Joe Biden – On Liberty Watch

The Voting Rights Scam

Where to begin? Let’s start with President Joe Biden’s over-the-top rhetoric about Republican resistance to H.R.1, the constitutionally dubious “For the People” Act the House passed that among other things nationalizes elections. Its dubious constitutionality partly owes to Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution which reads:

“The Times, Places and Manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”

The Bill is such a constitutional nightmare—and an assault on free speech and federalism—that both the ACLU and the Institute for Free Speech have objected to it. Their respective briefs can be found here and here.

Let’s move beyond the constitutional objections and think about what the allegedly moderate Joe Biden actually said in his quest to get H.R.1. enacted into law. Among other things, he said that recent laws either passed or being considered in state legislatures (e.g., Georgia, Florida and Texas being prime examples) are the most “significant threat to our Democracy since the Civil War”.

That would make it a greater threat than Woodrow Wilson’s habit of tossing political opponents in jail. Or Watergate. Or World War II. Or the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII. Or the Kill List that shows up on the President’s desk every day. Or the NSA’s domestic spying habits. Or the use of the IRS as political enforcer. Or the phony FISA warrants proffered by the FBI during the various investigations of Donald Trump. Or FDR’s Court Packing scheme.

To continue, Biden went on to say that the bills that H.R.1. is meant to counteract represents 21^st century Jim Crow; are “subversion and suppression” and a sure sign of of an emerging autocracy.

So let’s step back for a minute and consider what the misnamed “For the People Act” actually proposes to do to “protect our democracy”. David Harsani of National Review points out: “the For the People Act would force states to count mail-in votes that arrive up to ten days after Election Day; compel them to legalize ballot harvesting; ban them from having voter-ID laws; empower bureaucrats to redraw congressional districts; require states to allow felons to vote; undermine free-speech rights by imposing a new array of burdens on civic groups, unions, and nonprofit organizations; force states to count ballots cast by voters who are in the wrong precincts; prohibit election officials from reviewing eligibility of voters; and bar officials from removing ineligible voters from the rolls. See article here.

Since most of the requirements specified in the 800 page H.R.1. are new, it’s hard to understand why Democrats who got elected without the new requirements are all of a sudden decrying those very same election laws. And not to out too fine a point on it, even after the supposedly authoritarian Republican laws got enacted, the voting systems of Florida and Texas have far more liberal rules for voting than does, for instance, Delaware—the state that spent 50 years or so electing Joe Biden to he Senate. That’s where he made friends with such notable defenders of minority rights as Herman Talmadge and Strom Thurmond among others. So it’s hard to see where Mr. Biden’s principled objection lies.

It should be pretty obvious where the Democrats are headed here. They are setting the stage to challenge the legitimacy of the 2022 and 2024 elections—if they lose. It is a cardinal rule, held dear by by the Democratic Party leadership, that the definition of a legitimate election is one in which they win. After all, they challenged the legitimacy of the Presidential elections of 2000, 2004 and 2016. Not to mention that Stacey Abrams has yet to concede the Georgia gubernatorial race of 2018.

The assault on the constitutional order being orchestrated by the Democratic Party leadership is pernicious. In its stealth the Act stands in contrast to Donald J Trump’s final frontal assault on the rule of law, culminating on January 6, 2021. And it is a disgrace that only a tiny segment of elected Republicans are willing to acknowledge the blindingly obvious fact that Donald Trump tried to overturn an election by the use of force.

On the other hand, the progressive assault, in which the whole of the Democratic Party leadership is complicit, is but a piece of a longer term project targeted at the institutions of a free society, most particularly the first amendment. At root that makes the political question rather stark. Do you wish to vote for a bunch of cowards who are terrified of their base? Or do you wish to goose-step your way into a future run by the latest bunch of predictably certain-to-fail utopian saviors whose authoritarian tendencies reveal themselves daily?

Or you can adopt a sensible approach and support classical liberals independent of their of party status.

JFB

The Liz Cheney Affair

In 1860, on reading Darwin’s Origin of the Species, it was reported that the wife of the Bishop of Worcester said “Let is hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known”. If, as seems likely, Liz Cheney (WY -R) is summarily tossed out of the Republican Party leadership, the Bishop’s wife would make a fitting replacement.

