The Democrats are apoplectic about President Donald Trump appointing another conservative to the Supreme Court, with good reason. Somehow the Supreme Court has become all-powerful.
The Supreme Court really is supreme. Justices are appointed for life, and once a Supreme Court decision – whether it is 9-to-0 or 5-to-4 – is made, it is the law of the land and it can’t be overruled except by a later Supreme Court.
The president can be overruled. Congress can be overruled, but the Supreme Court cannot.
If Judge Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, conservatives will have a solid 5-to-4 majority, or solid if Chief Justice John Roberts decides to remain a conservative.
The Supreme Court is in theory unbiased and nonpartisan, but it left that behind years ago. The justices appointed by Democrats vote in a block, as do the justices appointed by Republicans.
So it makes sense for the Democrats to pull out all the stops in trying to defeat Kavanaugh. Regardless of who gets elected president or which party controls Congress, the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court are going to be running the show.
The Democrats get this, or else they wouldn’t be lining up behind what is a baseless allegation against Kavanaugh.
The problem for the country and for Republicans is that the Republicans in the Senate don’t appear to understand what is happening.
What the Republicans should have done is gone on with the vote in the Judiciary Committee, voted in the Senate and be done with it. The Democrats, if they were in charge, would never hold up the nomination of a Supreme Court justice on such a shoddy accusation. Simply to hold a hearing gives the allegation far more credibility than it deserves.
And Republicans should be apoplectic about the possibility that Kavanaugh won’t get the nomination, because if Republicans can’t get Kavanaugh approved they will lose big in November. The Republican base will be so completely demoralized that they won’t bother to go vote.
And they will have a good point. They have gone to the polls and elected Republican majorities in the House and Senate and elected a Republican president. If all those elected Republicans can’t get a conservative appointed to the Supreme Court, then what’s the point?
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The committee hearing where Kanavaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, is scheduled to testify is Thursday, but it appears that her lawyers are attempting to dictate how, when and where she will testify and who gets to ask her questions.
This is a meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee. If Ford has something to tell them she can appear before them at the appointed time and say whatever it is she has to say. If the committee members want to question her they can. If they want someone else to question her they can do that also. It is not her committee.
It appears that the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, has already bent over backwards to accommodate Ford. He asked her to testify on Monday and she refused. That could have been the end of it, but Grassley agreed to allow her to testify on Thursday, which is a considerable accommodation when you consider that the committee was supposed to vote last Thursday.
It is time for the Senate Republicans to stand up for themselves.
They don’t call the Republican Party the Stupid Party for nothing. Here they have a well-qualified candidate for the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh has been investigated by the FBI six times for the positions he has held, and the FBI has found nothing in his background that would disqualify him from any of those positions – including being appointed Supreme Court justice.
The allegation by Ford is unsubstantiated by anyone. Ford cannot even say when or where it happened. She admits that she had been drinking, but despite her lack of memory on even the year this happened or the house where it happened, her memory is clear that she only had one beer and that Kavanaugh was drunk.
How can she have such a specific memory about how much she had to drink when she can’t even remember what year it happened? How did she know Kavanaugh was drunk? Who else was drunk? Was the person who drove her home whenever and wherever this occurred also drunk?
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Democratic Sen. Chris Coons said that the burden of proof was on Kavanaugh. He also said before the Thursday hearing that he was going to vote against Kavanaugh, which is at least honest.
There is no way that Kavanaugh can prove his innocence because the allegations against him are so vague that it is impossible, unless he perhaps had a videotape of every moment during his high school and college careers. Or perhaps if he had an unimpeachable source who had been with him every moment of his life in high school and college.
How could he possible prove that he was not in any house in Montgomery County while he was in high school?
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If Kavanaugh isn’t confirmed then its hard to see how the Republicans will ever get a conservative male appointed to the Supreme Court, because it would mean that any woman can make a claim of sexual harassment or assault against a man and if they were ever in close vicinity to each other then the accusation is true.
There is no defense against a vague accusation at an unknown time and an unknown place. How could anyone prove that weren’t somewhere at some time if they don’t know where the somewhere is or when the some time is?
The accusation by Debbie Ramirez is even less credible, if that is possible. She admits she was passing out drunk and doesn’t remember much about what happened, but with the help of Democratic attorneys did manage to remember a singularly despicable action by Kavanaugh. The other people who were there or could have been there say that her drunken memory is inaccurate and the incident never occurred.
