Democrats simply wanted the Scalia seat filled because it gave them an edge in the court, that’s it. That’s why they had demanded it be filled. Had Schumer made the case to the American people that McConnell is right and that the people needed to vote the power to his party, he may have won that debate and subsequent election. He, instead, cried foul about checks and balances built into the Constitution of the United States. Schumer isn’t mad that the Senate Republicans didn’t hold a vote on Merrick Garland. He is mad that the American people rejected his

The whole speech is a subtweet of the Mueller investigation //

When many people think about the virtues of our Constitution, they first mention the Bill of Rights. That makes sense. The great guarantees of the Bill of Rights—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and the right to keep and bear arms, just to name the first few—are critical safeguards of liberty. But as President Reagan used to remind people, the Soviet Union had a constitution too, and it even included some lofty-sounding rights. Ultimately, however, those promises were just empty words, because there was no rule of law to enforce them.

For those who value freedom and still believe the Constitution matters, you have reason to celebrate. On September 14, a federal judge ruled that Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s coronavirus lockdown measures are unconstitutional.

According to the judge, “The court believes that defendants undertook their actions in a well-intentioned effort to protect Pennsylvanians from the virus. However, good intentions toward a laudable end are not alone enough to uphold governmental action against a constitutional challenge.”

The judge also wrote, “even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered. The Constitution cannot accept the concept of a ‘new normal’ where the basic liberties of the people can be subordinated to open-ended emergency mitigation measures.”

While many defenders of private gun ownership recognize that the Second Amendment was written to provide some sort of counterbalance against the coercive power of the state, this argument is often left far too vague to reflect an accurate view of this historical context surrounding the Amendment.

Looking at the debates surrounding the Second Amendment and military power at the end of the eighteenth century, however, we find that the authors of the Second Amendment had a more sophisticated vision of gun ownership than is often assumed.

Fearful that a large federal military could be used to destroy the freedoms of the states themselves, Anti-Federalists and other Americans fearful of centralized power in the US government designed the Second Amendment accordingly. It was designed to guarantee that the states would be free to raise and train their own militias as a defense against federal power, and as a means of keeping a defensive military force available to Americans while remaining outside the direct control of the federal government.

This grew out of what was a well-established opposition to standing armies among Americans in the late eighteenth century. In his book Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802, Richard Kohn writes:

No principle of government was more widely understood or more completely accepted by the generation of Americans that established the United States than the danger of a standing army in peacetime. Because a standing army represented the ultimate in uncontrolled and controllable power, any nation that maintained permanent forces surely risked the overthrow of legitimate government and the introduction of tyranny and despotism.

Perhaps we have put too much weight on ideas and political philosophy //

Christopher Caldwell’s essay on the roots of America’s partisan divide the other day. He makes a fascinating argument: the two seminal dates in American history are not 1619 and 1787, but rather 1787 and 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed.

That year, for all intents and purposes, a second constitution was created. American constitutional law pivoted from the ethos of ‘one law for all’ to ‘different laws for different races, sexes, sexual orientations, etc.’–seemingly a move to boost the historically disadvantaged but actually a regression to tiered inequality which America had slowly but surely been moving away from since the founding with votes for women, desegregation, and decriminalization of homosexuality.

The civil rights constitution turned old injustices around and granted poorly defined identity groups permanent privileges not available to Americans as a whole (‘privilege’ = ‘private law’). Caldwell writes:

Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787, that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefitted by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.

U.S.
Supremes Signal a Brave New World of Popular Presidential Elections
By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
July 11, 2020 10:44 AM
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Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Elena Kagan prior to the State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., February 4, 2020 (Leah Millis/Reuters)
The Court’s decision in Chiafalo v. Washington seems sure to intensify the partisan fight over the Electoral College’s future.
Whither the Electoral College?

The Supreme Court had its say on the matter during the always-eventful last week of the term. To repeat a contention often made in these columns, the High Court has evolved into an essentially political institution, robed in the judiciary’s apolitical veneer. Given that we are a deeply divided nation, that the late-term cases are usually the most controversial, and that the four left-leaning justices — those appointed by Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama — tend to vote as a bloc in these cliffhanger rulings, one doesn’t expect many 9–0 decisions when the calendar reaches late June (let alone July).

Yet there it was on Monday: Chiafalo v. Washington. At issue was the question of “faithless electors.” Specifically, may a state enforce the pledge it compels electors to make to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the state’s popular vote? The Court’s holding that states have the power to do so was unanimous. Significantly, though, the Court was not of one mind about why.

