Dear President Trump: I Don’t Want to be “the Party of Healthcare.” I Want to be the Party of the Constitution.

A federal judge in Texas recently ruled that Obamacare is unconstitutional due to its mandate requiring Americans to buy health insurance, and the Trump administration has decided not to defend the law, reigniting the “repeal and replace” battle lost by the Republicans following Trump’s election.  Speaking on the decision not to defend the law, Trump has declared that Republicans will become “the party of healthcare,” and while I am shaking my head in dismay, Barack Obama must be smiling to himself, because he knows that even if Democrats lose the battle over Obamacare, they will have won the war to make the federal government (and therefore taxpayers) ultimately responsible for healthcare.    

Obamacare was nothing more than a wealth-transfer scheme in which taxpayers were forced to subsidize health insurance for people who supposedly couldn’t afford it on their own.  I say supposedly because whether or not someone can “afford” something is a complicated question that requires a study of what choices they’ve made in life, and an assessment of whether or not they’re doing anything and everything they should be doing to assume full responsibility for themselves and their families.  Nothing like that happens in Obamacare or in any welfare program run by the geniuses managing our federal government.  The war fought by Obama and Democrats wasn’t over Obamacare, per se.  It was over whether it is the proper role of the federal government to ensure that all Americans have healthcare.  I am not 100% clear on what Trump means when he says Republicans will be “the party of healthcare,” but it’s difficult to see how that label restores the power of the people to be free of the federal government’s interference in our healthcare and in our wallets. 

I’ve written on this subject so many times that I feel like a broken record.  The only role the federal government legitimately has with respect to health insurance and healthcare is to ensure a free and fair marketplace.  To that end we should be pursuing tort reform, reducing the regulatory burden and paperwork mandates associated with healthcare, getting rid of barriers to competition and legislating transparency in healthcare pricing.  The federal government made sure that we know how many calories are in that cheeseburger we just ordered, but good luck finding out how many thousands of dollars that surgery is going to cost you.  A friend of mine was recently injured when her car was rear-ended.  Her medical bills are now close to $300,000 and she’s not done with her treatment.  Everyone, myself included, has a story about the outrageous medical bill they received for something.  Democrats and Obamacare did NOTHING to address the immoral scam that has become our health industry.  Instead they just found a way to pass the bill to someone else – hard-working, tax-paying strangers who have zero control over the health habits of the people they’ve been forced to subsidize.  That’s not only wrong, it continues our slide towards economic suicide.  If we could only have the good sense to take the steps that would restore rational, competitive pricing to healthcare, then it wouldn’t seem so crazy to make every capable citizen responsible for paying his own bills.  What a novel idea, eh? 

We MUST have the fight in this country to restore the Constitution and the limits of the federal government to use its citizens as a credit card.  Only when that happens is there any hope of Making America Great Again.  Good luck to us.

~CW

The post can also be viewed at the blog site The Pesky Truth.

The Left’s Faux Reality

 

“Trump is a fascist!”

“Trump is a white supremacist!”

“Trump is colluding with the Russians!”

What do you do when the realities of the world don’t conform to your pre-formed prejudices and desires for shaping the world around you?  Well if you’re an honest and reasonable person, you re-adjust your prejudices and desires according to reality.  But if you’re a leftist bent on an agenda that isn’t served by reality, it’s the other way around;  you simply invent your own reality to conform to your prejudices, or as Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker and other leftists like to put it nowadays, you define your own truth.  When you have the luxury of your own truth you’re spared from engaging in thoughtful debate or justifying your actions, and the real world is no longer an obstacle to your schemes and ignoble ambitions.  Anything is possible if you conjure up an alternate universe, and if you can persuade others to pretend along with you.

Alternate Reality has long been one prong of the Left’s many strategies for forcing its agenda on this nation, but since the election of Barack Obama, who showed the Left the art of how it is done, it has been elevated to center stage.  Obama campaigned on the myth that the economic recession that started in 2008 was entirely the fault of George W. Bush and Republicans.  I can’t recall anyone ever asking Obama to defend his reasoning for such a claim.  Instead, the media talked about thrills up their legs and laughed along with him when he adopted his phony, folksy accent and pushed his pretend broom around the stage to “clean up the messes” supposedly left just by the Republicans.  And so the myth was born and it became the Left’s alt-reality that Bush and the Republicans destroyed the economy and Obama rode in on his white horse and rescued us.  That constitutes “their truth” in the Left’s make-believe universe.