How do attorneys help someone remember an incident that person can’t remember? Is there some knowledge of law that helps people remember? Or do they do it perhaps by explaining to the person how important it is that they have the memory that the attorneys want them to have.
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I first realized that Trump was something special when I attended one of his primary rallies. I can’t count the number of political rallies and speeches I’ve been to or watched, but here I was seeing something entirely different. Trump was having a conversation with 10,000 or so people.
Folks in the crowd hollered at him and he responded. There didn’t appear to be any script at all. It appeared that he had said to his aides, “I’m going to go out here and talk to these great people. How long do I have before we have to leave?” And that was the only preparation, other than a lifetime of preparation that gave him the confidence to constantly speak off the cuff about whatever popped into his head, or whatever was shouted at him.
The people at the rally absolutely loved it. The only dour expressions in the entire place were on the faces of the poor reporters who had drawn the short straw and been forced to cover Trump. They clearly hated him and were extremely uncomfortable with the crowd.
But it makes me think that if some of the Democrats who detest Trump and would like to see him impeached or run out of town ever took the time to listen to him, to watch what he is doing and put out of their heads all the terrible things they have read about him, that they would at least see that we have the most open administration in modern times.
When Trump holds a press conference, he answers questions, not with some paragraph written by a team of speechwriters and recited, but with a real answer about what he thinks at that moment.
He talks to the press all the time. I don’t remember President Barack Obama holding impromptu press conferences or stopping on the way to the helicopter to answer questions for five minutes. Trump does. He knows he is by far the best spokesman for his administration and he takes advantage of that.
He has done more for the economy in 19 months in office than Obama did in eight years. The GDP is now growing at a rate of over 4 percent. More people are employed now than ever before. The unemployment rate is hitting historic lows. His much maligned trade deals are working, just like he said they would.
China is going to be a tough nut to crack, but he’s well on his way. China doesn’t import much from the US, but it depends on selling vast amounts of goods to US consumers. Trump has considerably raised the cost for China to do business in the US, but you don’t see prices here going up. We are not having economic difficulty because of the tariffs placed on Chinese goods, but the Chinese are. What Trump has to do is figure out a way for the Chinese to save face while agreeing to a fair trade deal. No doubt he has already figured it out but is waiting for the time to be right.
Trump knows how to negotiate. Obama had no idea, which was not his fault; he had no experience. Obama had never negotiated deals.
When he went to buy his house in Chicago, he didn’t negotiate; he had a corrupt real estate developer help him out. It’s tough to find a corrupt real estate developer to help negotiate a trade deal with China, or the European Union or Canada.
But negotiating is what Trump has been doing for the past 50 years. Trump understands the economy in a way that Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson and Kennedy never did because he had to understand it to make a living.
Working in the private sector with your own money on the line every day results in a different kind of learning than reading about economic trends in government reports.
The news media reports unfairly on Trump. Exaggerations, misstatements and differences of opinion they call lies, and people believe it.
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The news media has lost its collective mind. The goal of an article seems to be to get in as many jabs at Trump as possible. In the article by The New York Times about Trump’s visit to North Carolina after Hurricane Florence, the reporter worked overtime to make Trump look bad.
Trump made the comment about a man who had a boat in his yard at least getting a new boat out of the disaster. It was meant to be funny. News flash to The New York Times: People often use humor to lighten an otherwise bad situation. No doubt other folks had said the same thing; it wasn’t that original.
To be serious, there is no reason for a president to visit a disaster area except public relations. The president isn’t going to do anything. It is done to show concern and make people feel better.
In this article, The New York Times writer managed to work in the criticism of Melania Trump for wearing spike heels to get on the plane to visit Texas after Hurricane Harvey. The media deemed this a huge faux pas because you can’t wander around a disaster area in spike heels.
But of course Melania didn’t have on spike heels when they arrived. It is not the least bit unusual for a woman to change her shoes.
Air Force One has plenty of room for a couple pairs of shoes and plenty of room for a woman to change her shoes. How on earth could Melania Trump changing shoes on Air Force One even be a story? How on earth could it still be a story over a year later? The hatred for Trump by the media knows no bounds.
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Why did Sen. Dianne Feinstein sit on this blockbuster accusation against Kavanaugh until the last days before the vote? She knew all about the accusation, had a letter from Ford detailing her allegations, so why didn’t Feinstein put this before the committee during the normal course of business?
The answer is obvious. Feinstein knew all about the allegation, but it is an extremely weak he said, she said, with one corroborating witness who says it didn’t happen – so two he saids and one she said.
