SUPREME COURT DOUBLE WHAMMY

Wednesday was the last day of the Supreme Court’s session, and if you thought the Democrats were screaming and melting down like the Wicked Witch of the West at a water park, the final day brought a double whammy from which they may never recover.

First came the (of course) 5-4 ruling that government workers cannot be forced to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective bargaining.  One analyst, asked to sum up the consequences for the Democratic Party in one word, chose “catastrophic.” Stephen Green of Instapundit says his sources estimate 20% of federal workers will opt out, which will mean a yuuuge money loss to government employee unions, and therefore to the Democrats whose reelections they support.  The majority ruled that the forced fees violate the First Amendment freedom from compelled speech by requiring workers to support unions (and the political candidates they back) whose politics they disagree with.  For instance, there are probably a lot of rank-and-file workers who support Trump, but who are being forced to give money to union leaders who use it to elect politicians who want to impeach him. 

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The liberal minority lamented that the ruling “overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law — and its economic life — for over 40 years,” which is sort of like arguing that you shouldn’t get rid of slavery because it’s been around so long.  Just because an unconstitutional wrong has been allowed to go on for four decades doesn’t mean it should go on indefinitely.

Several years ago on my radio show, I explained why so many blue states and cities within them had amassed crippling public debts and were facing bankruptcy.  For decades, they’d engaged in an unsustainable cycle in which union bosses helped elect and reelect Democrats, who then held closed-door contract negotiations with the union bosses and signed sweetheart contracts and pension deals to be paid by the only party to the agreement who was never allowed at the table: the taxpayers.  Over time, this resulted in some workers retiring after 20 years and living another 40 years on benefits so generous, they cost the taxpayers more than they did when they were actually working.  The cost to cities was the equivalent of maintaining three police forces, fire departments, etc.  It worked out great for union bosses and Democratic politicians, not so much for taxpayers and city officials facing budget crunches.  With this latest Supreme Court ruling, one of the wheels just came off the gravy train.   

https://www.westernjournal.com/supreme-court-deals-big-setback-to-labor-unions/

The other devastating Supreme Court news for Democrats is that swing vote Justice Anthony Kennedy announced that he is retiring as of July.  That means President Trump will appoint his successor.  If Senate Republicans are smart (yeah, I know), they will put aside their grandstanding and blocking and confirm that pick pronto. 

While Kennedy has ruled with the conservatives in recent cases, he’s also been known to go off the reservation in strange and unpredictable ways.  Trump has the chance to replace him with a solid Constitutionalist and impact SCOTUS decisions for generations (Kennedy has been on the Court since 1988!)  

Democrats, especially celebrities, responded to the 1-2 punch with language that made Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” sound like “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”  I expect them to try to block Trump’s SCOTUS nominee with any possible excuse: he can’t pick a Justice while he’s under investigation (and they’ll drag out the investigation for eight years if they have to); citing the Republicans’ refusal to vote on confirming Merrick Garland (irrelevant since Trump still has over two years to go in his first term); and the ever-popular “But he’s literally worse than HITLER!!!”  They’ll make this an election issue to fire up their base with claims that Trump will appoint a racist, sexist Nazi who wants to ban Mexican restaurants and put the racially-diverse models from Benetton ads into concentration camps.

But the issue should also fire up the Republican base, which has lately seen the importance of having a Supreme Court that holds the line against leftist assaults on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  They are thrilled at the recent wins, but they saw how narrow were some of the rulings (the Colorado bakery case) and how close the votes (5-4 on cases that should have been unanimous, such as finding that federal judges don’t have the right to usurp the President's power over national security measures based on subjectively divining his hidden intentions from tweets sent before he was even a candidate.)  GOP voters have seen the conservative majority cite the law and the Constitution, while the liberal minority mostly cited emotions.  Under those circumstances, 5-4 is much too close for comfort.

