Judge Jeanine Piro — Americans Want the Truth

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This is good, really good.

When she said, “The system doesn’t need to be fixed, your administration needs to be fixed,” I gave her a big smile. She’s exactly right. Blaming “the system” is a typical cop out used by the very people who caused every aspect of whatever problem is at hand. Blaming the system seems to be a universal conceit. Years ago I was on a Bar association committee to investigate what was wrong with the legal system and how to change it so it would work better. We might as well have been looking for a way to make pigs fly. When I suggested that it really didn’t matter what system was in place if the same people were going to be running it, I was hooted down.

Judge Jeanine is also right about how to investigate the IRS scandal. Start with the low level IRS employees and put them before a grand jury. They don’t want to take the heat by themselves and they will quickly start rolling over on their bosses. Then you do the same to the bosses and keep moving up the ladder.

For a brilliant read on how this works, take a look at Diary of a DA by Herbert J. Stern. IRS employees will be a cake walk compared to the gangsters Stern was dealing with. This will take a special prosecutor because no one in Eric Holder’s Justice Department has the heart for it.

Changing times and the “Living Constitution”

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Changing technology presents a recurring problem for lawmakers. Laws are enacted with a background understanding of the facts. When those facts change, the effect of the old legal rules can change along with them. A law created for one world may have a very different impact when applied to the facts of a different era. As a result, changing technology and social practice often trigger a need for legal adaptation. Maintaining the function of old rules can require changing those rules to adapt to the new environment.

This paragraph opens an essay in the Harvard Law Review by Constitutional scholar and Fourth Amendment expert Orin Kerr.  Professor Kerr’s essay calls for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its previous ruling back in 1973 which stands for the current state of the law on police searches incident to an arrest.  That ruling held that the Fourth Amendment always permits a “full” search of a person and property on his person at the time of arrest. The question currently being debated in the Federal courts is whether the police may search the content of a suspect’s cell phone when he or she is arrested, relying on the “incident to arrest” exception to the requirement to obtain a search warrant before conducting a search.

Professor Kerr says the Supreme Court should change it previous ruling on the Fourth Amendment by adopting a special rule for cell phones, stated this way: Such a device should be searched pursuant to the search‐incident‐to arrest exception only when “it is reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found” in the device.

I think Kerr is on to something here, and that he is right.  The Supreme Court should revise its earlier ruling. But there is something here that is even more interesting to me than the current law on warrantless searches incident to arrest.

I agree whole heartedly with Kerr’s opening paragraph quoted at the beginning of this post.  I agree that, “A law created for one world may have a very different impact when applied to the facts of a different era.” If we agree with that statement, does that mean we must agree with the “Living Constitution” school of thought so popular with liberal Constitutional law professors? [I have no idea what Professor Kerr’s views are on this].

No, for this reason.  Kerr’s statement of changes in facts and technology calling for a change in the law does not support the claims for a “Living Constitution.”  The Constitution does not need to changed to accommodate a change in previous opinions of the Supreme Court when those decisions were reasonable interpretations of how the unchanging principles embodied in the Constitution are to be applied to current facts and circumstances.  But if the principle upon which a decision is based cannot be found in the Constitution, or if the decision can only be supported by ignoring a principle that is clearly stated in the Constitution, then a Living Constitution that grows and changes according to the the personal whims of judges is required for their decisions to be sustained.

A case like Roe v. Wade is the consummate example of a “Living Constitution” being needed to justify it.  The Constitution itself is silent on either abortion or a right of privacy.  These concepts had to read into the Constitution by an activist judge and that sort of judicial fiat needs a Living Constitution to justify it.  Otherwise, those who wanted abortion to be a Constitutional issue would have had to resort to the intolerable labor of convincing their fellow citizens of the merit of their idea and then go through the process of getting a Constitutional amendment approved by 2/3 of Congress and ratified by 3/4 of the states.

A Living Constitution is how you can ignore the legitimate amendment process and get the Constitution to say what you want it to say and ignore what it actually says, or doesn’t say.

A welfare state is not a benevolent state

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Obama’s massive expansion of welfare, food stamps, social security disability, free cell phones, and all the other government give-aways that we probably don’t even know about, are not done out of any genuine concern for the well being of the Americans and illegal aliens who are getting the benefits. To the contrary, these gifts and entitlements are simply a way for Obama to buy the votes of those he claims he wants to help.  He doesn’t use his own money or that of his campaign donors to buy these votes, even if vote buying were not illegal and despicable.  He buys them with money taken from hard-working Americans and pays it to idle Americans solely to persuade them to vote for him in order to keep the benefits coming.

