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Political correctness

Roberts sides with liberals on DACA

June 20, 2020

Mike Huckabee

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but…Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberals on the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, ruling that President Trump’s attempt to rescind Obama's DACA program is unlawful – even though Obama repeatedly stated that he had no constitutional authority to create it before going ahead and doing so.

The Court ruled that Trump didn’t give a good enough reason for why he rescinded it. Roberts wrote, "We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action."

Just off the top of my head, how about: “It's illegal because the President has no constitutional power to invent new immigration laws”?

The story at the link states, “No one disputes that the President has the power to end DACA. Instead, the focus of Thursday's case is whether administration officials followed procedural rules when terminating the program.” Actually, a lot of people disputed that Trump has that power, mostly based upon their delusional belief that Trump isn’t really President. The “reasoned explanation” argument was just the excuse that they thought might pass muster in courts, if they could find enough liberal judges. I can almost picture their attorneys leaving the SCOTUS, high-fiving each other and saying, "I can't BELIEVE they bought that!"

Personally, I have supported something similar to DACA in the past. I think it’s wasteful and cruel to send kids who were brought to the US by their parents when they were small and have only known America back to nations where they have no place and might not even speak the language, particularly after the state has already paid to educate them to the point when they’re about to become employed taxpayers. But this was NOT the way to deal with it. Letting a President simply ignore the Constitutional separation of powers as if his office conveys magical abilities is not the way to handle it, nor is restricting the powers of future Presidents from undoing the unconstitutional actions of previous Presidents unless they say “Mother, may I?” convincingly enough to a judge.

In the dissent, Justice Thomas, one of a dwindling number of SCOTUS members who remembers what the Constitution is and cares what words mean, warned that the Court’s decision means future presidents will be stuck with illegal policies inherited from their predecessors:

"Under the auspices of today’s decision, administrations can bind their successors by unlawfully adopting significant legal changes through executive branch agency memoranda. Even if the agency lacked authority to effectuate the changes, the changes cannot be undone by the same agency in a successor administration unless the successor provides sufficient policy justifications to the satisfaction of this Court."

I refer you again to Sen. Josh Hawley’s speech warning that we have become a nation in which laws are no longer made by the elected Representatives of the people but by unelected bureaucrats and judges who think that wearing a robe makes them wizards. I guess now we can add rogue Presidents to that list. Everyone can make laws except our lawmakers.

The good news: if Trump wants to bypass the Democratic House and create laws and programs by executive order, he can now feel free to go ahead, knowing that his successors can only do away with them if they can come up with a reason better than “But this is plainly UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!” As Roberts first signaled when he twisted the law into a pretzel to uphold Obamacare, that’s no longer a convincing enough reason for the SCOTUS to overturn something.

As for what to do about the SCOTUS, it's obvious that having Justices appointed by Republicans, even by Trump, is no guarantee that they'll protect the Constitution. But letting the Democrats have the Presidency and Senate would be exponentially worse. As law professor/blogger David Bernstein (who called the DACA decision "a very dangerous ruling" and "a very bad day for the separation of powers") said, the best insurance against 5-4 liberal decisions thanks to a rogue conservative Justice is to have a 7-2 or higher conservative bench.

More on the Supreme Court shocker

June 20, 2020

Mike Huckabee

I don’t often recommend watching speeches in Congress these days, but Wednesday brought one by Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley that is a must-hear for Christian conservatives. It concerns the outrageous Supreme Court ruling, joined by alleged conservative Justices Roberts and Gorsuch (Gorsuch even wrote it) that refines the ban on “sex” discrimination in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include “gender identity,” a concept that wasn’t even contemplated until decades after the law was written.

It is effectively a surrender to the left, since if judges can interpret the plain language of laws to mean anything they choose, then we no longer have a representative republic, we have rule by unelected judges and bureaucrats. Outrageously, Senate Republican leaders seem to be fine with that, brushing off the ruling as “the law of the land” (say, aren’t YOU supposed to make those?) and showing no interest in passing legislation to correct it. The Chamber of Commerce/Wall Street branch of the GOP is also fine with that, since they don’t care about social values issues anyway, and find them a bit of an embarrassment among their liberal country club friends. Hawley has some important words that they need to hear, and that Christian conservatives and other social values voters really need to hear.

