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Ready-Fire-Aim! Virginia Democrats shoot themselves in the foot

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The latest battle in the gerrymandering wars took place in Virginia. The Democrats in Virginia had all the guns – they control the governorship, the legislature and a majority of the voters. In a classic example of “Ready-Fire-Aim,” the Democrats promptly used those guns to shoot themselves in the foot.   

It all started a few years ago, back when Virginia was a purplish state. Voters approved an amendment to the state constitution to establish a non-partisan procedure for drawing Congressional Districts. That procedure produced Districts that resulted in a Democrat-Republican split in the elected Representatives of 5-4, which is approximately the same as the split in Virginia voters. So far, so good.

Then Virginia gradually shifted blue. Last fall, Virginia Democrats joined the gerrymandering wars. As is often the case with wars, it started with the political equivalent of stirring songs, glitzy parades, and predictions of victory in a month.

The Democrats figured that with a little creativity and an utter absence of shame – the absence of which has never been in short supply among politicians – they could gerrymander the Districts to shift the 5-4 split in their Congressional delegation to a 10-1 split.

They would be heroes! (And maybe some of them would fill those five new Democrat Congressional seats!)

Sure, it would take another amendment to the state constitution in order to nullify the one from a few years ago that established the non-partisan procedure for drawing Districts. But, as the Democrats reminded themselves, they controlled the three bodies that approve such amendments – the legislature, the governorship and the voters.

Constitutions contain procedures for amending them. The Virginia constitution stated that the legislature is supposed to approve the amendment twice. In between those two approvals, there’s supposed to be an election of the legislature. Only after those two legislative approvals and that intervening election, can the matter be put to the voters in a referendum.

There’s method behind this redundant madness. The thought is that, after the legislature approves the amendment the first time, the voters should get a chance to dis-elect the legislature that approved the amendment. And then the new legislature has to re-approve the amendment.

A constitution is a sacred thing, you see, even if it’s just a state one. Amendments to it are not to be taken lightly.

This is where the Democrats misfired. They got the requisite approval accomplished in the state legislature which they controlled, but the approval came after early voting had already begun on the requisite election of the legislature. In fact, about 40% of the votes had already been cast for that election.

After the election, they got the requisite second approval from the new legislature, and then they narrowly got the approval of voters in a referendum.

The matter went to the Virginia Supreme Court. This week, that Court held that the first approval by the legislature did not occur before the election of legislature, because at the time of that approval the election was already underway and 40% of the voters had already cast their ballots.

In effect, therefore, there was no “election day,” but rather an “election period.” The Democrats mistakenly failed to accomplish the requisite legislative approval for the amendment prior to the commencement of that election period. The result was that 40% of the voters were denied the opportunity to consider that approval in weighing their votes in what was supposed to be a subsequent election.

The matter cannot be reviewed further by the U.S. Supreme Court, because it is purely a matter of state law. The Virginia Supreme Court is the final authority on the subject. The Democrats could start again from square one in Virginia, but it’s too late for the upcoming mid-term election.

There’s a certain poetic justice in this. Democrats like loosey-goosey election procedures such as early and absentee voting for any and all. This time, it shot them in the foot and blew up in their faces. They will use this experience to advocate for gun control, no doubt.

Ending racial gerrymandering ends a failed scheme where legal rights were allocated by race

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Imagine a system where arrests, convictions and sentencing for the crime of murder had to be in proportion to the racial composition of the population.

Since Asians are about 7% of the population, the murder arrests, convictions and sentences for Asians in such a scheme would have to be 7% of the total.  Likewise, since Blacks, Latinos and whites make up about 13%, 19% and 62% of the population, respectively, they’d have to account for 13%, 19% and 62% of the murder arrests, convictions and sentencing.

At first glance, that sounds reasonable. But of course, it is not.

The reason is because those four races commit murder at dramatically different rates. FBI data show that whites (if you include Latinos/Hispanics as whites) comprise 82% of the population but commit only 46% of murders. Asians comprise 7% but commit only 1% of murders. (Latinos/Hispanics apart from whites comprise 19% and commit 20% of murders.)

So, who is committing all the murders that whites, Asians and Latinos are not?

Blacks are. Blacks comprise 13% of the population, but commit 51% of murders in the country. If you do the math, the statistical likelihood of a Black person being a murderer is quadruple the likelihood of a white person being a murderer, and roughly 22 times the likelihood of an Asian being a murderer.