I'll also point out that in the ruling on Trump’s travel ban, the four liberal Justices seemingly wanted to establish an unconstitutional precedent that powers clearly granted to all Presidents should not be held by this particular President because…uh…”TRUUUUUUMP!!!”  This is part of the wave of irrational responses to his election, such as refusing to recognize his legitimacy because he didn’t win the irrelevant popular vote; declaring themselves the “Resistance;” donning obscene knitted hats; living in a fantasy world where Trump would be impeached and Hillary would somehow take his place instead of Mike Pence; and threatening and harassing anyone associated with him.  They suggested that he can't really be President because he's a crude, uncivilized racist (nope, that was Democratic Party grandfather Andrew Jackson) or a New York rich guy who wanted to put immigrants in concentration camps (Nope again, that was Franklin Roosevelt.)  Yet despite their refusal to accept reality, he is indeed the President.

Some of the conservatives on the Court might hold Trump in low regard personally as well, but they at least know that their job is to protect the Constitution, not advance their personal political agendas. They recognize that all Presidents have certain powers, even ones whose employees can’t get service at a third-rate chicken restaurant run by childish liberals. It doesn’t matter if Beyonce won’t perform at his White House, or Robert DeNiro gets Tourette’s when he thinks about him.  The only requirements for the job are being American-born, over 35 and winning a majority of Electoral votes.  Check, check and check.  Deal with it.   

And now, Trump will exercise another power designated to duly-elected Presidents: he will nominate his second Supreme Court Justice and cement the conservative majority.  To quote Robin Williams, "Reality: what a concept."

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/27/supreme-court-justice-anthony-kennedy-to-retire.html

Must see

Wow!  Today's left, summed up in a lot of clips followed by one word.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/300518

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Election Round-up

Here’s a round-up of Tuesday’s primary election results.  Short version: on the Republican side, it was a good night for President Trump; on the Democratic side, it was a bad night for sanity.

In GOP races, several Trump-backed candidates defeated strong challengers, including Rep. Dan Donovan in New York’s 11^th Congressional district and South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster.  As expected, Mitt Romney easily won the Utah GOP Senate primary, which means he’s a virtual lock to be elected. 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2018/06/27/primaries-bring-good-news-for-trump-and-republicans-bad-news-for-divided-democrats.html

The real news was made on the Democratic side.  It’s been said that all the Democrats had to do to win in November was not act crazy, and they’re failing even at that.  First, the good news for the Dems: incumbent Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin easily defeated transgender traitor Chelsea Manning, who called for defunding and dismantling our police and military, plus six other challengers of varying degrees of wackiness. 

But in the Maryland Governor’s race, incumbent Gov. Larry Hogan (who ran unopposed in the GOP primary and was declared the winner one minute after the polls closed) will face former NAACP president and Bernie Sanders campaign veteran Ben Jealous, who is calling for "full funding" for education, single-payer health care, taxing "the rich" to make all public colleges "free" for Maryland residents and legalizing marijuana, which I’m sure is very popular with his supporters. 

But the biggest bombshell of all on the left, the upset that’s being compared to Eric Cantor’s loss on the right, came in New York, where 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley lost to 28-year-old Democratic Socialist Alexandria Acesio-Cortez.  Crowley was the fourth most powerful House Democrat and was considering a challenge to Nancy Pelosi as Speaker.  But he got complacent and barely bothered to campaign against his challenger from the far-far-left. 

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Acesio-Cortez ran on all the usual “progressive,” government-as-helicopter-parent ideas for making America into Venezuela: Medicare for everybody, guaranteed federal jobs, abolishing immigration law enforcement and more. The district is diverse and heavily immigrant, and the recent detention issue helped stir up fears among voters there (which I assume was part of the plan all along).  I wonder if the media that helped promote that issue, often hysterically and misleadingly, ever imagined that it wouldn’t hurt Trump in the polls, but it would sink one of the most powerful Democrats in the House?  Once again, Trump’s critics hurled a boomerang at him and ended up conking themselves on the head. 

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-win-stuns-democrats-puts-new-attention-on-pelosi.html

The outcome in November will either be that Republicans will pick up a seat (if there are enough general election voters to swing the district toward sanity) or more likely, there will be another far-left socialist in Congress and in the public eye, to remind rational Democrats of just how far to the left the party has veered, leaving them and rationality behind. 