Incidentally, since I think it’s suicidal to ignore your opponents, I also read this take on the same subject by a liberal Washington Post editor.

It’s infuriating because it makes the lazy and bigoted assumption that being opposed to letting the LGBTQ agenda steamroll religious rights, the law, the Constitution and basic biology is born purely out of personal animus toward gay people. But it’s worth reading to hear the arrogant attitude of the left toward millions of people they know nothing about and never even talk to. It boils down to “Why can’t you just take the crumbs we throw you and shut up?” Remember this the next time WaPo runs an article lamenting how some people just don’t recognize when they’re “speaking from a place of privilege.”

This Week: The Supreme Court lights the Constitution on fire

June 20, 2020

Mike Huckabee

In one week, the Supreme Court has managed to douse the Constitution with gasoline and light it on fire with two separate outrageous decisions. In the first, by declaring that “sex discrimination” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act also means “gender identity,” they affirmed that the plain words of laws don’t mean what Congress intended but whatever judges want them to mean, rendering the concept of laws written by elected representatives of the people to be meaningless. In the second, they ruled that President Trump cannot use an executive order to undo a previous President’s illegal and unconstitutional executive order unless the Court approves his reasons for doing so, which eviscerates the separation of powers, usurping for the Court a power reserved exclusively to the Chief Executive. And in both of these dangerous and destructive rulings, the key vote was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the liberals.

Yesterday in the Senate, Constitutional scholar Sen. Ted Cruz took to the podium and spent about 10 minutes dismantling Roberts’ “legal reasoning,” in which he concedes that something is, of course, obviously what we all know it is, then yanks some rationale out of the ether for ruling the other way. It’s a must-see or must-read for anyone who cares about preserving – or more accurately now, reviving - the Constitution and the rule of law:

None of this is surprising since Roberts has made it clear from his writings and interviews that he doesn’t see his job as ruling on whether an issue before him is Constitutional or not – which is actually his ONLY job. He erroneously sees his job as being to look at something before him that he assumes the people want, like Obamacare, same-sex marriage, gender identity protections, DACA or keeping a citizenship question out of the Census and then work backward to try to find some legal mumbo-jumbo to justify it. He’s now done this so many times that he’s left the Constitution as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

(Incidentally, for Justice Roberts’ enlightenment, here are 10 instances where Obama himself admitted that he had no Constitutional authority to create DACA):

Since there are no elections for Supreme Court Justices, and impeachment is a longshot, there’s only one way to counter this. That is to ensure that President Trump is reelected and the GOP holds the Senate, so that Trump can continue appointing conservative, constructionist judges who can rise to the level of SCOTUS appointments, and we can all pray that he appoints enough of them so that if one or two decide, like Roberts, to go, rogue, they won’t be “swing” votes.

Of course, there is one other solution, but it’s not very likely. As Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton suggested, if John Roberts “believes his political judgment is so exquisite,” “I invite him to resign, travel to Iowa, and get elected. I suspect voters will find his strange views no more compelling than do the principled justices on the Court.”

Supreme Court shock

June 20, 2020

Mike Huckabee

Monday, the Supreme Court not only rewrote the 1964 Civil Rights Act to redefine the ban on job discrimination by sex to include “gender identity” (setting the stage for endless nuisance lawsuits targeted at religious institutions), but they also rejected a number of cases in which citizens were appealing government interference with their Second Amendment rights.

For instance, the SCOTUS rejected an appeal by a New Jersey man who services ATMs and carries a lot of cash who understandably wants to carry a gun, but the local government requires that he name a specific threat to justify his need for one (as if he knows the name of the person who will eventually pop up and try to rob and likely kill him.) If you read the Second Amendment, you’ll notice that nothing in it says that citizens must justify their specific need for a gun to the government before they’re allowed to keep and bear one.

As the (sadly only) three Justices who dissented from the gay rights ruling noted, this Court is only too ready to pull new rights out of the ether when they involve abortion or LGBTQ issues, but they refuse to defend the clearly-enumerated Constitutional right that the Founders listed second in the Bill of Rights. It’s especially disappointing that alleged “conservative” Justices such as John Roberts and even Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch went along with the liberals in these activist rulings.