A few tangential points are worth your attention. One, this high Black murder rate accounts for a large part (but not all) of the high overall murder rate in America as compared to Europe.

Two, the victims of these Black murderers are also mostly Black themselves. Black-on-Black violent crime in America is, tragically, extremely high.

Three, a few people would contend that Blacks don’t really commit murder at a high rate (though they cannot dispute that they die of murder at a high rate since, after all, there’s a Black body to prove it).

Those people would say that these statistics to the contrary are instead proof that the justice system racially discriminates against Blacks in arresting them, convicting them and sentencing them for crimes they did not commit (but, interestingly, does not discriminate against Latinos or Asians). Nobody really believes that contention – even the people saying it – so I won’t address it.

And four, an interesting tidbit is that the number of men we arrest, convict and sentence for murder is several times the number of women, even though the two sexes are about 50/50 in the population. Does anyone seriously contend that men are victims of sex discrimination in the field of murder arrests?

Back to our hypothetical. A scheme where people must be arrested, convicted and sentenced for murder in proportion to their racial representation in the population, even though murders are not committed in that same proportion, is undeniably unjust and probably criminal.

We would have to arrest many more whites and a lot of Asians for murders they didn’t commit. And we would have to leave un-arrested a lot of Blacks for murders they did commit, all to achieve our fantasy of racially proportionate representation in the law of murder.

This superficially appealing but fundamentally unfair concept of racially proportionate representation in the law brings us to another area of law – the way we elect Congress.

The country is divided into Congressional Districts of equal population – about 762,000 people each. Each district gets one representative. That amounts to the 435 members of the House of Representatives.

Each district typically elects a House member of the party that controls the district. Only 10-15% of the districts are actually competitive. (That’s why members of Congress are seldom voted out of office.)

Because populations shift, the districts must be redrawn periodically. That’s done by state legislatures. In doing so, the legislatures often “gerrymander” the districts. That is, they draw weird-shaped districts in order to distribute the population such that each district has a slight majority of the party doing the drawing. In a state with a 55/45 split between the two parties, the party in power can easily achieve an 80-20 split in the House members elected from that state. There’s more about gerrymandering HERE.

Gerrymandering has been going on for a long time, overtly or covertly. It’s unseemly and might be unfair, but it’s part of our system of representative government. The Supreme Court allows it, because there’s nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it.

But when the gerrymandering is done for the purpose of racial discrimination, there are special rules that have evolved and changed. For a while back in the Jim Crow days, the Democrats who controlled the South racially gerrymandered the districts in a way to prevent the election of Black representatives.

That wasn’t difficult. Even in Louisiana which is about 30% Black, they simply drew the districts such that no district had anywhere close to a majority of Black voters. Divide and conquer was the strategy. The result for many years was that there were none or very few Black members of Congress.

That changed in the last half of the 20th century with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and numerous legal challenges to districting. In fits and starts, judges gradually concluded that the VRA together with the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment required that a state’s Congressional delegation be Black in proportion to the Black population of the state. In Louisiana, that meant that two of their six representatives should be Black since about 30% of the state population was Black.

That was achieved with gerrymandering. They drew two “majority minority” districts that concentrated the 30% Black population. The resulting districts had a weird shape, but there was some assurance that two Blacks would get elected in those two mostly-Black districts.

It was something like affirmative action. When the number of Blacks qualifying for prestige colleges and jobs was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the qualifications scale. Similarly, when the number of Blacks getting elected to Congress was not “enough,” society put its thumb on the election scale. For a while, Lady Justice peeked to check which race she was judging.  

There’s an expression in law that hard facts make bad law. Imagine a case where a child is run over and crippled after darting into a passing car. The law says the driver was not at fault but our emotions want to help that child, and so we bend the law to obtain a result that’s emotionally satisfying but legally bad.

In racial gerrymandering, the hard fact was that not many Blacks were being elected to Congress despite a significant sentiment that Congress should have more. The bad law that resulted was divvying up Congressional districts by race.

Allocating representation in Congress by skin color is almost as bad as allocating arrests, convictions and sentencing in murder cases by skin color. It denies our individuality. It assumes that Blacks will and should vote only for Blacks while whites will and should vote only for whites. To the extent those assumptions are unfortunately accurate, the effect is to further drive people apart racially. It is all founded on a destructive us/them view of race.

Moreover, this racial divisiveness is self-perpetuating. Politicians become motivated to reinforce their constituents’ destructive beliefs that they can only be represented by a member of their own race, not “the other” race.