It’s weak and would never hold up in a court of law or in any rational consideration of Kavanaugh’s qualification for any job, much less reach the level of denying him a seat on the Supreme Court for which he is extremely qualified.
But Feinstein knew the Democratic operatives were out there and would find something better than this 36-year-old impossible-to-verify allegation.
Unfortunately for Feinstein and the Democrats, they never came up with anything worse. So with the clock running out Feinstein was forced to go with what she had.
It’s like a player at the end of a basketball game realizing that the best shot they can come up with is an off balance 40 footer over outstretched hands. This is not a shot the player would ever take if time wasn’t running out, but as the clock ticks down the player knows it’s this shot or nothing, so he takes the shot and hopes for the best.
That’s Feinstein. She had the ball and was hoping for a much better look at the basket, but she didn’t get it, so she did the only thing she could do, which was throw up a Hail Mary shot as the buzzer sounded.
Right now that ball is in the air and we don’t know whether its going to swish through the net, roll around the rim and fall out or bang against the backboard and go in. But the home crowd is trying to force the ball through the net by screaming its support and, unfortunately for the country, many of those screaming are journalists who claim to be unbiased.
The New York Times has gone so far in the tank, it is analyzing the yearbooks of classmates of Kavanaugh at Georgetown Preparatory School where Kavanaugh was a student 35 years ago.
Can you even imagine someone not getting appointed to the Supreme Court because of some nonsense someone wrote in their high school yearbook? Given the opportunity, The New York Times would no doubt send in archeologists to remove the necessary layers of paint to discover what was written on the bathroom walls at Georgetown Prep in the early 1980s.
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The Trump administration is in the process of making it harder for people to legally immigrate to this country to take advantage of the welfare system. It makes so much sense that it is bound to spawn lawsuits from all the liberal organizations in the country.
The idea that with the line of immigrants waiting to get into the US legally, which is millions long, we would allow someone who wants to come here for the freebies over some skilled professional who wants to come here and work is so absurd that it makes perfect sense for Obama and Hillary Clinton supporters to be all in favor of it.
In fact, they probably want to move the freeloaders to the front of the line.
It’s not like this country has money to give away. We’re over $20 trillion in debt. The only time the federal government should be giving money away is when it furthers a necessary goal of the federal government. If the government wants to give more money away, give it to Americans.
Of course people who live in countries with no financial safety net want to come to the US and get free health care and all kinds of free handouts.
Even the poor in this country have televisions and smart phones. In much of the world that alone would make them rich, not poor, as would living in a building constructed according to a building code with running water and electricity.
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I heard this on a radio talk show and I don’t remember which one, but the pro-abortion activists are saying that if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade and abortion is no longer legal, that millions of women will die as a result.
Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter; what matters is that pro-abortion activists believe it is true.
Imagine what a person would do to save the lives of millions of women. Would a person embellish a story, putting a Supreme Court nominee in the place of another boy? Would a person turn what was a harmless physical interaction between three teenagers into an attack and rape attempt?
What would you do to save millions of lives? Once again the question is not whether any lives would be saved or not, but what pro-abortion activists believe.
Would you put your family through the ordeal of death threats and commit perjury, for which you know you would never be tried, much less convicted?
Former President Bill Clinton’s aide James Carville said, “When you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’re going to find.” That was in response to being asked about the accusation of Paula Corbin Jones that, while governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton had exposed himself to her while they were alone in a hotel room.
So imagine what you would get if you drag the possibility of losing millions of lives through the country club.
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I don’t doubt that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said he would wear a wire to record his conversations with Trump. In fact, Rosenstein hasn’t denied making the statement; he said he was just kidding around.
Right. Rosenstein appears to be a big practical joker. I bet his has a drawer full of those buzzers you wear so when you shake someone’s hand it goes off and gives them a start. He probably has glasses with a Groucho Marx nose and mustache attached that he puts on when meeting new Justice Department employees. Yeah, he certainly appears to be a big joker, the life of the party.
Actually, Rosenstein appears to be virtually humorless and he and fired FBI Director James Comey, fired Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, fired Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and the whole cartel seem to have a belief in common that they don’t report to the president or anyone else. Theirs is a higher calling. They determine what is right and then it is their responsibility, not to carry out the orders of their superiors, but to answer to their own higher power.
They are much like religious fanatics; they are above common men like Attorney General Jeff Sessions or Trump. Theirs is a more sacred duty.
