Before the election there were dark warnings of the possibility of violence by Trump supporters in the event of a Clinton victory. Well, we are getting the violence, but it seems to be coming from Trump opponents, although it must be said that it can no way be attributed to Hillary Clinton who was quite gracious in her concession speech the following morning.
Republicans ought to think about waiting a bit before popping the champagne corks. President-elect Donald Trump is likely to propose an infrastructure program with a price tag in the vicinity of $1 trillion dollars. The Trump proposal may wind up looking a lot like the program Obama signed into law in 2009 that did little to no good. And there is that matter of where that $1 trillion is going to come from. The accumulated debt already on the books is now $20 trillion and headed upwards. And that doesn’t count the present value of unfunded entitlements under current law.
On the other hand Obamacare is almost certainly going to be dismantled and replaced with something more market friendly. We can expect an effort to inject competition into the health care finance system by allowing insurance companies so sell across state lines. That would be all to the good. It would eliminate lots of bureaucracy and facilitate efficiency gains by enlarging risk pools. Perhaps they will take up the issue of tort reform in an effort to reduce the practice of defensive medicine.
Dodd-Frank will come in for a significant overhaul. And there may be an effort to resurrect some form of Glass-Stiegel, which would separate commercial and investment banking.
Early on we can expect Trump to nominate a replacement for Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. With respect to the nominee, there are two questions lurking not very far in the background. First, will Trump’s nominee come from the list the Heritage Foundation drew up for him early on in the campaign? Second, will Chuck Schumer, the presumed minority leader, try to mount a filibuster? Or will he hold his firepower to see if Trump will get a chance to tip the balance of the Court if one of the more liberal Justices steps down?
Personnel is policy so we should be able to get a sense of the broad outlines of what a Trump administration would look like after he makes a few announcements for key cabinet and staff positions.
Donald Trump is going to spend the next two months taking a crash course in how to be President. Let’s hope he studies his Cliff Notes carefully. He’s going to need them.
The headline on the front page of the New York Times reads: Establishment Shaken by Trump Victory. The Times headline suggests that elites still haven’t quite caught on to the joke. Shaking up up the establishment is precisely what the voters wanted to do.
The manner in which the 2016 campaign was conducted stands as an indictment of political and media elites. The Republican Party establishment stood by helplessly as Donald J. Trump, a lifelong Democrat, violated long standing political norms and launched a withering assault on Republican orthodoxy before going on to capture the nomination of that very same Party. For its part, a thoroughly corrupt Democratic Party establishment stacked the deck to ensure that Hillary Clinton would secure its Presidential nomination even though she was under criminal investigation. For all we know, she still was when the votes were cast on November 8, and still might be today.
Add to this the fact that media elites ignored or downplayed Hillary Clinton’s long list of policy failures, mounting evidence of her corruption and that of the Clinton Foundation, and the damage the Clintons rained down on important American governing institutions. For its part, Fox News spent the better part of the year running infomercials for the Trump campaign with Sean Hannity acting as head cheerleader.
By the time the organs of the elite media finally got around to launching their predictable and brutal assault on Trump, after having conveniently waited until he had secured the Republican nomination, it didn’t matter. The public had already tuned them out. Quite simply, the public no longer trusts conventional news outlets to report the news even handedly. And they shouldn’t. Moreover, the culture has become so coarse, politics so infantile, and deviancy defined down so low, that it provides a wall of protection around aberrant behavior, which is precisely the opposite of what the culture is supposed to do.
The net of it is that elites went down market, checked their privilege and abandoned the idea of stewardship. Into the vacuum that remained rode Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, perfect exemplars of our trashy pop culture. It permits Trump to boast that he could shoot someone on Park Avenue and not lose support. It allows Hillary Clinton to stare into the camera and repeatedly lie, wink and invite her supporters to participate in her lies.
In the end the American people were presented with a choice between a fool and a knave. They decided to take a chance. They chose the fool.