In short, racial gerrymandering is founded in racism, and it promotes more racism.

In my upcoming final installment of this series, I’ll discuss the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last week abolishing racial gerrymandering. It’s the most boldly correct and politically consequential decision in years. And I’ll discuss the media’s disgraceful reporting on it.

A primer on gerrymandering and race discrimination

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The 435 members of the House of Representatives represent the people of specific geographic areas. Those areas are drawn up to include equal populations.

The population of a Congressional District is currently about 762,000 people. The intent is for each citizen and 762,000 of his close friends to have a voice in Congress.

This necessarily means that Congressional Districts have vastly different geographic sizes and shapes reflecting different population concentrations. Alaska has only one Congressional District covering the entire sparsely populated state, while one of the 26 Congressional Districts in New York State is just a few square miles of densely populated Manhattan.

Because populations change and shift, Congressional Districts must be redrawn periodically. (It’s different for the Senate where each state gets two Senators regardless of population, and the boundaries of states don’t change.)

The natural question is, who draws up these ever-changing Congressional Districts?

A computer program could do it in milliseconds. Give it a few factors to consider such as natural geographic boundaries, and then ask it to draw up random equal-population globs on the map.

Ah, but simplicity and logic in government are usually subordinated to the political needs, incompetence and corruption of politicians.

In the case of drawing up Congressional Districts, those politicians are among the worst of their kind – state legislators. You know, those brilliant statemen who take a few months off from their ordinary jobs as rocket scientists and brain surgeons in order to inflict on the population of their state whatever legislation best meets the needs of their donors.

The needs of their donors can be summed up with: “Maximize my power by maximizing my political party.”

The legislators thus draw up districts that favor their party. A seventh grader from yesteryear, or a PhD from today, can see how this is easily done. You simply draw the districts so that the majority party has a majority not just in the state as a whole, but in each district.  

Say a state has a population of 7.62 million, with a total number of Congressional Districts of 10 (because 7.62 million people divided by 762,000 people per district equals about 10 districts). Say further that about 3.16 million are Republicans and the other 4.46 million are Democrats (or at least tend to vote that way) for a party split of about 60/40 between Democrats and Republicans.

In an ideal world, the districts might be drawn such that the party split between Democrat and Republican Representatives is about the same as the party split between Democrat and Republican voters – about 60/40 – and so there would be 6 Democrat Representatives and 4 Republican ones.

In the real world, however, here’s where it gets mischievous. In my example, the state legislature is probably controlled by the Democrats, since 60% of the voters are Democrats.

That Democrat legislature will be motivated to “gerrymander” the Congressional Districts to maximize the number of Democrat Representatives and minimize the number of Republican ones.

They achieve this by drawing the Congressional Districts in such a way that Democrats have at least a small majority in every Congressional District. If a map shows a Republican majority in a district, then they shift the geographic boundary of that district to borrow from an adjoining district where the Democrat/Republican split is more favorable. The outcome can be weirdly-shaped districts, such as shown on the above map of Louisiana.

Gerrymandering is always possible, because a statewide political split won’t be reflected in every county and every precinct. Rural counties tend to lean Republican, while urban counties tend to lean Democrat. If the legislature needs a few more Democrats in order to have a majority in a rural district, just shift the district boundary to borrow some from the nearby city.

In my example, that could mean the ten districts in the state wind up with Democrat/Republican splits of something like 55/45, 60/40, 57/43, 62/38, and so on. With their 60/40 overall advantage, the Democrats have plenty of votes to spread around in order to have a majority in each of the ten districts.

This result is odd, and arguably not intended by the Founders. In a state where Republicans have 40% of the voters, they wind up with zero Congressional Representatives. And, of course, they wind up with zero Senators as well, since Senators are elected statewide in this state that is 60% Democrat. Millions of Republicans in a Blue state can be left with no representation in Congress.

In my example above, Democrats are the gerrymanderers. But a recent example of gerrymandering was by Texas Republicans who, spurred on by President Trump, gerrymandered their state to shift about 5 House seats from Democrat to Republican. Democrats are poised to return the favor in Virginia and California, while Republicans are poised to re-return the favor in Florida. We have full-on gerrymandering wars.

Gerrymandering is a volatile issue. It seems at odds with representative government because it allows the majority party to not just out-vote the minority party, but to lock them out of government altogether, at least in a given state’s Congressional delegation.

