Daily Digest
THE FOUNDATION
“All know and feel … the sacredness of the connection between husband and wife. All know that the sweetness of social intercourse, the harmony of society, the happiness of families, depend on that mutual partiality which they feel, or that delicate forbearance which they manifest towards each other.” —John Marshall, Sexton v. Wheaton, 1823
TOP RIGHT HOOKS
NPS Removes Battle Flag From Battlefield
The hive mind appears to be taking over. While we can at least understand the push to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state capitol grounds, the rush to jerk it from all store shelves or any public view is astounding. From the “General Lee” of Dukes of Hazzard fame, to Apple pulling Civil War games from the App Store, to the National Cathedral removing stained glass over the mere presence of the Confederate flag, the reaction quickly became absurd. Now, the nation’s first National Military Park, Chickamauga, a park established in 1890 for reconciliation between veterans of the Confederate and Union forces after the War Between the States, has removed Confederate battle flags from its gift shops. Gettysburg has done so as well. Undoubtedly there was a memo from the National Park Service requiring this asinine measure — in order to propagate Obama’s race-bait narrative. It has been said that ignorance is bliss, but the fact is, ignorance is miserable.
Meanwhile, Obama no doubt will be promoting his race bait later today when delivering the eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who, again, supported the flying of the Confederate flag at the SC capitol. If black lives really matter, then why does Obama not deliver eulogies for the other 20 blacks murdered every day on average, most by other blacks? Simple: It doesn’t fit the race-bait narrative.
Finally, of course, the American flag flew over those 13 rebellious states before the Confederate battle flag was ever flown. Better get that American flag down next.
Clinton Strings Along Investigators With Hidden Emails
We’re still trying to grasp all we don’t know about Hillary Clinton’s cannon of destroyed documentation. On Thursday, the State Department admitted that nine full emails and six partial emails that Clinton lackey Sidney Blumenthal handed over to the Select Committee on Benghazi were not in the reams of printed emails Clinton dumped on the department. Clinton had to have known this. Earlier this year, Clinton said she handed over all the emails regarding her tenure as secretary of state, though she admitted that she destroyed half of her emails because they were “private.” Clinton swears she told the truth, but it was not the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the events leading up to the day when jihadists killed four Americans in Benghazi. “This has implications far beyond Libya, Benghazi and our committee’s work,” Benghazi Committee Chair Trey Gowdy said. “This conclusively shows her email arrangement with herself, which was then vetted by her own lawyers, has resulted in an incomplete public record. … The revelation these messages were not originally produced to the State Department by Clinton is significant and troubling.” The emails show that Clinton was encouraging Blumenthal to send her intelligence reports on Benghazi, despite Clinton’s claim that the reports were unsolicited. So why is the State Department cooperating with the Benghazi investigation now? It’s very possible Hillary, Blumenthal and Co. are contriving these releases as a red herring designed to tie up Republican political capital on an issue that may be a nonstarter. Barack Obama did the same thing with his birth certificate.
House Republicans Mull Impeachment of IRS Head
Last February, Barack Obama glibly claimed there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” at the IRS. A month later, at the height of the scandal over the IRS targeting conservative nonprofits, the agency destroyed 422 backup tapes that might have contained 24,000 of Lois Lerner’s emails. Here’s what the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee learned at their hearing yesterday: Yes, the IRS knew of significant gaps in the public record. Yes, Congress issued a preservation order and a subpoena. But still, records were destroyed. Furthermore, eight days after former chair of the House Ways and Means Committee David Camp sent a letter to the IRS in June 2011 inquiring about the targeting of Tea Party groups, Lerner’s hard drive somehow crashed. Tim Camus, the deputy inspector for investigations, calls the whole email-destroying frenzy an “unbelievable set of circumstances.” As for Republican lawmakers, they think the unbelievable set of circumstances is grounds for the impeachment of IRS commissioner John Koskinen. A Republican on the House Oversight committee told National Review, “We’ve briefed the leadership’s counsel, and I think that they’re open to it, but it’s the type of thing where this town is like, ‘oh, that’s not how we do things, it’s not really been used lately.’ But, quite frankly, we really haven’t had executive branch officials behave this way like we do now.”
