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According to a report by BreakingDefense.com, the commander of United States Indo-Pacific Command has reported he is only able to meet roughly half of his day-to-day operational requirements. This is a big deal, since the People’s Liberation Army Navy can throw as many as 70 submarines out there.

Now, while there is, at present, a decent capability gap in America’s favor (China has very few nuclear attack submarines), and one that long-term economic trends will make difficult for China to close (thank you, Marcus Island motherlode), this is not a good situation. But it was one that was a long time in the making, and politicians in both parties are to blame.

When the Berlin Wall fell, the United States sought a “peace dividend.” Presidents George H. W. Bush and scumbag/liar-Bill Clinton both slashed a lot of ships. Many submarines were also cut, including a number of reasonably modern Los Angeles-class vessels. In fact, some of the decommissioned Los Angeles-class vessels were simply retired when they were due to have their reactors re-fueled.

As a result, of 62 nuclear attack subs — most of which could still be in service today — nearly half have been retired and are in various stages of scrapping. Right now, Admiral Philip S. Davidson could have used some of those subs. But it gets even worse.

In the latter stages of the Cold War, the United States had developed the Seawolf-class submarine. This was a performance beast, and according to the 13th Edition of the Naval Institute Guide to the Ships and Aircraft of the United States Navy, the fleet was due to get 30 of these vessels. These were to replace 50 older vessels of the Sturgeon and Permit classes.

Well, they only got three, and the third, USS Jimmy Carter (SSN 23) survived a mid-1990s cancellation effort led by John McCain (one of many weapons programs he targeted). Then there was the promise of a new nuclear attack submarine, which became the Virginia class.

The problem was, the retirements kept coming. Today, the Navy has 17 Virginia-class subs, the three Seawolf-class ships, and 34 Los Angeles-class vessels. That number for the Los Angeles-class ships is misleading, since the Navy doesn’t actually decommission nuclear-powered vessels until they are completely de-fueled.

Admiral Davidson, though, says he wants 30 subs working in the Pacific. Giving him that leaves precious little to help contest Russian ambitions in the Arctic or to handle other requirements in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere.

As of now, the Navy is building two Virginia-class subs a year. That is a ridiculously low number. The good news is that it only takes five and a half years to build a new Virginia-class sub. So, if President Donald Trump could triple the number of Virginia-class subs being ordered over the next six years, it would give the Navy an extra two dozen subs by the end of the 2020s — enough to avoid a catastrophic shortage.

In addition, the Navy could also commit to keeping some of the older subs in service longer. There are 30 Los Angeles-class attack subs with the vertical-launch tubes to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles. These could be given a second refueling to also hold the line.

America’s nuclear attack submarines are marvels of technology. But there is one thing they can’t do — be in two places at once. Still, the United States has time to put some real pressure on Russia and China by a massive submarine building and overhaul program. The money spent on that could prevent a war.  ~The Patriot Post

The Supreme Court heard oral argument this week in two cases challenging congressional district lines drawn for partisan advantage. The question before the justices is whether state legislators violate the Constitution when they draw up district lines with politics in mind.

Partisan politics has been part-and-parcel of the redistricting process since Gov. Elbridge Gerry gave his name to the concept of partisan map drawing in 1812 with a state Senate district in Massachusetts. Even the challengers in Tuesday’s two cases don’t claim that there should not be any politics involved in redistricting.

So how much politics is acceptable, and how much politics is too much? It’s the political corollary of Goldilocks’ dilemma.

The challengers in this case are trying to convince the Supreme Court that there is some nebulous line marking the boundary of “too much politics” — a boundary that exists nowhere in the text of the Constitution.

They want to involve the courts even more deeply in what is, under the separation of powers principles, a basic  legislative function. This reduces accountability and usurps legislative authority.

While voters can vote legislators out of office if they don’t like what the legislators have done — such as drawing gerrymandered districts — they can’t vote federal judges out of office. That’s why the Framers of the Constitution committed the task of drawing up district lines to state legislatures with the supervision of Congress — and not to federal courts.

Nevertheless, federal courts have been deeply involved in redistricting for decades now, despite the Supreme Court’s decision 15 years ago, in Vieth v. Jubelirer, holding that challenges to partisan gerrymandering are not justiciable.

In that decision, Justice Antonin Scalia reasoned that federal courts lacked the authority to hear disputes raising political questions that are better left to the political branches.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy left the door ajar to future challenges, suggesting in a concurring opinion that perhaps courts could hear these types of suits if “judicially discernible and manageable standards” could be found.

Just last term in Gill v. Whitford, a case arising out of Wisconsin, the Supreme Court once again was unpersuaded that any such standard exists and recognized that it may be impossible to take the politics out of drawing electoral district lines.