In the preceding paragraph, I used “minority” in the numerical sense, as in the “minority party” as distinct from the “majority party.” When “minority” is used in gerrymandering in the racial sense, the matter becomes not just volatile, but explosive. That’s the subject of a long-overdue Supreme Court decision this week, which I’ll discuss in my next column.

On men rebranding into women and Democrats re-branding into Independents

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It’s not easy being a Democrat. It began a century and a half ago when they got caught on the wrong side of history.

Democrats supported the enslavement of human beings. Many of them actually owned enslaved human beings. They fought the bloodiest war in U.S. history to retain their right to enslave human beings.

Suffice to say that this right to enslave human beings was not one of the God-given ones mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration does not speak solemnly of the right to “life, liberty, happiness and enslaving humans.”

History sided with the Declaration and against the Democrats, for a while.  

But, alas, history these days is written not by the winners but by the Democrats – specifically the Democrats who rule the Humanities Departments at major U.S. universities. These Democrat humanist historians saw that slavery was bad for the Democrat brand. So, they buried it.

As a result, most people today – especially young people – think it was the Republicans who were the Southern slave owners and they think (I’m not making this up) that Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat.

Blame this on the Democrats in higher education, but blame it also on the Democrats in lower education. Teachers tend to be Democrats. When it comes to teaching the role of Democrats in slavery and the Civil War, they don’t.

Their past safely buried, the Democrats succeeded in rebranding themselves as civil libertarians who wanted equal civil rights for everyone. In short, they rebranded themselves as Republicans.

But they kept the name “Democrat,” mostly.

But not entirely. Many Democrats decided to candidly call themselves “socialists.” I give them credit for being honest enough to call themselves what they were, but I give them discredit for being what they were. Socialism is a proven failure.

As time went on, people came to recognize the failure of socialism. It sounded great in those university humanities departments, but invariably failed every time it was tried in the real world – from the Soviet Union to China to Eastern Europe to Latin America to Cuba to everywhere else. It succeeded in exactly zero places.

And so, the growing socialist wing of the Democratic party re-branded itself. They became “liberals.”

It was a shameless theft of the word “liberal,” which had always meant small-government and individual rights. In fact, in Great Britain, the word liberal still retains its old meaning. If you want to start a fight, introduce a GB liberal to an American one. (Don’t worry, they won’t break anything.)

That worked for a while for the Democrats. But the people eventually caught on. They came to recognize that “liberal” did not mean liberal in the classic sense. It instead meant something roughly the opposite – it meant socialism. And so “liberal” became a bad brand.

The Democrats wondered, what do we do now? Starting another civil war seemed imprudent, given that they didn’t have many guns.

They decided to simply re-brand again. It worked before, sort of, so it would work again. They started calling themselves “woke.” As if non-Democrats are all busy sleeping.

You know what happened to “woke.” It became a four-letter word. The reason is that people began to associate woke with – you know what’s coming – socialism (and worse).  

And then came “progressive.” As if anyone not a Democrat is regressive. This progressive moniker ironically harkens back over a century to the Presidency of Woodrow Wilson who was an avowed white supremacist until a stroke involuntarily relieved him of his power in favor of his wife who was an avowed white supremacist and eugenicist.

As for the success of the current “progressive” brand . . . meh.

The problem is that Democrats are simply too burdened by the brand “Democrat.” They can call themselves whatever, but people still know that Democrats are the people who wanted to replace merit with skin color, who wanted boys in the girls’ locker rooms, who have been predicting the incineration of the world for two generations, and who wanted – and did – abolish the nation’s borders.  

And so, in the most brazen re-branding yet, the Democrats have taken to calling themselves non-Democrats. Specifically, they are starting to call themselves “Independents.”

Yep, in a number of upcoming races, lifelong hard-left Democrats are calling themselves “Independents” in an apparent bid to distance themselves from any accountability for their Party’s craziness – a craziness that they endorsed up until, oh, about yesterday.

It reminds me of one particular craziness by the Democrats. For years, they maintained that a man could change into a woman by announcing that he had simply changed his mind about his man/woman thing.

I submit that Democrats are likely to be about as successful in “changing” into Independents as men are successful in “changing” into women. But we’ll see.

Do Blue states produce stupidity, or does stupidity produce Blue states?

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Blue states have more problems than Red states. On average, the people in Blue states are less law-abiding and less law educated.

The dysfunctional big cities are mostly in Blue states – Chicago, L.A., New York, Baltimore, Seattle, Portland, Detroit, East St Louis, Minneapolis, and – I’ll admit it – my own former city, Denver.