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FEATURED RIGHT ANALYSIS
SCOTUS Endorses Same-Sex Marriage
By John J. Bastiat
Continuing to goose-step onward in its blitzkrieg against Rule of Law in America, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today in favor of allowing homosexuals the “right” to marry. The ruling effectively invalidates bans on same-sex marriage remaining in 14 states and mandates that homosexuals can marry anywhere in the U.S. The importance of this ruling, especially for Christians, cannot be overstated. Nor can the damage done to the Third Pillar of Liberty.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in the other three major homosexual-rights cases over the past 20 years, wrote the majority opinion. He was joined, of course, by the reliably liberal clown act that is the leftist side of the bench: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Rather than rehash the sordid trail of this abrogation of Rule of Law, we thought we’d let the dissenting justices (who wrote four separate dissents) address the issue themselves:
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:
“Petitioners make strong arguments rooted in social policy and considerations of fairness. … But this Court is not a legislature. Whether same-sex marriage is a good idea should be of no concern to us. Under the Constitution, judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be.”
We do note here, however, the irony of Roberts' statement in light of yesterday’s atrociousObamaCare ruling.
Roberts continued, “Although the policy arguments for extending marriage to same-sex couples may be compelling, the legal arguments for requiring such an extension are not. The fundamental right to marry does not include a right to make a State change its definition of marriage. And a State’s decision to maintain the meaning of marriage that has persisted in every culture throughout human history can hardly be called irrational. In short, our Constitution does not enact any one theory of marriage. The people of a State are free to expand marriage to include same-sex couples, or to retain the historic definition.”
“But for those who believe in a government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach is deeply disheartening.”
“Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens — through the democratic process — to adopt their view. That ends today. Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law.”
“The majority’s decision is an act of will, not legal judgment. The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”
Justice Antonin Scalia noted:
“This is a naked judicial claim to legislative — indeed, super-legislative — power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government.”
“So it is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”
“The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact — and the furthest extension one can even imagine — of the Court’s claimed power to create ‘liberties’ that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
“These [precedent] cases ask us to decide whether the Fourteenth Amendment contains a limitation that requires the States to license and recognize marriages between two people of the same sex. Does it remove that issue from the political process? Of course not. It would be surprising to find a prescription regarding marriage in the Federal Constitution since, as the author of today’s opinion reminded us only two years ago (in an opinion joined by the same Justices who join him today): ‘[R]egulation of domestic relations is an area that has long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States.’”
“But the Court ends this debate, in an opinion lacking even a thin veneer of law. Buried beneath the mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages of the opinion is a candid and startling assertion: No matter what it was the People ratified, the Fourteenth Amendment protects those rights that the Judiciary, in its ‘reasoned judgment,’ thinks the Fourteenth Amendment ought to protect.”
“But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts' permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003.”
“They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a ‘fundamental right’ overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds — minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly — could not.”
Justice Clarence Thomas explained:
“The Court’s decision today is at odds not only with the Constitution, but with the principles upon which our Nation was built. Since well before 1787, liberty has been understood as freedom from government action, not entitlement to government benefits.”
“Yet the majority invokes our Constitution in the name of a ‘liberty’ that the Framers would not have recognized, to the detriment of the liberty they sought to protect. Along the way, it rejects the idea — captured in our Declaration of Independence — that human dignity is innate and suggests instead that it comes from the Government. This distortion of our Constitution not only ignores the text, it inverts the relationship between the individual and the state in our Republic.”
“Petitioners argue that by enshrining the traditional definition of marriage in their State Constitutions through voter-approved amendments, the States have put the issue ‘beyond the reach of the normal democratic process.’ But the result petitioners seek is far less democratic. They ask nine judges on this Court to enshrine their definition of marriage in the Federal Constitution and thus put it beyond the reach of the normal democratic process for the entire Nation.”
“The majority’s inversion of the original meaning of liberty will likely cause collateral damage to other aspects of our constitutional order that protect liberty.”
“Aside from undermining the political processes that protect our liberty, the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect.”
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
The impact of this ruling will be felt far and wide. It won’t be simply Christian bakers, florists and photographers who are assaulted by the Rainbow Mafia for daring to have their own conscience. Christian churches, schools, agencies and so on will soon be in the crosshairs for opposing this heretofore undiscovered constitutional right. This is only the beginning.