However, the court did not issue a final decision on the issue. Instead, it sent the case back to the lower court on procedural grounds because the plaintiffs had not established that they had standing to file suit.

As Justice Samuel Alito noted in Cooper v. Harris, another redistricting case in 2016, recognizing partisan gerrymandering claims as justiciable and a violation of the Constitution will “invite the losers in the redistricting process to seek to obtain in court what they could not achieve in the political arena” and transform the courts “into weapons of political warfare.”

The fact that the Supreme Court just heard its fourth partisan gerrymandering challenge in less than two years shows that Alito’s fear is not unfounded.

North Carolina Case

In Rucho v. Common Cause, one of the two cases heard on Tuesday, a district court struck down North Carolina’s congressional map drawn by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2016 as an unconstitutional political gerrymander because it favored Republican candidates.

The case was already pending when the Supreme Court decided Gill v. Whitford last term, so the district court had to reconsider its ruling in light of Gill, which had required showing a district-specific injury.

Back at the district court, the three-judge panel ruled for the challengers again, basing its decision on a laundry list of theories, including the creation of a “judicially manageable” three-prong test under the First Amendment and a claimed violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

The theory by the lower court that partisan gerrymandering violates the 14th Amendment is particularly dubious. As the Public Interest Legal Foundation pointed out in an amicus brief, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. The authors, sponsors, and supporters of the amendment in Congress could not possibly have intended the amendment to prevent partisan gerrymandering.

Why? Because “they were elected from districts with far greater disparity between statewide political preferences and the partisan composition of legislative delegations than those districts challenged” in the North Carolina case.

When one compares the results of the 1864 presidential election with the congressional delegations of various states, for example, one sees numerous states where Republicans held all or almost all of the congressional seats even though the Democratic presidential candidate, George B. McClellan, received a large percentage of the vote.

This included Connecticut (Lincoln 51.4 percent vs. McClellan 48.6 percent), Michigan (Lincoln 55.3 percent vs. McClellan 44.7 percent), and Maine (Lincoln 59.2 percent vs. McClellan 40.8 percent). Yet in all three of these states, Democrats did not hold a single congressional seat.

Former Solicitor General Paul Clement, who represents the North Carolina legislature, told the court that plaintiffs were trying to claim that the Constitution guarantees proportional representation, which could not be further from the truth.

He also warned that if the court got “in the business of adjudicating these cases … they will come in large numbers, and they will come on your mandatory appellate jurisdiction.”

(While the Supreme Court largely has discretion to select which cases to hear, Congress has mandated that the court must hear appeals of certain types of cases, including those involving redistricting.)

“Once you get into the political thicket,” said Clement, “you will not get out and you will tarnish the image of this court for the other cases where it needs that reputation for independence so people can understand the fundamental difference between judging and all other politics.”

Clement also rebutted the notion that the Founding Fathers intended the Constitution to prevent partisan gerrymandering:

A lot of hard constitutional issues come before this court because you are dealing with something that was unknown to the framing generation. But the framing generation understood partisan gerrymandering firsthand. James Madison was the intended target of a partisan gerrymander by Patrick Henry. He complained about it bitterly. So did George Washington. Neither of them contemplated suit. Hamilton actually suggested to John Jay that the Federalists ought to partisanly gerrymander the Electoral College for the 1800 presidential election. John Jay say it wasn’t such a good idea.

All three authors of the Federalist Papers knew about this and didn’t think there was a judicial solution.

Maryland Case

The second case before the court on Tuesday was Lamone v. Benisek, a challenge to Maryland’s congressional map drawn by the Democratic-controlled legislature in 2011. The challengers in that case argued the map was an unconstitutional political gerrymander because it violated the free speech and associational rights of Republican voters who were moved out of a traditionally Republican district.

A three-judge panel ruled in their favor, recognizing partisan redistricting as a violation of the First Amendment.

An Impossible Undertaking

The problem in both of these cases is that the plaintiffs want courts to intervene in what are political disputes, violating the separation of powers principle that assigns redistricting decisions to state legislatures and Congress.

Further, there is no manageable standard — and not for a “lack of judicial imagination,” Clement told the Supreme Court. Politics is intrinsic to line drawing. The court is being asked to draw a line in the sand, i.e., some politics is acceptable but too much politics violates the Constitution. How could one possibly determine how much politics is too much?

While the Constitution does guarantee representational rights for individual voters, it does not guarantee representational rights for the political parties. Moreover, many members of the public split their votes or are independent voters who cast their ballots for third parties like the Libertarian and Green Parties.

How is a court supposed to determine how many congressional seats a political party is entitled to in a state when from election to election, from candidate to candidate, the number of votes for particular candidates of particular parties can vary greatly?

Indeed, after two hours of oral argument in the North Carolina and Maryland cases this week, the justices seemed no closer to a consensus than last year.