Blue states have the worse budget woes. California, Illinois, Washington, New York and now Colorado are facing severe shortfalls. Their remedy is of course to raise taxes, not to cut spending. You see, the official color of Blue-sters is green.

In Colorado, there’s the TABOR Amendment to the state constitution which requires voter approval for these tax shakedowns. Naturally, the Democrat politicians are scheming to dodge the Amendment, even though the people of the state have already foiled them in their dodges three separate times. Ah, but this time the Democrats have 100% Democrat appointees on the Colorado Supreme Court.

That’s right, even the Blue-ish people of Blue Colorado (isn’t it a cruel irony that “Colorado” means “color red”?) refuse to allow their elected Blue-sters to raise taxes beyond the rate of inflation. But the Blue-ster politicians may still find a way to do it.

In all Blue states, there’s a psychological denial of the fact that if you raise taxes too much, people will move away. In California, they’re proposing a “one-time” 5% tax on the wealth of billionaires, as assessed by government assessors (how convenient that they do the assessing).

Apart from the fact that this tax is almost certainly unconstitutional, and vague to the point of being unenforceable, it ignores the fact that billionaires are typically smart enough to dodge it by . . . [wait for it] . . . moving out.

Duh.

One might think that even a Democrat state legislator in California would know that typical billionaires are smart enough to figure that out. But no, Democrat state legislators in California are not smart enough to figure out that the billionaires will figure that out.

We’re talking world class stupidity here.

This Blue state stupidity has gotten too obvious to ignore. The country used to mock the people of Mississippi. But recent data shows that Mississippi students are now doing better on standardized tests than California students.

People used to mock the kissin’ cousins of Appalachia. But we now have a deep Red Vice President who went to Yale Law School after growing up poor and barefoot in deep Red Appalachia, while the new mayor of deep Blue New York is an unredeemed Marxist with nary a clue about how to balance a budget, manage people, avoid Jew-baiting, or tie his shoes. And he was voted into office by a million deep Blue voters who don’t know Karl Marx from Groucho, and don’t care that they don’t.

So, I have a question along the lines of, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

In Blue states, did the stupidity of the people make the states Blue? Or did the Blue states make the people there stupid?

I think it’s mostly the latter. The people who flocked to California a generation or two ago weren’t stupid.  Heck, they launched Hollywood, they invented Silicon Valley, they made surfing cool (and that’s no easy feat). Fifty years ago, I wished everybody could be California girls.

But after the people got there, something weird happened. Maybe it was in the water or the drugs or the collective fashion-consciousness.

Whatever it was, it became cool to be leftish, to be druggy, to be counter to whatever is the culture. The more extreme, the more cool – all the way up to, and stopping just short of, Charles Manson.  

Yep, there was general agreement even in California that Manson was a step beyond cool. You could say that, in California, Charles Manson was literally too cool.

Of course, in the rest of the world, Manson was a murderous psychopath. California probably would not say that; too judgmental.

Once this mass hysteria took root in California, it spread like crabgrass. Fashion is like that. Hula hoops, bell bottoms, long hair and moustaches, streaking, gender mutilation, electric vehicles, dumbing down the school curriculum, you name it.

One day you’ve never heard of it, the next day you can’t live without it, and the following day you wouldn’t be caught dead in it.

And so, Leftism was the fashion of the day. Except it lasted for a generation. A generation lost in space.

In that time, they really messed things up. They tried to abolish merit, and almost succeeded, substituting a hodge-podge of skin color, sex habits, and political leanings. They ridiculed 2,000-year-old religions, and hated 3,000-year-old ones. They canceled and sought to outlaw anyone who disagreed with that agenda.

The fashion-conscious people went along with it for a long time. To be on the wrong side of fashion in a fashion-conscious world (and all worlds are) is to be without a friend. Better blue than uncool.

In short, my conclusion is that the Blue states produced stupidity, not the other way around.

But finally – or maybe this is not final – the tide turned, the fashion changed, the chickens came home to roost, the Kool-Aid ran out, and the people awakened from their wokeness.

They’re discovering, one hopes, that they aren’t actually stupid, but were just mistaken. We will see what comes next.

Now that democracy has failed in America, let’s try it in Iran and Cuba!

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Half a century ago, American children were taught in elementary school that “representative democracy” was the highest form of government.

Part of me wondered even then, why should everyone get an equal say in things? That wasn’t how it worked in my elementary school, I observed, even as they taught that creed. The students and the janitor didn’t get the same say as the principal and the teachers.

