The Trouble With Narrow SCOTUS Rulings
The Supreme Court has sometimes issued rulings so sweeping and wrong that the nine (or often only five) robed despots have done irreparable damage to our Constitution and Republic. Roe v. Wade comes to mind for its invention of make-believe “rights” and its federalism-crushing precedent. Yet in other cases, the Court’s mistake has been in not going far enough to defend basic rights guaranteed in the Constitution.
Let’s start with scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, which, in a 7-2 ruling issued Thursday, SCOTUS failed for a third time to strike down. To be clear right up front, the Court’s real failure came in 2012, when Chief Justice John Roberts switched sides and inexplicably rewrote the law so as to uphold it. In that egregious ruling, he unilaterally declared the individual mandate penalty a tax so that he could say Congress had the authority to create the law under its power to tax. This was despite the fact that Democrats had gone out of their way in crafting the law and then defending it before the Court to say that the penalty was not a tax. Neither were the leftist justices making the tax argument.
Roberts sacrificed the Rule of Law on the altar of politics in order to not be seen as discrediting his own institution. Ironically, the result of his effort was a precedent that did damage to the Court.
Not only that, but he ensured future litigation would continue because he left standing a law that Congress clearly did not have the constitutional authority to enact. That next litigation came when Republicans used their 2017 tax reform to zero out the penalty tax for anyone who hadn’t purchased health insurance.
Texas and 17 other states then sued to challenge the law on the grounds Roberts had created. If there’s no tax, they said, the mandate cannot stand. And without the mandate, the law itself must fall. Despite their victories in lower courts, it was a long shot, and sure enough, it failed — though not on the merits, which the majority didn’t even really address. Instead, the seven justices ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing under Article III.
After joining the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s picture is plastered across the Internet today primarily because of the Democrats’ hysterical warnings last fall. “The American people should make no mistake,” cried then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck scumbag/liar-Schumer, “a vote by any Senator for Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.” So much for that. Moreover, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas joined the majority.
The bottom line is what we said from the beginning: scumbag/liar-nObamaCare, as with every other massive and unconstitutional entitlement created by Congress, is here to stay, unless Congress says otherwise.
The second ruling to consider is the Court’s 9-0 ruling in favor of Catholic Social Services, a Philadelphia foster agency that had sued to stop from being forced by the city to place adoptive children with same-sex couples, contrary to biblical and church teaching.
First, note that the unanimous ruling is one of several this term, and that’s significant given the Democrats’ push to pack the Court. The justices seem to be sending a message: Don’t do it.
Second, the ruling is a clear win for religious liberty. “CSS seeks only an accommodation that will allow it to continue serving the children of Philadelphia in a manner consistent with its religious beliefs; it does not seek to impose those beliefs on anyone else,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his majority opinion. “The refusal of Philadelphia to contract with CSS for the provision of foster care services unless it agrees to certify same-sex couples as foster parents cannot survive strict scrutiny, and violates the First Amendment.”
Third, however, the ruling does not provide protection for religious liberty beyond the narrow instance at hand. In fact, the ACLU celebrated the ruling for not “establish[ing] a constitutional right to opt out of [non-discrimination] laws when discrimination is motivated by religious beliefs.” That’s a tendentious framing, of course, given that Rainbow Mafia thugs are the aggressors in these cases.
Yes, the ruling heeds the limits of judicial authority, but it fails to provide true and needed protections for the religious liberty of all Americans. Yes, it’s the latest in a series of rulings favorable to religious liberty, but it also highlights the shortcomings of these narrow rulings. It’s what the Wall Street Journal editors call Roberts’s “mode of seeking consensus by watering down principle.”
The primary problem is that the Court again shied away from overturning the Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith, which applies a standard to claims of religious liberty that has turned out to be too stringent. That’s especially true when leftists are demanding total fealty to their intolerant dogma in every facet of life.
“Dodging the question,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch, “guarantees it will recur tomorrow.”
Tomorrow actually came this past Tuesday in the case of Colorado baker Jack Phillips. In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, saying that he did not have to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding. Yet because the Smith precedent still stood, the Court tailored its ruling narrowly, and the result has been continued harassment of Phillips by the Rainbow Mafia.
On Tuesday, Phillips lost a similar case in Colorado, when a Denver district judge ruled that he violated the rights of Autumn Scardina, an activist attorney who demanded a cake for “her” gender “transition.” Phillips will of course appeal, but all of this could have been avoided if the Supreme Court would take one of the many opportunities it’s had to definitively protect religious liberty. Instead, as Justice Samuel Alito put it, “The Court has emitted a wisp of a decision that leaves religious liberty in a confused and vulnerable state.”