This is a bad form of corruption by itself, but it’s also evil for what it does to those who improvidently make a Faustian bargain with Obama.  They are robbed of their opportunity to be self sustaining, independent and proud.  That’s no small thing if you consider Abraham Maslow and his famous theory on innate human needs.  These are psychological needs that are essential to happiness and human flourishing.  These innate needs follow steps through security, stimulation, identity, and at the top of the hierarchy is something Maslow calls self actualization.  It sounds daunting but all it means is the ability to make happen in your life whatever it is you want to happen.  Within reason, of course.  You can’t win the lottery even though you want to, and that’s because it’s a matter of chance that you can’t control.  But most of the good things in life are within a person’s control.  Having friends, getting an education, getting a job or entering a profession, making a living, having a family, seeing your children grow up, living in a good neighborhood, taking great vacations, having a healthy sex life, creating things with your own hands, having the respect of others, knowing you are a moral person, and doing it all by your own talent and initiative are what makes you a self-actualizing person, and therefore a happy and fulfilled person.

Depending on government welfare for anything other than a temporary lift completely destroys all possibility of ever knowing the joy of independence and self respect.  Nothing else explains the insistence of certain people that they would starve and die before they would accept government welfare. They are the ones who understand that man does not live on bread alone.  Even those who do not think this way, those people who don’t believe they need or want independence and self reliance will invariably suffer by trying to live outside those values.

That’s the fate to which Obama’s welfare expansion dooms all the Americans who accept it.  That justifies calling it evil.  It’s evil because it’s done for selfish opportunistic reasons and inflicts harm on those its done to, without care or concern by the evil doer.

Walter Russell Meade says all this in his blog post entitled, Want to Be Happy? Get to Work:

Work is an essential aspect of human life, one of the things that fulfill us as human beings. There is a basic human desire to contribute to society, so we grow depressed and feel listless when we’re not doing that.

While we don’t want to read policy directives right out of this research, the general principle, that work is important for people of all ages, should always be in the background of our thinking about retirement and employment more broadly.

Right.

 

The peculiar ironies of this world

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Screen shot 2013-05-18 at 10.21.01 AM This must be one of the most perplexing of such ironies, that the man who founded a company making some of the worst software in the world, a company whose profits and stock price have floundered for years because of that, but is nevertheless able to persuade the great masses of people on earth to buy and use his crappy software, often to the exclusion of better products, and thus make himself the richest man in the world.

The phrase “go figure” comes to mind but it’s wrong to say it.  This is an incalculable enigma, trying to think it through and understand it would be a fool’s errand. It is a phenomenon that can be observed and known but never understood.

Best headline of the day: “The Obama administration is making the case for conservatism better than Mitt Romney ever did.”

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U.S. President Obama gestures as he responds to a question during a news conference with Britain's PM Cameron at the White House in WashingtonThis headline is from a piece at the left-leaning Slate.com, written by John Dickerson. I don’t know who he is but he has given us an insightful, perhaps brilliant, piece of writing here. To find such wisdom and perception at a leftist rag like Slate is jaw dropping.  So be it, I’ll take it.  Here’s a taste:

The Obama administration is doing a far better job making the case for conservatism than Mitt Romney, Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner ever did. Showing is always better than telling, and when the government overreaches in so many ways it gives support to the conservative argument about the inherently rapacious nature of government. 

First let’s get our terms straight. Conservatives are not the same as Republicans. The former believe in a philosophy which stays roughly fixed and the latter belong to a party that occasionally embraces the philosophy but deviates when necessary to win elections, pass legislation, and follow the selfish aims of those who are in office and want to remain there. Conservatives argue against the expansion of government, whereas Republicans sometimes enlarge it to please their constituents or themselves. Republicans also sometimes botch foreign policy operations and spin themselves silly in their aftermath, which is why the Benghazi revelations are left out of this grand unification theory.

Though some of these scandals will allow Republicans to score points in the daily tally of who is ahead and who is behind, there is a larger benefit to conservatives that goes beyond the fall in the president’s approval ratings or the boost Republican Senate candidates may get in 2014. Those outcomes rely on further adjudication of these issues. It may turn out that President Obama had nothing to do with any of them. It could simply be rogues in various agencies. Or, maybe President Obama orchestrated the whole kaleidoscope of wrongdoing on the White House whiteboard. You don’t have to embrace either of those theories to see that it’s much easier to agree with the conservative notion that government is a mess. We have enough evidence of that already. 

That a lefty writing for a leftist website could write the words quoted above either contradicts my belief that lefties don’t understand the world they live in, or it confirms my other belief that lefties are smart and do understand how the world works but just don’t care so much for that as they care for their leftist agenda of big government controlling every nook and cranny of everybody’s life.  A corollary to that theorem has to be that occasionally even they feel threatened if they get a bit too much of what they want.

