Consent of the Governed and Interpreting the Constitution

If consent of the governed means anything, we have to apply the Constitution in the way the people who ratified it understood it.   Otherwise we are imposing laws nobody consented to, which is tyranny.  It's easy to say that people who object to decisions like Roe v Wade and Obergfell are just misguided bigots.  But in fact, they are objecting to laws invented by the courts that were not lawfully adopted by the legislature or consented to by Constitutional ratification.  The ends don't justify the means.  The means change the outcome.  If the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in ways that nobody consented to, there is no limit to the Supreme Court's power.  There is also no binding precedent, because any precedent can be reinterpreted to mean something entirely different.  The Supreme Court becomes a Supreme Revolutionary Council with essentially unlimited powers and life appointments for members.

Let me give you an example of how this works.  The 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, when homosexual acts were illegal in every state.  If the legislators who voted to ratify the 14th Amendment had known they were ratifying same sex marriage, it wouldn't have passed.  Obergfell should have been decided on the full faith and credit clause.  Any marriage validly performed in one state must be recognized in all states.  This would have left the states in control of who could marry inside their borders, but forced all states to recognize same sex marriages performed elsewhere.  Such a decision would have been consistent with the invalidation of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which conservatives liked because of the states rights reasoning, even though the outcome didn't go their way.  DOMA was invalidated because the Supreme Court ruled marriage was a state matter, and federal law could not interfere with it under the 10th Amendment.  A ruling on full faith and credit would have been much more easily defended as consistent with the original intent of the Constitution.   If Obergfell had been decided on full faith and credit, doubt about the permanence of Obergfell, including this article, wouldn't be necessary.  Since using the 14th Amendment was a stretch, Obergfell is a shaky decision.

Samantha Bee and the Goal of the Resistance

This was my reaction to a WSJ article on Samantha Bee calling Ivanka Trump a "feckless c*nt."   It got 102 likes, more than any other comment I've made on WSJ.

Samantha Bee's insulting obscenity was in service of a slow-motion coup d'etat under the color of authority, intended to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.  President Trump was duly elected according to the Constitution.  The #Resistance wants to use any and all means possible to either remove President Trump or paralyze him with pseudo legal lawfare.  For serving the cause of undermining the Constitution, Samantha Bee was applauded by people who not only have no decency.  They have no respect for Constitutional government.  To a Vietnam Era Veteran like me, Samantha Bee and the people in the #Resistance are getting very close to becoming domestic enemies of the Constitution.  This isn't a mere squabble about the niceties of discourse.  The election outcome was incorrect, according to the left, so they need to fix it.    The left's temper tantrum over Hillary's loss is assumed to be more important than the rule of law, checks and balances or preserving the Constitution itself.

Why I Dislike Coastal Elites

I generally find leftist elites hard to tolerate because they take no responsibility for their actions. For me this started at the end of the Vietnam War, when Democrats in Congress outlawed US air strikes in Southeast Asia and cut the aid budget for South Vietnam by 75% between 1973 and 1975. From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed about 2 million Cambodians. Victorious communists in Vietnam and Laos killed several hundred thousand more people. Roughly 2 million people fled South Vietnam to escape communist rule in leaky boats. The "Give peace a chance" folks maintain to this day there was no bloodbath.

The same people, like John Kerry, or people mentored by the antiwar crowd, like the Smartest President Ever, are still leading the left. The number of dead and the number of refugees in Syria that resulted from Obama's self restraint in the Middle East, where, like in Vietnam, we chose not to use air power effectively, are reminiscent of pictures of refugees from Vietnam for a reason. The same policies by the same people gave the same outcomes.

As to why I dislike coastal elites more than fly over country elites, that's easy. Coastal elites are snobbier. They are much more likely to tell me that I can be ignored because I have horse manure on my boots and my degrees from fly over country schools are far inferior to their degrees from Harvard.

I interviewed to go to Harvard. I was a 3rd generation legacy at Harvard, with the grades, SAT scores and extra curricular activities to get in there. Their snooty attitude, and the aniti-war slogans all over campus, repelled me. I didn't even apply. So part of why I dislike coastal elites is that I could have been one and chose not to be.

 

Then there are people who say that if you are elite yourself, you can't complain about elites. These folks are also very irritating. John Hinderaker wrote a piece in his Power Line Blog about "Why Normal Americans Hate the Elites." The comments claimed that since Mr. Hindraker graduated from Dartmouth and Harvard Law, he was an elite and had no right to complain about other elites. I thought that was a particularly funny socialist class solidarity argument, so I wrote this comment in response:

 

I need your advice urgently. I have an MS in Management from Northwestern University (Kellogg Graduate School of Management) and an MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign, both in fly over country. Since I went to grade school in Missoula, Montana, I identify as a redneck, even though I am over educated for this status and can turn the accent on and off like a faucet. My alternate accents include Montgomery, AL, and Skokie, IL. I live in North Suburban Cook (Crook) County, Illinois, which is a very blue state, but I voted for Trump in the general election (not the primary). I'm a Vietnam Era veteran with a low tolerance for leftist malarkey. Do I have enough street cred to be tired of coastal elites with leftist attitudes, or am I still too elite myself to have this position? In your answer, please state your credentials for judging when people can be fed up with elitist fertilizer of equine origin. 