Obama was central to advancing the faux reality that man-made “climate change” is a proven fact, because the clever leftists know that the more you evade debate and speak as though something is a fact, the more some people will accept it as fact and ignore any evidence to the contrary.  Obama unilaterally declared the debate to be over, citing the falsehood that 97% of climate scientists agree, and any dissent by people far more educated on climate science than Obama has no place in the faux reality.  And now, of course, the world is doomed in twelve short years (according to the truth of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) which is why we must put our fates and our money into the hands of….wait for it…leftist politicians.  Funny how that works, eh? 

The Obama years also gave us the faux worlds of Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick in which, in a country of 330 million people, a handful of incidents of overly aggressive policing were parlayed into a phony narrative of widespread, systematic racism and oppression running rampant in our police forces and all through American society.  The reality, according to an article written by Larry Elder and featured on the website RealClearPolitics.com, happens to be just a tad different:

No one doubts the existence of bad cops or of cops who make poor decisions or who use poor judgement. But where's the evidence of "systemic" racism? When black Harvard economist Roland Fryer conducted a 2016 study of police use of force, he expected to find widespread evidence of police officers disproportionately using deadly force against blacks. Instead, he found the opposite. Police, he concluded, were more hesitant to use deadly force against blacks than against whites. "It is," he admitted, "the most surprising result of my career." This tracks another study published in 2014 by researchers at Washington State University, who reached the same conclusion, finding "there was significant bias favoring [emphasis added] blacks where decisions to shoot were concerned."

According to the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald: "In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to The Washington Post. The paper categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as 'unarmed.' That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. ... Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population."

The stats don’t lie and Mr. Elder’s information is easy to verify for anyone interested in the truth, but this of course excludes leftists and race hustlers with their own agenda, along with the sheep who so desperately want to believe the hustlers.

A false narrative was used to justify the Left’s shameful partisan rejection of SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh as his accuser was deemed to be entitled to her own truth according to Democrat Senator Corey Booker and his fellow posers, which meant they could simply ignore the abundance of evidence that disproved her story along with the reality of Justice Kavanaugh’s life history that ought to have put a question mark in the mind of anyone who is objective. …Anyone who is objective…..  We the People weren’t supposed to notice the convenient, self-serving connection between Democrats’ faux reality and their political ambitions for that SCOTUS seat; but alas the leftists can’t seem to perfect the art of making everyone bow to their faux realities, though there is no shortage of bullying and demands to observe their rules of political correctness to try and force it to be so. 

The Covington Catholic farce only enjoyed brief success as a faux reality thanks to the marvel of cell phone cameras and the existence of fact-based news outlets to counter the MSM, but the leftists certainly gave it the old college try.

Nowhere is the Left’s faux reality better displayed than in their rabid, delusional hatred of Donald Trump.  The billionaire real estate developer entered politics at the age of 70, when his disgust for what he perceived to be this nation’s misguided and inept leadership finally reached a boiling point.  Despite America’s familiarity with Trump, it was only when he became president that the Left suddenly discovered that this well-known celebrity of 30 years who hob-knobbed with Republicans and Democrats alike was actually a “fascist,” a “white supremacist,” and a “Russian agent.”  Furthermore the wall isn’t a necessary component of border security, it’s purely a “vanity project” to gratify Trump’s ego (in contrast to the walls constructed during the Obama administration which were necessary for our security, apparently).

I take particular umbrage with the Left’s duplicitous faux narrative that Donald Trump is the “world’s biggest liar” or that he is somehow uniquely immoral among American presidents.  Democrats have used Trump’s sloppiness with the truth to double down on their strategy to manipulate young minds so that liberals and the young are completely incapable of distinguishing between lies of careless speech and exaggeration versus far more destructive lies that are meant to trick them into giving up more and more of their Constitutional rights and their liberty.  Historian Lee Edwards did a great job of putting the reality of Trump’s lies in perspective with those of past presidents in his essay for The Heritage Foundation:  “The Massive Lies Of Past Presidents Make Trump Look Honest;” and esteemed historian Victor Davis Hansen gives perspective on claims about Trump’s “immorality” in his piece, “Democratic presidents behaved a lot worse than Trump in the White House,” wherein he asks us to ponder this salient question: 

“The paradox again raises the question: When any one man can change the lives of 330 million, what exactly is presidential morality after all — private and personal sins, or the transgressions that affect millions of lives for the worse?” 