After all, Liz Cheney is about to be sacrificed because she is telling the truth about the 2020 election. And a solid majority of House Republicans know it; they just don’t want it to be widely known—even though it already is among the community of the sane.

The reason why Liz Cheney is a problem for the fanatics in the Republican Party is that she insists on telling the truth, and telling it out loud. Donald J Trump, she says, lost the election of 2020. Well, that should be as controversial as asserting that gravity exists. Cheney also famously voted to impeach Mr. Trump for his use of violence and intimidation when he stoked up a mob on January 6, 2021 to prevent Congress from performing its Constitutional duty to count the votes in the electoral college so that Vice President Pence could declare Joe Biden the winner.

Of course Liz Cheney was right on both counts. Mr Trump, like all schoolyard bullies, is just a sore loser. And loser is the operative word here. He lost the popular vote by 7 million votes, and he lost the electoral college by getting only 232 votes to Joe Biden’s 306. Not that mere facts matter very much to the luminaries leading the fight to overthrow Cheney.

The leaders in the fight to overthrow her include such notables as Rep. Matt Gaetz (FL-R) who, among other things, is (allegedly) the subject of a sex trafficking probe by the Department of Justice. Then there is the delusional Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA – R), a QAnon conspiracy theorist who continues to insist that Trump won the 2020 election.

Here is where we come to a critical difference between House Democrats and House Republicans. House Democrats actually believe the nonsense that they routinely assert, about…roughly everything. Which is not to deny that as Democrats move forward with their legislative agenda they are capable of inflicting massive damage on the body politic, precisely because they believe in what they are doing. Ignorance and enthusiasm always make a bad combination.

The vast majority of Republicans on the other hand do not actually believe the baloney about Trump “really” winning the 2020 election that was stolen from them. They are simply cowards. They are quaking in their boots, fearful of being politically injured by a school yard insult hurled at them by the World’s Biggest Loser. Their claim to leadership is that they don’t actually believe a word they are saying.

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when Republicans could do simple arithmetic. That time has past. They are apparently clamoring to get on board a train driven by a man who lost what should have been an easily winnable Presidential election. And he did lose—to a 78 year old political hack whose campaign consisted of reading banalities to a teleprompter set up in his basement.

Meanwhile the Republican Party as a whole ran considerably better than Trump did. They picked up House seats whittling down the Democratic majority to one of the smallest on record. They only lost control of the Senate because The World’s Biggest Loser made sure of it in Georgia by discouraging Republican voters in the suburbs in the January run-off. The Republicans also picked up the Governor’s office in Montana; and they won new majorities in the New Hampshire Assembly and Senate. Democrats won no new majorities in State legislatures. None.

Republicans are about to commit political vandalism on a grand scale. Not only are the Republicans on the cusp of voting to institutionalize the big lie; they are doing it to curry favor with a loser. A big loser, who wallows in grievance; a loser who has displayed stunning incompetence; an ignoramus who has demonstrated he is incapable of comprehending truth, much less telling it.

It is beyond comprehension why Republicans would expect that they will earn the confidence of the voting public by signaling support for Trump and Co. It is clear from the election returns of 2020 that the Republican Party didn’t lose; Trump did. He lost by alienating highly educated suburban Republicans. By supporting the ouster of Liz Cheney for the sin of telling the truth, the Republican Party is turning itself into a smoking ruin led by…losers.

JFB

The $6 Trillion Dollar Man

It has always been obvious to the more astute observers of the political scene that Joe Biden is a party man, a partisan hack, and not a very bright one at that. Regrettably, some people actually fell for the line that on the contrary, Mr Biden is a moderate who would “reach across the aisle” to find “common ground” etc. etc. By now, they should have been disabused of that notion.

In his first 100 days in office Biden the moderate has proposed $6 trillion in new spending, much of which is for middle class welfare programs. We are for instance, going to have “free” community college, paid leave, new spending on child care and on and on. The list is endless.

All this is supposedly going to be “paid for” by taxing “the rich”. Except of course that it won’t be. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay for Mr. Biden’s fantasies. Regardless, the idea of taxing the rich to pay for a whole new menu of middle class freebies simply completes the progressive journey from feigning self-sufficiency to promoting welfare dependency. That has been the agenda all along. After all, it has such an impressive track record, as in Venezuela.