It’s tough to deal with fanatics of any stripe and it appears that the Justice Department and the FBI was chock-full of people who believed they knew what was best for the country and they were determined to do it whether it was legal and ethical or not.
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To solve the whole Kavanaugh controversy I think Washington needs to go back in history, back even before the country was founded, to the basic principles of witch trials. They can use a time-honored method used for witches to determine if Kavanaugh is telling the truth. All they have to do is tie a big stone to Kavanaugh’s feet, take him down to the Potomac and throw him in. If he survives then he is a witch and is lying and if he drowns then he was an honest man who was telling the truth.
It will settle this controversy once and for all. I think the Democrats would agree that it is a reasonable solution.
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This report just in. As a young teenager, Kavanaugh dressed in a disguise and went to the homes of neighbors at night demanding that they pay him a bribe or be the victims of vague threats of property damage. Reports indicate that most of the neighbors paid a small token when faced with this threat.
The fact that millions of other young people have done the same thing notwithstanding, do we want a Supreme Court justice who as a boy threatened his neighbors?
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Republicans need to grow a backbone. The Democrats are united in their efforts to keep Kavanaugh or any other conservative off the Supreme Court, and with good reason. Kavanaugh is, in Supreme Court terms, a young man. With his appointment the Supreme Court will have a conservative majority for the foreseeable future.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 85 and is not immortal. She could have resigned while Obama was president to make certain that she would be replaced by a like-minded justice, but she didn’t. Trump is president at least until January 2021, and the odds are at least even that he will win a second term.
Steven Breyer is 80. Assuming that Trump wins a second term, Ginsberg would be in her 90s when Trump left office and Breyer would be 86.
So the odds are that Trump will have two more appointments if he is reelected, and you have to consider the odds high that he will have another appointment this term.
Republicans need to set the tone for future appointments. If the deal is going to be that Democratic presidents get to appoint whatever qualified candidate they choose and Republicans have to appoint someone who the Democrats like, the Republican base isn’t going see much reason for going to the polls and voting.
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Trump is reportedly trying to privatize the postal service, something that Congress won’t allow, not because it isn’t a good idea but because unions still have too much power.
Trump is a negotiator, so the idea to privatize, which he knows would never fly, might be an attempt to get Congress to do something about the postal service.
As a postal customer I think two things could be done to make the postal service more cost efficient. First, cut out Saturday delivery. In today’s world it isn’t necessary.
Second, raise the postal rates on junk mail. I don’t know what the rate is, but considering the amount of junk mail we receive that goes straight into the recycling bin, it’s got to be nearly free. Why should I pay for a government service to delivery stuff I don’t want to my house?
And please don’t call me and tell me that the postal service is an independent agency. The workers are all government employees and receive the unbelievably lucrative government benefits. Try and get full retirement after 30 years in the private sector. Plus, cost overruns are picked up by the federal government.
So how can an agency where all the employees are paid by the federal government and receive government benefits and has its cost overruns paid for by the federal government not be considered a federal agency? It’s a slick sleight of hand to pretend that the federal government doesn’t pay for the postal service.
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Global warming disciples, it seems, are not going to go away. It is true that the earth has been warming for the past 20,000 or so years. Man cannot take the blame for the end of the Ice Age.
However, man’s activities have changed the makeup of the atmosphere, global warming disciples say that is causing the earth to warm faster than it would otherwise. That may be true, but the figure that I want to see before I stop cooking my food, heating my house and driving to work is how much of an increase in the natural rate of warming, if any, is caused by man.
Is it 10 percent? Which would mean that in the time the earth would warm 1 degree absent man, it warms 1.1 degrees because of man’s activities; or another way to look at it would be that after nine years the earth would be as hot as it would have been without man after 10 years. Or is it 100 percent? Meaning the earth is warming twice as fast as it would if men didn’t burn anything. Or maybe it is 0.01 percent.
It seems until someone can scientifically prove what the rate of increase is that man is causing, it is foolish to punish industrialized nations for producing carbon.
Man has also reduced the amount of carbon put in the air, if you believe that all those firefighters contain blazes. Before man came along the only thing to stop a forest fire was a change in the wind, a river or a big rainstorm. No one was flying in big loads of fire retardants to contain a forest fire. No one was creating firebreaks and setting backfires.
It seems if we are going to consider the amount of carbon man burns, we should also take into account the amount that man prevents from being burned.
