Can you imagine Joe Biden playing chess? Could he beat, say, an average seventh-grader? C'mon, man: I'm serious! Not a joke! But on MSNBC's Saturday edition of The Weekend, co-anchor Alicia Menendez claimed that whereas Biden is playing chess, Donald Trump is -- at best -- playing Hungry Hungry Hippos [billed as a game for "preschoolers."] The daughter of Sen. Bob "Gold Bars" Menendez should describe what game he was playing. She's not in the right place to swagger. Co-host Symone Sanders Townsend chimed in to suggest that the better game analogy for Trump might be the card game Uno. The comments came in the context of Biden's participation in various recent events, including the G7 summit. Sanders-Townsend suggested that Biden's performance counters any notion that he might be "a little too old." Whuh? Surely Sanders and the rest of the panel have seen this video from the G7 of a dazed and confused Biden doddering away until Italian PM Giorgia Meloni gently rescues him. Chess? It was more like Weekends at the Memory Care Wing. Reed Galen, co-founder of the disgraced Lincoln Project, chipped in to claim, using a favorite liberal phrase, that Biden has always "met the moment" during his presidency. Moments like the disgraceful Afghanistan withdrawal, and the porous southern border? Here's the transcript. MSNBC The Weekend 6/15/24 8:14 am EDT MICHAEL STEELE: President Biden is back in the United States after attending the G7 summit in Italy. The group announced $50 billion in new financing for Ukraine from frozen Russian assets. The White House said the United States will work with the country and the G7 leaders to finalize details of the loan in the coming months. It will provide money for Ukraine's military and reconstruction by the end of the year. And just this morning, Vice President Kamala Harris announced the U.S. will provide an additional $1.5 billion tobolster Ukraine's energy sector and humanitarian needs. Joining us now is Reed Galen, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, and MSNBC contributor Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent for Politico.  Reed Galen, Eugene Daniels, welcome to you both. So this is, I said this was a great week for the president. He's having these back-to-back weeks both the national stage and domestically the economy, the numbers were strong, coming out on inflation.  . . .  ALICIA MENENDEZ: It's amazing, because you think about the fact the president is playing chess, and the former president, at best, is playing Hungry, Hungry Hippos.  SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND: Yeah, if that. Maybe Uno. I'm going to give him Uno, maybe. He's playing Uno, and somebody keeps telling him, drop four. [Laughter on set.] You know, the split screen this week, much like the split screen last week. We keep talking about the split screens that have happened. And again, for everyone that's saying, you know, oh, Joe Biden seems a little too old. I don't know about you, but from France, doing all these things, coming back to America, going back out to the G7 in Italy, now he's on his way to L.A. right now as we speak to do another event, and I don't know where Donald Trump has been. Railing, railing against the machine on a stage. . . .  REED GALEN: The one thing we've known about Joe Biden since he took office, is this is a man who meets his moments. He met his moment at the beginning. He met his moment with the economic crisis in the wake of Covid. He met his moment with Ukraine. He has met his moment over and over and over again. And I think now, look, we are just a few days away now from that first debate. And so what the split screen's gonna look like is exactly what we're going to see in Atlanta not too long from now, which is someone railing against the ghost. Who else is in the room with you, Donald? Do you see the people there?  With someone who's going to be like, you really want four more years of this? You want this back? And I think it's a very stark thing, and there are more Americans -- look, a lot of Americans are upset about their choices. Got it! Okay, but this is where we are. We all know that, like, we're locked in.  People are going to say, wait a minute, yes, inflation is high, it's coming down. But, do I want to go back into a place of more chaos like I had? Do I want to wake up every mornin gand worry about what the president's thinking? That's what people in Russia have to do. And I don't think that the American people will end up wanting.  

A melancholic take on a classic. The post Revisiting Elliott Smith’s cover of ‘Waterloo Sunset’ by The Kinks first appeared on Far Out Magazine.

Jefferson wrote of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” in his ringing declaration which still speaks to our hearts.  But what these Laws of Nature are is a matter of considerable debate.   [W]ithout faithfulness to our ancient covenants, reason evades us and morphs into mere rationalizations. Jefferson professed the watchmaker God of the Deists. God has crafted a perfect instrument in the universe, and its laws reveal themselves to us as we apply ourselves to their study. It follows for him that the universe should be studied before Scripture, as it reveals its own workings to reason just as a machine reveals the physical laws underlying its own engineering. Accordingly, he insisted that children not be allowed to study the Bible until they had mastered reason through the study of history and science. He wrote: Instead, therefore, of putting the Bible and Testament in the hands of the children at an age when their judgements are not sufficiently matured for religious inquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history. Jefferson certainly did not express reverence for Scripture as received law, for to him, law did not need to be received through a handoff from one generation to the next. Ideally, it could and should be derived directly from Nature. Thus, no one tradition could claim support of the State, and Jefferson accordingly was a powerful advocate for religious freedom. Religion was essentially a private affair and thus properly had nothing to do with the public and coercive affair which is law. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Judges Hold the Integrity of Our Legal System in Their Hands) Jefferson’s point of view allied him temperamentally with the French revolutionaries as it already had with the French philosophes. The English constitutional concept had failed, he thought, corrupted by those in hereditary positions of power so that it excluded 90 percent of the people from the vote. He was deeply concerned with the problems of the “dead hand of the past,” unreasonable reliance on tradition which ultimately is unnecessary for law, as laws are derivable from Nature itself and no tradition is necessary. Ultimately, Jefferson censured Britain for the corruption of the English Common Law by “pious copyists” who had added Jewish law onto it. This fraud, he felt, was furthered by English judges who “could be accused of deliberately if piously avoiding the truth,” in the words of historian Trevor Colbourn. And although Jefferson stood for the religious freedom of Jews and was an effective and constant advocate for it, he had contempt for Jewish tradition and law, which he