The case is worth our attention because of what’s been going on under the radar. //

The Court’s decision in Chiafalo v. Washington seems sure to intensify the partisan fight over the Electoral College’s future.

Whither the Electoral College? //

Among the Left’s many transformative projects is the drive to have presidents elected by a national popular vote. The project, known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, would effectively eliminate the Constitution’s Electoral College system. It would reduce the College to a nullity by requiring a state’s electors to vote for the candidate who wins the national popular vote — regardless of whether that candidate loses the state’s popular vote. As Hillary Clinton and Al Gore could tell you, that would radically change how presidents are elected, and ultimately how we are governed.

Today, by 5-to-4, with John Roberts shockingly joining the four conservatives on that court, the US Supreme Court ruled that blocking state aid to religious schools, if such aid was available to private schools, in general, was unconstitutional. This is from Roberts’s opinion:

A state need not subsidize private education, but once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.

That was 100% good news.

A myth has grown up that providing an education to children must be done by the government via a system of government owned and operated schools. Along with that myth a corollary has developed that any use of state revenue to support non-government schools deprives government schools of resources. This is patent nonsense. Tax dollars for education are to educate children and it doesn’t matter where that education takes place or who does it so long as it happens. If a child goes to a private school, the government school reaps a windfall. They not only don’t have to teach a child, they get to keep the taxes that child’s parents pay while the parent have to tuition in addition to the taxes.

This case, however, tends to have greater import.

Justice Neil Gorsuch went out of his way to demolish the idea that ‘free exercise of religion’ was the same as the Obama-esque ‘freedom of worship.’

Most importantly, though, it is not as if the First Amendment cares. The Constitution forbids laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion. That guarantee protects not just the right to be a religious person, holding beliefs inwardlyand secretly; it also protects the right to act on those beliefs outwardly and publicly. //

Even today, in fiefdoms small and large, people of faith are made to choose between receiving the protection of the State and living lives true to their religious convictions.

Of course, in public benefits cases like the one before us the stakes are not so dramatic. Individuals are forced only to choose between forgoing state aid or pursuing some aspect of their faith. The government does not put a gun to the head, only a thumb on the scale. But, as so many of our cases explain, the Free Exercise Clause doesn’t easily tolerate either; any discrimination against religious exercise must meet the demands of strict scrutiny. In this way, the Clause seeks to ensure that religion remains “a matter of voluntary choice by individuals and their associations, [where] each sect ‘flourish[es] according to the zeal of its adherents and the appeal of its dogma,’” influenced by neither where the government points its gun nor where it places its thumb. McDaniel, 435 U. S., at 640 (opinion of Brennan J.) (quoting Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U. S. 306, 313 (1952)).

Montana’s Supreme Court disregarded these foundational principles. Effectively, the court told the state legislature and parents of Montana like Ms. Espinoza: You can have school choice, but if anyone dares to choose to send a child to an accredited religious school, the program will be shuttered. That condition on a public benefit discriminates against the free exercise of religion. Calling it discrimination on the basis of religious status or religious activity makes no difference: It is unconstitutional all the same.

The ruling will lead to a tsunami of polarizing court cases and further degradation of Americans' natural rights to free speech and religious exercise. //

This is a salient example of what Christopher Caldwell calls the United States’ second constitution, which is at war with its first: the identity politics laws and regulations passed largely since the 1960s in the name of “antidiscrimination.”

“Just as assuming that two parallel lines can meet overturns the whole of Euclidean geometry, eliminating freedom of association from the U.S. Constitution changed everything,” Caldwell writes in “Age of Entitlement.” At the time, it wasn’t obvious how “extra rights” could destroy natural rights. But it is now. //

Given all that has happened after Obergefell v. Hodges, which we were vociferously told was ridiculous to forecast — transgenderism immediately going mainstream, pushing religion inside the closet LGBT people were vacating, limiting people’s ability to freely express their faith and ideas, forcing education institutions to promote LGBT politics and behavior — it’s naive to think such scenarios will not quickly become reality as a result of this court decision. //This decision also cements public schools’ status as social enforcers and subsidizers of far-left politics, as they can have no potential legal defense against a teacher switching genders in front of students, putting boys in girls’ locker rooms and sports, or teaching preschoolers that Heather can have two or even three mommies. Queer theory is now reigning U.S. employment law. This means it must also dominate all institutions of higher education that are not explicitly religious, both public and private. //

All elected officials and candidates need to start being asked in public, on videos immediately posted to social media, why they aren’t doing anything to keep naked men from getting access to naked girls in showers, bathrooms, and locker rooms. Republicans need to be asked how they can tell us to vote for them “because judges” when their Supreme Court nominees just passed an LGBT version of Roe v. Wade that will lead to teaching preschoolers the confusing, anti-science lie that “boys can have girl brains.”