Among the more fascinating proposals Mr Biden is flogging are the ones for education and police reform. They are the purview of state and local governments. Both the management of police and public education in America’s cities have been fiefdoms of the Democratic Party for at least 50 years. The management of these institutions has been a gargantuan failure, particularly for minorities. Mr. Biden proposes to give us more of the same.

In the meantime Mr Biden’s cheerleaders in the press are ecstatic about his poll numbers. The latest has his support around 52%. As the Washington Post helpfully points out, 52% is a majority. What the Post didn’t mention was that, with the exception of Donald Trump, Biden’s poll numbers at this point in his presidency are lowest of any president’s since 1945.

JFB

Same Circus, Different Clowns

As roughly everybody knows, on January 6, 2021, then-President Donald J Trump stirred up a crowd by claiming that the most recent presidential election was stolen from him, implying that Joe Biden’s ascension to the office was illegitimate. Immediately thereafter a crowd of Trump supporters, some of whom were armed, attacked the Capitol and attempted to stop Congress from carrying out its lawful duty in counting the electoral votes of the several states. Counting those electoral votes was the last formal step in certifying the election, paving the way for Mr. Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.

In the aftermath, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell pinned responsibility for the attack on Trump. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and the Senate minority leader Charles Schumer demanded that Trump ether step down or be forced from office immediately. As in right away, without delay. (See the You Tube video below dated January 12, 2021.)

In the event, Pelosi and Schumer demanded, naturally enough, that someone else take action. When that didn’t work, the House impeached Trump for the second time. The vote came on January 13, 2021, a day after Schumer’s speech. But then a funny thing happened. Speaker Pelosi didn’t get around to sending the article of impeachment to the Senate for 12 days, by which time Biden had been sworn in and Trump had become a private citizen.

Not only that, the article of impeachment was for incitement. Trump could easily have been impeached for dereliction. He, as Commander-in-Chief, refused to respond to an attack on the seat of government. Moreover he rebuked his own Vice President for refusing to tamper with the states’ electoral votes. Not only are those surely impeachable offenses; the evidence is unassailable.

As it now stands, after insisting on the immediacy of the situation, Speaker Pelosi took her time sending over a deeply flawed article of impeachment. The trial is not scheduled to begin until February 8, 2021. Moreover, the article she sent over contains two important constitutional issues. The first has to do with the definition of incitement—at what point does a political speech become incitement to violence? The second has to do with impeaching a former president.

The balance of the evidence suggests that a former president may be impeached, paving the way for a majority vote that would prohibit him from holding office again. But there is sufficient ambiguity to make the case less than clear cut.

The issue of incitement is more problematic. Did Trump incite his followers to violence? It is my opinion that he did. But having said that, we need to acknowledge several factors. First, restricting the political speech of a sitting politician sets a dangerous precedent when free speech is already under attack. Second, the incitement charge was totally unnecessary to achieve the desired goal, namely securing a conviction in the Senate. Third, because of (presumably) sloppy drafting and the constitutional issues involved, Republicans can dodge the underlying issue. In effect they are being given a low cost opportunity to vote for acquittal.

An acquittal would allow Trump to argue that once again, he has been exonerated. That is surely not an outcome to be welcomed. But it sure looks like the path of least resistance, due in part to the handiwork of Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer. As always they have quashed the national interest in favor of their own narrow political interests.

JFB

Malarkey Man

It is a mere 3 days since President Joe Biden took the oath of office and he is already furiously backtracking on his Covid campaign promises. Back on October 29, 2020 at a campaign rally in Coconut Creek FL, Biden tore into President Trump’s handling of the virus—a task that didn’t really require much effort. Anyway, candidate Biden pledged “I’m not going to shut down the economy, I’m not going to shut down the country, but I am going to shut down the virus.”

Sometime after January 20, Biden discovered that his desk in the Oval Office did not have a red button labeled “Virus Killer”. And so the reset began. At his Friday press conference Biden proceeded to announce “there’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” He went on to project that Coronavirus deaths would rise by another 50% to reach “well over 600,000.”