expressed many times. Judaism’s insistence on public law revealed from God was antithetical to his entire way of thinking. He identified Judaism with his hated political opponents, the Federalists, whom he deemed were “marked, like the Jews, with such a perversity of character.” Yet for all that, Jefferson, engaged in a famous extended correspondence with the last Federalist president, John Adams, after they both had served in the White House. Adams shared the views of Edmund Burke about the French Revolution and the murderous excesses of what it did in the name of the Religion of Reason espoused by its bloodiest and most tyrannical elements. Adams insisted that religion was necessary to ground the state in morality, that science depended on moral teachings preceding them. He did not believe that people would automatically derive law from speculation, but rather needed to internalize the moral imperative passed down from parent to child, as modeled in Hebrew Scripture. In response to Jefferson’s criticism of Judaism, Adams wrote: I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation … preserv[ing] and propagat[ing] to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of morality and all civilization. Adams stood for natural law no less than Jefferson, but it was of another kind, a kind which saw law as being passed down and cherished, home by home, family by family, in the model set out in Deuteronomy’s command to “teach them to your children.” He displayed a passing familiarity with post-Biblical Jewish literature and saw the continuous passing-on of covenantal law as the foundation upon which our own Constitution was built. In this, he embraced the law traditions which he had absorbed through the writings of Sir Matthew Hale, which he had in turn received from his mentor, the extraordinary Common Lawyer and rabbinic scholar, John Selden. Adams knew that Jefferson had criticized Hale for being corrupted by religious tradition. Adams stood for Hale and Selden and their understanding of law against Jefferson’s. The basic principle that Selden identifies is that of fidelity to our agreements. Our lives reflect a series of choices to govern ourselves in coordination with and in response to others who enter into such a self-governed mode of living with us. These covenants admit of organic change, much as a ship, even though its boards have been replaced through the years till hardly a single original board remains, is still called by the same name it had at the beginning. It is that same ship. So, Selden taught, are our laws, as best exemplified by the three-thousand-year continuity of Jewish law, but whose teachings, propagated throughout the world in Scripture, serve as a model for all other legitimate law systems, each reflecting the genius of its own people. This natural process is not at odds with revelation. This is also a way to understand Jefferson’s phrase “Nature’s God.” And it has the great advantage of not being so easily perverted as the claims of reason were by Robespierre and his gang in order to justify their Terror. Or, we might add, to justify the enslavement of a race of human beings on the “reasonable” assertion of a scientifically established superiority. Perhaps a firmer sense of immutable received law, such as motivated Jefferson’s British contemporary, William Wilberforce, might have kept Jefferson more faithful to his own vision of slavery necessarily dying out in the light of equality of man asserted by him on behalf of the nation as a whole. But Jefferson would be the last to claim infallibility for any human, nor of exempting himself in theory of the possibility of human failure. It is hard to think of America without his contribution. John Adams certainly held Jefferson in the highest esteem. His last words, recorded by his son, were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Yet it may be that in this age of wokeism, in which reason has been employed to destroy civilization and the culture that enables it, we may see that Adams’ vision was clearer in decrying our need to temper our emotions with received traditions and to reject decisively the antisemitism that is so frequent a companion of tyranny. Adams no less than Jefferson stood for reason. More than Jefferson, though, he saw that without faithfulness to our ancient covenants, reason evades us and morphs into mere rationalizations. As he wrote: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” (READ MORE: Welcome to Venezuela, America) People who take self-government seriously hold themselves to covenants beyond their ability to change at whim. We use the measure we saw used by those who came before, which prepared them to teach us. We use it ourselves and teach those who, seeing us, will learn how to carry it on themselves. The post As John Adams Knew, We Must Hold To Received Traditions appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The month of June is often recognized these days as “pride month,” dedicated to the celebration of the chief of the seven deadly sins. But for well over a century, the Catholic Church has dedicated June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Despite finding its roots in the medieval pieties of nearly a millennium ago, the Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart is now being challenged as “extremist” due to its stark opposition to the demonic novelty called “pride month.” The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a beautiful and poignant expression of this “eucatastrophe.” In a recent opinion article for The Hill, staff writer Nick Robertson claimed, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus flag is a symbol associated with the Christian right wing, specifically used to protest Pride,” referring to a Sacred Heart flag flown by Martha Ann-Alito, the wife of Catholic U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Court’s landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022. According to CatholicVote, the article has been retroactively edited to read instead, “The Sacred Heart of Jesus flag has been used by some opponents of gay rights to protest Pride and LGBTQ rights in general.” (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: Pride Month, Leftism, and ‘The Ape of the Church’) The original claim proffered by Robertson is patently false. The diabolical notion of “pride month” was not engineered until the 1970s and was not an official “celebration” until the year 2000. June has been celebrated as the month of the Sacred Heart in the Catholic Church since 1856, and June has been formally dedicated to the Sacred Heart since 1899. Furthermore, devotion to the Sacred Heart is not “specifically used to protest Pride,” as Robertson ignorantly insisted. Rather, devotion to the Sacred Heart is a means of prayerfully, often sorrowfully or penitentially contemplating the love which Christ bears for mankind and His suffering, crucifixion, and death. The revised claim — that imagery honoring the Sacred Heart “has been used by some opponents of gay rights to protest Pride” — may be closer to the truth. But then, what better way to rebel against the sin of pride than with the ultimate image of humility? For that is one of the two great virtues which the Sacred Heart most embodies. Christ — that is, God