There is no holy grail of a manageable judicial standard, and the history of the Constitution and the First and 14th Amendments provide no support whatsoever for the claim that partisan redistricting violates the Constitution.

The Supreme Court should finally settle this matter and hold that political gerrymandering, while perhaps unwise and in some instances unfair, is not a constitutional concern and instead is a political thicket the federal courts should not enter.

If states think partisan gerrymandering is a problem, they can solve it by setting the parameters that govern the drawing of the boundaries of political districts.  ~The Patriot Post

For decades, the Left has pointed to that clause as evidence the Constitution is a bigoted document. For those same decades, the Left has remained willfully ignorant — or purposefully deceitful — with regard to the history behind that clause. “The three-fifths rule for counting slaves is often misunderstood,” The Heritage  Foundation explains. “When the Constitutional Convention debated the issue of how to count population for the purposes of representation, the Southern  delegates to the Convention would have been pleased if nonvoting slaves had been counted as full persons. That way, the Southern states would have had a greater representation in the House of Representatives. In contrast, some Northern delegates resisted counting slaves at all” (italics original).

Though imperfect, the three-fifths compromise allowed for the recognition of slaves a human beings, the ratification of the Constitution, and the creation of the union. A bloody Civil War to preserve that union ultimately precipitated the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution — banning slavery, guaranteeing due process and equal protection to former slaves, and granting black Americans the right to vote, respectively.

No compromise, no union.

If scumbag-Booker wants to talk honestly about bigotries, acknowledging his own party’s long history of them would be a great place to start. Like the fact that Democrats opposed those amendments, or that there were 20 Democrat platforms that either supported segregation outright, or were silent on the subject, from 1868 through 1948. Or that the Democratic Convention of 1924 held in Madison Square Garden was known as the “Klanbake” where a plank condemning KKK violence was defeated outright. Or that it was Democrat Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Conner who set dogs and water hoses on black protesters in 1963 in Birmingham, or that Democrat Governor and ardent segregationist Ross Robert Barnett was the man who denied James Meredith admission to the all-white University of Mississippi in 1962. He might even mention that, percentage-wise, more Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats — which passed despite a 57-day filibuster led by former KKK member and Democrat Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV).

The same Robert Byrd Democrats referred to as the “conscience of the Senate.”

Instead, scumbag-Booker spoke to the “rank racist rhetoric” used by Donald Trump during the immigration debate. And while he insisted America is “a nation of conscience, and I found partners on the other side of the aisle who agree with me on these issues,” he wants term limits for Supreme Court justices because he believes the GOP “stole a Supreme Court seat,” when Republicans exercised their constitutional prerogative to provide or withhold their advice and consent regarding appointees to the federal bench.

The GOP did so because it was a presidential election year, and argued the voters should have a say — and they cited loose lips-Joe Biden’s 1992 statement of precisely the same reasoning as their rationale for doing so.

scumbag-Booker is also disenchanted with “rugged individualism.” “I love rugged individualism and self-reliance. But rugged individualism didn’t get us to the moon,” he said. “It didn’t beat the Nazis or Jim Crow.”

Jim Crow? Once again, facts are stubborn things. The Jim Crow era, during which segregation was strictly enforced between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 right up to the civil-rights marches of the 1960s — often with lynchings and murder when police efforts fell short — was a political effort wholly owned by Democrats and the faction of their party known as “Dixiecrats.”

scumbag-Booker’s distaste for rugged individualism per se is even more alarming, yet he is in lockstep with a Democrat Party whose appetite for mob rule — and permanent control — is undeniable. This is the party that wants to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, eviscerate federalism, lower the voting age to 16, and give noncitizens the right to vote.

And yet scumbag-Booker still insists he’s all about unity. “In all of my elections that I’ve had, I’m not trying to beat Republicans; I’m trying to unite Americans,” he said on Martin Luther King Day. “Because there’s not a right or left way to move forward. You move forward by moving forward.”

Apparently the presumption of innocence isn’t part of the “moving forward” equation. During the Brett Kavanaugh nomination hearings, Booker insisted that “whether he is innocent or guilty,” it is time to “move on” to another Supreme Court nominee. At a press conference prior to the confirmation process, he joined Sen. Elizabeth dinky-Warren (D-MA) in asserting that supporting Kavanaugh made one “complicit in the evil.”

After the hearing and prior to the 2018 election, scum bag-Booker doubled down, insisting the Kavanaugh’s impeachment would be on the table if Democrats take control of one or both Houses of Congress.

scumbag-Booker is entitled to believe whatever he wants. But as his campaign unfolds, he should be held to  account to name the specific “bigotries” in the Constitution to which he was referring. Illuminate us all, Mr. scumbag-Booker.