JFB
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Posted inCulture, Politics|Comments Off on Failure of the Elites
There should be no doubt that one of the more inauspicious Presidential contests in recent history produced an earthquake. Donald Trump, a businessman with no political experience and little policy knowledge, managed to win the Republican Presidential nomination and then the White House by running as an outsider. In so doing he has shaken up the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic Parties.
Trump carried states Republicans haven’t won in decades. They include Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Iowa and (apparently) Michigan. In short, the blue wall in the rust belt crumbled. And it crumbled for a reason.
These are the states that elites refer to as “fly over territory”. And they are in revolt. Citizens in those states are tired of the relentless condescension heaped on them by political, media and financial elites. These citizens see themselves, their values and their culture as being under siege. Theirs is an insurgency fed by slow economic growth and social engineering that violates their sense of fairness. In short, they look very much like the 1980s Reagan Democrats of Macomb county Michigan.
So when Trump posed the question “What do you have to lose” they decided to take the leap, more out of desperation than hope.
Let’s not kid ourselves. As Lloyd Benston would say, Donald J Trump is no Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a two-term Governor of California, the nation’s largest state. Ronald Reagan had a core set of beliefs he carried with him throughout his political career. They included a belief in American exceptionalism; a determination to push back against a communism many saw as ascendant, and a commitment to liberty and free markets. Reagan was inclusive, an optimist and had no use for crony capitalism. And Reagan unambiguously promoted clear policies that were consistent with his beliefs.
It is not clear if Donald Trump has any core beliefs, much less a thought out political agenda. Speaker Paul Ryan has one that is ready to go. The real question is whether Ryan and Congressional Republicans are going to be able to get Trump to adopt and champion that policy agenda. Or whether Trump actually intends to fight to build his silly wall and take apart the global trading system to boot. Let’s hope it turns out to be the former, not the latter.
As all Trekkies know, about every 7 years or so Vulcans experience an overwhelming hormonal imbalance known as pon farr that subjects them to an overpowering desire to mate. It can often lead to a marriage proposal. But Vulcans can become unhinged as the urge grows, causing them to behave in highly emotional, non-rational ways for brief periods of time. Moreover, a female Vulcan can challenge a proposed bonding by calling for “koon-ut-kal-if-fee”, a ritual in which the bonded male must fight a challenger to the death to maintain his bonded status to the female.
That’s what happened to Spock in the episode “Amok Time”.
Leonard as Spock
Americans are seemingly subject to a similar fight to the death every 4 years when a Presidential election rolls around. For relatively brief periods of time the body politic becomes collectively unhinged. This makes it relatively easy for partisans to stir up faux outrage to manipulate voter emotions for strategic advantage as Election Day approaches. The same techniques used to convince you to root for Rocky Balboa, buy a certain type of car or perfume are used to convince you of the overwhelming necessity to vote for Jones or against Smith, depending on what the focus group data have to say.
With that in mind, it is well worth bearing a few things in mind, no matter who wins.
It is not the end of time; Armageddon is not around the corner, no matter what the guy with the sandwich sign says.
Tomorrow will look pretty much like today.
The day after tomorrow will look pretty much like tomorrow, and so on.
You should begin to carefully forget all the promises the winning candidate made, because their chance of being enacted as enunciated is slim, bordering on none.
The people on the other side are not idiots; nor are they enemies. They are people with whom you disagree.
Family members and friends are still family members and friends, even if they voted for the “wrong” candidate.
If you are really passionate about this, and truly believe what you say, then get involved. Volunteer for a campaign, join a local organization working to better the community, run for the Board of Education, go to Town Council meetings and speak up. Just shouting from the bleachers doesn’t accomplish very much.
Most important: Live long and prosper.
JFB
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Posted inCulture, Politics|Comments Off on The Koon-ut-kal-if-fee
James Comey is about to get the Ken Starr treatment. The old saw has it that when the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; when they are both against you, attack the prosecutor. That’s where we are now in the Clinton e-mail saga. The Clinton machine is gearing up for a ferocious assault on FBI Director Comey designed to change the subject from her e-mails to Justice Department protocols.
