Tag: Trump

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crime and punishment ideological culture judiciary national politics & policies Second Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism term limits U.S. Constitution

Perry Mason for the Court

Neil Gorsuch, Perry Mason, Supreme Court, Judge, nomination, Trump

Legend has it that a juror once ran up to attorney Neil Gorsuch, after Gorsuch won a case proving a gravel pit owner had been cheated, declaring, “You’re Perry Mason.”

These days, Gorsuch sits on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and is President Donald Trump’s nominee for the late Justice Scalia’s seat on the nation’s highest court.

And now Gorsuch is receiving testimonials worthy of the indefatigable TV lawyer.

Brad Smith, the chairman of the Center for Competitive Politics, expressed his pleasure “that President Trump has nominated someone who will defend a robust First Amendment.”

Ballot access expert Richard Winger noted that Gorsuch has a “good record in cases involving independent candidates and minor parties.”

“I am hard-pressed to think of one thing President Trump has done right in the last 11 days since his inauguration,” wrote Neal Katyal in the New York Times. “Until Tuesday,” continued the Georgetown law professor, “when he nominated an extraordinary judge and man, Neil Gorsuch, to be a justice on the Supreme Court.”

Katyal, who had served as an acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, added that Gorsuch’s record of holding government officials accountable “should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.”*

Even I have pertinent testimony: back in 1992, Gorsuch argued (in a co-authored Cato Institute paper) that term limits were “constitutionally permissible” as “institutional constraints on the power of government” that “the Framers,” if alive today, would likely see as “necessary preconditions for liberty.”

No, Gorsuch is not actually Perry Mason — I never knew where Perry stood on term limits.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* On Reason’s Hit & Run blog, Damon Root strongly agreed.

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Accountability responsibility too much government

Out of Our Misery

Obamacare, ACA, Trump, Chickens home to roost

Obamacare may be on the way out.

According to The Atlantic, “the powers of the incoming Health and Human Services secretary are broad enough to cripple the [Affordable Care Act] so it has to be replaced.” Which is significant since the new President has just “signed an executive order empowering his administration’s agencies to do all they can — within the bounds of the Affordable Care Act — to undercut that law.”

The Atlantic’s Vann R. Newkirk II suggests this is . . . “ironic.” The executive leeway Trump is taking is not without precedent. “The irony of that component,” he writes, “is that it rests on precedent set by the Obama administration, which used executive and regulatory power liberally to make the law work in the face of Republican opposition.”

Irony? How about chickens returning to the home roost?

Obamacare itself undermined Obamacare. The plan, from the beginning, was so gimcrack with hidden redistribution that, to both opponents and proponents, it was designed to fail . . . to usher in the Glorious Era of socialized medicine.

Since Obamacare increased “insurance” costs for hundreds of thousands of previous insurance policy holders, and increased medical costs generally, too, it actually discouraged participation from the healthiest, many of whom would rather pay the exorbitant fines, er, “taxes.” Throwing the insurance industry into a death spiral.

So, putting the system out of our misery sooner seems sensible.

But Congress and Trump cannot stop there. Either they repeal more federal regulation and subsidy*, or keep parts of Obamacare, despite a lack of financial stability. A new bill in the Senate promises to do the latter.

We haven’t seen much hint of the former.

But can hope. Audaciously.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* To let markets work. Note that The Atlantic tends to miss the point of Obamacare critics. In describing more market-based options, the magazine characterizes the Medical Health Savings Account approach as “For people sick of high deductibles, Republicans offer high-deductible plans as replacements for Obamacare.” The idea is to incentivize people to pay for their own care, which would bring costs down generally.

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Don’t Trump the Gun

Trump, president, inauguration, democracy, election, protest

The 2016 presidential election will go down in history as a doozy. The Trump win was a surprise, even shocking many of his supporters. But the most obvious lesson we learned pertains to the modal Obama-Hillary voter.

Well, make that lessons. Plural.

  1. Today’s most vocal Democrats don’t seem to understand democracy. The “deal” of our democratic republic, as I learned in Civics and “on the streets,” is that you do your best for your party, candidate, or policy, and accept the results . . . until the next election. Whiners, rioters and Hollywood actors (to place them in descending order of tolerability) would serve their cause better by remembering this.
  2. It has become commonplace, now, to make sweeping judgments about one’s opponents based on little or no information. Or erroneous info. On no basis whatsoever, nearly every lefty YouTuber and street shouter I have seen yammers on about how anti-gay Trump is. Truth is? No president has ever entered the White House more pro-gay than Donald J. Trump.
  3. Actual policy issues mean too little to too many. What does matter? Style. Obama has “good style.” Bush had “dumb style.” Trump has “evil style.” Substance? Results?

Blankout.

Tomorrow the President-elect becomes President. And Resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue*. As skeptical as some of us may be (myself included), we owe it to ourselves, our neighbors, and the country — perhaps the world — to give the president a chance. At least, take a deep breath and let him make a mistake before pouncing.

