"Rule of law, individual liberty, inalienable rights."

Mollie Hemingway tweets,

Battle lines are more clearly being drawn these days, between those who clearly believe America is irredeemably evil and must be violently overthrown and those who believe America remains greatest country on earth, based on rule of law, individual liberty, inalienable rights.

Decades of public education have given former group a *huge* advantage, reinforced by media that awards itself prizes to indoctrinate message. Seriousness of that side now being impossible to ignore, however, finally forces rule of law side to realize fight must be engaged.

"I'm not on the ballot, but I am pretty darned invested!"

Trump and the Rule of Law

Ace of Spades links to this twitter thread by John Hayward.

John Hayward @Doc_0
This "rule of law" talking point is the most absurd example of NeverTrump and Democrat desperation yet. It's the nook-nook they're sucking on to get themselves past the disappointment of Impeachment Theater not only fizzling, but backfiring spectacularly.

By any objective standard, Trump is far less of a threat to the "rule of law" than Barack Obama was. In fact, the big reason the anti-Trump circus is squawking about "rule of law" right now is they remember how concerned conservatives were about it during the Obama years.

Obama's entire agenda was an all-out attack on the rule of law. When Obamacare crashed and burned, he was out there giving speeches where he told people to just ignore the broken law and promised not to prosecute them for it.

If anything, Trump is clearly the target of people who disdain the rule of law, using laws and administrative procedures to sabotage his administration. The proverbial Crazy Hawaiian Judge is the real threat to rule of law, not Trump. Abusive injunctions are a threat.

And Trump is clearly on the right side of the biggest single Rule of Law issue there is: immigration, citizenship, sanctuary cities, border defense. The Dems, ALL OF THEM, are sworn enemies of the rule of law and openly promise to undermine it as vigorously as possible.

Trump is also on the right side of the second biggest Rule of Law issues, free speech and gun rights. The enemies of those things are the ones declaring open war on the rule of law. The 1st and 2nd Amendment are inextricably linked in defining what the law means and how it rules.

And Trump spent most of his first term under attack by one of the worst abuses of the Rule of Law this nation has ever seen, the Russia collusion hoax and its attendant abuses of the FBI, FISA, etc.

No one willing to give "the Resistance" and Obama a pass on the Russia hoax can be taken seriously when they talk about the Rule of Law. They're just tossing around loaded political terms without any commitment to what those terms actually mean.

Worse, they're perverting the Rule of Law to mean "the rule of the permanent administrative state." The Rule of Law is meaningless, indeed inverted from its true meaning, if there are no laws to bind the administrative state, no accountability, no consequences.

Argue the merits of Trump's policies all you want, but let's stop this charade that he's some kind of unique existential threat to the Rule of Law. Every Dem running in 2020 is vastly more of a threat than Trump on his worst day. /end

That clarifies it!

"The president is un-American by violating norms and the rule of law!" -people trying to undo an election by conducting impeachment proceedings with a coached witness in secret in a basement

— Razor (@hale_razor) October 14, 2019

"Do you think the FBI would give you a pass if you decided to respond to a subpoena by bleaching your hard drive?"

Kurt Schlichter writes at Town Hall,

...Sure, the rule of law is terrific in concept, and it would sure be nice to give it another whirl here in America, but we aren’t blind or stupid. We see what the “law” is and how it’s applied – there’s one law for the elite (that’s the one that never gets applied) and one for us Normals that’s designed to keep us in line with our mouths shut.

Today, the “law” is a weapon wielded by the establishment to cement its grip on its power and position. That’s why Democrats are so eager to repeal Citizens United and pass all sorts of new laws restricting election campaigning. They know they will be able to violate those laws with impunity while using them to jam up their conservative opponents.

Justice? That’s a laugh. And all the fake posturing and posing, both by the Democrats and by the conservaquisling crew, is not going to change our minds and make us unsee what is right before our eyes.

...And because there is no equal application of the law today, there is no rule of law in the United States today.

What it means right now is that preferred establishment figures and groups get a free pass from their elite prosecutor pals, but you – an uppity Normal or the representative you choose – gets the full weight of the feds. That’s by design. The law is not designed to restrain our masters. It’s designed to keep you in chains. The elite tries to sell you on the idea that justice is blind, that before the law everyone is the same. But that’s a lie. It’s not, and that’s the way they want it.