And finally, yours truly rebutted the laughable myth that Barack Obama was an honest broker when compared to Trump. 

Democrat Senator Tom Udall, in announcing his decision not to seek re-election, cited his ability to concentrate the remainder of his term on “…[getting] so much more done to help reverse the damage done to our planet, end the scourge of war, and to stop this president’s assault on our democracy and our communities.”  In the aftermath of the two-year Mueller investigation during which we learned about corrupt individuals within our FBI, Justice Department and State Department and their efforts to undermine a constitutionally elected president and hinder his administration it is nothing short of surreal to hear Udall’s galling and delusional claim that Trump is the one assaulting our democracy.  Good riddance, Senator Udall.  Be sure to take your faux reality with you when you leave.

Leftwing commenters on Fox News articles, especially those relating to Trump, love to call Fox “faux news” and hurl other insults denoting their low opinion of Fox’s credibility; but with the Mueller report now released and no evidence of collusion found, it turns out that Fox’s coverage was far more in keeping with the truth than their beloved “mainstream” news outlets which fed the Left’s need for validation of what they wanted the truth to be.  Will that change their opinion of Fox?  I doubt it, because – for its own selfish purposes - the Left has spawned a culture that no longer cares what is real and what isn’t.  To understand the destructiveness of this mindset, consider how the refusal to face reality would impact someone’s personal life.  If you refuse to face the truth about poor financial decisions, a bad spouse, a child in need of help or behaviors that destroy one’s health, how does denying reality serve your life in the long run?  It NEVER ends well, and it won’t end well for this nation, but the Left’s elites who mastermind alternate realities don’t care about the future of the country or about their fellow citizens.  They care only about their own grasp on power. 

~CW

This essay is also posted at the blog site The Pesky Truth.  

Gavin Newsom and the Illogic of Liberalism

(CNN) March 13, 2019: 

After signing an executive order that will place a moratorium on the death penalty in California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom gave an emotional explanation of his decision Wednesday, saying he could not morally allow executions in the Golden State to go forward.

"It's a very emotional place that I stand in," he said, noting that the subject was once "an abstract question" for him, but now he is "the backstop" for any execution that takes place in California. "And so I am expressing this is not from (a) paradigm of politics. It's not a situational conversation for me. This is about who I am as a human being. ... To me this is the right thing to do."

Newsom noted that the only thing standing in the way of executions resuming in California is the judicial review of the state's lethal injection procedure, which could be completed soon. Citing a National Academy of Sciences report estimating that 1 out of every 25 people on death row is innocent, Newsom said he could not countenance the odds of putting an innocent person to death.

"If that's the case, that means if we move forward executing 737 people in California, we will have executed roughly 30 people that are innocent," Newsom said. "I don't know about you. I can't sign my name to that. I can't be party to that. I won't be able to sleep at night."

See the full article here.

“….the subject was once "an abstract question" for him,…”

There, in one off the cuff remark – the truth spoken accidentally - is the essence of what’s wrong with liberalism.  Nothing matters until it happens to me.  I find it stunning that a man of Newsom’s age and resume is only just now pondering the weighty question of wrongful conviction and the death penalty,  but I ought to be used to it by now.  How many of our laws, named for the predictable victims of predictable crimes, are born as a consequence of a liberal’s stunned discovery that they too can be a victim?  Too much thinking in the abstract and not enough putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, just like we see with the Left’s nonchalant attitude towards the victims of illegals.  That said, it’s no surprise to me whatsoever that, having had his epiphany about executing “innocent” people who are on death row, California’s Liberal-in-Chief still gets it wrong. 

If I were the governor of California, or any state for that matter, and if I believed reports that 1 out of every 25 people on death row is innocent, it might occur to me that there is something seriously wrong with our justice system that requires immediate investigation, because our multi-layered appeals system is supposed to be the fail-safe against wrongful convictions, right?  If everyone is doing their job appropriately and with integrity, there should be virtually NO innocent people sitting on death row after all appeals have been exhausted.  How is it possible that this isn’t the case?  If Gavin Newsom truly believes that 4% of the people on death row are innocent, then he must also believe that our appeals system is broken, and yet in his “emotional” proclamation against the death penalty he proposes to do nothing about it.  No help will be coming for the “1 in 25 innocent people” who are languishing in prison because Gavin Newsom thinks his job is done by sparing them from the death penalty.  This is the Left’s idea of what it means to be heroic.