On a related note, it was recently announced that the spiritual grandpa of all these young socialists, Bernie Sanders, enjoyed an income in 2017 of over $1 million for the second year in a row.  Not a bad haul for a socialist public servant.  When the USSR fell, humorist A. Whitney Brown observed, “Whoever thought the fatal flaw of communism would be that there’s no money in it?”  Obviously, Bernie has found a way around that flaw.  Congratulations to him for being one of the handful of elites for whom socialism really pays.

http://dailycaller.com/2018/06/22/bernie-sanders-earns-more-than-a-million-dollars/

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 Must-See Video Round 2

Today’s Must-See Video: Some loudmouthed leftist millennial students at Georgetown University pulled one of their “public shaming” attacks on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as he was getting into a car after a campus event, screaming at him about separating families at the border.  But they didn’t count on meeting more than their match in the form of his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, who got right back in their faces.  They’re lucky her security intervened and directed her toward the car before she kicked their pathetic heinies. 

At the link, note that one of the protesters refers in his social media posts to himself as a “rising senior” and talks of being furious that McConnell was invited to “my campus.”  He seems to have an awfully high opinion of himself for someone who is now best known for yelling at his elders like a jackass while wearing a backwards baseball cap like a sad rapper wannabe from 2005. 

I can’t help thinking as I watch this video that if the parties were reversed, the left would be trumpeting this far and wide as an outrageous example of toxic masculinity and white privilege threatening a Chinese-American woman.  As it is, though, I seriously doubt these guys have enough masculinity to reach the level of “toxic.” Or even the level of “detectable.”

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/26/elaine-chao-tells-protesters-to-leave-alone-husband-mitch-mcconnell-when-confronted-on-immigration.html

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 Armed citizen stops crime

In Atlanta, in one of those common instances gun control advocates refuse to admit exist, a good guy with a gun stopped three armed attackers who were assaulting a pregnant pizza delivery woman and trying to steal her car.  If there hadn’t been an armed citizen on hand, I wonder if the cops would have shown up in 30 minutes or less?  And if they don't, is your funeral free?

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/punks-attack-pregnant-woman-then-bystander-shouts-drop-the-gun-or-ill-drop-you/

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 Not heartless monsters

ABC News reporter Tim Llamas went to the border and stumbled across an illegal human smuggling ring in operation.  What he learned made it clear that there is much more to the illegal immigration issue than the one-dimensional, “ICE bad” stereotypes that the left is peddling these days to score cheap political points.  He found that the border agents aren’t heartless monsters but decent people trying their best while faced with a very difficult job. 

I hope he also realized (and it would be nice for a lot of leftist know-it-alls to realize this) that the dangerous situation with crime and gangs in their home countries that drives them here needs to be addressed in their home countries.  The United States can’t allow the entire populations of multiple nations to swarm across our borders, no matter how much sympathy we may feel for them.  Those nation’s leaders need to spend less time wagging their fingers at Trump and more time cleaning up their own countries so their people don’t have to flee here. 

https://www.westernjournal.com/abc-reporter-goes-to-border-stumbles-across-active-human-smuggling-op/

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 Hitler v. Trump?

Well, I guess it was inevitable that when leftists started tarring President Trump as “worse than Hitler,” that meant they must think that Hitler has some good points Trump lacks.  So one of them has written a column listing ways in which Hitler was a “hero” and Trump isn’t.  Let me know when they sink to praising Hitler’s dancing ability and skills at apartment painting.  Then we’ll know that their writing has become such a self-parody, they’re plagiarizing Mel Brooks.

https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/leftist-columnist-trump-isnt-hero-but-hitler-was/

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 A genuine Huck's Hero

This is a story we desperately need in a time when all sorts of bullies, cowards and scoundrels are posturing as heroes and resistance fighters.  It’s the story of a genuine American hero who waited three-quarters of a century for his deserved recognition.

Yesterday, President Trump awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously to 1st Lt. Garlin M. Conner for his valor and astounding courage during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II.  Conner had been ordered to the front lines near Houssen, France, to observe German forces and direct artillery fire.  He left a position of relative safety and moved to a shallow ditch where he could carry out his mission more effectively.  When the German troops started to surge forward toward him, Conner directed American artillery fire toward his own position, risking his life in order to save his battalion and prevent a German victory.  Miraculously, he survived and lived until 1998.  But he didn’t live long enough to see his family’s victory in securing him the Medal of Honor after a 22-year battle.  His wife, Pauline Conner, did live to see it, though, and she was at the White House to receive the Medal on his behalf.  She said, “He was my hero for 53 years. He still is today.”