Look at Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. I recently asked fellow folks who did stuff with classified material back in the day what would have happened to one of us if we had done what that Looming Doofus James Comey said The Harpy did before handing her an “Elite Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free” card. The results were 99% “I’d be in Leavenworth,” and the other 1% insisted that I was racist and cisnormative for even bringing it up.

Do you think the FBI would give you a pass if you decided to respond to a subpoena by bleaching your hard drive? Come on. You’d be negotiating with Bubba for the top bunk’s primo cell block view. But the FBI brass gave her a pass, because she was their establishment pal. Then, when we dared to elect someone that the bureaucrats did not approve of, they picked a bunch of Hillary donors to “investigate” our candidate until they found a “crime.” I’m old enough to remember back when “Russian collusion” was a thing; actually, we’ve found that it was a thing only among the liberals paying people to pay Russians for a dossier as part of a campaign to undo the election. Yet, none of our law enforcement apparatus, under the wheezy command of Sleepy Jeff Sessions, seem interested in investigating that. I wonder what Jeff’s doing in the photos they must have of him – there’s an image to haunt your nightmares.

Where there are two sets of laws, there are no laws. There’s just power being applied to try to keep the Normals in line. Remember, Manafort was investigated and cleared years ago. Even that half-wit Michael Cohen would have kept up happily committing his low-grade graft if not for daring to be associated with the guy the establishment hates. By the way, I find it hilarious that Cohen gave Mueller the pleas to the two (fake) campaign finance “crimes” in exchange for five years. Idiot. He had the brass ring and gave it away – if he’d been my client, and I don’t represent gutless morons, I would have held out for six months home detention. And that sad-faced, desperate, basset hound-looking Democrat operative (working through fellow partisans in the Southern District of New York office) would have eventually given it to him.

Read more here.

It is not too much to ask the Supreme Court to support the rule of law.

In PJ Media Andrew Klavan writes,

It is not too much to ask the Supreme Court to support the rule of law.

...But the whole point of the First Amendment is that there are certain choices citizens are not allowed to make — like compelling or curtailing the speech of the opposition.

...The left doesn't like the rule of law much. If they legally lose an election, they take to the streets as if some injustice had been done to them. If we enforce our border laws, they become hysterical and try to intimidate and bully public officials. If they can't get a law passed by constitutional means, they are perfectly happy to use regulation to exert extra-legal control over the citizenry.

All of which is bad enough in leftist media, leftist mobs and leftist officials. But in leftist Supreme Court justices, it's even worse.

Read more here.

Victor Davis Hanson saw it coming!

Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of the importance of the rule of law. "Sanctuary cities have been terrible for the American worker. It is elite versus the mass. The Democratic and La Raza elite want an unassimilated constituency that is replenished every year that ensures the demographics change, and that they can be spokesmen for group grievances rather than individual accomplishment. Employers want access to cheap labor, and then they dress it all up with utopian caring. In fact, it is one of the most amoral, uncaring phenomenon in the world! It is bad for the American poor. It destroys the rule of law. Who is to say when you start destroying the sanctity of the law that you can pick and choose which other laws people have to follow?"

If Americans do not believe they are better than the alternative, nobody else will either! For immigration to work in this country, it traditionally had to be legal! It had to be a melting pot, with assimilation, integration, and intermarriage.

To Eric Holder, the law was secondary. He politicized the Justice Department in favor of those he decided were oppressed. Obama tried to influence the Trayvon Martin jury by saying "Trayvon looks like the son I never had." The Left got everything they wanted: the House, the Senate, and a president very skilled in teleprompted rhetoric.

Can we be brave and be triumphant? Point out the hypocrisy! Obama says we have to watch out for CEOs, but he doesn't think that applies to him! Al Gore sells his failed cable news station to an anti-Semitic Middle Eastern authoritarian government that enriches him because of profits from fossil fuels, and, he does so in haste to beat capital gains tax increases!

Hanson finishes this July 2016 program by pointing out that the Republican party now is populist, and the Democrat Party is the coastal blue blood elitists! How prescient can he be?

Three ways the election is rigged

The Donald articulated a three-point critique of the system that its defenders have not even tried to answer. Instead, all we got was fake outrage over Trump’s perfectly legitimate rejection of the default legitimacy of our illegitimate system.

His first point was that the media is not merely biased but an active partisan player for the Democrats.

