Author: Redactor

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national politics & policies Popular term limits U.S. Constitution

The Court-Packers

Supreme Court, NPC, packing the court, FDR, law, justice, constitution

“What if there were five justices selected by Democrats,” presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke explored at an Iowa campaign stop, “five justices selected by Republicans, and those ten then pick five more justices independent of those who picked the first ten?”

Beto, meet FDR.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried something similar with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have added six new justices to the nine-justice U.S. Supreme Court. It failed in the Senate, even though FDR’s Democratic Party controlled the chamber.

This “court packing” gambit may have been the most unpopular action of FDR’s whopping three-plus terms. 

Despite the obvious self-interested power grab, “Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand . . . would not rule out expanding the Supreme Court if elected president,” Politico reported.

“It’s not just about expansion, it’s about depoliticizing the Supreme Court,” Sen. Warren explained . . . with a straight face. Yet Beto’s suggested reform would officially turn the nation’s highest court into a partisan, two-party political institution.

To the good, Democrats are also bantering about term limits for the nation’s High Court. Trouble is, term limits require a constitutional amendment, meaning a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress as well as 38-state ratification. 

Court packing, on the other hand, only requires simple majorities of both houses and the presidency. Which Democrats threaten in 2020.

“You need to gain power,” Washington Examiner columnist Philip Wegmann reminds, “before you can abuse it.”

So the abuse, for now, is merely promising.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Supreme Court, NPC, packing the court, FDR, law, justice, constitution

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Thought

Harriet Beecher Stowe

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Cathedral,” The Atlantic Monthly (1846).
Categories
Today

House of Lords

On March 19, 1649, England’s House of Commons passed an act abolishing the House of Lords, declaring it “useless and dangerous to the people of England.”

This was during Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector, after the execution of Charles I. The House of Lords did not again meet until the Convention Parliament of 1660, under the Restoration of the monarchy.

Categories
ideological culture Popular

The Ominous Linkages

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Green New Deal, socialism, Greta Thunberg,

What does a 16-year-old Swedish girl have in common with a popular 29-year-old U.S. Representative?

Environmentalism and socialism.

The young woman is Greta Thunberg, who spear-headed a “global movement of schoolchildren striking to demand climate change action.” The Representative is AOC, er, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who last month launched her “Green New Deal.”

Sixteen-year-old Thunberg has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Rep. AOC hasn’t been nominated yet, but if Barack Obama could be awarded a Nobel merely for being elected. . . .

But back to that linkage: the Swedish youngster was nominated by three adult members of the Socialist Left Party; AOC calls herself a socialist.*

But what’s the deeper link? 

The solution, apparently: socialists want to destroy capitalism, or at least commandeer it; and environmentalists obsessed about anthropogenic global warming believe it’s caused by burning fossil fuels and by bovine flatulence — both made worse by capitalism, which has allowed the masses (not just the elites) to harness petroleum for power as well as raise gigantic herds of cattle for eating and milk-production. The direct control that socialism entails serves, say its advocates, as the only way to curtail carbon emissions.

A more likely story? Socialism would make us so much poorer that it is inconceivable that most of us would be able to afford to drive cars or eat steaks or drink milk.

Regardless of their so-called “green” policy obsessions, Ms.Thunberg and Rep. AOC are green in a more profound sense, of lack of experience — the latter because she’s young, the former because she’s a miseducated ideologue.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It is also worth noting that the much of AOC’s much-ballyhooed Green New Deal has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with typical leftist social engineering.

New Green Deal, FAQ, socialism, environmentalism, global warming, climate change,

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Green New Deal, socialism, Greta Thunberg,

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Today

Hawaii

On March 18, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill enabling Hawaii to become the 50th state in the Union. The official day of statehood was set for (and became) August 21 of that year.

The statehood signing occurred exactly 85 years after The Kingdom of Hawaii formalized its treaty with the U. S. establishing exclusive trading rights.

Categories
Thought

Yves Guyot

Yves Guyot

With the development of civilisation, man’s wants become more various, and his aptitudes more specialised. The consequence is, that he can produce more utilities than before; but these utilities are more limited in their nature; they are all of one kind. He now produces, not so much what he wants, as what others want. Hence it comes to pass that exchange becomes an ever more imperious necessity; for exchange consists in giving away what are to us superfluous utilities in order to obtain what are to us necessary utilities.

Yves Guyot, C. H. d’Eyncourt Leppington, translator, Principles of Social Economy (1892), p. 65.
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links

Townhall: Dear Fellow Peasant

The core idea behind the institutions of representative government — state legislatures, city councils, Congress — is that lawmakers, sometimes referred to as “representatives,” should endeavor to implement “the will of the people.”

Right? Stop laughing. 

To be such a ‘servant of the people’ necessarily entails knowing the public’s preferences.

Hmmm. How to find out what people want? Or don’t?

“Dear Fellow Peasant,” by Paul Jacob, Townhall.com, March 17, 2019

Click on over to Townhall to read the whole column, with information on initiative and referendum controversies in North Dakota, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington State.


Categories
Today

Wartime

On March 17, 1780, General George Washington granted the Continental Army a holiday “as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”

On March 17, 1941, the U.S. Selective Service held its first lottery for the draft, in preparation for World War II. (Image, above, from the Morning Oregonian, from that year.)

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video

CNN Sued for $275 million

The Covington Catholic students’ Lincoln Memorial brouhaha has reached the next level of extremity:

There has been much analysis of the suit. Timcast’s is worth checking out. Another worthwhile interview about the subject was conducted by Dave Rubin.

Categories
Today

Madison and Freeing the Slaves

On March 16, 1995, the state of Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state of the Union to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment had been officially ratified in 1865, one hundred thirty years earlier.

James Madison, fourth President of the United States and “Father of the Constitution,” was born on this date in 1751.