Himself, in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity — not only condescended to love His creation mankind, but deigned to humble Himself and become one of His own creatures. What king would leave his throne, dress himself in burlap and rags, and live in a hovel for love of his simple subjects? As if this were not in itself astounding — truly, in the reverential sense of the term, awesome — enough, Christ also suffered and died for His creation. He alone who is blameless, who is the very antithesis of and antidote to sin, took the sins of all mankind upon Himself, paying a price that man could never otherwise pay. He suffered brutal torture, public degradation and abuse, and finally the most grueling and ignominious of executions — all willingly, all for the sake of love. And, of course, this is the other great virtue which the Sacred Heart embodies so beautifully. It is no accident that this holy symbol of love, the Sacred Heart of Love Himself, is seen as hostile to the perverse agenda which claims “love is love” as its slogan. Love is self-sacrifice, love is discipline, love is humility, love is suffering. Ultimately, love is Christ. These definitions, immutable and eternal, are utterly rejected by the LGBT mod in the midst of their debauched bacchanalia month of “pride.” Referring to Christ, the author J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote to his sons: There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste — or foretaste — of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires. Tolkien understood, certainly, as have countless Catholics throughout the centuries, that Christ’s death is the ultimate, the perfect expression of love. Tolkien’s semi-invented word for it was “eucatastrophe,” an event in which tragedy and sorrow are mingled and intertwined with joy and wonder so intimately that the two become one and the same. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is a beautiful and poignant expression of this “eucatastrophe.” This heart so on fire with love that it suffers the cross, the crown of thorns, the lance in the side, and still burns for its beloved. The LGBT agenda rejects this definition of Love, championing instead Hell’s definition, which is nothing more than a disordered and even depraved love of self. This is why “pride month” takes the deadliest of the seven deadly sins as its moniker and emblem, and it is why both humility and love — in the form of the Sacred Heart — are rejected, scorned, and feared. The post In Defense of the Sacred Heart appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — Over the years, I’ve written a lot about drug offenders sentenced to decades in federal prison, even life without parole, for first-time nonviolent offenses.   [I]t’s also about the younger Biden’s sense of entitlement and failure to accept responsibility. Many were black men with few resources and limited prospects. None of them had the clout or sophistication of Hunter Biden, a Yale Law School graduate who was found guilty Tuesday on three felony counts involving his purchase of a gun in 2018 while he was addicted to and using crack. If the president’s son goes to prison, there will be only one person Hunter should blame for the outcome: himself. (For the record, I hope the president’s son does not have to do time, as he appears to have turned his life around.) (READ MORE from Debra J. Saunders: November Is Coming and Biden Has Another Border Plan) But the evidence against Hunter Biden in this case was overwhelming. If you read his memoir, Beautiful Things, you know that Hunter Biden was guilty, and he knew he was guilty. Which makes me wonder why he pleaded not guilty. The younger Biden apparently thought he would snow a courtroom — and charm jurors into not believing the mountain of evidence gathered against him. Cable TV talking heads talk about this story as a cautionary tale about the scourge of drug addiction, when really, it’s also about the younger Biden’s sense of entitlement and failure to accept responsibility. There’s a pattern here with Hunter Biden. In 2014, the then vice president’s son was discharged from the U.S. Navy Reserve — after he tested positive for cocaine. No criminal charges were filed. This was different. “No one in this country is above the law,” special counsel David Weiss proclaimed after the verdict. The outcome recognized the “illegal choices the defendant made.” Weiss also noted that it was “the combination of guns and drugs that made (Biden’s) conduct dangerous.” It was President Joe Biden’s misfortune that he was scheduled to speak at an Everytown for Gun Safety event Tuesday afternoon. Later in the day, the Bidens flew home to Wilmington, where they could be with their son. After the guilty verdict, Biden reacted appropriately. “As I said last week, I am the president, but I am also a dad,” he said in a statement. “Jill and I love our son, and we are so proud of the man he is today. So many families who have had loved ones battle addiction understand the feeling of pride seeing someone you love come out the other side and be so strong and resilient in recovery.” (READ MORE: There Are 2 Americas: Pro-Fauci and Anti-Fauci) That’s an improvement over what the president has been saying for years: “My son did nothing wrong.” You see, there’s another issue that follows the first relative of a president to be convicted of a felony — greed. The president’s son raked in more than $2 million in 2013 and 2014 as he served on the board of Ukrainian energy firm Burisma while his father was in charge of the White House policy toward Ukraine. That doesn’t pass the smell test. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Hunter Biden Is Guilty. But You Knew That. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The vice presidency is the U.S. Constitution’s oddity. Aside from presiding over the U.S. Senate and casting a vote when there is a tie, there are few official duties associated with the office. Unless delegated a policy portfolio the vice president basically sits around awaiting the earthly demise of the president. John Nance Garner, the Texan who served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first vice president, is reputed to have said “the vice presidency is not worth a bucket of warm spit,” although some accounts suggest he used a more colorful term. Had Garner stuck around until Roosevelt’s fourth term he may have had a different view of the office.  