They need to be asked on camera whether they support the Constitution’s unconditional guarantees of freedom of association, freedom of speech, and the freedom to worship, and if not, how they can take an oath of office swearing fealty to that Constitution. They should be asked how they can justify not voting to eliminate Title VII now that the Supreme Court has made it a Trojan horse for forcing lingerie shops to hire men to fit women’s bras and female beauticians to wax a man’s genitals. They should be asked what effective steps they are taking to ensure that taxpayer dollars do not finance genital mutilation, and that medical and therapeutic professionals lose their licenses if they mutilate the healthy bodies of underage boys and girls. //

Fighting this may not work. That two-thirds of our nation’s highest court clearly despise the Constitution and the way of life it protects, and which it is their sole job to defend, may be yet another indication that the United States we know and love is heading into a dark night of oblivion, like all empires before it. If that is the case, however, I’m going down fighting as hard as I can.

These people believe you are as stupid as they are //

Third amendment -- troops quartered under contract in hotels is consent and compensation by definition

An additional 140 House Republicans joined a lawsuit Friday seeking to end proxy voting used by the lower chamber this week for the first time in history.

The House proxy voting rule allows it to do business with as few as 20 members present, with each controlling the votes of 10 others. //

This new House rule creates the strange situation of establishing a quorum by counting members as present who are, in fact, absent. It allows the House to do business with as few as 20 members present, with each controlling the votes of 10 others.

The only reason to attempt something so radical is the fear of failure under the traditional legislative practice that the Constitution requires and Congress has always followed.

Churchgoers across the country are reasserting their fundamental rights of conscience—rights that too many political leaders have forgotten or denied. //

On Friday, President Trump said churches and houses of worship are “essential” and called on governors nationwide to allow them to open this weekend. If they don’t, Trump said he would “override” governors, citing forthcoming guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In remarks Thursday, the president criticized some governors who have “deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential” but not churches. “It’s not right. So I’m correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship essential.” //

At the end of Thomas Jefferson’s life, in typical Jeffersonian fashion he designed his own tombstone and wrote his own epitaph: “Author of the Declaration of American Independence / of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom / and Father of the University of Virginia.”

It’s easy to see why Jefferson included the Declaration, which gave birth to a new nation, and the University of Virginia, which was—and is—a monument to his genius. But why include a state statute for religious freedom?

Because Jefferson understood what Walz, Newsom, Murphy and others have forgotten or rejected: that “our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to God.”

Emmet G. Sullivan, the judge in the case of former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is refusing to let William Barr’s Justice Department drop the charge. He’s even thinking of adding more, appointing a retired judge to ask “whether the Court should issue an Order to Show Cause why Mr. Flynn should not be held in criminal contempt for perjury.”

Pundits are cheering. A trio of former law enforcement and judicial officials saluted Sullivan in the Washington Post, chirping, “The Flynn case isn’t over until a judge says it’s over.” Yuppie icon Jeffrey Toobin of CNN and the New Yorker, one of the #Resistance crowd’s favored legal authorities, described Sullivan’s appointment of Judge John Gleeson as “brilliant.” MSNBC legal analyst Glenn Kirschner said Americans owe Sullivan a “debt of gratitude.”

One had to search far and wide to find a non-conservative legal analyst willing to say the obvious, i.e. that Sullivan’s decision was the kind of thing one would expect from a judge in Belarus. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley was one of the few willing to say Sullivan’s move could “could create a threat of a judicial charge even when prosecutors agree with defendants.” //

The acts at issue are calls Flynn made to Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak on December 29th, 2016 in which he told the Russians not to overreact to sanctions. That’s it. The investigation was about to be dropped, but someone got the idea of using electronic surveillance of the calls to leverage a case into existence.

In a secrets-laundering maneuver straight out of the Dick Cheney playbook, some bright person first illegally leaked classified details to David Ignatius at the Washington Post, then agents rushed to interview Flynn about the “news.”

“The record of his conversation with Ambassador Kislyak had become widely known in the press,” is how Deputy FBI chief Andrew McCabe put it, euphemistically. “We wanted to sit down with General Flynn and understand, kind of, what his thoughts on that conversation were.”