In what the New York Times describes as a coordinated attack by Hillary Clinton and her allies, Mrs. Clinton assailed Mr. Comey’s decision to notify Congress of his decision to re-open the e-mail investigation as “unprecedented” and “troubling”. If I were Mrs. Clinton and I continuously lied about my e-mail server I would be troubled too. But Comey’s action is hardly unprecedented.
In July of 2008 Alaska’s senior Senator, Ted Stevens, a Republican, was indicted by the Justice Department on corruption charges. He was subsequently convicted on October 28, 2008, just days before the election. He lost his re-election bid by a narrow margin.
The story doesn’t end there. Attorney General Eric Holder moved to have the verdict set aside in 2009 after an investigation found that the investigation and prosecution of Stevens “…were permeated by the systematic concealment of significant exculpatory evidence which would have independently corroborated Senator Stevens’s defense and his testimony, and seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness”.
And then there is the Presidential election of 1992. Larry Walsh, the Special Prosecutor in the Iran-Contra affair, abused his power when re-indicted former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger on October 30, the Friday before the Presidential election. There was no reason for Walsh to have taken such a step except to influence the Presidential election, which it almost certainly did, in favor of Bill Clinton.
Somehow or other I don’t remember the Clinton’s complaining about that one.
About Those Protocols
Note the irony. Hillary Clinton breached every protocol known to mankind, or at least the State Department, when she set up her private e-mail server and when she mixed Clinton Foundation business with State Department business. Not to mention the impropriety of Bill Clinton meeting privately with Attorney General Loretta Lynch in the back of an airplane shortly before the decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton.
And now she and her sycophants are complaining about Comey not adhering to protocol. That is rather amusing, n’est pas?
It is all part of the same old story. The Clinton’s are essentially lawless; they play by their own rules, which is to say that for them—there are no rules. Even down to securing building permits, as it turns out. Sunday’s New York Times describes how the Clinton’s just go ahead and build away without bothering to secure the necessary permits. So it is in matters big and small.
The Upshot
It is true that when James Comey wrote to Congress to inform them of the latest developments in the e-mail saga he probably violated policy and guidelines. Comey has been grandstanding like this for years. As the Clinton’s would say, nothing new to see here.
According to Justice guidelines, officials are supposed to refrain from taking actions that might influence election outcomes. But no matter what he did, either by commission or omission Comey’s actions could influence this year’s election. Even if he had chosen to stay silent, the story probably would have leaked anyway. And it is hard to take complaints about protocol violations seriously from people who had no problem with Bill Clinton meeting with Loretta Lynch privately in the back of an airplane while Hillary was the subject of an ongoing investigation. But that is all inside baseball.
What really matters is the heart of the story. Once again, the Clinton operation has been shown to be untruthful. More to the point there is the ongoing damage to fundamental institutions that seems to follow the Clinton’s everywhere they go. After staining State and Justice, Hillary Clinton is now attacking the FBI in an effort to destroy its institutional credibility and that of its Director in order to salvage her Presidential quest. That, apparently, is her idea of stewardship.
If history is any guide, we can expect more bombshells in the days ahead. Strap in.
JFB
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Posted inPolitics|Comments Off on James Comey Again…
Only eleven days before the election FBI Director James Comey has sent a letter to Congress effectively re-opening the Bureau’s probe into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server. The proximate cause was the discovery of additional Clinton e-mails “pertinent to the investigation” from an unrelated case.
It appears that the unrelated case is that of Anthony Weiner, former Congressman and estranged husband of Huma Abedin, a top aide of Hillary Clinton. The FBI found e-mails pertinent to the Clinton case on one of Weiner’s computers. According to The New York Times, a senior law enforcement official said that “tens of thousands” of e-mails belonging to Abedin were on Weiner’s laptop. Law enforcement indicated it didn’t know if any were duplicates of e-mails discovered earlier.