The overarching theme here is that some of the justices can’t seem to tell the difference between judicial activism — legislating from the bench — and defending core constitutional rights. Unless and until the justices develop the backbone necessary to stop doing the former while upholding the latter, American Patriots and particularly Christians will be forced to continue fighting what should be unnecessary legal battles to defend the Constitution from encroaching government programs and diktats, as well as basic Liberty and individual rights against the tyrannical persecution of the “tolerant” Left. ~The Patriot Post
Dems’ HR 1 Gambit Dead-Ends at GOP Roadblock
Senate Democrats’ last-ditch effort to garner some Republican support for a blatant power grab failed on Thursday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell unequivocally rejected Senator Joe Manchin’s proposed compromise on S 1/HR 1 — the dubiously titled “For the People Act.”
In announcing the GOP rejection, McConnell stated:
Senate Democrats seem to have reached a so-called ‘compromise’ election takeover among themselves. In reality, the plan endorsed by scumbag/worthless-Stacey Abrams is no compromise. It still subverts the First Amendment to supercharge cancel culture and the Left’s name-and-shame campaign model. It takes redistricting away from state legislatures and hands it over to computers. And it still retains S. 1’s rotten core: an assault on the fundamental idea that states, not the federal government, should decide how to run their own elections.
Senate Democrats need the support of at least 10 Republicans in order to advance the bill past the filibuster for a floor vote. Manchin, who has rejected pressure from his fellow Democrats to vote to eliminate the filibuster, also opposed the original HR 1/S 1. He was aiming to come up with a compromise he hoped would successfully avoid the filibuster issue entirely.
However, Manchin’s proposed “compromises” amounted to little other than nibbling at the edges of what remains a profoundly partisan and anti-federalist piece of legislation. “I would make this observation about the revised version,” McConnell said. “It still turns the federal election commission from a judge into a prosecutor.”
Unsurprisingly, scumbag/liar-Schumer blasted Republicans over their refusal to get behind “critical voting rights.” Translation: He means the institutionalization of election fraud to perpetuate Democrats’ nationwide control. Furthermore, exactly whose voting rights would supposedly be “critically” affected should this legislation fail to pass? The answer is simple: Nobody’s. That is, no one who’s legally allowed to vote.
The Democrats are sure to keep pressing this “voting rights” gambit as they promulgate a disinformation campaign that they hope to turn into a midterm election issue. Republicans must continue to shine the bright light of truth on this deceitful attempted power grab. ~The Patriot Post
Is socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden Mentally Impaired?
There was a moment in Geneva, a moment missed by most journalists, when socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin were sitting side by side, finishing up a discussion on cyber warfare. Thinking the mics had been turned off, Putin leaned into socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden and whispered, “ socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe, admit it. Trump won the election.”
To which socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden nodded knowingly and replied, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.”
Ba-dum-chh. Making light of the American president’s mental state has been mostly fun and games to this point, but sooner or later someone’s going to get hurt. First-term Texas Republican Congressman Ronny Jackson seems to understand this, and yesterday he penned a letter to socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden, cosigned by 13 fellow House Republicans, that urges the president to submit to a cognitive test and share the results with the American people.
Jackson, perhaps more than any other American citizen, is best suited to write such a letter. After all, he was formerly the White House physician to both Barack scumbag/liar-nObama and Donald Trump. If anyone understands the great strain and the awesome cognitive demands of the American presidency, it’s Jackson. Yesterday, in addition to sending that letter, he issued a written statement:
The American people deserve to have absolute confidence in their President. They deserve to know that he or she can perform the duties demanded of the office, and they deserve to have full transparency on the mental state of their highest elected leader. I would argue that the American people don’t have that confidence in President socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden. When I was Physician to President Donald J. Trump, the liberal media relentlessly pushed a narrative that he needed a cognitive test and that it should be the standard for anyone serving as Commander-in-Chief and Head of State. I administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) test and President Trump excelled. Given the precedent set and Biden’s clear mental impairment, I believe it is past time he undergoes a cognitive test.
“We write to you today,” the letter to socialist/scumbag/ liar-Biden begins, “to express concern with your current cognitive state. We believe that, regardless of gender, age, or political party, all Presidents should follow the precedent set by former President Trump to document and demonstrate sound mental abilities.”