So what could Newsom do?  As someone keenly interested in the subject of crime and punishment, I’ve seen dozens of cases where people have been wrongfully convicted, though how many are on death row is a separate question (more on that later).  In nearly every case the system failed due to either human error or corruption.  The correction for that is surprisingly simple and yet agonizingly absent.  It’s called “A-C-C-O-U-N-T-A-B-I-L-I-T-Y.”  Every case of wrongful conviction should be thoroughly studied to determine what went wrong, and if there were mistakes or wrongdoing those responsible should be held to account by losing their jobs, their licenses or by legal punishment if that’s appropriate.  But we don’t live in an age of consistent accountability.  Nowadays, when convictions are overturned due to mistakes and malfeasance, the victims are compensated by large payouts from other innocents:  the taxpayers; and all too often the inept and corrupt keep doing what they do.  Where is Gavin Newsom’s outrage about that?  He has no outrage because he’s a voluntary player in that very system.

Do I believe 1 in 25 people on death row are wrongfully convicted?  Actually, no – not on death row.  That’s because I believe prosecutors tend not to seek the death penalty unless they have a mountain of damning evidence and because the system is weighted in favor of the accused.  That doesn’t mean it never happens, but I believe that it’s exceptionally rare, especially in these days of modern science.  But what I believe is irrelevant to my criticism of Gavin Newsom, because his claim is that he believes 4% of people on death row are wrongfully convicted. 

By the way, I am a proponent of the death penalty because it’s what some people deserve.  We shouldn’t have to indefinitely feed, clothe and house people who disregard the rights of others and kill for greed and pleasure.  They voluntarily forfeited their rights to live, in my humble opinion.  But I do believe that wrongful convictions do occur and are a blight on us as a society, and what people need to understand is that there’s no contradiction in supporting the death penalty if you also adhere to the principle that holding people accountable for their actions keeps the system working as it was intended so that “justice” really means justice.

~CW

Why Rand Paul Got It Wrong

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God."

            ~Oath of office for members of congress

An op-ed by Rand Paul was posted on Fox News today:

In September of 2014,  I had these words to say: "The president acts like he's a king. He ignores the Constitution.  He arrogantly says, 'If Congress will not act, then I must.'  Donald J. Trump agreed with me when he said in November 2014 that President Barack Obama couldn’t make a deal on immigration so “now he has to use executive action, and this is a very, very dangerous thing that should be overridden easily by the Supreme Court.”

I would literally lose my political soul if I decided to treat President Trump different than President Obama. (Although, I’ll note, not one Democrat criticized Obama for his executive orders.)  I support President Trump. I supported his fight to get funding for the wall from Republicans and Democrats alike, and I share his view that we need more and better border security.  However, I cannot support the use of emergency powers to get more funding, so I will be voting to disapprove of his declaration when it comes before the Senate.

Every single Republican I know decried President Obama’s use of executive power to legislate. We were right then. But the only way to be an honest officeholder is to stand up for the same principles no matter who is in power.  I was against foreign aid and foreign intervention without a true national security threat — under Republicans and Democrats.  I’ve stood up and voted against budgets that pile up endless debt and borrow too much — under Republicans and Democrats.  I will stand up for the Constitution, the rule of law, and the system of checks and balances we have — under Republicans and Democrats.  Every single Republican I know decried President Obama’s use of executive power to legislate. We were right then. But the only way to be an honest officeholder is to stand up for the same principles no matter who is in power.

There are really two questions involved in the decision about emergency funding. First, does statutory law allow for the president’s emergency orders, and, second, does the Constitution permit these emergency orders?  As far as the statute goes, the answer is maybe — although no president has previously used emergency powers to spend money denied by Congress, and it was clearly not intended to do that.  But there is a much larger question: the question of whether or not this power and therefore this action are constitutional. With regard to the Constitution, the Supreme Court made it very clear in Youngstown Steel in 1952, in a case that is being closely reexamined in the discussion of executive power.  In Youngstown, the Court ruled that there are three kinds of executive order: orders that carry out an expressly voiced congressional position, orders where Congress’ will is unclear, and, finally, orders clearly opposed to the will of Congress.