In the meantime he did say that he is sticking to his target of 100 million vaccinations delivered in his first hundred days in office. Left unmentioned is that we are already vaccinating about 960,000 people daily. Which means that Biden means to raise the vaccination rate all of 4% over the next several months. Pretty impressive for a guy who promised to make the coronavirus his #1 priority.

But he has been busy on other fronts. Like gender identity. The executive order he just signed reads as follows: “Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the rest room, the locker room, or school sports. . . . All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.”

Note that the executive order references gender identity, not sex. Meaning that you don’t have to be a girl to play on a girl’s sports team; you merely have to self-identify as female. Which, among other things, means that girl’s sports are essentially over. They will be dominated by boys claiming to be girls.

The Biden team is busy pretending that the President is merely enforcing the Supreme Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision handed down in 2020. But in that 6-3 decision, the majority opinion for which was authored by Justice Gorsuch, the Justices took pains to say that it was limited to employment status and had no bearing on “sex-segregated bathrooms, locker rooms, and dress codes”.

The Court went further to note that their decision was limited to the language of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The majority specifically noted that under Title IX of the 1972 amendments “we do not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.” (See Abigail Shrier in the Wall Street Journal here.)

As bad as this is, it’s actually even worse than it appears at first glance. On the matter of gender identity Mr Biden has gone so far as to say that “in prison, your sexual identity is defined by what you say, not what the prison says.” Which effectively means that sex (or gender) is simply a social construct; biology is not determinative.

This conceit denies the profound difference between men and women. Not only that, it is part of a much grander project; namely the utopian transformation of society into one without differences, and therefore without hierarchies.

It is a vision of human beings as undifferentiated cogs in a machine, the equivalent of ants living in an ant colony. There is no room for individualism, for decency, for joy, for love; only for the dream which inevitably leads to marching orders. It is a vision as old as the hills and has always and everywhere led to authoritarianism and human misery.

But of course there will always be hierarchies. There can be hierarchies of competence that are freely chosen and held to account. Or there can be unaccountable hierarchies that are aristocracies of power not subject to the rules designed for mere mortals. The difference is that one is beholden to the idea of truth; the other denies there is any such thing. For them all that matters is power.

Around 490 BC, it was Protagarus, who laid the foundation for today’s postmodernism by arguing that “Man is the measure of all things”. Plato understood Protagurus to mean that there was no objective truth. Things are either true or not true based on how an individual perceives them.

There is a great irony here. Joe Biden, who endlessly goes on about “following the science” apparently doesn’t realize that if there is no truth there is no science. And all his talk is nothing more than what he likes to call “Malarkey”.

JFB

Joe Biden’s Choice

Within hours of President Biden’s call for civility, protesters went on a violent rampage in the Pacific Northwest, mostly in Portland Oregon. The protesters, according to the New York Times, marched through the streets, burned an American flag and smashed windows at Democratic Party Headquarters.

Violence in Portland, The New York Times

The protesters were not supporters of the now departed Donald J Trump. Nor were they from QAnon, the Proud Boys or other white supremacist groups. They were self-identified antifascist and racial-justice warriors, which is to say, fascists who like to call themselves antifascists. Their complaint was that Joe Biden’s promised reforms “won’t save us”.

Of course they won’t, primarily because they are not interested in being “saved”. They are simply nihilists who seek to smash and destroy. They could care less about the back and forth of democratic politics and the making of public policy. They seek to engender distrust and destroy democratic institutions, not to build on them.

If he means what he says, Joe Biden has a golden opportunity to take a large step toward restoring civility to the Republic and strengthening our democratic institutions. He can condemn the violence in Oregon without reservation just as strongly as he rightly condemned the violence fomented by Donald Trump at the Capitol on January 6. And he can seek to have the perpetrators brought to justice for their crimes, just as the perpetrators of the January 6 riots should be prosecuted for their crimes to the full extent of the law.

The choice is clear. It is a choice between violence and liberal government. Tolerating violence based on what “side” it favors is no justice at all. It is a fundamental attack on equality before the law and our democratic institutions. Vigorous prosecution of those who use violence to achieve political ends is a defense of the rule of law and democratic institutions.