If At First You Don’t Succeed At the dawn of the republic the Constitution provided that each member of the Electoral College would cast two electoral votes but no distinction was made between the offices of president and vice president. The candidate receiving the highest number of electoral votes, providing it was a majority, was elected president. The candidate with the second highest number of electoral votes was elected vice president. If no candidate received a majority of electoral votes then selection of the president passed to the U.S. House of Representatives, selection of the vice president would be decided by the U.S. Senate. (READ MORE: The State of the President)  Keeping in mind political parties are not a constitutional construct, the framers did not envision the difficulties that would arise from that process. While the election of George Washington as the nation’s first president and John Adams as the first vice president was virtually unanimous, competition intensified when Washington decided against seeking a third term. In the election of 1796, the first post-George Washington contest, Vice President John Adams prevailed and was elected to the nation’s highest office. But the emergence of political parties resulted in an acrimonious contest that ended with Thomas Jefferson being elected vice president. Four years later Jefferson ousted Adams and ascended to the Presidency with Aaron Burr becoming his first vice president. The Twelfth Amendment During the early days of the Jefferson Administration the experience of having the nation’s two highest offices occupied by political rivals prompted Congress to reconsider the process. As a result the Twelfth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was proposed. It provided that electors would cast one vote for president and one vote for vice president. The U.S. House of Representatives would still decide the Presidency in the event no candidate received a majority of electoral votes; the U.S. Senate would decide the vice presidency. The Twelfth Amendment was ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the state legislatures on June 14, 1804 putting into place the process we use today. The vice presidency has only rarely been a launching pad for the presidency. The lack of constitutional clarity relative to the role of the vice president again became an issue in 1841. After serving just 32 days in office, President William Henry Harrison became the first U.S. President to die while in office. Vice President John Tyler became president but only after some debate as to whether the Constitution proscribed automatic ascension. The issue was resolved and precedent was established that the vice president would immediately become president upon the death or resignation of the incumbent president. A footnote to vice presidential history: the only vice president of the United States to be chosen by the U.S. Senate after no candidate had received a majority of electoral votes in the Electoral College was the nation’s ninth vice president, Richard Mentor Johnson. Johnson had served in both the House of Representatives and as a U.S. Senator from Kentucky and was vice president during the administration of Martin Van Buren. Vice Presidential Vacancies There were times in U.S. History when the office of the vice president became vacant. George Clinton served as vice president under two different presidents — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — and died in 1812 as Madison prepared to seek a second term. Being vice president under Madison was hazardous duty as his second vice president, Elbridge Gerry, died in November of 1814 leaving the nation without a vice president for over two years. Vice President John C. Calhoun became the first of two vice presidents to resign from office. He did so after a wide political rift developed between him and President Andrew Jackson. Spiro T. Agnew resigned as vice president in 1973 after pleading no contest to a felony tax evasion charge. Franklin Pierce, Ulysses S. Grant, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and William Howard Taft all had a vice president die while in office. Eventually, in 1965 the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. It finally clarified the succession issue — the vice president becomes president upon the death or resignation of the president. And it provided a mechanism for filling a vacancy in the office of vice president between national elections. The amendment empowers the president to nominate a vice president who then takes office upon confirmation by a majority of votes in both houses of Congress. The amendment came into play upon Agnew’s resignation when President Richard M. Nixon nominated U.S. Representative Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be vice president. Ford was quickly confirmed. Nixon himself was forced to resign in the wake of the Watergate scandal in August of 1974 resulting in Ford becoming the first and only person to serve as President of the United States without having first been elected either president or vice president.  Upon becoming president, Ford appointed Nelson Rockefeller to serve as vice president. Rockefeller was confirmed and served as vice president for the remainder of Ford’s term in office. Ford ran for election to a full term in 1976 having chosen U.S. Senator Bob Dole rather than Rockefeller as his running mate. The duo subsequently lost to Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. Accidental Presidents Eight U.S. presidents have died while in office, four of whom were assassinated and four who died of natural causes. Harrison was the first to die of natural causes having taken ill shortly after delivering a long-winded inaugural address on a cold March day. Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt each died of natural caucuses. Abraham Lincoln became the first president to die at the hands of an assassin; a fate which also befell James A. Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy. The performance of the vice presidents who followed the eight presidents to die while in office has been decidedly mixed. Tyler alienated his own party leaving him out of contention for a full term in his own right. He eventually sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. Millard Fillmore, who had an otherwise distinguished career proved to be an unremarkable president. A Whig, he was the last president not associated with either the Republican or Democratic Party. [F]our sitting vice presidents have been elected to the presidency: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and George H.W. Bush. Lincoln’s second vice president, Andrew Johnson, became the first president to be impeached; he avoided conviction and removal from office when the effort fell one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed. When President James A. Garfield was shot by a disappointed office seeker and months later succumbed to his wounds, Chester A. Arthur became president. Arthur had been added to the Republican ticket to appease powerful New York political interests. Ill and after a somewhat unremarkable presidency, Arthur did not seek election in his own right and died shortly after leaving office. On September 6, 1901 President William McKinley was shot by a crazed ideologue while at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. He was succeeded in office by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Like Arthur, Roosevelt was placed in the vice presidency in a New York political deal. Unlike Arthur, however, Roosevelt became one of the nation’s most impactful presidents and in 1904 secured election to the office in his own right. The next vice president to ascend to the presidency upon death of the president was Calvin Coolidge. The mild mannered Coolidge, referred to at the time as “silent Cal” took office when President Warren G. Harding died of a likely heart attack. Harding’s presidency was overshadowed by the Tea Pot Dome scandal which touched upon members of his administration but not on him personally. