On the job with the GOP circular firing squad

Senator Graham is not part of the solution. That makes him part of the problem

Tuesday Morning No. 31 / Orlando, Florida

If constitutional conservatives hope to shut down Biden's leftist appointments to the federal courts, they need more than the current collection of Senate Republicans. Ted Cruz told the New York Post recently that “If Republicans take back the Senate, I'll continue that fight to prevent activists from being confirmed while pursuing Constitutionalists for the bench.”

Cruz can't pull this wagon by himself on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He's obstructed by Lindsey Graham, who has voted to move every one of Biden's judicial appointments to the full Senate for confirmation, including most recently two extreme leftists to the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, Eunice C. Lee and Myrna Pérez. By failing to throw some sand into the gears of this one-party government, Graham is a Democrat enabler. Nothing surprising here. He voted for both of Obama's SCOTUS nominees, Sotomayor and Kagan, with the excuse that a president gets to choose his team.

How nice. The only problem is that Supreme Court justices don't join a president's “team.” They serve for life by promising to uphold constitutional law. They aren't like cabinet appointments that go away when administrations change. They can inflict permanent damage: Think of the twisted interpretations of the 14th Amendment that allow illegal immigrants to offload their babies here as American citizens, when the 14th says no such thing.

Pérez and Lee are just the kind of judicial appointments that voters – especially anti-Trump Establishment Republicans – should have given some thought to when they pulled the Biden lever. Neither has held a job outside of judicial activism. Neither has been a judge or prosecutor. Neither has so much as weighed the merits of a traffic ticket in county court.

Myrna Pérez is director of the Brennan Center's Voting Rights and Education Program, noted mainly for its lawsuits against voter integrity laws, specifically those which require voter identification. How would you like to have her on the Supreme Court when SCOTUS decides whether or not Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution is constitutional?

Eunice C. Lee has only worked as a public defender whose internships at People for the American Way and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund are described in the moderately-conservative National Review as “two left-wing dark-money groups.”

If voters expect the federal bench to be populated with respected legal minds who revere our Constitution, they will be disappointed at least until 2025. Lindsey Graham thinks these two appointments are just swell, thank you.

Let's look at the Judiciary Committee. The majority Democrats, including Kamala Harris when she was a member, stood solid in unanimous opposition to almost every one of Trump's appointments (an exception being Amy Coney Barrett). They didn't care about presidential prerogatives or quaint ideas about the president and his team. If you followed the Kavanaugh hearings (irony or ironies, as he turned out not to be the constitutionalist that Republicans had hoped for), you saw the real Socialist Democrat Party at work: vicious, partisan, nasty, lacking even a shred of civility.

It's one thing for Never Trumpers to want Biden. How many of them stopped to consider the consequences of having characters like Chairman Dick Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Cory Booker, Diane Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar, and child-Senator Jon Ossoff running things on the Judiciary Committee in a Buy One, Get One Free election? And don't forget Mazie Hirono and that war hero Richard Blumenthal, who forgot that he didn't actually serve in Vietnam as he had claimed. And then to top it off, they have their pal Lindsey Graham humming their tune as well.

The committee has some fighters in Cruz, Lee, Hawley, and Cotton, but also three who voted for Biden's $1.2 trillion giveaway: Grassley, Tillis, and Graham, three wafflers in sore need of primary challenges next time around.

In the news . . .

The search for truth R.I.P. The College Board wants to make sure college-bound high school students understand that they live in a nation of white supremacist racists. A question on a practice exam for the Advanced Placement course in U.S. Government and Politics includes a graph that claims that 25% of American blacks do not have photo identification, compared with only 10% of all voters and then asks what this means to an opponent of voter ID laws. The “correct” answer is “(A) Voter-ID laws are likely to decrease turnout among African American voters because they are less likely to have government-issued IDs.” If this figure is correct (we don't concede that it is), then 25% of black Americans can't have a bank account, driver's license, or automobile tag, and they can't visit a doctor, get a mortgage, enroll their children in school, or board an airliner or Amtrak train. Bit of a stretch to believe it's 25%.

. . . Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose jurisdiction includes Chicago, denies a challenge to the placement of the Obama library in historic Jackson Park, designed in 1871 and considered an environmentally sensitive area. Trees that serve as stopovers for migratory birds will be destroyed thanks to Barrett's order.

. . . Twitter has permanently banned reporter Alex Berenson, a leader in exposing Big Tech censorship and criticizing the CCP coronavirus lockdowns, for violating its “Covid-19 misinformation rules.” Berenson publishes here at Substack.

. . . Just the News gives its weekly Golden Horseshoe award to the U.S. Labor Department for a $10 million grant to promote “gender equity” in the workplace – in Mexico. The project is to “improve gender equity in the Mexican workplace by supporting actions to increase the number of women in union leadership, strengthen protections, address harassment at work and augment the wages for women.”

. . . Also at Just the News, “More than 70% of the 61,731 absentee ballots put in drop boxes in the November 2020 presidential election in DeKalb County, Georgia, were counted and certified by officials, despite violating chain of custody requirements.” Under the state's tepid new reform bill, drop boxes are still allowed.

Quotes for today

“America's foreign policy establishment performed abysmally during this long and tragic conflict, leaving U.S. soldiers and the Afghan people to pay the price. Yet thus far, those responsible have not been held accountable. On the contrary, the architects of defeat have gone on to lucrative careers at think tanks, consultancies, universities or the private sector and are still regarded as experts on a war they failed to win.” – Stephen Walt in the Wall Street Journal.

“The problem is not Biden’s illness. The problem is Biden’s lifelong commitment to the left-wing ideology of America hatred. To blame dementia is to let Democrats off the hook for a half-century of disasters.” – Antionette Aubert at American Greatness

Corrections and amplifications

In the Friday Letter 455 of Aug. 27, a news note about the Marxist Rep. Rashida Tlaib incorrectly spelled persona non grata.

In a “25th Amendment Watch” story about the former White House medical advisor warning of President Biden's mental decline, we failed to give his full name as Ronnie Jackson. Dr. Jackson is a physician and a Member of Congress from Texas who advised Presidents Obama and Trump.

To our readers: Beginning next week, this column will be titled First Tuesday and will appear monthly at Substack as part of our free version. It will follow the same numbering sequence used here.