“Moving forward” demands nothing less.  ~The Patriot Post

Speaking of stopping clocks, that’s the point — the European parliament voted this week to scrap the biannual time change, allowing each European Union nation to choose its time. Nations that wish to remain on daylight time will spring forward for the last time in March 2021. Those choosing standard time will fall back for the final time in October 2021. It will be interesting to see what countries choose and how it affects commerce and other things.

Last year, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced the “Sunshine Protection Act,” which would allow the U.S. to stay on Daylight Saving Time all year round. President  Donald Trump even recently voiced support for doing so. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, we wrote last year, “Totally disrupting the space-time continuum twice a year leads to sloppy work by sleepy people, car accidents and other injuries, hordes of zombie children and a drastic increase in swearing. No rational human wants that to continue.”

We had a lot of fun advocating for Daylight Saving Time, but in all seriousness it is high time America picked a time and stuck with it. Surely if Europe can do it, we can too.  ~The Patriot Post

During a White House meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, President Trump signed a formal proclamation that the United States recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. In so doing, the president acknowledged a longstanding fact of life, bolstered a vital American ally, promoted stability in a deeply unstable neighborhood, and upheld the oft-ignored but crucial distinction between acquiring territory through aggression and acquiring it through lawful self-defense. Good outcomes all, extending the Trump administration’s already exemplary record when it comes to the Middle East.

Trump’s policy shift didn’t sit well with everyone, of course. Those angrily denouncing it included the dictators and terror-sponsors who rule Iran, Turkey, Russia, Syria, and the Palestinian Authority. A few reflexively anti-Trump editorial boards chided the president for a “pointless provocation” that will “damage US diplomacy.” Tellingly, though, there was barely any protest from most Arab governments, which in recent years have come to value Israel as an ally against Iran and its proxies. As a CNN headline put it, “Trump’s Golan Heights announcement met with a shrug in the Arab world.”

Trump’s announcement is being described as a pro-Netanyahu campaign ploy, but no matter who wins Israel’s upcoming election, the Golan will remain part of Israel. Which is why even Netanyahu’s political foes applauded the American announcement. Benny Gantz, the retired general hoping to become Israel’s next prime minister, publicly thanked Trump for his proclamation.

The president’s signature changes nothing on the ground. Israel has held the western two-thirds of the Golan Heights — a plateau that towers over the Sea of Galilee and much of northern Israel — since the 1967 Six Day War. That war, recall, was one of blatant aggression against Israel: Syria joined Egypt and Jordan in an assault that Syria’s Defense Minister Hafez Assad had labeled “a battle of annihilation” to “explode the Zionist presence” in the Mideast.

But Israel declined to be annihilated or exploded. It repelled its invaders and seized the Golan Heights, from which Syria had been shelling Jewish farms and towns for more than 20 years. In the aftermath of the war, Israel offered to return the territory in exchange for peace. Damascus refused to negotiate. It tried to recapture the Golan Heights in a massive armored invasion in 1973. Israel repelled that threat too.

Thus, Israel has ruled the Golan Heights for 52 years (1967-2019) — more than twice as long as the 21 years of Syrian rule that began in 1946. The contrast between the two eras could not be more open-and-shut, as Michael Doran, a former senior director at the National  Security Council, testified before Congress last year:

“The last 70 years constitute the laboratory of real life, and its results are incontrovertible,” Doran told the House Oversight Committee during a hearing on US-Israel relations. “When in the hands of Syria, the Golan Heights promoted conflict. When in the hands of Israel, they have promoted stability.”

Nonetheless, Israeli and US leaders well into the 1990s kept trying to entice Damascus to make peace with its Jewish neighbor in exchange for a return of the Golan. In his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu used a secret back channel to communicate with Syrian President Bashar Assad about a land-for-peace deal.

Fortunately, nothing came of those efforts. Syria’s implosion in 2011 plunged the country into a hellish civil war that eventually included Iran, Russia, the Islamic State, and Hezbollah. If Israel hadn’t retained the Golan Heights, the plateau would likely have been captured by Iran or ISIS, and Israel might well have faced an unspeakable existential nightmare. Instead, the Golan Heights remained an oasis of stability and decency amid the savagery of the Syrian war. Israel even made use of the territory to provide medical care to thousands of Syrian civilians.

If Israel had seized the Golan Heights as an act of aggression, it would arguably have no right to keep the land even after all these years. But in 1967, Israel was the target. It seized the Golan in a defensive war against an enemy explicitly bent on “annihilation.” Syria forfeited its sovereign right to the territory when it was defeated by its intended victim. To claim otherwise is to claim that a belligerent aggressor should lose nothing for waging an unlawful war. That would be folly. By endorsing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, the Trump administration is sending a message of deterrence to would-be warmongers. It’s a message that should have been sent years ago. Better late than never.  

~The Patriot Post