The Democrats do not care a whit about democracy
Roger Kimball
The events of the last few days have made incontrovertible something that candid observers have known for some time now: that the word “democracy” in the maw of Democrats bears the same relation to really existing democracy that the Russian word “Pravda” bore to really existing truth in the Soviet era.
If you look it up, you’ll see that “Pravda” means “truth.” At least, that’s what the dictionary says it means. But anyone on the ground, experiencing the full-court press of Soviet disinformation knew that the newspaper Pravda deployed the word “truth” only to undermine it. It was necessary to pay lip service to the charade. Otherwise the Potemkin village that had been so carefully built up and that maintained the prevailing consensus might crumble, and who knows what might happen then?
In the beginning, a large part of the population, fired by ideological zeal, actually believed the fiction that was palmed off as the truth. As time passed and the contradictions between word and deed accumulated, however, fewer and fewer believed it, even if many continued to say they did. Eventually, the acrid stench of hypocrisy overcame all but the most committed ideologues — or the most cynical powerbrokers.
That is where we are now in the twilight of Bidendom. Everyone with eyes to see has known he is and has been a malign and senile puppet. But until his debate with Donald Trump a few weeks ago, we were all told to forget the evidence of our eyes and ears and join the Orwellian chorus that insisted he was “sharp as a tack,” “intensely probing,” etc.
Now that Biden — or someone writing over his name — has declared that he would not be running for reelection, thus clearing the runway for his DEI vice president, person-of-color Kamala Harris, the farce of Biden’s cognitive competence could be retired in favor of lo-cal encomia to his “selflessness” and public-spirited support of “democracy.”
But pay attention. What just happened is essentially an anti-democratic coup. Kamala Harris, who got no delegates — zero — when she ran for president in 2020 and was only chosen as Biden’s running mate because he had promised to pick a black woman, is on the cusp of being handed the Democratic nomination for president of the United States.
Fourteen million people voted for Biden in the primaries. What about their votes? Don’t be naive. The voters don’t matter except as a matter of packaging. What matters is what the mostly unnamed Council of Elders wants. They wanted Biden when he was a useful proxy. When he ceased being useful, he was cashiered. Just today it was announced that those transcripts Special Counsel Robert Hur made of his conversation with Biden — the ones that prompted him to say that Biden was an elderly man with a poor memory who was not fit to stand trial — suddenly the DoJ found them and is about to release them. Expect a lot more where that came from.
But the real take away from this melancholy farce is that the Dems do not care a whit about democracy. They believe, as I have often observed, that “democracy” means “rule by Democrats.” In 2020 they managed the balancing act whereby they shouted “our democracy” while actually working to destroy it. They are hoping it will work again this time. The phoenix-like return of Donald Trump, together with the malevolent preposterousness of Kamala Harris, makes that exceedingly unlikely. And that, it may almost go without saying, is as reassuring a thing for genuine democracy as it is devastating for the fraud that goes under the nauseating title of “Our Democracy.”
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/the-democrats-do-not-care-a-whit-about-democracy/
***************************************************CBS News Implies Kamala Harris Should Be Exempt From Criticism
The bitter Sunday afternoon announcement that President Joe Biden would end his reelection bid spurred hours of live network television coverage. With all that time to talk, it was guaranteed that the TV newsers would start worrying out loud about a new Kamala Harris presidential campaign.
CBS News really demonstrated the protective liberal urges. The news wasn’t two hours old before Robert Costa warned that the Republican attacks were going to be “rough-and-tumble like we’ve never seen it.”
Costa received a text from Donald Trump Jr. “already attacking Vice President Harris, saying she owns the entire policy of President Biden, [is] even more liberal, and he’s saying she’s not competent!”
Stop. What in that statement is rougher than we’ve ever seen? The Democrats and their staunch media allies compare Donald Trump to Hitler and other mass-murdering dictators. They explicitly call him an “existential threat” to democracy. How is it then “rough” to say Harris is ultraliberal and incompetent?
The impression you get is that attacking Harris is exponentially worse because she’s a “woman of color.” She’s automatically “historic,” which apparently means “beyond criticism.”
“CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell joined in: “I remember the 2020 Republican National Convention, not the one we had last week, but in 2020 and the attacks against Kamala Harris then were very, very personal.”
But I can’t find any Harris attacks in the 2020 speeches of Trump or Mike Pence or Nikki Haley or even Donald Trump Jr., let alone a “personal” attack.
“Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan then uncorked this whopper: “I can only imagine that, and a woman at the top of the ticket will take slings and arrows that a male candidate won’t. That’s just the facts and we know it.”
Once again, in 2016, journalists such as Carl Bernstein called Trump a “neo-fascist sociopath.” How is a “male candidate” somehow getting it easy? But suggesting Harris makes “word salads” or “cackles” is just beyond the pale!
An hour later, O’Donnell repeated the theme, talking about Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016: “It was personal. He called her nasty, he called her a lot of other words. I wonder whether those same types of attacks would work in 2024? There will be a different dynamic running against a black woman.”
Let’s repeat: “Nasty” is less harsh than “authoritarian” or “Hitler.”
In her 2016 convention speech, Clinton said Trump didn’t have the temperament to be president: “Donald Trump can’t even handle the rough-and-tumble of a presidential campaign.” Today, CBS feels the need to protect Harris from the slightest rumble.
Four hours after Biden withdrew from the race, O’Donnell recounted talking to a top Democratic strategist who said, “They are eager to have Vice President Harris run against, in their words, a convicted rapist.” That could be described as “very, very personal.”
It also can be described as false. In a civil trial—with no real requirement of evidence—a jury of New York City Democrats found Trump liable for sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll, but not rape. (Naturally, they didn’t mention that Carroll also claimed in 2019 that she was assaulted by Les Moonves, the longtime CEO at CBS.)