Some people are smarter, more diligent, better educated, work harder, and pay more taxes. Shouldn’t they get more of a say in how those taxes are spent than people who are not smart, not diligent, don’t work, aren’t educated, and don’t pay taxes?

The only plausible answer to that question as to why everyone should get an equal say, is that everyone should feel like a stakeholder in the nation.

That’s a nice sentiment, but there are several problems with it. First, allowing – nay, begging – stupid lazy people to vote is a high price to pay to make them feel like stakeholders. Second, it doesn’t work. They still don’t feel like stakeholders.

Third, if you want people who don’t pay taxes to feel like stakeholders in the nation, maybe a good first step would be to ask them to pay some of the nation’s taxes.

As it stands today, the bottom 40% of earners pay about one percent of federal income taxes. Is it any wonder that those so-called taxpayers always want to increase taxes? It’s because they themselves never pay them.

The Founders recognized this fallacy with the democratic republic they created. They recognized that at some point the lazy stupid masses might come to realize that they could vote for a “redistribution” of the wealth of the smart hardworking producers. That’s undoubtedly the reason that the Constitution originally did not allow for income taxes; it took the 16th Amendment. (Nearly all amendments after the first ten were mistakes, BTW.)

In another genius of socialist branding, the stupid lazy masses have dubbed this legalized theft “fairness.”

But let’s leave the tax tangent and get back to the broader failure of American democracy.

What we have now is mob rule. Everyone has a microphone in the form of the internet, including me. With that microphone, they can get “clicks” on what they post. Those clicks are more or less exchangeable for cash.

Human nature being what it is, many people are owned by their desire for cash, and thus many internet posters are owned by their desire for clicks. They post stuff that is designed to generate clicks and cash.

That’s why we now have horrible creatures out there like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens who are willing to generate clicks/cash with blood libels of the Jews.

Barely better are the people behind “Instapundit” who post misleading headlines appealing to notions in my tribe such as all Democrats are transexuals who want to conduct “gender affirmation” surgery on children in schools while burning the flag in Satanic rituals in the playground. (I’m sure the leftist websites have similarly weird headlines about Republicans, but I don’t see them because I don’t go to those websites.)

It’s political porn; it panders to the worst instincts of political junkies; it’s addictive; and it’s destructive to them, us, and our society.

And it works – for the perpetrators anyway. Ask Tucker.

(I have a friend who says he habitually clicks into Instapundit, but only to get the links. Uh huh. And I’m sure he got Playboy just for the articles.)

Speaker of obscenity, there’s the legislative branch. That’s the branch of government where a majority of the people elected to do the voting are supposed to enact and repeal laws.

Except it takes more than a majority to do both enacting and repealing. The Senate filibuster rule (another thing not in the Founder’s Constitution, or even the current one) means that it takes 60 of the 100 Senators to enact or repeal almost any law.

That means that the minority party – the political party that the people decided should be fewer in number than the other party – has a veto over any enacting or repealing of the laws.

That’s a bit weird. The “rule” is that that majority rules, except that the minority gets a veto. Huh?

It gets worse. Not only does the minority get a veto, they can shut down the government unless the majority concedes its power to them.

The minority shut down the government for over a month last fall, demanding that the majority pretend that the minority was the majority and the majority was the minority, by repealing part of the tax bill that was passed by the majority months earlier.

Now the minority is doing the same on a narrow issue, with the result that people are waiting hours in TSA lines at the airport. (I say fire TSA anyway; it’s all theater.)

The latest is the minority’s filibustering of a law to require photo ID when you vote, just as you’re required to have photo ID when you board an airplane, borrow a book, or cash a check – a law that is supported by 80% of Americans.

Maybe the majority should formally concede that it is effectively the minority. Then they can turn the tables and demand those minority filibuster rights. At which time the minority would say, “Not so fast, we’re  the minority, so we’re in charge here!”

Yep, that’s American “democracy.” Don’t even get me started on the European kind.

And sooooo . . . .

Let’s impose this farcical system on Cuba and Iran. Given their history of ecumenical largess (I have no idea what that phrase means, but it popped into my demagogue head; help me here, Tucker) they’ll surely be every bit as successful with it as we currently are.

OK, don’t go away mad. Here’s a tidbit to brighten your day. Donald J. Trump is not a Democrat, and I’m not even sure he’s a democrat.