President Joe Biden has a choice to make. He can defend the rule of law and democratic institutions. Or he can be just like Donald J. Trump and be politically selective about how the law is enforced.

That choice will tell us a lot about what Joe Biden is really made of.

JFB

Joe Biden’s “American Recovery Plan”

“Drink coffee and do stupid things even faster” — Sign in a coffee shop.

Apropos the sign, an avalanche of stupidity is coming our way. Just 5 days away from his inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden has outlined the first part of his “American Recovery Plan”. It is virtually indistinguishable from the progressive wish list Nancy Pelosi has been going on about for the last 20 years or so. The only difference is that now progressives actually have a shot of getting what they have always wished for.

Consider just some of the proposals being put forward in the spectacularly misnamed American Recovery plan. To begin with, the price tag for this monstrosity is $1.9 trillion. That comes right after the $900 billion relief package Congress passed just last month. Not to mention the $2.2 trillion CARES act Congress passed in March of 2020. And this is only phase 1 of the Biden proposal. He promises more, fully backed by Bernie Sanders as the upcoming chair of the Senate Budget Committee.

If Congress approves the Biden phase 1 package it would amount to $5 trillion in additional spending thus far for Covid and Covid marketed relief efforts. That spending is over and above the normal appropriations for running the government, all passed in a 10 month period. And it’s all done with borrowed money.

So let’s look at some specific proposals. Among other things that have absolutely nothing to do with Covid, Biden plans to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour. If enacted, this is guaranteed to make things worse for the people who are the supposed beneficiaries.

The unemployment rate is highest for people with low incomes and relatively little formal training. Plenty of these people work in the hospitality industry, specifically restaurants, which are among the hardest hit by the pandemic. Recent survey data suggest that about 110,000 restaurants, about 17% of the total, have closed their doors permanently because of Covid.

The Biden solution is to raise the cost of labor for an industry in free fall. Very clever. Not only that, the restaurants that survive will simply switch their compensation systems to a European style one in which customer costs associated with tipping are built into menu prices (service compris) and tips are eliminated. The effect will be lost jobs and reduced employee compensation for those who keep their jobs. Oh, and the survivors’ tax bills will rise because, let’s face it, virtually nobody reports all their tips to the IRS.

Other goodies in the package include checks for $1,400 to round it up to $2,000. Schumer and Pelosi have indicated that they are enthusiastically on board. What this is supposed to accomplish beyond the buying of votes is left unspecified. And of course, this is to be financed, by more borrowing, because we are assured “there is plenty of money available”.

Another $350 billion or so is slated for “emergency” relief for state and local government finances. Translated into English, this means that the states that manage their finances well will be required to bail out predominantly blue state public pension plans that are underfunded to the point where in some cases, like Illinois, they are approaching insolvency. And not to put too fine a point on it, the sorry state of pension finance has nothing whatsoever to do with Covid. Bailing them out will just put off the day of reckoning until it gets worse.

Another $170 billion will be forked out “so that schools can re-open”. But of course, the schools didn’t need to close and stay closed in the first place. This is just a gift to the politically powerful teachers unions who have argued for closing the schools and keeping them closed.

Private schools have opened independent of the state. And not just the elite ones. The K- 12 Catholic schools in Massachusetts opened successfully and have had almost no Covid infections. In other places, relatively affluent parents (like here in Fairfax County) have hired private tutors to run learning pods for groups of children.

Needless to say, the teachers unions have opposed these efforts while fighting to keep the schools shut down for in-person learning. This is in spite of the fact that already the data clearly show a catastrophic fall-off in the academic performance of disadvantaged children. Let’s face it, the public schools are run for the benefit of the staff, not the kids. That’s why the kids are being sacrificed.

As more details of the Biden plan seep out, it will become clear to all with eyes to see that the Biden trajectory is simply Obama redux on steroids (or perhaps coffee). It will be all about centralization, command and control. The crushing hand of the state will weigh in on every decision. Fantasies aside; there is nothing moderate about it.

JFB

The Moderate Mr. Biden and Other Fantasies

During the recent presidential primary and election campaigns the underlying question concerning Joe Biden was, given his druthers, how would a President Biden govern? One of the more interesting fantasies marketed by the Biden campaign was (and remains) that President-elect Joe Biden is a moderate whose election presages a return to normalcy.