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge ran and won a full term as president. (READ MORE: Presidents’ Day and Problematic Presidential Rankings) Franklin Delano Roosevelt is considered by many historians to be one of the nation’s most influential presidents. He has the distinction of being the only president to have been elected to four terms in office. His first vice president was the aforesaid mentioned John Nance Garner who found little oxygen of his own serving under the charismatic Roosevelt. Garner was replaced in the vice presidency by Henry A. Wallace who served during Roosevelt’s second and third terms. When he ran the fourth time Roosevelt placed Harry S. Truman on the ticket. On April 12, 1945, just days into his fourth term, Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage. Three years later, in 1948, Truman defeated Thomas E. Dewey election to win a full term in office. The nation was stunned once again on November 22, 1963 when bullets fired by Lee Harvey Oswald struck President John F. Kennedy, who was riding in an open car through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Lyndon Baines Johnson became president, won a landslide election in 1964 only to become bogged down in the war in Vietnam. He abruptly withdrew from the 1968 presidential election. Vice Presidents Who Were Elected President In addition to the vice presidents who became president due to the death or assignation of the president, four sitting vice presidents have been elected to the presidency: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, and George H.W. Bush. Richard M. Nixon lost as a sitting vice president in 1960, but was elected president in 1968. Joseph Biden served as vice president in the Barack Obama Administration and then was elected president four years later. The vice presidency has seldom been a pathway to the Oval Office. Kamala Harris is the nation’s 49th vice president. Only six of her predecessors have been elected to the presidency in their own right. Despite that, holding the office is currently viewed as an asset for those who aspire to the nation’s top job. Pathways to the Vice Presidential Nomination The mixed performance of the vice presidents who have become president through the death or resignation of the incumbent president has placed a brighter spotlight on the office. Thus, when selecting a running mate presidential nominees at least give lip service to a candidate’s ability to step in at a moment’s notice and serve as president. Political considerations have often played a greater role in the selection process. During the era of American politics where nomination conventions actually selected presidential and vice presidential candidates the vice presidency was frequently a prized bargaining chip. As referenced, Millard Fillmore, Chester A. Arthur, and Theodore Roosevelt were the result of political deals.  The bargaining chip has not always worked. In 1976 Ronald Reagan announced the selection of Richard Schweiker, a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania as his running mate weeks before the Republican National Convention in an effort to woo Keystone state delegates. The effort fell short and the convention went on to nominate incumbent President Gerald R. Ford.  Geographic and political considerations have also loomed large in the process of ticket building. In an effort to bind the nation together in the midst of the Civil War, the Republican National Convention of 1864 nominated Andrew Johnson of Tennessee as Abraham Lincoln’s second running mate. Notably, Johnson was also a Democrat in what was an effort not only for unity but to shore up Lincoln’s re-election chances. The nomination for vice president has also been used to bind the party together after a contentious presidential nomination fight. In the modern era, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson competed for the 1960 Democratic Presidential nomination. After some acrimony Kennedy prevailed, but then offered Johnson the second spot on his ticket to unify the party. Johnson, then a U.S. Senator from Texas, also brought geographic balance to the ticket headed by Kennedy who was serving as a U.S. Senator representing Massachusetts. During the same era Republicans were having their own internal issues with the GOP having been split between more moderate so-called “Rockefeller Republicans” and an ascendant conservative “Goldwater” wing initially spearheaded by U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who became the Republican nominee in 1964 only to lose a landslide election to Lyndon Johnson. In 1980, former California Governor Ronald Reagan had become the conservatives’ leading light and engaged in a spirited primary with George H.W. Bush and several other candidates. Reagan prevailed and bound the party together by selecting the more moderate Bush as his running mate. Interestingly, Reagan chose Bush only after considering a novel co-presidency offer to former President Gerald R. Ford.  More recently identity politics have played a role in vice presidential selection. In 1984, former Vice President Walter Mondale was nominated by Democrats to challenge incumbent President Ronald Reagan. Mondale broke new vice presidential ground by selecting Geraldine A. Ferraro, then a U.S. Representative from New York as his running mate. She became the first woman to be nominated on a major party ticket. The effort resulted in a landslide loss to Reagan. In 2008, the presidential nomination in hand, U.S. Senator John McCain of Arizona surprised the political world by picking then little known Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, making her the first and so far only female to be nominated for vice president by the Republican Party. The duo lost to Barack Obama in the General Election. In 2020, Kamala Harris, a U.S. Senator from California was tabbed by Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate. Following a controversial election Biden and Harris took office making her the first female, and the first person of color, to be elected to the vice presidency. Vice Presidency in the Spotlight Aside from the death of a president or the casting of a high profile tie-breaking vote in the U.S. Senate, the vice presidency occupies the spotlight when a party’s presidential nominee is in the process of selecting his or her running mate. This year, with both parties poised to nominate men of advanced age, the selection of the vice presidential nominee looms even larger. The Democratic ticket is set with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris seeking election to a second term. Donald Trump has parted ways with his first vice president, Mike Pence, so speculation has been building as to whom he will select to be nominated with him at next month’s Republican National Convention. As has become customary a rather long list of potential candidates is being circulated. Presidential nominees tend to keep the short list close to their vest, and Donald Trump is especially known for calling his own shots.  