Not surprisingly these developments produced wall-to-wall news coverage, giving the faltering Trump campaign a shot in the arm while inflicting damage on Clinton in what was already a terrible week for her. The Comey letter comes on top of the news released by the Obama Administration that Obamacare premiums on average were slated to rise about 25% before subsidies. In addition there was a constant stream of Wikileaks revealing tension in the Clinton campaign over her email scandals.
Answering her own question about why Clinton tried to keep her e-mail arrangement secret, close advisor Neera Tanden who described the e-mails as a “Cheryl [Mills] special”, said: “I guess I know the answer. They wanted to get away with it.”
For her part Hillary Clinton reverted to form. She intimated that Comey sent his now famous letter only to Republicans. He didn’t. It was addressed to the Republican Chairs and Democratic Ranking Members of the relevant committees. Clinton also demanded that the FBI turn over the information to the public, which she knows the FBI is not going to do.
It is also worth paying attention to Secretary Clinton’s comment noting that millions of people have voted already. Which is to say that is a textbook example of why early voting schemes are a really bad idea.
Speculation is Now Over the Top
There is now rampant speculation as to why Comey decided to continue with the investigation, and to make that fact public. Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, claims there is a bombshell of a story in the newly discovered e-mails. He said
“We don’t know what this means yet except that it’s a real bombshell. And it is unthinkable that the Director of the FBI would take this action lightly, that he would put this letter forth to the Congress of the United States saying there is more information out there about classified e-mails and call it to the attention of congress unless it was something requiring serious investigation.”
Perhaps.
Then again there is also the possibility that Comey was simply getting ahead of career FBI personnel who were about to leak the story anyway.
What Was Comey Thinking?
The better possibility is that the FBI was simply trapped by it’s own incompetence and had no choice. Here we have a situation in which it is reported that there are tens of thousands of Huma Abedin’s e-mails floating around on non-government servers, including her estranged husband’s laptop. How could the FBI possibly spend over a year investigating Hillary Clinton’s e-mail set up and be oblivious to all these e-mails in the possession of her top aide and her top aide’s husband? Didn’t they question Huma Abedin as part of the investigation? If not, why not? If so, how could they not have inquired about Abedin’s e-mails? Or did Abedin have some sort of immunity deal? Let’s not forget that as part of Cheryl Mills’s immunity deal, the FBI agreed to destroy her laptop.
Let’s also remember Comey’s rationale for jumping in to violate all protocols by announcing on television that he was not going to recommend prosecuting Clinton, thereby short-circuiting the process. In July he said: “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” (emphasis added).
So Comey incorporated what lawyers refer to as “specific intent” as a requirement for prosecution even though (a) it is not part of the relevant statute and (b) it makes no sense to require intent when gross negligence is the evidentiary threshold specified in the statute, which it is in this case. You don’t intend to be negligent; you simply are negligent. Unless for some reason the FBI is investigating to see if there is evidence of specific intent in the new e-mails this is about as pointless as it gets, unless it involves some other area of malfeasance. For example, that could include evidence of a quid-pro-quo relating to the Clinton Foundation and government policy. With the Clinton’s that is always a very real possibility. Let’s face reality; it is a near certainty that a Hillary Clinton Presidency would bring with it unending scandal.
In the end, it is reasonable to assume that this whole situation stems from FBI incompetence combined with Clintonian corruption. Which is to say, same old, same old.
JFB
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Posted inPolitics|Comments Off on Comey Calls a Do-Over
Interestingly enough, the polls are starting to tighten even though Trump has had probably the worst Presidential campaign month in modern history. To some extent this is to be expected. In the waning moments of a Presidential campaign undecided but party affiliated voters start to head home. This favors Trump because has had far more problems with Republicans than Clinton has had with Democrats.
But the odds still strongly favor Clinton. Trump would have to win all the toss-up states and flip New Hampshire to win. If he did that, but lost Utah to Evan McMullin in Utah, the race would go to the House. Very unlikely, but still possible.
Chris Smith: Hardly a Profile in Courage
Chris Smith, a Republican Congressman from New Jersey’s 4th Congressional District and senior member of New Jersey’s delegation is running for re-election. He has been endorsed by the Asbury Park Press, and according to his campaign website he is “tied for second” out of all 435 current Members of the House in authoring bills that have been signed into law. There are those of us who would rather see Congress spend more time repealing laws instead of passing new ones.