While it is true that Biden may be less radical than members of “The Squad”, that’s really not saying very much.

The key to the Biden candidacy and likely governance strategy lies in the profound but under appreciated truth that politics lies downstream from culture. Today it is culture that dominates elective politics and in ways that are not obvious to most. That is not an accident. In campaigns, politicians speak in gauzy generalities and use cultural symbols to deliver emotionally satisfying messages designed to bring voters to the polls. But those symbols are typically anodyne and don’t really say much about how, if elected, a politician would govern.

There is a big difference between what politicians say and what they do. Former Governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, used to say that “… you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose”. Which is where interest groups and party organization come into play.

On the stump politicians routinely make utterly implausible promises that they inevitably fail to accomplish. But in the process the successful ones do manage to hold on to their base of support. They do this by taking care of the interest groups that provided them with organizational and financial support.

These politicians go by the old adage “Don’t forget to dance with the girl who brung ya.” They take care of their interest groups–the girl who brung them. Those groups have specific policy goals that they would like to see accomplished, and they are not about to be satisfied with pie-in-the-sky rhetoric. They want results.

In part, this is what accounts for the wide chasm between what politicians campaign on and how they actually govern. The masses get the rhetoric; the interest groups get the policy. The mechanism that facilitates the process–the difference between campaigning and governance is the bureaucratic apparatus of the Administrative State. It is through Agency rule-making that interest groups can maximize their leverage and achieve their goals without necessarily having to petition Congress.

The emasculation of Congress and neutering of democratic choice is the direct result of the progressive faith in rule by disinterested experts perched on bureaucratic rungs of power. The rising power of the bureaucracy over American life crucially depends on several factors. First, in its desire to escape accountability career politicians have continued to delegate massive amounts of decision making authority to Agency bureaucrats. Probably well above and beyond what is constitutionally permissible under the non-delegation doctrine.

Second, generally under Chevron deference (1984), the courts are bound to accept an Agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute within its jurisdiction as long as the interpretation is not unreasonable.

Third, the continuing politicization of language combined with deliberate use of ambiguity and the denial of the idea of fixed meaning effectively gives Agencies carte blanche to rewrite entire laws well outside their original intent.

These developments have placed enormous and increasing power in the hands of the Executive Branch. Which brings us to the question of President-elect Biden’s allegedly moderate instincts.

Let’s take a case in point. In the matter of transgender rights Biden has promised to use Executive power to “…restore transgender students’ access to sports, bathrooms, and locker rooms in accordance with their gender identity.” He further promises to commit to passing the Equality Act which according to CNN “…would protect against anti-LGBTQ discrimination in commercial and public life, with no religious exemptions.”

Let’s take a look at the implications of this. The moderate Mr. Biden has clearly said that he believes that sex differentiation is simply a cultural construct; that your sex is not an objective reality, and that your sexual identity is simply what you declare it to be.

Here Biden has clearly hitched his wagon to the trans activist train. Rather than call gender dysphoria what it is, he has chosen to use the coercive power of government to re-shape society according to the world view of post-modern cultural de-constructionists. This, even though real world evidence shows that sex differences are embedded in our DNA. For instance, all else equal men have greater bone density and lung capacity. These differences matter, especially in sports. And women’s sports are being devastated by men competing as self-identified women, including those who have transitioned.

For example, the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that trans women had a 12% advantage across various exercise metrics a full two years after hormone treatments to suppress testosterone. (Before treatment they had a 31% advantage). The academic journal Emerging Topics in Life Sciences says that “Accepted science regarding male and female physiology suggests that trans women have an advantage over their cisgendered counterparts.”

Most important is that this debate is not about women’s sports at all. It is really about the re-ordering of society based on the idea that biological sex is unimportant. And that re-ordering would come from bureaucratic rule-making designed to alter the culture and the language we use to frame issues.

Anyone who doubts this should consider the implications of the H.R.5 —the Equality Act, enthusiastically supported by Joe Biden. Basically the proposed Act amends the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or a sex stereotype. Further, “SEC.1107.CLAIMS” goes on to say “The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq.) shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under, a covered title, or provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement of a covered title.”.