The many factors that have come to influence such decisions are all at play. Will Trump follow the lead of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan and attempt to bind up the GOP’s internal ideological divisions by picking former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley? Will he attempt to appeal to a significant minority group by selecting a person of color like U.S. Senator Tim Scott or Dr. Ben Carson? Perhaps U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants? Or will he give the GOP its second female nominee with South Dakota Governor Christi Noem? He could stick with an ideological apostle in Ohio U.S. Senator J.D. Vance. Or he could set aside geographical, ideological, and identity considerations and select North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, a safe competent choice. Safe and competent can be important because vice presidential nominees hurt rather than help a ticket. Such was the case in 1972 when the Democratic Party nominee, George McGovern, picked U.S. Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. The hapless McGovern campaign had failed to conduct a comprehensive background check and it came to light that Eagleton had been hospitalized several times for treatment of depression. Eagleton was forced to resign the nomination and was replaced by Sargent Shriver, a brother-in-law of the late President John F. Kennedy. The result was a landslide loss to Richard M. Nixon. Trump’s decision will matter more this year than usual. Regardless of the outcome of the November election neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden will be a candidate in 2028. And while the vice presidency has only rarely been a successful launching pad to the presidency, this year’s nominees will have a head start on the 2028 presidential nominating process. And, well, as we have learned from history, whoever is elected is always just a heartbeat away. Lowman S. Henry is Chairman & CEO of the Lincoln Institute and host of the weekly American Radio Journal and Lincoln Radio Journal. His e-mail address is lhenry@lincolninstitute.org. The post A Glimpse at the History of the Vice Presidency appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

David Boaz, the Cato Institute’s long-time executive vice president, left us last week. His passing was an obvious personal loss to his family and friends. It was a professional loss for the Cato Institute. It was political loss for libertarians. And for the larger conservative movement as well. The evidence is overwhelming that … morality is best modeled and taught, rather than imposed with threats of prosecution and prison. Back in the mists of time — sometime in 1978, I believe — I ran into a Stanford University graduate student by the name of Williamson Evers. I was in law school at the time but was devoting much of my time to journalistic and political endeavors with a libertarian bent. He told me I should visit the Cato Institute in San Francisco. So I drove up into the city, a rare trek for me, and met Ed Crane, Cato’s founding president, Charles Koch, who provided Cato’s seed capital, and David Boaz. (READ MORE from Doug Bandow: Iran Tries To Stem Religious Conversions From Islam) It was my first contact with organized, institutional libertarians. It was a transformative experience. Although I signed on with the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign, which brought me to Washington, I was hooked on the libertarianism. While in the campaign I began writing for Roy Childs, editor of Libertarian Review and later Cato’s first foreign policy analyst. When Cato moved to DC I reestablished contact with Ed and David. When my libertarian-minded boss, Martin Anderson, who was Reagan’s domestic policy adviser, left the White House, I headed into what I considered to be the realist libertarian camp, determined to bring a hardline commitment to liberty to the rather barren territory of Washington, D.C. I started out at Inquiry magazine and soon ended up at Cato. At the latter it was immediately evident that David was essential to the institute’s success. Ed was Cato’s outsize outside face, driven by policy but unconstrained by management theorems. The world incorrectly thought Cato was an acronym, but when it came to operations it really did stand for Crane and the Others. Except when it came to David. He, too, was driven by a commitment to liberty. And he promoted a free society in multiple ways. For instance, he worked on the Ed Clark presidential campaign in 1980, a serious effort perhaps unmatched until former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson’s run decades later. But it was at Cato where David combined two roles, fleshing out libertarian ideas and turning them into practical policy proposals, and ensuring that their presentation was professional and persuasive. It is hard to overstate the importance of the latter role. The libertarian movement was by turns enthusiastic, rabid, antagonistic, didactic, passionate, angry, anarchic, careless, revolutionary, and more. David was calm, deliberative, intellectual, thoughtful, principled, and, above all, professional. He introduced many to libertarianism with his seminal books, The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and The Libertarian Reader. He also wrote shorter though important pieces throughout his career — an early article in the New York Times before drug legalization was popular fueled the fight against prohibition. Although David never hesitated to insist that he was a liberal, in the classical rather than modern sense, and not a conservative, his personal life illustrated his commitment to libertarianism, not libertinism. He was quite abstemious: no smoking or drinking, and certainly no illicit substances of the sort that often showed up at libertarian gatherings. I started at his position, but eventually gave in to the temptations of wine. More seriously, gay and in a committed relationship that lasted three decades until his death, he long ago made the case for gay activists to be pro-family: “Gay leaders would be better off making a pro-family case, playing up their commitment to their partners and their desire for a legal union.” He also challenged social conservatives — especially those once and twice divorced, often adulterous leaders on the right who lecture the rest of us on Western civilization — about the real remedies for very genuine social problems. With some asperity, he observed: “you won’t reduce the costs of social breakdown by keeping gays unmarried and not letting them adopt orphans.” Disagree with him you may, but this was not a rhetorical flourish. He was pushing conservatives toward better policies. Surely rampant adultery, which rarely seemed to attract the same high decibel denunciations from political social conservatives, was a bigger threat to the family than gay marriage (which, in the interests of full disclosure, I opposed in favor of civil partnerships). However, it was in ensuring that Cato’s multiple products were serious, persuasive, well-written, and, above all, professional that David was essential. I always did what I could to avoid the office — working at home and traveling often. I was particularly determined to evade dealing with the details of production, preferring to write and speak and leave the rest to others. David, though a fine writer and speaker, recognized the economic principle of comparative advantage and devoted himself to the tougher but necessary work of professionalizing Cato’s work. Without that, the