But bear in mind that the greatest leader of the ancient world – the one who brought the greatest good to the greatest number – was Augustus Caesar. He wasn’t either.  

Are the Dems rooting for Iran because Iran is America’s enemy, or because the new Supreme Leader is gay?

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Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.

One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.

Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world who sought freedom in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China and Eastern Europe.

Dems believe that Iran’s enemy has raped the earth, ruined the climate, undermined the sacraments of diversity, equity and inclusion, elected a man with bad orange hair to the Presidency, increased the wealth of everyone but at the cost of especially increasing the wealth of the wealthy, made “woke” a four-letter word, and is rapidly driving Starbucks out of business.

Iran’s enemy is of course America, which happens to be the Dems’ primary enemy as well. So, in a textbook example of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the Dems see Iran as their friend.

That’s all that matters to the Dems. Forget about Iran’s atrocities. Forget about the hostage-taking, the baby-beheadings, the rapes, the murders, the incinerations. Forget about the imprisonment of people for political beliefs, the torture of dissidents for dissenting, the belligerent development of a nuclear bomb for use on Israel, and the throwing of gays off tall buildings for being gay.

(Correction: A reader has informed me that Iran does not throw gays off tall buildings; they pay ISIS to do that. Homer nods.)

Which brings me to my second theory. It has been reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader who assumed the supremacy after the supreme demise of his supreme father is . . .

. . . gay.

President Trump, a supporter of gay rights, was reportedly pleased by the news. He laughed.

Gayness is not a sin, in my view. It’s barely worthy of mockery. For cheap mockery material, it’s on the order of baldness.

But under these circumstances it’s notable. The new Gay-atollah could be a second reason why the Dems are rooting for Iran.

It would be a DEI “resistance” exercise by the Dems, now that ordinary DEI has been outlawed or at least discredited. As in “I want the gay guy to win!” Or “I want the gay guy to beat Trump!” Or just “I want the gay guy!” (“But the bushy beard? Eww!”)

As for that newly-supreme-and-outed gay man serving as the putative Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran while cowering in a corner somewhere, he has yet another thing to watch out for. He has to watch out for not just bombs in the sky, but himself in the sky. Stay away from tall buildings, my friend.

Rubio/Vance vs. Harris/Newsom in 2028 – seriously?

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Predictions are hazardous, especially about the future and especially about politics, but the best prediction right now is that the 2028 Republican nominee for President will be either JD Vance or Marco Rubio, and the Democrat nominee will be either Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris. The ones not nominated for President will likely be nominated for Vice President.

Before we employ these people for these important jobs, let’s do what employers do: Let’s look at their resumes.

(I’ve tried to present this in a neutral manner, unlike Wikipedia which unabashedly spins the tone and even the substance of the bios to favor Harris and Newsom and to disfavor Vance and Rubio.)

JD Vance:

  • Grew up poor in Appalachia with an alcoholic and drug-abusing mother.
  • Joined the Marines.
  • Graduated Ohio State University, summa cum laude.
  • Graduated Yale Law School where he was an Editor of Yale Law Journal.
  • Clerked for a prominent federal court judge, and then worked at a prestige law firm.
  • Worked for Peter Thiel’s venture capital company.
  • Wrote a NYT best-selling book about his life, later made into a hit movie directed by Ron Howard; the book sold three million copies, and the movie had over four million viewings.
  • Elected U.S. Senator for Ohio.
  • Elected Vice President of the United States.
  • Sports a lousy beard.

Kamala Harris:

  • Daughter of an Afro-Jamaican father and Indian mother.
  • Graduated Howard University (no listed honors).
  • Graduated University of California Hasting College of Law (no listed honors).
  • District Attorney for Alameda County, then appointed to state positions by an older politician she was dating, Willie Brown.
  • Elected first woman, first African-American and first South Asian-American Attorney General of California.
  • Elected Senator from California (first African-American, first South Asian-American, second Black woman).
  • Elected first woman, first African-American, first South Asian-American Vice President, and given responsibilities for discovering and remedying the “root causes” of illegal immigration under the Biden administration.
  • Defeated in 2024 election for President.

Marco Rubio:

  • Born to legal Cuban refugees in Florida.
  • Graduated University of Florida.
  • Graduated University of Miami Law School, cum laude.
  • Elected to Florida legislature, then elected first Cuban-American Speaker of the State House of Representatives.
  • Adjunct Professor at Florida International University.
  • Elected U.S. Senator from Florida and served ten years, was member of numerous committees and subcommittees.
  • Defeated in the Republican nomination for President.
  • Appointed Secretary of State by President Trump.
  • Widely considered very active as Secretary of State, with the NYT dubbing him “Secretary of Everything.”