I can only find one thing in what Mr. Dickerson says to quibble with, and it is just a quibble. He says Republicans sometimes deviate from conservatism to win elections. I’d say the opposite is true, that it is precisely when they abandon and malign conservatism that they lose elections. There are many examples, Both 2008 and 2012 are prime examples as are 1996 and 1998. That so many Republicans believe they must deviate from conservatism in order to win elections is what has earned them the moniker as the “stupid party.” The prime example of how Republicans win when they articulate conservatism well is 1994. Since then, Republicans have largely abandoned the very thing that worked so well for them in 1994. In fact they began renouncing conservatism almost as soon as the 1994 election was over and have continued on that course since, much to their detriment.  How ironic that someone from the Left understands Republicans better than they understand themselves.

All of Mr. Dickerson’s article is highly recommended, and you shouldn’t short change yourself by reading only what I have quoted above.  Read the whole thing.  It’s worthwhile.

171 years ago today…the Oregon Trail began

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On May 16, 1842, about 100 pioneers with 18 wagons set out from the Independence, Missouri, area in one of the first wagon trains to the Northwest. Over the next two decades, tens of thousands would follow on the Oregon Trail, the longest of the great overland routes to the western frontier.

“Oregon or the Grave.” “Patience and Perseverance.” “Never Say Die.” Such were the slogans that pioneer families painted on their wagons before striking out on the Oregon Trail, which began at Independence and stretched 2,000 miles across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains to the valleys of the Oregon Territory. The journey usually took four to six months. The settlers started out in the spring so they could get through the mountains before snow blocked the passes.

They packed as much flour, bacon, salt, dried fruit, and other supplies as they could into the covered wagons, called “prairie schooners” because, from a distance, their white canvas tops looked like ship sails crossing the plains. Once on the trail, the settlers averaged about 15 miles a day. Many walked the whole trail beside the wagons.

Along the way, they faced blistering heat, biting cold, pounding rainstorms, and howling blizzards. They crossed flooded rivers and waterless plains. At times they endured hunger and thirst. Indian attacks were a rare but real threat. Cholera, smallpox, and other diseases were more common killers. Thousands died on the trail. The route was lined with broken wheels, smashed wagons, bleached bones of dead oxen, and buried loved ones, making it the nation’s longest graveyard.

“We lost everything but our lives,” wrote one settler after the trek. Yet thousands kept heading west, determined to make better lives for themselves and their children. The ruts left by their wagon wheels remain in some places—a testament to the iron will of the American pioneer.

The above is from Bill Bennett’s American Patriots’ Almanac.

Places in Wyoming to observe wagon wheel tracks and other Oregon Trail artifacts include, but are not limited to: Split Rock near Muddy Gap, Independence Rock South of Casper, Guernsey State Park, and South Pass City.

There exist some terrific and wonderful books to read about the Oregon Trail and the American Westward movement.  These include, but again are not limited to: The Way West by A.B. Guthrie (sequel to The Big Sky), and Across the Wide Missouri by Bernard DeVoto.  The latter chronicles the decline of the fur trade in the 1830’s and is a history of the period immediately preceeding the birth of the Oregon Trail.  The A.B. Guthrie books are in the category of historical fiction, and are literary masterpieces.

The Tea Party is Back!

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From National Journal:

Just months after President Obama’s reelection deflated conservative activists, a slew of rapidly unfolding scandals involving government malfeasance is giving the movement new life.

“This is a defining moment for our movement, and it will test us and the country to make change,” said Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks. “Our social networks are on fire, and the intensity continues to build.”

Perhaps the tea party’s biggest victory in 2013 is not one that can be measured as succinctly as a law’s repeal or a candidate’s win. The swirl of Washington scandal offers the movement a kind of “I-told-you-so” bragging rights about the evils of government overreach that is frequently dismissed as conspiracy theories from the political fringe.

For now, tea-party groups are expected to enjoy a surge in fundraising and interest. Activists are poised to confront members of Congress over the IRS and Benghazi attacks the way they did in 2009 over Obama’s health care law. “White House in Damage Control Mode as Scandals Pile Up,” declared the Tea Party News Network in an e-mail blast Tuesday afternoon.

“I think it’s time we get back out there on the streets,” Kremer said. “The movement has matured and grown, and the real work to effect change is done outside of rallies, but we need to keeping making sure our voices are heard.”

I remember when he criticized the Tea Party for its objections to his spending and taxing excesses. He said, “I don’t know what they’re complaining about. They ought to be thanking me!” They weren’t about to thank him then. Now they might be.