O’Donnell said she told this Democrat strategist to recall Trump running against Hillary, and wondered: “How will suburban women in 2024 react to attacks on the first woman of color to lead a party’s ticket?”
She’s suggesting it’s political suicide to criticize Harris because of her race and gender. This is coming from journalists, who are supposed to be about accountability and democracy.
At every turn, the media make plain they are about damaging Republicans and helping Democrats.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/24/cbs-implies-kamala-harris-should-be-exempt-from-criticism/
*******************************************************The Overreaching Power of the Bureaucracy Is Destroying Our Representative Government
The United States is a republic with decision-making power held by elected legislators representing the people. Yet many of the biggest decisions affecting the lives of Americans are made by unelected bureaucrats.
In recent years, we have seen the administrative state going to levels never seen before, making decisions that Congress never told bureaucrats to make. This includes the Biden administration continuing its student loan forgiveness efforts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s nationwide eviction moratorium, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s final rule to help kill off gas-powered cars.
The EPA car rule helps illustrate the extent of the problems. It’s a shocking attack on freedom to try and limit what cars people can drive, and it’s ludicrously expensive. The agency’s projected compliance cost of the rule is a whopping $760 billion. To put this cost in context, the projected cost of the 2009 stimulus bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was $787 billion.
Therefore, the EPA, without Congress speaking on whether it wants the agency to impose such a major change in policy, is imposing compliance costs in this one rule roughly equivalent to the cost of one of the biggest pieces of legislation passed by Congress in our history.
The modern administrative state has been a serious problem long before the Biden administration, though. It has undermined our republican form of government with executive branch bureaucrats often serving as the prime decision-makers rather than our elected representatives. Early 20th-century progressive leaders like President Woodrow Wilson who helped assemble the administrative state were bent on advancing executive branch expertise and power. In fact, Wilson himself had a shocking disdain for voters and specific groups of citizens.
Our country is looking more like the nation envisioned by Wilson and less like the republic envisioned by the Framers of the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, we must restore representative government. And reform must start with Congress, which created the agencies and the rulemaking process in the first place.
Reform is never easy. Plenty of people want to keep power within the agencies and give them a blank regulatory check to aid the ideological ambitions of those who seek greater governmental control. However, one important solution isn’t difficult: Congress should establish in law some boundaries for agency power.
For example, Congress should prohibit agencies from issuing rules outside their demonstrated regulatory expertise, unless clearly authorized to do so. After all, one of the biggest justifications for agency rulemaking is the alleged expertise of agencies. If they don’t have the expertise on certain issues, then it follows that Congress didn’t want them to promulgate rules on those matters.
That’s common sense, as are many other boundaries. For example, absent clear authority from Congress, it would be absurd to think lawmakers wanted agencies to equate shutting down businesses with regulating them, as the EPA is doing with its new power plant rule. The rule is creating infeasible requirements that necessarily will lead to plant closures.
It would also defy common sense to think Congress, without saying so clearly, is OK with an agency banning or limiting the availability of certain types of goods, such as cars; reshaping an entire industry; or doing an end-run around Congress because it’s tired of waiting on legislators to pass a law. Therefore, legislators should make it clear that such rules are prohibited unless clearly authorized by law.
It’s helpful that the judicial branch has recently put some limits on agency rulemaking power. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court got rid of what was known as the Chevron doctrine, which was a judicial creation that required courts to give deference to agencies’ often expansive interpretations of ambiguous laws they administer. This helped to make it easier for agencies to achieve their policy objectives by favoring bureaucrats over the people challenging the agencies in court.
Now that this favoritism is gone, it should make it tougher for agencies. However, make no mistake, it won’t stop sweeping and egregious rules, in part because legislation often provides vague or general authority to agencies that they can take advantage of, even if it is obviously inconsistent with congressional intent.
More relevant to putting a stop to sweeping rules is the “major questions” doctrine. The Supreme Court has said there are “extraordinary cases … in which the ‘history and the breadth of the authority that [the agency] has asserted,’ and the ‘economic and political significance’ of that assertion, provide a ‘reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress’ meant to confer such authority.” In these instances, an agency must have a “‘clear congressional authorization’ for the power it claims.”
Even with the existence of the major questions doctrine, new legislation from Congress is required because a congressionally passed law can provide clear prohibitions of agency actions and far more comprehensive protection from agency abuses than the judicial branch. Statutory language should serve as a first line of defense against agencies ignoring the will of Congress and, thereby, the will of the voters.
When asked what kind of nation the Framers of the Constitution created, Benjamin Franklin answered, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
If we are going to keep our republic, then we need Congress to step up with major reforms to stop the abuses of the administrative state.
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JD Vance makes an interesting point
Kamala Harris' husband's ex-wife and the mother of her two step-children has broken her silence after a clip of vice presidential nominee JD Vance resurfaced, in which he refers to Harris as a 'childless cat lady.'
Kerstin Emhoff, the ex-wife of Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, defended the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee against 'baseless' criticisms over her lack of biological children, claiming Harris is an equal co-parent of their kids.
Her remarks came just hours after Vance's 2021 interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson went viral on social media.
In the interview, Vance said the US was run by 'a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.'
'Look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC - the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,' Donald Trump's newly-announced running mate continued.
'How does it make any sense we've turned our country over to people who don't really have a direct stake in it?'
But Harris has been a step-mother to Emhoff's two * adult * children since she married their father in 2014, and has been lovingly dubbed 'Momala.'
Ella Emhoff, now 25-years-old, was an art student when Harris was picked as Biden's running mate. She has since exploded onto the fashion and art scene as her stepmom became the first woman Vice President of the United States.
But her pro-Palestine leanings have recently made waves amid the ongoing war in Israel.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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