Why is it that so many so-called “conservative” Justices morph into liberals after just a short time on the SCOTUS (or as the media call it when a judge goes from respecting the text of the Constitution to rewriting laws from the bench, they "evolve”)? Some of it might be peer pressure, or just living inside the upper-crust liberal DC bubble. Some of it might also stem from the fact that ALL of our Supreme Court Justices attended the same handful of Northeastern Ivy League colleges (every one of them spent time at either Harvard or Yale) and were taught by the same liberal professors. While a few were able to resist the indoctrination, there is no real “diversity” on the Court. For instance, there’s not a single Justice who was schooled in the South or West, and can understand the needs of farmers or ranchers who bring cases to the Court.

Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit sums up the problem in a recent book called “The Judiciary’s Class War.”

Reynolds argues that the problem with the judiciary isn’t political but a class divide. Since the judiciary is the only branch of government that requires members to attain elite schooling, it’s dominated by people from upper middle class, elite backgrounds. Once they’re on the bench, they tend to favor things that people of their class embrace (abortion, gay rights, birth control, open borders, etc.) and even invent new “rights” to promote them, while marginalizing the real rights that working class Americans care about, such as freedom of religion, property rights, gun rights and honest apportionment of legislators to represent legal citizens.

Victor Davis Hanson also has some related thoughts about how “class, not race, divides America”…

SCOTUS decisions like Monday’s will make many conservatives despair of ever being able to get America back on the right track of respecting the Constitution and laws as written by elected Representatives of the people. But if you give up and stop voting, then you’ll guarantee the election of people like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who will put their lead feet on the accelerator to take America over the cliff.

A Republican majority in both Houses and the reelection of President Trump would at least set the stage for passing legislation to replace the legislation concocted by the courts, and to keep allowing Trump to nominate conservative judges to lower courts who might someday be on the Supreme Court. And of course, to nominate SCOTUS judges who will actually defend the Constitution. So far, he’s batting .500 on that, which is .500 more than we’d ever get under Joe Biden.

Supreme Court rules on sex disrimination

June 20, 2020

Mike Huckabee

In a landmark case, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Monday that the Title VII ban on sex discrimination in hiring from the 1964 Civil Rights Act also applies to LGBTQ people, expanding gender employment protections to include gender identity.

Justice Gorsuch wrote, “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.”

Justices Alito, Kavanaugh, and Thomas dissented, with Alito arguing that "There is only one word for what the Court has done today: legislation,” and that’s up to Congress, not the courts. Alito wrote, “The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely enforcing the terms of the statute, but that is preposterous. Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination because of ‘sex’ is different from discrimination because of ‘sexual orientation’ or ‘gender identity.’”

I think that most people would agree that it isn’t fair to fire someone from a job just because of their sexual orientation. However, the SCOTUS, as has become its habit in cases that push the envelope of LGBTQ rights, has once again thrown a monkey wrench into the system without making provisions to settle the inevitable chaos that will ensue.

For instance, when they “discovered” a hitherto unknown right to same-sex marriage in the Constitution, they added some vague words about how this shouldn’t be construed to trample First Amendment religious protections. But the ink was barely dry on the ruling before radical gay activists, who had argued that religious people had no reason to oppose it because it would never affect them, were gleefully filing federal lawsuits to force religious florists and bakers to cater same-sex weddings or else face bankrupting fines and even jail.

And now, the SCOTUS has done it again. Most people might side with the specific plaintiffs in this case, who were fired from jobs such as skydiving instructor and funeral director for being gay.

But what about churches that don’t want to hire, say, a cross-dressing gay or trans youth minister because that violates their Constitutionally-protected religious beliefs? The Court has once again kicked open the door for countless drawn-out, expensive lawsuits, eating up church funds that could have been spent on things like helping the poor, and which will now have to go to lawyers. And all because the Justices can’t resist upending the long-established social order without a thought to providing clarity to head off the negative consequences. They’re like someone who throws a lit match into a fireworks factory, then walks away saying, “I’ll let the rest of you sort this out.”

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