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s handlers, of course, won’t allow him to submit to any such test, unless his decline becomes utterly untenable. But perhaps bipartisan pressure will ultimately force their hand. The 46th president still has 44 months left in his term, and, as we’ve written previously, House Speaker scumbag/liar-Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats have already made some maneuvers to this end. As our Mark Alexander wrote in March:
Weeks before the election, scumbag/liar-Pelosi seeded the 25th Amendment legislation for socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s path to resign. As I noted then, “ scumbag/liar-Pelosi’s target is, ostensibly, Trump. But if socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden wins, this will provide Democrats plausible deniability to remove him. Of course, he’ll be complicit in that political maneuver, and ‘acquiesce’ to House Democrats in order to cover the fact that the real candidate has been scumbag/liar-Kamala Harris all along, thus not causing protest from his supporters that the transition was fixed before the election.”
In addition, our Thomas Gallatin reported in February:
Nearly three dozen House Democrats led by Jimmy Panetta (CA) recently sent a letter to socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden requesting that he give up his unilateral authority to launch the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In the letter, Panetta contends, “Vesting one person with this authority entails risks. Past presidents have threatened to attack other countries with nuclear weapons or exhibited behavior that caused other officials to express concern about the president’s judgment.”
Of course, Panetta’s letter didn’t mention socialist/ scumbag/liar-Biden’s advanced age or his mental state, but it didn’t have to. The letter was unprecedented, and, as Gallatin noted, it “tacitly underscores fears that socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden can’t be trusted with nukes.”
Regardless of whether Democrats one day join Republicans in their concern for socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s cognitive decline, Jackson and his colleagues have done the nation a service by going on the record rather than merely whispering and muttering about it. ~The Patriot Post
North Korean Defector: ‘This Country Is Choosing’ Tyranny
America’s colleges and universities are in trouble.
But we’re not talking about financial problems. Yeah, they’ve got those too. Instead, the real concern is that our institutions of higher learning have become centers of indoctrination where gullible minds are taught to hate the very country that made “free thinking” in academia possible in the first place.
It isn’t surprising that most American students gobble up the vitriol spewed by their professors at our country’s founders, the Declaration and the Constitution, and Western traditions. By the time they enter college as freshman (yes, we can still use that term), their minds have already been saturated with 18 years of left-wing propaganda found in television, movies, and social media. And their minds have already been primed by agents of the Left, also known as union school teachers.
In recent years, the pieces of this broader effort to undermine our country from within include Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and the Learning for Justice curriculum.
When they get to college, it’s one thing for American students to realize what’s being done to them, but quite another when a defector from North Korea finds that country’s mindset thriving here in the land of the free.
That’s right — North Korea. The quintessential Potemkin village, a place desperately trying to appear prosperous and free but whose citizens are oppressed by authoritarianism, state-sponsored brainwashing, and speech codes.
Sounds a little too much like our own country, doesn’t it?
Former Columbia University student and North Korean defector Yeonmi Park, for one, was amazed to find what Fox News summarizes as “anti-Western sentiment, collective guilt and suffocating political correctness” in a top American university. “Yeonmi saw red flags immediately upon arriving at the school. During orientation, she was scolded by a university staff member for admitting she enjoyed classic literature such as Jane Austen. It only got worse from there as Yeonmi realized that every one of her classes at the Ivy League school was infected with what she saw as anti-American propaganda, reminiscent of the sort she had grown up with.”
Park risked her life to get to America, a place she thought would embrace free speech and an open inquiry into ideas. In 2007, she escaped with her mother from North Korea, where they had fallen into slavery only to be rescued by Christian missionaries. She published a memoir, In Order to Live, describing her harrowing struggle to find freedom.
Instead, she found in the United States a nation evolving into a future North Korea. Even in the “land of the free and home of the brave,” people are silenced or punished for speaking out against the state, and citizens are told what to think and how to speak.
While you might think this type of anti-American propaganda can only be found in Ivy League schools, think again. Students in community colleges, state universities, and even our elite military academies are being taught to hate their country and to feel guilty for being American.
At the college level, administrators and deans have wholly embraced the “anti-racist” agenda and pledged to train its faculty and students how to be anti-racist. Add in strict speech codes, safe spaces, trigger warnings, preferred pronouns, cancel culture, self-censorship, mocking traditional viewpoints, removing Western literature and history, and professors using the academic lectern as a political bully pulpit, and you’ve got an army of millions ready to burn it all down after they graduate.
That’s enough to scare just about anybody, even a defector from the totalitarian regime in North Korea. Sometimes in history “there’s a military coup d'etat, like a force comes in taking your rights away and silencing you,” Park says. “But this country is choosing to be silenced, choosing to give their rights away.”
Maybe it’s time more Americans start waking up and heeding Park’s warning before it’s too late.