Then there is electoral integrity. We’ve seen numerous investigations of voter fraud and no one cares. We have one party refusing to clear voter rolls of ineligible voters, while also on a quest to ensure that no one need prove his identity to vote. Sure, Democrats have good reason to believe their voters are too lazy and/or stupid to obtain ID cards, but we all know why they really oppose voter ID: it makes it harder to cheat. And then there’s Project Veritas. We have a Democrat party operative and the husband of a sitting Democrat congressbeing caught on tape proving Democrat catspaws paid to cause violence at a Trump rally, violence which the media covered and blamed on Trump to damaging effect. And this guy went to the White House hundreds of times and frequently met with President Faily McWorsethancarter.

Hey Pearl Clutchers, read that again and tell me how this isn’t a thousand times worse than Watergate. Then tell me how this is getting only a millionth of the outrage and coverage if the system isn’t rigged.

And then there’s the corruption of the rule of law. Trump was right – Hillary should not even be running because if we had a single justice system – instead of one for the powerful and connected and another for everyone else – her unhealthy carcass would be in federal prison. That’s not hyperbole – that’s literal truth understood by anyone who worked with classified materials and/or actually passed a bar exam. Then there is the IRS persecution of conservative organizations that has gone totally unpunished. And, of course, the Wikileaks treasure trove has shown that the Democrats simply ignore the law in their campaigns, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable while their opponents will see a weaponized FBI and DOJ turned upon them.

The system is rigged.

...The solution is to demand the system do its damn job and root out corruption and earn back the default acceptance we would love nothing more than to be able to offer again, confident that the system is unrigged. Too bad if our refusal to simply acquiesce to your scam is inconvenient.

Read more here.

Vote for the rule of law

Kurt Schlicter writes at Town Hall,

...There will be no check or balance on Hillary Clinton. Not the Congress (D or R), not the courts, not the media, not the bureaucrats. None. This Alinksyite corruptocrat, her second-rate mind twisted with hatred toward normal Americans, will reign unchallenged. She has already sought the power to jail those who criticize her; reversing Citizens United would only be the first step in an unopposed quest to eliminate all legitimate means of dissent, to bar all legitimate means of opposition. Which, of course, would leave only illegitimate means – something she is too dense and ignorant of normal Americans to imagine is possible.

Which leaves Donald Trump as the only alternative, not merely because he is less awful than Hillary Clinton – leprosy is less awful than Hillary Clinton – but because the election of a tacky jerk like Donald Trump is the only thing that could ever motivate the elite to rediscover checks and balances upon executive power.

...America will have never seen checking and balancing like President Trump would experience. And that is exactly, precisely what America must have right now.

Hillary Clinton will roll into office unhindered and unaccountable. We know what Clintons do when there is oversight; any sane person should shudder at the thought of them not merely unaccountable, but actively abetted by the entire elite. If you want to tear this country apart – not figuratively, not metaphorically, but with the real violence and bloodshed she will blunder into provoking – then hand that aspiring pants-suited Chavez wannabe the keys to the Oval Office.

That’s the choice. There’s no white knight riding in to snag the nomination away from the guy who won it fair and square. It’s Trump or Hillary. Sorry, that’s your choice, and making no choice is a choice for her.

...Only one thing matters. One thing only. That is restoring the rule of law. And only a Trump presidency has any hope of doing that.

Sorry.

Suck it up and vote for the rule of law.

And, astonishingly, that means you must vote for Donald Trump.

Read more here.

How Obama ended the rule of law

Victor Davis Hanson wrote at National Review Online on February 17,

Somehow, having an Enemies List is all right if you’re Barack Obama and not Richard Nixon. It has become an iffy idea to cross Barack Obama. After seven years, the president has created a Hugo Chávez–like deterrent landscape, intended to remind friends and enemies alike that he is perfectly willing to use the federal government’s vast power to go after those he finds politically inconvenient, while exempting those he understands to be sympathetic to his agendas.

...To have a legitimate disagreement with the president is to be caricatured as either a coward or a bully. On illegal immigration, Obama complained that Republicans were “scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States.” Earlier, he had claimed they wanted to round up kids having ice cream: “But now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”

But aside from the psychodramatic tics and the jokes in poor taste, Obama has used government in a fashion contrary to the Constitution. IRS official Lois Lerner directed the federal tax agency to dole out tax-exempt status to groups on the basis of their ideology, and — particularly during a campaign season — on whether they were perceived Obama supporters. After staging a phony question-and-answer mea culpa, she pled the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee of inquiry and retired with her full pension and apparent exemption from criminal prosecution.

