Daily Digest

Jun. 25, 2015

THE FOUNDATION

“We must take human nature as we find it, perfection falls not to the share of mortals.” —George Washington, letter to John Jay, 1786

TOP RIGHT HOOKS

Slain SC Pastor Teaches One Last Lesson

The murderer in Charleston almost didn’t commit his crime because the people of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church were so kind to him when he entered the building. And even after his grisly act, family members of the slain extended grace to him. Unfortunately, that’s not true of out-of-town rabble rousers who came Tuesday night to disturb the memorial. Protesters with bullhorns shouted, “Arm yourself or harm yourself,” and “Never forget, never forgive.” That, of course, is the antithesis of the Christian message. Church members and other locals discouraged the protesters, who eventually left. Meanwhile, the Left exploited the tragedy to take on the Confederate flag, demanding the one flying on the state capitol grounds be removed (never mind it was put there by Democrat Gov. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings in defiance of federal civil rights legislation). Many Republicans even joined in calling for the flag’s removal. But here’s an interesting fact you won’t see on the nightly news: Pastor Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in the attack, voted in 2000 as a South Carolina state senator in favor of the compromise that kept the flag on capitol grounds. That sends a pretty powerful message that he didn’t seem to think the Confederate flag was a symbol worth censoring.

And don’t miss the fact that Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane Finally Got Those Duke Boys — no more “General Lee” Charger toys.

New Yorkers Say ‘No’ to SAFE Act

The New York State Police initially shot down inquiries into how many “assault weapons” have been registered with the state after its legislature enacted the SAFE Act in 2013, and we now have a pretty good idea why — because compliance is abysmal. On April 30, New York Supreme Court Judge Thomas McNamara ordered the State Police to disclose registration statistics. According to the figures, which were made public this week, just 23,847 gun owners have registered a total of 44,485 military-looking weapons. For perspective, that’s less than the 50,000 firearms registered under a similar law in Connecticut. Keep in mind, Connecticut has a population of 3.6 million, according to the Census Bureau. New York’s is 19.8 million. Just a small disparity. Keep in mind also that New Yorkers own somewhere around 1,000,000 of these so-called assault rifles, which would mean just 4% of eligible firearms have been registered. Leah Barrett, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, tried to put a positive spin on the numbers, responding, “Tens of thousands of people have complied with the law. That’s important. It shouldn’t be overlooked.” What shouldn’t be overlooked either is that the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers are exercising civil disobedience by rejecting a blatantly unconstitutional law. And they aren’t afraid to be jailed for it, either.

Pope’s Science Adviser’s Political Agenda Exposed

An old adage from the Gospel of Matthew warns, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (7:15). Unfortunately, Pope Francis did just the opposite when writing the environmental portion of his encyclical. Microbiologist Hans Schellnhuber is a science adviser to the Vatican, and also a fraud. Schellnhuber is in fact a strong believer in the Gaia hypothesis — in a nutshell, the worship of Mother Earth. “When Francis' encyclical was leaked last week, we wondered if his position on the man-made global warming question was ‘a misuse of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the church at large,’” writes the Investor’s Business Daily editorial board. “Our conclusion has only been solidified by the revelation that the pope was in league with Schellnhuber. … From atheists to strong-arm redistributionists, this pope is unequally yoked with those who don’t share the tenets of his faith — but who are happy to use that faith to achieve their political aims. Yes, there’s truly something wrong here.”

Don’t Miss Alexander’s Column

Read Clinton’s Benghazi Cover Up 3.0, on what you need to know about the three iterations of Clinton’s BIG Lie cover-up on Benghazi.

If you’d like to receive Alexander’s Column by email, update your subscription here.

FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS

ObamaCare: SCOTUS Overrules Rule of Law

By Nate Jackson

Once again, politics trumps Rule of Law. The Supreme Court issued its ObamaCare subsidies ruling this morning, upholding the Obama administration’s lawless execution by a vote of 6-3.

We’ve noted the background on the subsidy issue numerous times, but the summary is this: The language of the law restricted subsidies to people purchasing health insurance on stateexchanges. When 34 states declined to serve as vassals of the federal government, Barack Obama decided to issue subsidies on the federal exchange as well. Some 27 states challenged that “interpretation” of the law.

Unfortunately, six black-robed despots agreed that lawlessness should stand.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, saying, “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

To do so, the Court decided that the law meant for the federal and state exchanges to be “equivalent” (even though it says no such thing) and, therefore, subsidies for both are intended by the law.

In fact, however, Democrats fully intended to limit the subsidies precisely in order to coerce states into setting up exchanges. ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted as much in one of his infamous “speak-o’s.”