Which is to say that in direct defiance of the First amendment, religious organizations would be have to change the practice of their religious beliefs in order to conform to the requirements of federal anti-discrimination law. Which law will be interpreted by the bureaucracy in the rule making process. And if there is any doubt as to the upcoming Biden Administration’s intentions here, keep this in mind. Biden has already nominated Xavier Becerra to be HHS Secretary. Becerra is an abortion rights fanatic who is currently suing the Little Sisters of the Poor over their continued refusal to finance employee purchases of contraception and abortafacients.

It actually gets worse. Biden believes that your rights are the ones that are given to you by government. In his recent criticism of Judge Amy Coney Barrett he said, according to NBC News, “she didn’t lay out “much of a judicial philosophy, in terms of the basis upon which she thinks, (sic) are there unenumerated rights in the constitution.”

Not surprisingly, Biden, whom no one has accused of being exceptionally bright, has it exactly backwards. The ninth amendment, which is the one in the Constitution that discusses enumerated rights, reads as follows. “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people” (emphasis added). That of course means that the enumerated rights doctrine is meant to restrict the power of Government, not people, who retain all their inherent rights.

So when you put it all together, the supposedly moderate Mr. Biden has promised a cultural revolution to upend civil society by using the power of government to impose a wholly artificial definition of sex on it. He promises to attack the First amendment guarantee of freedom of religious practice. And he is of the belief (to the extent he has any) that our rights are not inherent; they are the ones government deigns to bless us with.

Quite the moderate.

JFB

A Supposed Return to “Normalcy”

President-elect Joe Biden won the race by running a determined campaign that focused exclusively on an indisputable fact. Joe Biden is not Donald Trump. To which the voters responded by giving Trump the heave-ho while cutting into the Democratic majority in the House and (probably) leaving the Senate in Republican hands.

The institutional Democratic response to all this thus far has been to continue to push their leftist agenda that was fairly decisively rejected at the polls. In return they ask for a return bipartisanship and comity.

The plea for comity is coming from people who spent the last 4 years or so calling the Republicans racists, white supremacists, misogynists and Nazi sympathizers. It comes from people who routinely voted as a bloc against Trump’s judicial nominees and legislative initiatives. It comes from people who argued that the entire Trump presidency was illegitimate; that but for collusion with Russia, Trump would not have been elected and that Trump was a Russian “asset”.

Democrats and their friends in the media ludicrously argued that Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanaugh was the leader of a high school gang-rape team; that in high school he unsuccessfully tried to assault Christine Blasey Ford. Mind you Blasey Ford never produced a shred of evidence supporting her claim; the witnesses she cited either refused to testify or flat out contradicted her, including her friend Leyland Keyser. And speaking of media friends, none of this prevented the Washington Post from describing Blasey Ford as a “prosecutor’s dream witness”.

Beyond the direct testimony of Blasey Ford, the party promoted wild and unsubstantiated claims of sexual assault brought forward by attorney Michael Avenatti. The legal career of Mr Avenatti has by now taken a turn for the worse. He is now a convicted felon, having been found guilty of committing fraud and extortion against Nike.

And then there were the physical attacks on officials of the Trump Administration, encouraged by Maxine Waters (D-CA), among others. According to NBC News, on June 25, 2018, she said:

“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere,” Waters, who has called for President Donald Trump to be impeached, told supporters over the weekend.

In the event, activists took up the call with zest, chasing scores of Trump officials and Republican office holders out of restaurants and physically threatening them, including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chou. And that isn’t all. Representative Steve Scalise was shot by a Bernie Sanders supporter during a Congressional baseball game. (I hasten to add that the man was obviously mentally ill, and Senator Sanders quickly condemned the shooting).

Nevertheless, the point remains. Democrats and progressives launched a scorched earth campaign of opposition, and not for the first time. Now that they have the White House, a bare majority in the House, and lack control of the Senate they have decided that they are in favor of bipartisanship and comity after all. Who is kidding whom?

The obvious question is: If Democrats are so interested in compromise, what grounds are they willing to concede in the search for consensus? The answer is: none.