Gavin Newsom:

  • Born into a prominent San Francisco family, where the father was close friends of the Getty oil family.
  • Played college baseball.
  • Started a successful winery with one of the Getty’s, and went on to other successful business ventures.
  • Appointed to political positions by the same mentor that Kamala Harris had (but didn’t date him).
  • Elected Mayor of San Francisco.
  • Elected Lieutenant Governor of California.
  • Elected Governor of California.
  • Had “severe dyslexia” as a child according to Wikipedia, and it’s still “pretty severe” according to Newsom.
  • Sports good hair.

So, there you have their bullet-point (can I still say that?) resumes. Which do you want to run the country?

Democrats condemn Trump’s “misogyny” for saying “we’re going to have to bring the women’s team” as well as the men’s to the SOTU

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In the raucous locker room celebration of the Gold Medal win by the men’s hockey team on the final day of the Olympics – an upset win for the ages – the team received a phone call from President Trump. They put the President on the speaker.

In the course of the hilarity and fun, Trump invited the team to this week’s State of the Union Address. Almost before the invitation was out of Trump’s mouth, the team accepted. “We’re in!”

Amid the laughing, shouting and carrying on, Trump quipped, “I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that!” The team laughed and roared its approval. Trump chuckled, “I do believe I would probably be impeached” if the women (who also won gold) were not invited.

The women’s team were no-shows, citing scheduling conflicts.

The men, in contrast, were able to clear their conflicts. Chants of “U S A, U S A, U S A” predictably ensued as they entered, for which even the Democrats felt obligated to stand. Mind you, these Democrats would not even stand for:

“If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens. Not illegal aliens.”

Over the course of the week, the Democrats found a way to be offended by the President’s locker room quip. The offense they settled on was “misogyny.”

The basis for this misogyny, apparently, was that Trump’s quip that he would “have to” invite the women to the SOTU implied that he didn’t really want the women to come, and he was inviting them only to avoid being impeached.

Trump said a lot of true things Tuesday evening – about an hour’s worth too many. None was truer than when he gestured to the silent, stony Democrats and said, “These people are crazy.”

Are the Supreme Court Justices “black-robed despots” deserving our “utter contempt”?

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Although this is not what I hoped for, it is what I predicted. The Supreme Court struck down the bulk of the Administration’s tariffs. All three liberal Justices went against the tariffs, and half of the six conservative ones did as well – which included two appointed by President Trump.

Not bothering with any legal analysis, the President instead declared that the six Justices who went against him are “very unpatriotic” and “fools” that he’s “ashamed of.”

He went on to call them “pooh-pooh breaths.” OK, I made that one up.

Years ago, another public figure employed similar language to criticize the Supreme Court. He characterized the Justices as “black-robed despots” for whom he had “utter contempt.”

That was after the Court unanimously declared racially segregated schools to be unconstitutional. That public figure was Alabama Governor George Wallace.

Bullying the Supreme Court didn’t work back then, and it’s not working now.

Let’s take the President’s name-calling one epithet at a time. First, the President says the Justices are “unpatriotic.”

OK, Mr. President, here’s something non-legal that you should be able to understand. At big law firms, each of these Justices could be making ten to twenty times their present income. They instead choose to be judges to serve the people as best they can.

Deciding a case against you, Mr. President, does not make them unpatriotic.    

They’re “fools” you say? At least seven of the Supreme Court Justices are extraordinarily smart lawyers with sterling backgrounds, and the other two are no slouches.

In contrast, your own legal background consists of being sued a lot.

And, Mr. President, you say you’re “ashamed of” the Justices?

Frankly, it comes as news to the country that you’re capable of shame. I voted for you three times, and your shamelessness continues to astonish me.

So, disagree with the Supreme Court – I sometimes do. Criticize their legal reasoning – it’s occasionally wrong.

But recognize that the job of a judge is not to be a Republican or a Democrat. The job is to apply the law of the land to the facts of the case.

If you personally don’t understand the law applicable to a case, or if you don’t have all the facts, then you aren’t criticizing. You’re just spouting off.

When that spouting off crosses the line into name-calling of dedicated professionals, you’re just being childish. I want more than that in my President.

Glenn K. Beaton practiced law in the federal courts, including the Supreme Court.