According to The Auditor | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com, Smith has taken “a leadership role” in helping to elect Donald Trump President. Smith’s re-election slogan is “A Leader We Can Trust.”
Trust to do what, exactly?
Smith has a reasonably safe seat that he is intent on keeping. Even if it means actively supporting Donald J Trump. That just might be a bridge too far.
Bill Clinton Inc.
The Washington Post has today published a front-page story based on the latest Wikileaks dump of John Podesta e-mails. It details how the Clinton’s used their foundation as a conduit for enriching themselves. In a classic shakedown operation the Foundation’s fundraisers not only raised lots of money from large multi-national corporations while Hillary Clinton served as Secretary of State, they also solicited money for Bill Clinton personally. The Washington Post delicately refers to the arrangement as the “intersection of charity and personal income.”
Details of the arrangement are outlined in a memo written by former Clinton aide and confidante Doug Band, who later referred to the operation as “Bill Clinton Inc.” Essentially what it boils down to is this. Large potential contributors were invited to buy their way into some elbow rubbing by making contributions to the Clinton Global Initiative and to Bill Clinton personally. The Clinton’s managed to amass well over $100 million this way.
Democrats who continue to (justifiably) link Republican candidates to Donald Trump’s outlandish behavior tend to be reticent about all this, except to try to change the subject.
And while we are still on the subject, is there anybody left in the world who actually believes that Hillary Clinton’s destroyed e-mails contained nothing more than wedding plans and Yoga routines? Is there anybody who actually believes the hacked e-mails are not authentic? Is there anybody who doesn’t believe that Hillary and Bill Clinton are corrupt on a heretofore unimaginable scale?
Just checking.
Be prepared for four more years of never-ending Clinton sleaze.
JFB
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Posted inPolitics|Comments Off on The Circus is Still in Town
One of the most passionate and thoughtless (the two fit together naturally) of Presidential campaigns is coming to a close, and not a moment too soon. It is by now abundantly clear that there are deep fissures in the body politic whose creation has been years in the making. In the years ahead, leaders will need to address some significant problems that were exposed, but not caused, by a campaign long on vitriol and short on insight.
Unfortunately, after the post-election dust settles, a decreasingly likely event, neither of the major party candidates is even remotely up to the task of asking the right questions, much less capable of leading the way back from the abyss. That is because they are each determined to expand the nanny state and its centripetal urge toward the bureaucratization of American life.
That leaves a choice: sit this one out, or write in somebody sensible, either of which is a perfectly sensible and honorable choice.
Several people currently in public life have the experience, judgment and temperament to assume the responsibilities of the Presidency. Each is certainly worth considering for a write-in vote. They include former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to name just a few.
This writer intends to write-in the name of Ben Sasse, a Republican, and junior Senator from Nebraska. Before his election to the Senate in 2014, Sasse was President of Fremont University in Nebraska. Sasse, who graduated from Harvard in 1994 with a BA in government, earned his PhD from Yale (in History) in 2004. He joined the faculty of the University of Texas LBJ School of Public Affairs before going on to become Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS in 2007 until the end of the second Bush Administration. In 2009, at age 37, he became 15th President of Midland University where he stayed until his election to the Senate.
Early on Senator Sasse announced he could never support Donald Trump’s quest for the presidency, a position he still holds. More than anything, Sasse can be described as a strict Constitutionalist who thinks that government should do fewer things, but do them better.
The best way to understand where Senator Sasse stands is to listen to him. The video below that contains clips from his maiden speech in the Senate is a good place to start.
With the election a little over 2 weeks away, the question of what to do presents itself with some urgency.
