Consent of the Governed and Original Intent

 

 The original intent of a law, and the original intent of the Constitution or an Amendment, is what the people consented to through their representatives in the legislature when the law was passed or the Constitution and Amendments were ratified.  Subsequently changing the meaning of what was agreed to by a court decision is, in reality, governing without the consent of the governed.  In commerce, it's called bait and switch.  The "Living Constitution," basically says the Constitution says whatever 5 Supreme Court Justices say it says on any given day.

If the interpretation of laws that is no longer predictable, it means that there really is no rule of law.  We instead have a rule of unchecked judges with lifetime tenure.  This is a serious problem that has become obvious in the last 20 years.  Before we pass lots of interesting new laws, we need to acknowledge that we have no idea how any of them will be interpreted.  Judges will make the interpretation up as they go along.

DACA Ruling: Orange Man Bad

Trump figured out that DACA, which Obama said was based on prosecutorial discretion, was illegal.  Three years later, the Supreme court ruled that even though Obama didn't use the Administrative Procedures Act to establish DACA, Trump must use the APA to abolish it, even though the Supreme Court acknowledges that DACA is illegal.  Trump doesn't seem to have the same prosecutorial discretion that Obama had.  It seems that some presidents are more equal than others.

So simply determining that you want to change environmental rules doesn't mean it's easy to design a change in regulations that will survive judicial review.  The Supreme Court has determined there is a penumbra is the Constitution, which only they can see.  It can be summarized for the layman as "Orange man bad."

Expensive Green New Deal

 

The election is a referendum on the Green New Deal.  If fracking is outlawed, natural gas prices will triple, and gasoline prices will double or triple.  Do people really want to vote for $4.50 a gallon gasoline?  About 87% of US electricity generation isn't renewable.  About 63% is fossil fuels.  Do you really believe we can scrap and replace 63%, or 87%, of US electricity generation withing 15 years?  It would be impossibly expensive.

The US has gradually substituted natural gas for coal in electricity generation, based on fracking natural gas.  As a result, the US is the only major economic power to have declining CO2 emissions since the Kyoto Agreement.  Outlawing fracking will force us back to coal, or turn the lights off in the US.

Renewable energy is intermittent.  There are times when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.  At the moment, the technology for storing energy from renewable sources to fill in for when they are not generating is both inefficient and prohibitively expensive.  The end result of strong ideology and weak engineering is California rolling blackouts.

The US is the only country that has met its goals for reducing carbon emissions.  The US did this by switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation.  The increase in natural gas came from fracking.  The Green New Deal eliminates fracking.

The Green New Deal will outlaw gasoline cars.  Less than 1% of US cars are battery driven now.  It will take a tremendous amount of investment to switch from gas stations to electric charging stations.California and New York already have versions of the Green New Deal.  Democrats have a history of running as moderates then switching to their real progressive positions once elected.  Leftists try to block every pipeline they can.

The bottom line is that you're smoking wacky tobaccy if you believe that Democrats won't implement major parts of the Green New Deal if elected. 

Do you expect the woke to be rational about their goals?  They have shown they have no rationality when it comes to canceling anyone who deviates even slightly from their ideology.  Do you think women are people who menstruate?  Wrong and unwoke!

Electoral College Blues

 Every presidential election since 1789 has been decided by the electoral college vote, except one, never the popular vote.  If you think it should be different, please use the procedures in Article V of the Constitution to ratify an amendment abolishing the electoral college and substituting the popular vote.  Good luck with that, by the way.  Ratification takes 3/4th of the state legislatures approving the amendment.  There's no way you can get the electoral college abolished by a Constitutional amendment, because small states won't ratify any such amendment.

Meanwhile you can be shocked, shocked, that Trump won the electoral college without winning a majority of popular votes, and won the presidency.  It's similar to your NFL team  gaining more yards but losing the game on points scored.  Shameful in both cases, right, even though the rules of the game were clear to everybody from the start.  Perhaps Democrats are too dumb to win presidential elections according to the Constitution.