A Laurel-and-Hardy team of agents conducted the interview, then took three weeks to write and re-write multiple versions of the interview notes used as evidence (because why record it?). They were supervised by a counterintelligence chief who then memorialized on paper his uncertainty over whether the FBI was trying to “get him to lie” or “get him fired,” worrying that they’d be accused of “playing games.” After another leak to the Washington Post in early February, 2017, Flynn actually was fired, and later pleaded guilty to lying about sanctions in the Kislyak call, the transcript of which was of course never released to either the defense or the public.

Warrantless surveillance, multiple illegal leaks of classified information, a false statements charge constructed on the razor’s edge of Miranda, and the use of never-produced, secret counterintelligence evidence in a domestic criminal proceeding – this is the “rule of law” we’re being asked to cheer. //

On the campaign trail in 2016, I watched Democrats hand Trump the economic populism argument by dismissing all complaints about the failures of neoliberal economics. This mistake was later compounded by years of propaganda arguing that “economic insecurity” was just a Trojan Horse term for racism. These takes, along with the absurd kneecapping of the Bernie Sanders movement, have allowed Trump to position himself as a working-class hero, the sole voice of a squeezed underclass.

The same mistake is now being made with civil liberties. Millions have lost their jobs and businesses by government fiat, there’s a clamor for censorship and contact tracing programs that could have serious long-term consequences, yet voters only hear Trump making occasional remarks about freedom; Democrats treat it like it’s a word that should be banned by Facebook (a recent Washington Post headline put the term in quotation marks, as if one should be gloved to touch it). Has the Trump era really damaged our thinking to this degree?

You need to hear what he has to say. //

“What really has been pissing me off lately is the fact that these officers that are going out here and enforcing these tyrannical orders, what they’re doing is they’re…putting my job and my safety at risk. Because…you’re widening the gap between public trust and law enforcement officers.” //

The special ops vet culled from his experiences oversees in order to lay down a lesson on law:

“[T]he thing that I want you guys to realize is that our power that we hold as law enforcement officers, it’s nothing more than a facade. It’s a badge and a gun. And…you don’t realize if you haven’t lived in anarchy, if you haven’t seen combat, things can be stripped from people in a heartbeat. And that’s what I’m afraid of.”

The man knows the American spirit:

“I’m afraid these actions are going to wake a sleeping giant, i.e. the American people… They’re going to be put in a position where they won’t have their rights trampled anymore. And us as law enforcement officers, we’ll have our ability to enforce the law stripped from us in about 10 minutes.” //

“And I promise you,” he went on, “most of you out there doing these tyrannical acts against our citizens, you’re not ready for combat. You’re not mentally or physically ready for combat in the first place. I promise you, you don’t want to go through that, and I hope I never have to go through that again.

The Michigan Conservative Coalition organized a protest against the state’s Governor, Gretchen Whitmer. They planned to create a traffic jam around the Michigan Capitol Building in Lansing, as a symbolic gesture of disagreement with Whitmer’s “Stay Safe, Stay Home directive” which they call #OperationGridlock.

A message found on the MCC’s website read, “We are all concerned for those afflicted with COVID 19. Yes, many of the personal behaviors we have been reminded to use are good practices. Wash your hands. Cover your cough. Stay home if you are sick. That said, Michiganders are fed up!”

Protestors carried signs that said, “Heil Whitmer,” “Open Michigan,” “End Crackdown” and “Impeach Whitmer.” ///

1st Amendment: the right to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for redress is a God-given right and cannot be restricted by the government.

Read over the Bill of Rights again, and even give it a third glance. Memorize them. These are not rules for you to follow, these are rules for the government to follow. Rules that they have to obey and rights that they cannot take away in any circumstance. Rights are given to us by God, not government, and as such, the amendments I posted above are untouchable.

Do NOT let anyone take these away from you, even in a time of crisis like this one.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it will take action in a religious liberty case involving churches in Greenville, Mississippi, where police officers issued $500 tickets to church members who refused to leave the parking lot for a drive-in Easter church service.

The DOJ told Fox News they believe the court filing “strongly suggests that the city’s actions target religious conduct.” The DOJ said the United States files in cases that have “important issues of religious liberty in courts at every level, from trial courts to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Attorney General William Barr issued a statement giving guidance on how the DOJ should work with religious-liberty cases.

“Religious liberty is a fundamental principle of enduring importance in America, enshrined in our Constitution and other sources of federal law,” Barr said. //

AG BILL BARR: "Government may not impose special restrictions on religious activity that do not also apply to similar nonreligious activity."