Donald Trump for the Republicans
The candidacy of Republican Donald J. Trump does not need a lot of discussion. He has spent the last year or so demonstrating that he is a simpleton who is spectacularly unqualified for any political office, let alone the Presidency. He has displayed an astonishing ignorance of even the most basic features of the government he proposes to lead. His policy knowledge concerning the important questions of the day is largely non-existent. His entire thought process, to the extent he thinks at all, is driven by narcissism. Unable to speak in complete sentences, he has the temperament of a psychologically disturbed adolescent, with all due apologies to psychologically disturbed adolescents.
He should be dismissed out of hand.
Hillary Clinton for the Democrats
Truth be told, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic nominee, has not spent the last year or so demonstrating her unsuitability. It has been more like a 30-year project.
The public has had a chance to observe Mrs. Clinton as First Lady, Senator from New York and as Secretary of State. And if the polls are to be believed, the public views her as Lady Macbeth: scheming, unscrupulous, ruthless and dishonest, with a driving ambition that knows no bounds. The public’s estimation is essentially correct.
Mrs. Clinton invariably describes her own experience in terms of process, not measureable results. That is because once we go beyond the bumper sticker slogans that represent the bulk of Mrs. Clinton’s public utterances, we are left with a record of unremitting policy failure. It was Mrs. Clinton who got us into a war in Libya for no good reason. It is Mrs. Clinton who has supported piling on the regulations that have slowed GDP growth to a trickle. It is Mrs. Clinton who led the Russian reset. And it is even now that Mrs. Clinton wants to set up a no-fly zone over Syria, the enforcement of which would require us to shoot down Russian war planes and risk a war with Russia—and for what reason, exactly?
But while Mrs. Clinton’s record of policy failure is unsettling, it alone does not disqualify her from occupying the Oval Office. It is her lawlessness that does so.
The incoming President of the United States swears an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of United States” which includes the duty to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed. Mrs. Clinton’s suitability for this is on the order of hiring John Dillinger as a bank guard. Time and time again she has shown her disdain for the rule of law both as it pertains to limits on government power and with respect to her personal behavior.
Mrs. Clinton does not stand on the shoulders of giants. She stands on a mountain of sleaze. From the early days in 1978 when she managed to “earn” $100,000 trading cattle futures, to the mixing of the business of the State Department with the family slush fund otherwise known as the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton and her husband have mastered the art of selling policy and access to the highest bidder. The entire Clinton operation is corruption on an industrial scale.
Still it is not Clinton’s personal and petty corruption that is so problematic. It is the transformative nature of her corruption of fundamental institutions of government and civil society that she and her husband leave in their wake wherever they go. This corruption, the cynicism it breeds, and its continual redefinition of deviancy down represents an existential threat to the cultural conditions necessary for the maintenance of ordered liberty.
Consider for instance, the now infamous “homebrew” server Clinton used for her State Department e-mails.
She has consistently (sometimes under oath) lied about why she had it set up and what was on it. She lied about the system’s security. Again and again, she lied about receipt and delivery of classified messages on the system. She lied about turning over all work related e-mails to the FBI. And she illegally destroyed something in the vicinity of 30,000 e-mails that were already under subpoena that she was legally obligated to protect.
And then FBI Director James Comey declined to prosecute what should have been an easy case. But only after he lied when he insisted that the senior staff of the FBI backed him. He gave himself cover by giving Clinton a public tongue lashing, while publicly (and incorrectly) asserting that no reasonable prosecutor would make the case. In so doing he took Attorney General Loretta Young off the hook, shortly after she met privately with Bill Clinton in the back of an airplane parked on a tarmac in Arizona.
And so with this sordid affair, she damaged the institutional integrity of the FBI, the Department of Justice and the State Department, all to achieve her political ambitions. And even that is not the worst of it.
Hillary Clinton has repeatedly shown her contempt for Constitutional norms, the Bill of Rights, the separation of powers, and constraints on executive power generally. As recently as the third Presidential debate, Mrs. Clinton, graduate of Yale Law School, demonstrated that she still seems to have trouble differentiating between the legislative and judicial branches. In response to a question about the Supreme Court Mrs. Clinton replied:
“The Supreme Court should represent all of us. That’s how I see the Court… And the kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on our behalf of our rights as Americans.”