So this is yet another case in which SCOTUS made a decision based on what it deemed was “best for society” rather than rendering a ruling based on the law. Six million poor souls might have been kicked off the insurance rolls without a pleasing alternative to keep the taxpayer money flowing, you see, so the justices had to act. So they interpreted the law’s language to mean something it doesn’t mean and was never intended to mean. That kind of lawlessness is what got our country into its current mess in the first place.

And to think — then-Sen. Barack Obama voted against confirming John Roberts to the Court in 2005. Where would ObamaCare be without Roberts?

As National Review’s Quin Hillyer sums up, “With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism. He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself. He is a disgrace. That is all.”

We could almost — almost — understand Roberts' reasoning in the 2012 decision upholding the constitutional justification for ObamaCare itself, though his own rewrite of the law in order to do so was an appalling miscarriage of justice.

In that ruling, Roberts wrote, “Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

But in this statutory case, the law’s language — and its intent — was clear. All Roberts and his five fellow travelers did today was “make policy judgments” and “protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

With his usual flare, Justice Antonin Scalia eviscerated this bad ruling, writing, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’”

He added, “Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an ‘Exchange established by the State.’ This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.”

In the end, however, this outcome is good politically for Republicans — and, conversely, bad for Hillary Clinton. It takes subsidies off the table as a campaign issue, and it means Congress isn’t on the hook to “fix” the law. But a change is not off the table if we can elect a Republican president. The law can be altered after 2016. Then again, the likelihood of that also seems to diminish with each victory Obama wins.

TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US

BEST OF RIGHT OPINION

Ann Coulter: There’s a Reason We Mostly Hear About White ‘Micro-Aggressions’
Larry Elder: The Meaning of Charleston
Victor Davis Hanson: Why Greece Won’t Pay
Veronique de Rugy: America’s Coming Transfer of Wealth
Jim DeMint: Let the Subsidies Die

For more, visit Right Opinion.

OPINION IN BRIEF

Ann Coulter: “In a country of more than 300 million people, everything will happen eventually. That doesn’t make it a trend. Go up to any ordinary, sentient person and ask: Which race assaults the other race more? Remember the ‘knockout game’ — or as its devotees called it, ‘polar bear hunting’? Black teenagers would go looking for white people to knock unconscious with a single punch, videotape the attacks and post them online. The knockout game was a real trend — which the media denied was a trend. … According to a preposterously, laughably, ridiculously bogus report on ‘hate crimes’ produced by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, blacks are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than whites are. It would be like a government report asserting that most rapes are committed by elderly white women. … In 2008, the most recent year for which such data seems to have been collected, FBI surveys show that, out of 520,161 interracial violent crimes, blacks committed 429,444 of them against whites, while whites committed 90,717 of them against blacks. In other words, blacks commit more than 80 percent of all interracial violent crime. … The Charleston attack was a hideous, sickening crime. But that’s why we should thank our lucky stars that it was so unusual. White-on-black violence is freakishly rare everywhere in America, except liberal imaginations.”

SHORT CUTS

Upright: “[The Confederate] flag represents what the Left believes is the last remaining Republican electoral stronghold in terms of presidential politics and that would be the South. … [I]t’s not going to stop with the Confederate flag because it’s not about the Confederate flag. It is about destroying the South as a political force. … I’ll make another prediction to you: The next flag that will come under assault — and it will not be long — is the American flag.” —Rush Limbaugh

Non Compos Mentis: “We need to put the American flag down. Because we’ve caught as much hell under that as the Confederate flag.” —Nation of Islam leader and race-baiter Louis Farrakhan

Village Idiots: “If the Confederate flag is finally going to be consigned to museums as an ugly symbol of racism, what about the beloved film offering the most iconic glimpse of that flag in American culture? I’m talking, of course, about ‘Gone with the Wind’… [W]hat does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the ‘GWTW’ intermission?” —New York Post film critic Lou Lumenick

Good question: “Where you been, Hillary? It’s been 10 months, girl!” —Robert Nettles, a longtime friend of Michael Brown, when Hillary Clinton finally showed up in Ferguson this week

The BIG Lie: “You’re in my house.” —Barack Obama to a heckler (No, Obama’s in our house.)

Sums up the Obama administration: “I don’t believe anyone is personally responsible.” —OPM Director Katherine Archuleta on the Chinese hack of federal data

And last… “A new report shows that 35% of Hillary Clinton’s Twitter followers are fake. Yet, most of them are registered to vote for her in Chicago.” —Fred Thompson

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis!
Managing Editor Nate Jackson

Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform — Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen — standing in harm’s way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.

ACTION

THE PATRIOT POST