There’s more at the link.  You’ll want to read it.  It will make you feel better about humanity and remind you why World War II veterans were called “the greatest generation.”  

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-awards-posthumous-medal-of-honor-to-wwii-army-officer/

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20 Questions for Peter Strzok

On Wednesday, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, the lead investigator for both the Trump/Russia probe and the Hillary Clinton email “matter,” will be questioned behind closed doors by the House Judiciary and House Oversight and Government Reform Committees.  His attorney, Aitan Goelman, has said he will not plead the Fifth and is willing to testify without an immunity deal, though he was subpoenaed for this testimony.  Goelman says his client “thinks that his position, character and actions have all been misrepresented and caricatured and he wants an opportunity to remedy that.”

According to attorney Joe diGenova, Strzok will try to do that by lying his backside off.  Gosh, I wonder if Strzok really will “pull a Bill Clinton”!

President Trump texted that Strzok is a “fraud” and that he should be questioned live on TV.  We’ll have to wait a while for that; a public hearing will reportedly be held sometime in the next few weeks.  In the meantime, in my eternal quest to be as helpful as possible, here are my “just for fun” questions for the committees to ask him now:

1.  On June 6, 2016, you were one of the officials who changed the language of Comey’s statement in the Hillary case from “grossly negligent,” which is criminal, to “extremely careless,” which could be something like not looking when you’re going down the stairs.  Hillary falls down the stairs a LOT –- is that what you meant?

2.  The day after the Trump/Russia investigation officially started, you flew to London.  Did you meet with Christopher Steele or other operatives, or did you just need a little break from all the dedicated anti-Trump work that had already been going on for months?

3.  Did you personally assign the “confidential informants” (SPIES) to investigate the Trump campaign people, and when did this happen?  And did you call them spies?  Come on, you know you did. 

4.  Did American taxpayers fly you first-class to London and also end up paying for George Papadopoulos’s bar tab?

5.  You said, “Now I need to fix it and finish it.”  Did you mean “fix” as in, “the fix is in”?

6.  How many informants in the Trump campaign did you have?  Is that more or fewer that than the number of people you had to carry out Lynch’s instructions to cover for Hillary?  (NOTE:  As reported in National Review, the part about Lynch wanting cover for Hillary is buried in the IG report, part of Comey’s testimony.)

7.  How did you like your work in Human Resources?  With this kind of experience and your vicious anti-Trump bias, you might be able to find work at a big company like Google.

8.  How do you really pronounce your name?  We were all just wondering.

9.  You and former CIA Director John Brennan have a lot in common --- for example, you both hate Trump.  Have you thought about going into business together, like those guys who formed Fusion GPS?

10.  After all the hard work you did to try to get Hillary into the White House, does it bug you that she goes around blaming the FBI for keeping her out?

11.  How did you get to lead both investigations?  Did your department have a contest to see who hated Trump the most? 

12.  That talk about the “insurance policy” --- was that just you boning up for your dream job in HR?

13.  Why did you like Hillary?  Was it because you thought that with her particular skills and personality traits, she had a lot to teach the FBI about secrecy? 

14.  If you owned a chicken restaurant, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders came in with her family, would you serve them?

15.  While you were on the Mueller team, what was your official job?  Did you coordinate the daily “Two Minutes Hate”?

16.  The IG did not conclude that your actions affected the outcome of the Hillary investigation.  Is that because you and Lisa Page were too busy texting each other hateful messages to actually get anything done?

17.  You finally lost your security clearance a few days ago.  While you were still working at the FBI in HR, how much of your day was spent looking at classified material while you still had the chance?

18.  Are you still collecting a paycheck from the FBI?  Whatever for?

19.  Once you’re completely out of the FBI, do you think you might follow in the footsteps of Christopher Steele and freelance for the Trump opposition?

20.  Which should we believe:  the text messages you thought no one but Lisa would ever see, or the carefully crafted lines you’re handing us today with your lawyer present?

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jun/25/peter-strzok-testimony-judiciary-committee-will-be/

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