But Mrs. Clinton’s defense of rights rings a little hollow when you realize that she excludes individual rights explicitly specified in the Constitution meant to restrain government power. She continues to attack the the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech by promising to overturn Citizen’s United. She made it demonstrably clear that she means to break religion to the saddle of the state so religious organizations might serve as instruments of state power. That is what explains her opposition to the Court’s Hobby Lobby decision. The same goes for the hacked Podesta e-mails describing efforts to foment a “Catholic Spring”.
Nor is Hillary Clinton a fan of the Second Amendment that protects a citizen’s right of self-defense. It is pretty hard to square the vast snooping apparatus of the NSA (supported by Hillary Clinton) with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, and a requirement for a specific search warrant.
And then there is the Fifth Amendment that prohibits the taking of life, liberty or property without due process of law, which would seem to rule out the summary execution of American citizens who find their way onto a Presidential “kill list.” Not only does Hillary Clinton support such a disgrace; she actually suggested “droning” Julian Assange, a political nemesis of hers. Finally, it is or ought to be, clear that Clinton has no use for the idea embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments that the legal use of federal power is limited to those activities enumerated in the Constitution, and that all other powers are reserved to the States and the people.
In the end it ought to be clear to all who are not willfully blind that Hillary Clinton is lawless and corrupt; that her corruption is endemic and infects everyone and everything in her orbit. Driven by blind ambition she will continue to subvert the institutions and norms that protect liberty and decency. She, no less than Donald Trump, represents an existential threat to freedom and decency in America.
For the Libertarians: Gary Johnson
The candidacy of Gary Johnson is a profound disappointment. At a time when so many citizens have expressed regret at the choices offered by the two major political parties, the time should have been ripe for a libertarian alternative. But it has not turned out that way.
Gary Johnson has shown himself to be unprepared for the job. He has displayed an appalling lack of understanding of U.S. foreign policy. Moreover, his view of world politics seems bereft of an analytic framework that extends beyond saying that we will respond if attacked.
On the domestic front his enthusiasm for unfettered free markets in refreshing. But it is troubling when a libertarian seems so eager to use state power to enforce emerging social norms, as Johnson seems to be willing to do. All citizens are entitled to the protection of the law, and so discrimination in public accommodations or the provision of public goods, should be prohibited. But Johnson does not seem to recognize that government policies that seek to force some religious organizations and owners of small businesses to provide goods and services that are antithetical to their religious beliefs are in collision with the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech, religion and association.
In fact, Johnson seems only barely familiar with the arguments; has repeatedly adjusted his positions, and in the end decided that the Hobby Lobby case was wrongly decided. He has voiced agreement with the Obamacare mandate that required religious organizations (and certain business owners) to provide certain contraceptive services and abortifacients over religious objections. In Johnson’s view, the mandate trumps the First Amendment. That is deeply troubling.
Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld are pro-abortion extremists, though not quite as extreme as Hillary Clinton. (Or for that matter Donald Trump before his conveniently timed change of heart.) Hillary Clinton makes clear her desire to get rid of the Hyde amendment to pave the way for government-financed abortions. Johnson still supports the Hyde Amendment, but that’s about the only difference.
The “prime directive” so to speak of libertarians is the non-aggression principle (NAP). It prohibits the initiation of the use of force or coercion; the use of force is only permissible in self-defense. While abortion is a fiercely debated topic in libertarian circles, this libertarian leaning writer finds it difficult to square abortion rights with the non-aggression principle.
Unfortunately, after toting up the pros and cons, the Libertarian ticket has not shown itself to be up to the task.
So What’s a Libertarian to Do?
Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have shown themselves to be fundamental threats to liberty. Gary Johnson has not shown himself to be up to the task. The remaining options are (1) to sit it out or (2) write in a name. Possible write-in candidates will be addressed in the near future.
JFB
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Jonathan Kay speaks with New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who encourages Jews to focus on bolstering their community instead of lecturing bigots who can’t be reasoned with.