Then there was a woman who argued that elite status was just superior intellect and should be celebrated. She said the author and other bloggers on the site should "own their elite status." For her, I had this response: 

The problem with leftists, ma'm, is they know so much that just ain't so. When their arguments break down, intellectually, these folks depend on the authority of their credentials to carry their arguments. They claim it's true because they have elite credentials, and you ain't. Well ma'm, my MS in Statistics from the University of Illinois, Champaign, tells me that extrapolating from less than 100 years of observations of statistical noise to forecast climate patterns that last hundreds or even thousands of years is statistical folly. People who make the "settled science" argument use their better credentials to claim better credibility, but their arguments remain statistical folly. That's why people like me, in fly over country, are tired of elites who refuse to engage intellectually, when they can condescend instead using their "superior credentials" to avoid having to face the fallacies of their arguments.

The same lady demanded, "Give me one concrete example of a member of a member of "majority" being "tyrannized" by an "academic."  I responded, "If Republicans were a protected class, almost every university in the country would lose an adverse impact lawsuit."

 

Conservative View of Parkland Shooting (Summary)

Federal Program Protected Parkland Shooter From Arrests

There was a federal program created by the Obama Administration to end the "school to prison pipeline." The Trump Administration is trying to cancel the program, but this is being hampered by legal action and administrative delays.

The program subsidized school counseling to replace arrests for criminal offenses on school grounds. This program meant that the Parkland shooter was counseled instead of arrested numerous times. The result was that the Parkland shooter was able to buy guns, because he lacked an arrest record, and the FBI couldn't find him, and didn't take tips about the Parkland shooter seriously, because there was no arrest record. Here's the best link on it, but there are more, if you need them.
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/02/28/obama_administration_school_discipline_policy_and_the_parkland_shooting.html

Here are some more links to how the program was developed, and how it was intended to work. Please note the emphasis on limiting arrests, regardless of the crimes committed. Here's 5 more links on the program. Some are in favor, some against:
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2018/04/10/sperrybroward_art.html
https://www.tolerance.org/m...
http://neatoday.org/2015/01...
https://www.usatoday.com/st...
https://www.city-journal.or...
https://veneremurcernui.wor...

Gun Restraining Orders Are the Best Way to Address the Problem

School shooters generally have noticeable mental and social problems.  The system generally knows about these individuals, like the Parkland shooter, but claims it can’t do anything about them.  First, authorities need to arrest and jail them if they commit assaults on teachers or other students.  That gives them an arrest record and warns the potential perpetrators not to go any farther.  But now there’s a new tool, a gun restraining order.  It gives authorities something between jail, or involuntary commitment in a mental institution, and letting a time bomb walk free.   After a hearing, a judge can remove the right of a defendant to own weapons.  The burden of proof is less than for involuntary commitment.  This was recently enacted into Florida law.  Gun Restraining Orders are supported by the NRA.

The Purpose of the Second Amendment

The purpose of an armed US populace is to check the federal government's ability to exceed its specified powers under the Constitution.  This argument was put forward as a rebuttal to arguments against the Constitution, that the federal government would have so much power that it would oppress the people and would be able to impose a military dictatorship.  See the last 2 paragraphs of Federalist Paper 46 in this link:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed46.asp

The last two paragraphs of the link say that the Federal Government will not be able to abuse its power because the residents of America, unlike the residents of Europe, are armed with military grade weapons and would be able to organize themselves into militias that would outnumber the federal army.  Some argue that Federalist paper 46 is not the same as the 2^nd Amendment.  However, the same man, James Madison, wrote both of them, about 18 months apart.  Federalist Paper 46 was published 29 January 1788.  The Bill of Rights was introduced in Congress on June 8, 1789.  I think that Federalist Paper 46 is a good indication of James Madison’s intent in writing the 2^nd Amendment.

For those of you who would argue that people armed with AR-15s and other "assault weapons" would not be able to fight a federal army today, please consider the amount of time it took the Iraqi Army to take Mosul, even though it was using large amounts of US artillery and air strikes. It took over 9 months, from October 17, 2016, to late July, 2017, to take Mosul from ISIS. ISIS was armed mainly with AK-47 rifles (true assault rifles) and improvised explosives, with a few captured machine guns and mortars. I think this shows that the 2nd Amendment is still an effective check on the Federal Government.

You should also consider that there are at least 5 million privately owned "assault weapons" in the US, and there are over 300 million privately owned guns overall. This means that there is more than one gun for each US resident. There is no way you can confiscate all of the guns out there. Don't bother to deny that's what you really want. We don't trust you. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." Malarkey on steroids. The left lies for a living.

The typical pro-gun voter believes the 2nd Amendment is a guarantee that the rest of the Bill of Rights will not be canceled unconstitutionally by the federal government. They view any effort to curtail gun rights as the first step in an unlawful move towards dictatorship. Since the left is already trying to cancel Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Speech in places the left controls, like college campuses, pro-gun voters increasingly feel the left is not dealing in good faith. They are likely to resist violently any effort to confiscate guns or have the Supreme Court reinterpret the meaning of the 2nd Amendment. I don't see any way any grand compromise can be reached on this issue.

Self Defense is a Natural Human Right

Both the Founders and a substantial number of people today believe that self defense is a natural right.  Both the Founders and many people today believe that self defense requires military weapons.  If you don’t believe that, ask yourself how Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were able to kill about a quarter of Cambodia’s population, about 2 million men, women and children, in the killing fields between 1975 and 1979.  Cambodians had no weapons to defend themselves with.  You say that could never happen in the US.  Before 1960, almost everyone would have said it could never happen in Cambodia either.  The Khmer Rouge Communists were an unprecedented event in Cambodian history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_Killing_Fields