~The Patriot Post
DAVID LIMBAUGH
Baker Jack Phillips — A Cultural Hero
Colorado baker Jack Phillips is a perpetual offender. He simply will not do it. His offense? Unswervingly honoring his deeply held, and constitutionally protected, religious beliefs.
We’ve all heard of Phillips and his travails. Leftist bullies have been tormenting him for years, beginning in 2012, when the Colorado Civil Rights Commission targeted him for refusing to make a custom-designed cake to celebrate a same-sex wedding.
After several setbacks in various tribunals, Phillips was finally vindicated in a 7-to-2 U.S. Supreme Court ruling holding that the state of Colorado had shown “clear and impermissible hostility” toward Phillips’ religious convictions in violation of his First Amendment rights.
If there’s one thing as certain as death and taxes, it’s that the left is indefatigable and heartless. They make it personal when you don’t bend to their wishes. It was personal against Phillips — and they made an example of him.
So, the state persisted, as if neither embarrassed nor chastened by the court’s decision. The left didn’t take a breath. Within weeks of the court’s ruling, it targeted Phillips again for a different but strikingly similar sin: refusing to build a custom cake celebrating a gender transition.
Specifically, attorney Autumn Scardina had requested that Phillips make a cake blue on the outside and pink on the inside to symbolize the transition from male to female. Just as with the same-sex-wedding cake, Phillips declined, explaining it would violate his religious beliefs to do so.
Phillips finally had enough. He filed a federal lawsuit against the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for pursuing him again, based on Scardina’s complaint. In the process, Phillips marshaled evidence that the state was engaging in anti-religious hostility, leading Colorado officials to back down.
Scardina let the appeals deadline pass but craftily filed a civil lawsuit against Phillips. Alliance Defending Freedom, Phillips’ public-interest law firm, filed a motion to dismiss what should have been deemed a frivolous case. But to leftist activist judges, frivolous often means meritorious. They view themselves as super legislators not bound by the separation of powers doctrine or limited by their proper judicial function.
The court allowed the case to proceed and it went to trial on March 22, 2021. Just this week, the judge ruled that in refusing to make the cake celebrating a gender transition, Phillips violated the law. Denver District Judge A. Bruce Jones cavalierly refused to take Phillips at his word — that he declined because making the cake would have violated his religious beliefs. Jones said the case involved Phillips’ refusal to sell a product, not compelling speech.
“The anti-discrimination laws are intended to ensure that members of our society who have historically been treated unfairly, who have been deprived of even the every-day right to access businesses to buy products, are no longer treated as others,” said Jones.
This is rank speciousness. Phillips didn’t refuse to sell any products to anyone. He refused to make a custom cake with a message violating his religious convictions.
Kristen Waggoner, general counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, captured the essence of the left’s witch hunt against Phillips. “Radical activists and government officials are targeting artists like Phillips because they won’t promote messages on marriage and sexuality that violate their core convictions,” said Waggoner.
That’s exactly right. Phillips will happily serve LGBTQ individuals. He doesn’t deny them access to his shop and doesn’t refuse to serve them. He just won’t bow to their demands to endorse messages, as part of his art, that contradict his values.
This case is not about discrimination. Phillips is the victim here, not those who have singled him out for punishment to make a societal statement. They can find plenty of bakers thrilled to make a cake to their specifications. But that’s not enough. Truth be told, Phillips’ tormentors probably don’t even care about a cake at all. Their goal is to suppress opposing views. No, that’s too charitable. They want to force us to think and say.
They sought Phillips out like the predators they are and have been ceaselessly harassing and abusing him for years and manifestly won’t be denied, even when the Supreme Court smacks them down. This is not their crusade for tolerance. It is precisely the opposite. They refuse to live and let live; they require total submission, and they’re willing to bankrupt and destroy any who refuse to surrender and grovel.
This is not America — or, sadly, perhaps it is. This is what it’s come to. The woke bullies insist we all become cultural insomniacs — so woke that we’ll never sleep again. Well, Phillips refused to sleep all right, but just not in the way his ruthless enemies demanded.
Liberty lovers are indebted to Phillips for his refusal to back down, for his courage in standing up not just for himself but for all of us who still care about America’s founding principles and particularly religious liberty and freedom of expression. While the left’s scorched-earth march to uproot traditional cultural values and our constitutional liberties can be painfully discouraging to witness, heroes such as Phillips are an inspiration and are providing a template for our resistance against leftist totalitarians.
God bless you, Jack Phillips, as you continue to fight for us. ~The Patriot Post
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