...The common thread in the scandals or incompetence at the EPA, GSA, ICE, IRS, Justice Department, NASA, Secret Service, and VA has been Obama’s desire to advance his own particular political agendas in a fashion contrary to the supposed disinterested nature of these bureaucracies, if necessary putting in place political incompetents who would unquestioningly do his bidding. NASA, for example, has no business making its “foremost” aim outreach to Muslims. In the Obama era, most Americans now just assume that Black Panthers can intimidate voters at a polling place; and that illegal aliens with criminal records do not face deportation in sanctuary cities; and that failed green companies can extort federal dollars, while successful coal companies and utilities are hounded; and that Cabinet secretaries facing accusations of scandal, incompetence, or unethical behavior — Lisa Jackson, Eric Shinseki at the VA, Kathleen Sebelius at HHS, Hilda Solis at the Department of Labor — just seem to quietly resign and float away in a fashion most unlike General Petraeus.

...Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an obscure Internet video-maker, suddenly was jailed on a minor parole violation and was damned publicly — and falsely — as the catalyst for the 2012 Benghazi attacks, in which four Americans were killed. No one now believes — as President Obama, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for so long insisted to the world — that Nakoula’s amateurish video prompted spontaneous mobs to take to the streets of Benghazi (just by coincidence on September 11) and to torch the American consulate and zero in their ad hoc GPS-guided mortars on the consulate annex.

...CIA Director General David Petraeus was forced to resign shortly after Obama’s successful reelection campaign in 2012, under mysterious circumstances, reportedly because he had improperly revealed classified information to a biographer, with whom he was having an affair. But that fact had been revealed to, but was not disclosed by, members of the Obama administration, months before the November 2012 election. The strange timing poses the question of why such misconduct was considered a non-firing offense before, but not after, the president’s reelection, when Petraeus, as CIA director, was likely to be slated to testify again, and at greater length, to a closed session of Congress on the Benghazi disaster.

The serial message goes out that it is unwise for a federal official or a prominent individual to oppose President Obama and his policies — while illegal or incompetent conduct, if undertaken in the president’s perceived interest, is considered to have been for a good cause and thus exempt from accountability.

In other words, there is no rule of law any more — an ossified relic in our pen-and-phone era of social justice.

Read more here.

Stop requiring clerks to put their names on marriage licenses

The biggest story here in the United States has been the jailing of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who does not want her name to be on marriage licenses issued to gay couples. I heard Glenn Beck discussing it with his partners, Pat and Stu, yesterday. They were making a lot of really good points, including questioning why the government has any business being in the marriage business in the first place.

Glenn was explaining the concept of different levels of laws that govern us. He said the highest law is God's law, which atheists might prefer to call Nature's law. He also talked about our inalienable right to practice our religion.

They brought up another point: If Kim Davis is to be thrown in jail for refusing to sign marriage certificates, why are not the mayors of sanctuary cities thrown in jail for refusing to follow federal laws? Why is Barack Obama not thrown in jail for not following federal immigration laws, or even his own health care law? Glenn, Pat and Stu were not advocating those things, but simply putting the whole Kim Davis thing in perspective.

Although I think Glenn, Pat, and Stu spend too much time being sarcastic, I respect Glenn's activism in support of the founding principles of our country and the moral stands he takes for things like #All Lives Matter.

A solution to the Kentucky problem? Stop requiring clerks to put their names on marriage licenses!

Cruz supports Kentucky clerk

Adrienne's Corner publishes Ted Cruz's statement supporting Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who is in jail because her faith would not allow her to put her name on a marriage license to a gay couple. Cruz writes,

“I stand with Kim Davis. Unequivocally. I stand with every American that the Obama Administration is trying to force to chose between honoring his or her faith or complying with a lawless court opinion.

“In dissent, Chief Justice Roberts rightly observed that the Court’s marriage opinion has nothing to do with the Constitution. Justice Scalia observed that the Court’s opinion was so contrary to law that state and local officials would choose to defy it.

“For every politician — Democrat and Republican — who is tut-tutting that Davis must resign, they are defending a hypocritical standard. Where is the call for the mayor of San Francisco to resign for creating a sanctuary city — resulting in the murder of American citizens by criminal illegal aliens welcomed by his lawlessness?

“Where is the call for President Obama to resign for ignoring and defying our immigration laws, our welfare reform laws, and even his own Obamacare?

“When the mayor of San Francisco and President Obama resign, then we can talk about Kim Davis.

“Those who are persecuting Kim Davis believe that Christians should not serve in public office. That is the consequence of their position. Or, if Christians do serve in public office, they must disregard their religious faith–or be sent to jail.