Meanwhile, let’s also stop denigrating half the country — that is, those who voted for Trump. Consider their alternative.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Part-time? Will he really spend a lot of time in Trump Tower?

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Trump, president, inauguration, democracy, election, protest

 

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ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies political challengers

Democracy — Oh, My!

Rockettes, democracy, inauguration, Trump, media, entertainment, illustration, association, voluntary

The President-elect has had some difficulty booking celebrity acts for his inauguration. And instead of taking this as a cue to trim down on celebratory excess, his team has extended the guest performer list to include New York’s world-famous chorus line dancers, the Rockettes.

The leggy, sequined showgirls might seem a perfect fit for the President-elect’s celebration — more, say, than a ballet troupe, or a string quartet — but one among the Rockettes protested.  Being a part of a performing team might seem a dream job, but not for Phoebe Pearl. She was, she wrote on Instagram, “overwhelmed with emotion,” and not in a good way. She felt “embarrassed and disappointed” that the gig “has been decided” for her.

She feels . . . coerced.

Dan Avery, writing before Christmas, characterizes the contract as a matter of “force.”

Welcome, Ms. Pearl, to the world that most American workers already know.

But the silliness reached high pitch with actor George Takei, who tweeted: “The members of the Rockettes and the Mormon Tabernacle are like all of us: Forced to go along with something horrible they didn’t choose.”

Democracy — oh, my!

Most people have had to put up with democratic results they did not like. Are Democrats only now understanding this?

To a degree, I sympathize. Which is why I want limits placed on government. Perhaps Democrats should have thought of this every time they cheered as their elected candidates increased presidential power. Did they not realize that someday they might lose?

And if you want a right of refusal, make sure it is in your contract.

The Rockette does not have a leg to stand on.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Rockettes, democracy, inauguration, Trump, media, entertainment, illustration, association, voluntary

 

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Common Sense

They Don’t Need No Stinkin’ White Men?

horse before the cart, strategy, Democrats, Clinton, backwards, voters, white, Trump

All informed, concerned adults should vote.

If they want to.

Yes, I am all for ballot access, and suggestions that we must minimize the vote in any election elicit a shiver: calls for voter participation reduction give me the creeps.

But that does not mean that every push for increased voter participation is a good idea.

In the case of a recent Nation think piece on how progressives can win future elections, it may indicate a severe misunderstanding of reality, a sort of cart-before-the-horse senselessness.

Steve Phillips has developed an “Organizing Strategy” that, his title informs us, would “Revive the Democratic Party” without depending on that dreaded category of citizens, “White Voters.”

Now before you jump to the conclusion that he is merely another trendy, leftist anti-racist racist, a person who has discovered the sheer joy of being able to heap scorn on the one group left in the modern world to which it is socially acceptable to deride, hate, and discriminate against, please note: his his plan to ignore white voters avoids the lesson Democrats most need to learn.

Hillary Clinton lost, Phillips correctly observes, because many, many minority voters who had previously voted for Barack Obama did not go to the polls for her. From this he extrapolates a need to seek out these voters. Democrats don’t need more white voters to win.

True enough. But he never once considers the obvious reason for Mrs. Clinton’s failure. She was a horrible candidate. Horrid. The worst.

From minority points of view, too: which is why so many blacks and Hispanics voted for Trump, in record numbers*.

Democrats, want to win? Stop promoting awful candidates.

And you could try better ideas, too.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* Well, that would be the Trumpian way to put the fact that the President-elect did better with minorities than did, uh, Romney.

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horse before the cart, strategy, Democrats, Clinton, backwards, voters, white, Trump

 

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government transparency ideological culture national politics & policies U.S. Constitution

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Reform

Trump, protest, conservative, centrist, right, illustration

Going into the presidential race, last year, Donald Trump was far from a typical Republican.

His rich man braggadocio, his prior support for abortion, and much else, put him culturally at odds with the social conservative wing of the GOP. He dared heap scorn on neoconservative foreign policy strategy, sacrosanct since Reagan on the right. He has supported many Democratic programs, not the least of which is the Gephardtian protectionism that pulled in so many moderate Democrats.

Besides, as he has famously stated, Democrats loved him, asked him for money, and (not coincidentally) gave him praise . . . right up until he started his campaign under the Republican banner. Then he was excoriated as sexist, racist, xenophobic, Ugly Americanist. Ivanka, his eldest daughter — extraordinarily close to him — was a registered as a Democrat recently enough that she couldn’t even vote for him in the primary.

Ideologically, he has been all over the map.

So one might reasonably think he would govern as a centrist. A non-humble Jimmy Carter retread, perhaps.

But he has assembled the most conservative cabinet in our lifetime. Far more conservative than Ronald Reagan’s. Predictably, Democrats are freaking out.

Why the move “rightward”?

Well, if all the Democratic leadership plus most of the moderate Republican leadership have come out strongly against you — in high moral dudgeon — what point is there to appease them?

The cost of the Trump anathematization strategy may become all too clear in Trump’s first Hundred Days.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Trump, protest, conservative, centrist, right, illustration