In that respect let us consider where the head of the party and its titular leader stands. To begin with, he has nominated California AG Xavier Becerra to lead HHS. Becerra, who has no experience in the field is quite simply a culture warrior. In particular, he is an abortion rights fanatic. Operating as California’s Attorney General, he launched lawsuits seeking to overturn other states abortion restrictions. Those states include Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Ohio. His justification for doing so? “No government” he said “state or federal, has the right” to interfere with abortion. Which, in another context, is essentially the argument Texas AG Ken Paxton recently made with respect to the election, an argument that rightfully got the back of the Supreme Court’s hand.

Becerra defended California’s mandate (since overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in NIFLA v. Becerra) that required pro-life pregnancy centers to provide patients with information on how to obtain state funded abortions. In yet another attack on the first amendment, he sued the Little Sisters of the Poor seeking to require them to finance the purchase of contraception and abortifacients.

Then there is the nomination of Neera Tanden to head the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). In one sense she is a candidate that everyone can agree on: she has antagonized just about everyone in Washington, left, right and center. And not because she is a strong independent leader. She is simply a Hillary Clinton sycophant. In emails revealed by Wikileaks she wrote “I would do whatever Hillary needs always. I owe her a lot. And I’m a loyal soldier” and, “I don’t really think the issues matter”. The only explanations for her selection are these: either Biden picked a sacrificial lamb to appease the nomination Gods, or he is making selections essentially at random. No one thinks she is actually qualified to run OMB.

I could go on, but there is only so much time in a day. It is becoming increasingly clear that the idea of a return to “normalcy” is nothing more than a liberal fantasy. Personnel is policy and Biden is in the process selecting personnel who are creatures of the left, most of whom served in the Obama Administration. Not only have they presided over numerous policy disasters in the past, they are unchastened, and fully intend to repeat their failures. Moreover, at the Administrative level it is clear that the supposedly moderate Biden means to govern by “pen and phone”, Obama style.

Strap in because the best days of the Biden administration are already behind us, and he hasn’t even taken the oath of office yet.

JFB

About Those Norms…

Players in the Democratic Party have spent the better part of the last 2 years piling on Attorney General William Barr, alleging that he is a political hack who can not be trusted to run the Department of Justice. While speaking from the Senate floor, Charles Schumer (D-NY), said: “His confirmation occurred only a few months ago and yet in a short time Mr. Barr’s conduct has raised damning questions about his impartiality and about his fitness…”

That’s the same Charles Schumer who directly threatened Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh when he addressed demonstrators on the steps of the Supreme Court: “…I want to tell you, Gorsuch… I want to tell you, Kavanaugh… you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

For this outburst the senior Senator from New York earned a reprimand from Chief Justice Roberts as well as the American Bar Association and others. Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, hardly a right wing extremist, agreed with Justice Roberts, characterized Schumer’s remarks as “inexcusable” and called on him to apologize. Schumer, of course, did no such thing.

There is another apology that Schumer and Company ought to be make, namely to Attorney General Bill Barr. Note that AG Barr recently said that the Justice Department looked at claims of electoral fraud in the November elections and did not find evidence to conclude that fraud changed the outcome, thereby pulling the rug out from under Trump’s claim of victory, not to mention his legal strategy, such as it is.

And then, just yesterday the story broke that Hunter Biden, son of President-elect Joe “Here’s the Deal” Biden, is under federal criminal investigation both in Delaware and in the Southern District of New York. Moreover the investigation has been going on for some time, at least since the spring of 2020. In keeping with Justice Department guidelines, the investigation was kept under wraps so as not to influence the upcoming election in November.

Compare that with the behavior of Loretta Lynch in the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation. Or with the gusher of leaks coming out of the FBI for the purpose of taking down the Trump presidency. Or with the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS during the Obama years. Or with the grandstanding of Sally Yates.

There has indeed been plenty of norm busting in the Justice Department in recent years. But it wasn’t the work of Bill Barr. He played it straight, and in so doing he enraged Democratic partisans whose idea of norms is whatever behavior advances progressive goals.

Democrats owe Attorney General Bill Barr an apology, but it’s an apology that will never be offered. That would require a sense of honor.

JFB