“Kim Davis should not be in jail. We are a country founded on Judeo-Christian values, founded by those fleeing religious oppression and seeking a land where we could worship God and live according to our faith, without being imprisoned for doing so.

“I call upon every Believer, every Constitutionalist, every lover of liberty to stand with Kim Davis. Stop the persecution now.”

Rule of law

David Harsanyi writes at Reason,

As far as I can tell, there are only three unassailable constitutional rights left in the United States: the right not to be "discriminated" against, the right to have an abortion and the right to have a gay marriage. In the eyes of liberals, nothing—not the freedom of association or religion or anything else mentioned in the First Amendment or Second Amendment—will ever supersede these consecrated rights.

...if we're going to be rigid about the rule of law, let's throw all officials who ignore it into cells. We can start with the president and work our way down.

Read more here.

“This shall be a nation of laws, not men”

Weird Dave writes at Ace of Spades,

This week on social media, THE big topic has been Kim Davis and her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. The Left has been outraged, OUTRAGED I tell you, that someone would so flout the decision of the SCOTUS. Typical of the Left there have been calls for violence, death threats and much social justice wanker posturing. This is all the more strange because what Kim Davis is doing is completely and totally a product of the Left, and I don't mean that Davis is a Democrat(which she is). Davis' refusal to issue same sex marriage licenses is the inevitable result of several generations of left wing political activism aimed at ignoring the rule of law when they find it advantageous to do so.

Think about the basic social contract that is the United States of America. What idea was the cornerstone of the ideological wall that the Founding Fathers used to construct this nation? What single, simple concept embodied everything that they hoped to create, and would serve as a yardstick for future generations to measure their path?

“This shall be a nation of laws, not men”

The idea of rule of law is that the law is immutable. It says what it says, and all men are required to respect it. It can be changed, of course, but until it is, it binds the righteous and unrighteous alike.

...To the Left, however, the law is simply a convenient cudgel to beat their foes with until it isn't, at which point it can be ignored. Case in point, contrast to the Kim Davis situation. In 2004 Gavin Newsom, then mayor of San Francisco, ordered that the city clerks issue marriage licenses to same sex couples in spite of the fact that same sex marriage was against the law in California. The Left just got so excited and jumped around like lovesick puppies celebrating Newsom for “doing what was right” and “following his moral convictions in spite of the law”. In 2015 when Davis does the exact same thing, she is roundly condemned. In Newsom's case, the rule of law was inconvenient to the desired outcome so it was ignored. In Davis' it supported the desired outcome, so it was invoked.

And how did the Right react? In both cases, the overwhelming reaction has been the same. In 2004 the Right maintained that the licenses should not have been issued, because rule of law. In 2015, the Right has maintained that the licenses should be issued, because rule of law. Most acknowledge that the law in question is nothing more than an arbitrary edict issued by Justice Kennedy's fiat, but, still, law of the land and all of that. This perfectly demonstrates one of the fundamental differences between Right and Left. The Left believes that the ends justify the means, while the Right maintains that the ends are meaningless, even dangerous, if the means are not just.

However, this time around there is an interesting twist. A growing number of people on the Right have started to point out that the rule of law is pretty darn arbitrary as far as the Left is concerned.

Kim Davis MUST follow the rule of law and issue the marriage licenses. Absolutely must.


But Washington DC isn't issuing gun permits despite being directly ordered by the SCOTUS to do so.


But immigration laws are not just being ignored, they are being flouted with impunity by the Obama Administration and Democrat sanctuary cities.

But the IRS refused to issue permits to conservative non-profits, holding them in limbo for years and possibly influencing the outcome of the 2012 election.

Are conservatives doomed to abandon principle for expediency and push whatever policies we want, regardless of what the law says, when we are in power? Could a SoCon President require the Department of Education to require prayer in schools or a FiCon President stop funding for welfare unilaterally? Would we even be conservatives then, or simply nothing more than another gang in power for a brief period of time? That right there is a reallllly interesting question, in which lies the death of the Republic.

Read more here.

Amen to these words

Judge Napolitano makes very good points here.

Trey Gowdy as the next Attorney General

Trey Gowdy to Eric Holder: "If you have the ability both to not enforce and not follow the law, then we have no law!" "How can you respect the law, and disrespect the statute that Congress has already passed?" If we ever get to the place in this society where a memo is on equal footing with the law, I think we're in trouble!"

I hope whoever wins the election in 2016 will consider Trey Gowdy as Attorney General.



Thanks to Adrienne for posting this exchange.