To my mind, like it or not, we had this conversation.  In fact, the government was shut down in a public battle over how much money would be spent on the wall and border security.  It ended with a deal that Congress passed and the president signed into law, thus determining the amount.  Congress clearly expressed its will not to spend more than $1.3 billion and to restrict how much of that money could go to barriers.  Therefore, President Trump’s emergency order is clearly in opposition to the will of Congress.  Moreover, the broad principle of separation of powers in the Constitution delegates the power of the purse to Congress.  This turns that principle on its head.

I, and many of my fellow members, called out President Obama for abusing executive authority. President Obama famously said that if Congress wouldn’t do what he wanted, he had his pen and his phone ready.  That was wrong.  Many of those voting now spent a good portion of their campaigns running ads against these words and actions of President Obama.  They will and should be condemned for hypocrisy if they vote to allow this because they want the policy or want to stand with the president in a partisan fight.

Some are attempting to say that there isn’t a good analogy between President Obama’s orders or the Youngstown case. I disagree. Not only are the issues similar, but I think Youngstown Steel implications are even more profound in the case of emergency appropriations. We spent the last two months debating how much money should be spent on a wall, and Congress came to a clear conclusion: $1.3 billion. Without question, the president’s order for more wall money contradicts the will of Congress and will, in all likelihood, be struck down by the Supreme Court.  In fact, I think the president’s own picks to the Supreme Court may rebuke him on this.

Regardless, I must vote how my principles dictate. My oath is to the Constitution, not to any man or political party. I stand with the president often, and I do so with a loud voice. Today, I think he’s wrong, not on policy, but in seeking to expand the powers of the presidency beyond their constitutional limits. I understand his frustration. Dealing with Congress can be pretty difficult sometimes. But Congress appropriates money, and his only constitutional recourse, if he does not like the amount they appropriate, is to veto the bill.  I look forward to working for a constitutional way to deal with our border security issue.

~Senator Rand Paul

Rand Paul makes some very valid points, but the flaw in his argument is this:  we are dealing with a rogue majority in congress that has made no secret of the fact that their actions are solely motivated by “resistance” to Donald Trump.  The definitive proof of this is that the very same members of congress who refuse to give this president the requested money for the border wall were fine and dandy with giving Barack Obama money for erecting walls at the border when Obama was POTUS.  The facts belie Democrats’ phony claims about walls being “immoral” or that “walls don’t work;” their blatant, spite-based use of our tax dollars as political weaponry is absolutely not how our government was intended to work, and it’s precisely why we have a crises at our border that’s led to a frustrated president’s declaration of emergency.

I’ve often written with outrage about Obama’s unconstitutional “pen and phone” actions that were a not-so-cleverly-veiled means of bypassing the legitimate will of congress, just as Senator Paul suggests; however, there’s no question that the Republican majority’s objections to DACA were consistent with their long-standing platform against illegal immigration.  At no time could anyone have ever made the case that Republicans had done an about-face on prior positions and misused their legislative powers for the simple purpose of spiting a president they disliked or for cynical political gain.

For the sake of “resistance” to Donald Trump, Democrats are selling our country out to people of other nations who disrespect our sovereignty and our inalienable rights to decide who enters our country and who does not.  What form will “resistance” take next?  Will they refuse to let Trump defend us militarily if we come under attack by hostile nations so as to deprive him of a “win,” the fate of the American people be damned?  Will they reject well-qualified, Trump-appointed patriots to posts within our government and compromise our protection and prosperity all in the name of childish “resistance?”  In fact, they already have.

Let me suggest, Senator Paul, that the fight over border wall money is just a symptom of the real emergency:  Democrats who are all-in on “resistance” at the expense of this nation and their fellow citizens.  Democrats have forsaken their oaths of office, and become enemies of the Constitution and all Americans who still embrace it.  This is just one more instance in which their side demands that we abide by the rule of law while giving themselves a pass to ignore it.  If it requires a declaration of emergency to fight back against such an enemy, then so be it.  This nation is truly in crisis.

~CW

This post can also be viewed that the conservative website, The Pesky Truth.