TODAY AT PATRIOTPOST.US
- ANALYSIS: Housing Discrimination, or Just Obama’s Economy?
- ANALYSIS: Iran Deal Is Nothing but Legacy for Obama, Kerry
- Krauthammer: Roberts Just Wants to Save the Court
- Will There Soon Be More American Hostages?
- Schumer: POTUS Hillary Will Create Carbon Tax
- Holder’s Idea of Terrorism Depends on the Perpetrator
- The Left Has Found Its 1 in 5 Rape Statistic
- The Dirty Little Secret Behind Obama’s Earth Day Lecture
- The UN Report On The Israel/Hamas Conflict Is Useless
BEST OF RIGHT OPINION
- Tony Perkins: With Ruling, SCOTUS Poisons Burwell
- David Harsanyi: Supreme Court vs. Rule of Law
- Charles Krauthammer: On Lowering the Flag
- Jonah Goldberg: Liberals Are Playing a Racial Shell Game
- Mona Charen: Whitewashing the Democratic Party’s History
For more, visit Right Opinion.
OPINION IN BRIEF
Charles Krauthammer: “[T]here’s a deeper reason for this rush to banish Confederate symbols, to move them from the public square to the museum. The trigger was not just the massacre itself, but even more tellingly, the breathtaking display of nobility and spiritual generosity by the victims' relatives. Within 48 hours of the murder of their loved ones, they spoke of redemption and reconciliation and even forgiveness of the killer himself. It was an astonishingly moving expression of Christian charity. Such grace demands a response. In a fascinating dynamic, it created a feeling of moral obligation to reciprocate in some way. The flag was not material to the crime itself, but its connection to the underlying race history behind the crime suggested that its removal from the statehouse grounds — whatever the endlessly debated merits of the case — could serve as a reciprocal gesture of reconciliation. The result was a microcosm of — and a historical lesson in — the moral force of the original civil rights movement, whose genius was to understand the effect that combating evil with good, violence with grace would have on a fundamentally decent American nation. America was indeed moved. The result was the civil rights acts. The issue today is no longer legal equality. It is more a matter of sorting through historical memory. … Perhaps we can learn a lesson from Arlington National Cemetery, founded by the victorious Union to bury its dead. There you will find Section 16. It contains the remains of hundreds of Confederate soldiers grouped around a modest, moving monument to their devotion to ‘duty as they understood it’ — a gesture by the Union of soldierly respect, without any concession regarding the taintedness of their cause. Or shall we uproot them as well?”
SHORT CUTS
Feel the burn: “Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.” —Justice Antonin Scalia in dissent in theObamaCare case
Another zinger: “Justice [Antonin] Scalia quips acidly that ‘we should start calling this law SCOTUScare,’ but the better term is RobertsCare. By volunteering as Nancy Pelosi’s copy editor, [John Roberts] is making her infamous line about passing the law to find out what’s in it even more true than she knew at the time.” —Wall Street Journal
Upright: “Here is John Roberts, chief oracle of the United States of America, from Thursday’s King v. Burwell decision: ‘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.’ … [I]magine for a moment if a Supreme Court justice argued that the Defense of Marriage Act was passed to improve marriage rather than destroy it so we must focus on the former rather than the latter and uphold any retroactive provisions the Bush administration cooked up to make that law work.” —David Harsanyi
Gloating: “After multiple challenges before the Supreme Court, the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.” —Barack Obama
The BIG Lie: “The Supreme Court ruled that the millions of Americans … be able to keep their affordable coverage.” —DNC Chief Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Unfortunately, as a taxpayer funding ObamaCare, YOU may not be able keep your plan or your doctor, and on average, YOUR family premiums are going up almost $3,000.)
Non Compos Mentis, part I: “For the second time, the Affordable Care Act has been upheld by the Supreme Court. … There wasn’t even a dissenting opinion, as I understand it. Or so far we haven’t seen it.” —Nancy Pelosi
Non Compos Mentis, part II: “The Supreme Court ruled against a Republican-led tax hike for 6.4 million Americans!” —Sen. Debbie Stabenow
And last… “At a fundraiser, President Obama complained that the public has ‘forgotten his successes.’ Forgotten? We’re still working on forgiving.” —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.