Institute would not have achieved the reputation for scholarship that it enjoys today. In the battle for the future of conservatism, libertarians might currently look to be the losers. Certainly, David was no Pollyanna, untethered from the reality of current politics. Yet he also looked to the future beyond the next administration and was optimistic. The evidence is overwhelming that economic liberty in its many forms has delivered a freer as well as more prosperous society. That morality is best modeled and taught, rather than imposed with threats of prosecution and prison. And that the promiscuous war-making of establishment conservatives and their Neocon allies is just another form of Big Government social engineering, only far more destructive than the New Deal, Great Society, and other attempts to remake Americans at home. (READ MORE: Leftists Blatantly Celebrate Lenin’s Legacy in New Book) David continued to work and promote liberty even as his health flagged, a sign of his dedication to creating a better future for other people. His departure is a loss personally and professionally. I remember someone once complimented me on my fine drug legalization piece in the New York Times. I have written (and spoken) a lot on the issue and was tempted to cheerfully accept the accolade. However, conscience got the better of me and I had to fess up that it was written by David, not me. It was not the only time that I wished I had written something that bore David’s name. RIP faithful crusader on behalf of liberty. The post David Boaz: Practical Libertarianism appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Why the outburst of campus protests in recent years, culminating in the sizable and sometimes violent demonstrations at such prestigious universities as Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, and Stanford? While many factors are at work, one that seldom gets mentioned: boredom. Students often have a lot of free time. TikTok, Instagram, drinking, sex, and internet porn do not provide adequate fulfillment. [S]chools receiving federal financial support should not be allowed to have average cumulative grade point averages above 3.0 (“B”). Why? Most college students don’t have much to do academically. Why is that? Grade inflation. Surveys of time use by the federal government suggest that the amount of time college kids spend on their academic work has fallen from an average of perhaps 40 hours weekly in the middle of the last century to about 27 or so hours today. Since a “year” in American collegiate parlance is actually only about 32 or so weeks, college students probably average less than 900 hours annually working on school tasks, probably less than much younger elementary or high school students — and less than half as much as the highly productive professional, technical, or managerial workers that most college students aspire to be. (READ MORE from Richard K. Vedder: College Football Is About To Change Forever) Harvard’s great political scientist Harvey Mansfield has taught in every decade since the 1960s — seven in total (as have I). In a great recent interview in the Wall Street Journal, Mansfield recalls how students do far less reading and writing in class than they did decades ago — but for much higher grades. Mansfield taught at the oldest and most elite of our colleges, while I had very similar experiences, teaching a bit at highly selective schools, but mostly at a very typical high mid-quality state institution with only moderately selective admission criteria, Ohio University.  When I started teaching American economic history in the 1960s, students were expected to read a textbook and about five other supplemental books. In my last years of teaching (until a couple of years ago), I considered it an accomplishment if students read the text and maybe a couple of short supplemental readings. Looking at old gradebooks, in the mid-1960s, my average grade in an introductory economics class was a “C” and it was rare for even 10 percent of students to get an “A.” Mansfield notes that a majority of grades today at schools like Harvard are “A” or “A-.” Nearly all students wrongly consider themselves Masters of the Universe. The grade system provides vital information not only to the universities themselves but to future employers wishing to separate the best and brightest from the mediocre and mundane. If everyone gets nearly the same grades, their informational value is virtually lost. Student incentives to work hard are dramatically reduced, allowing them time to form campus encampments and demonstrate for days over events occurring thousands of miles away that only very tangentially touch on their lives. A major factor in the rise of grade inflation probably was the introduction of institutionally administered student evaluations of professors on most campuses in the late 1960s or 1970s. In an attempt to make colleges more comforting and responsive to students in order to avoid unwanted campus discontent, college administrators initiated evaluations that at many schools were perceived by the professoriate to have some importance — bad evaluations sometimes severely reduced the prospects for tenure, for example. By giving high grades, professors thought that could buy some popularity and indirectly job security. I believe the increased role of the federal government has lowered the quality of American higher education materially in the last half century or so, but a case could be made that schools receiving federal financial support should not be allowed to have average cumulative grade point averages above 3.0 (“B”) for the undergraduate student body (exceptionally good students could still get near 4.0 averages). State governments could do the same for the universities they subsidize.  Another approach would be to introduce a “grade inflation tax” whereby schools would lose a proportion of subsidies — including research support, Pell Grants, etc., — if the accumulative grade point average of all undergraduates exceeded a “B” average. Collegiate apparatchiks, in turn, would have to harass or incentivize faculty into making the grading system useful again. (READ MORE: The Age of the Lazy American) To be sure, there are other factors involved in today’s campus protests, and one can legitimately argue that peaceful protests that do not interfere substantially with the pursuit of knowledge and discovery of truths are actually good — signs of a vibrant campus with a considerable diversity of views and members of the university community interested in the broader world. The protests of the Vietnam War era, for example, occurred when grade inflation was dramatically lower. But students today are not challenged by their academic duties enough, leading to such modern phenomenon as excessive time spent on social media rather than learning the verities contributing to prosperous and long lives. College should be more than four or five “gap years” of fun between secondary school and the “real world.” Richard Vedder is Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University and Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute. The post Grade Inflation and Campus Protests appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Earlier this month, in National Rifle Association (NRA) v. Vullo, the gun-rights organization won a landmark victory at the Supreme Court. Given the Court’s conservative majority, a casual court-watcher might find this unsurprising. Less intuitively, the NRA received legal representation from an ideological antipode — the ACLU. Further, the unanimous majority opinion came from staunch liberal justice Sonya Sotomayor. Uniting these disparate factions was the simple notion that the Constitution forbids governments to choke free speech by coercing third parties to dissociate from disfavored speakers. The state action in question violated the First Amendment in a clear and explicit fashion. The High Court ruled that — if the fact pattern alleged in lower courts proves true — New York State’s efforts to sever the NRA from its insurance providers constituted such coercion. After the 2018 mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, the then-director of the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS), Maria Vullo, made clear to insurers that continued ties with the gun-rights advocate would invite regulatory retaliation. “Vullo was free to criticize the NRA and pursue the conceded violations of New York insurance law,” Sotomayor wrote. “She could not wield her power, however, to threaten enforcement actions against DFS-regulated entities in order to punish or suppress the NRA’s gun-promotion advocacy.” (READ MORE from David B. McGarry: New York’s Attempted Hit on the NRA Violated the First Amendment) Nonetheless, New York did just that. The multi-pronged offensive went as follows. Vullo issued a guidance letter urging insurance providers to consider “reputational risks” that could attach to doing business with the NRA. In the context of the relevant financial-services regulatory regime, invoking such “risks” constitutes a not-so-veiled threat of regulatory sanction. Vullo also met privately with the NRA’s financial partners. Meeting with one partner, Lloyd’s of London, she made her aim explicit. As Sotomayor describes it, “Vullo told the Lloyd’s executives ‘that DFS was less interested in pursuing the[se] infractions’ unrelated to any NRA business ‘so long as Lloyd’s ceased providing insurance to gun groups, especially the NRA.’”  In other words: comply, or else.  Vullo’s censorial campaign had its intended effect. Financial institutions — including Lloyd’s — abandoned the NRA. The record suggests they did so against their will, solely to deflect regulatory scrutiny. According to a court filing, the chairman of one erstwhile NRA partner “placed a distraught phone call to the NRA,” saying that, “Although [the firm] wished to continue doing business with the NRA … it would need to ‘drop’ the NRA for fear of ‘losing [our] license’ to do business.”  Vullo presented simple facts and few legal ambiguities. The state action in question violated the First Amendment in a clear and explicit fashion.  The state’s actions fell well outside the parameters set in Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963), whose precedent directed the Court’s reasoning. The future seems far less clear, however. In recent decades, government officials have routinely threatened, cajoled, and enticed private actors to achieve various desired ends. Particularly when it concerns expressive activity under the protection of the First Amendment, this phenomenon — known as “jawboning” — raises significant constitutional questions. The Supreme Court will soon rule on another jawboning case (a headline magnet, Murthy v. Missouri), which questions whether the Biden administration’s attempts to shape social-media platforms’ content moderation policies consisted of constitutionally appropriate efforts at persuasion or impermissible coercion. Murthy presents a far more convoluted and extensive factual record than Vullo, containing endless ambiguity and variation.  From one angle, Vullo’s clear-cut fact pattern offers little indication respecting the likely complexities of Murthy’s outcome. However, the unanimous Court’s emphatic adoption of Bantam Books’ coercion standard — rather than other, more malleable standards that lower courts favored in Murthy — suggests the justices may enjoin only those instances of jawboning that seem clearly coercive in nature. “A government official can share her views freely and criticize particular beliefs, and she can do so forcefully in the hopes of persuading others to follow her lead,” Sotomayor wrote. Absent this ability, she argued, “the government could barely function.” Should this reasoning carry forward, it seems near impossible that the Court would uphold the totality of the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals’ sweeping injunction against the Biden administration. (READ MORE: Government’s Attack on Free Speech Can Only Be Stopped by Congress) Combing through the entrails of judicial opinions for portents of the future, while edifying to court watchers, distracts from the immediate importance of the Vullo ruling. A unanimous Court — at the behest of a two otherwise-diametrically-opposed advocacy groups — emphatically rebuked an act of petty and censorial tyranny. It preserved the First Amendment’s speech protections, which have never been more robust. While it is a feature of republican governments to be rocked incessantly by partisan antics and overreaches, the Constitution provides antagonistic checks and balances as necessary stabilizers. It is not perpetual calm, but a strong and resilient institutional bulwark, that defines a healthy system.  In the Vullo saga, the Supreme Court did its work. The system held firm. David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. The post The Supreme Court Defends Free Speech appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 (“NFA”) defines a machine gun as “Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” (emphasis mine) There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machine guns. Congress can amend the law. A bump stock is a device that uses the recoil of a firearm to cause a finger to re-depress the trigger of a semiautomatic firearm (meaning a firearm that requires a separate trigger pull for each shot) resulting in rapid trigger pulls and near-machine-gun rates of fire. But a bump stock is obviously not a weapon, does not have a trigger, and cannot rationally be defined as a machine gun or otherwise regulated under the current language of the NFA. Nevertheless, in 2018 after the prior year’s horrific mass murder in Las Vegas when a madman (whose motives were never determined) who used a bump stock to fire into a music festival crowd, killing 58 (some say 60) and wounding hundreds, the Trump administration’s Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”) changed years of regulatory interpretation to promulgate a rule that banned bump stocks as “devices (that) convert an otherwise semiautomatic firearm into a machinegun.” An early version of a bump stock was called the Atkins Accelerator which was submitted to the ATF in 2002. That device included a spring that “caused the firearm to cycle back and forth impacting the trigger finger, which remained rearward in a constant pull without further input by the shooter while the firearm discharged multiple shots. The device was advertised as able to fire approximately 650 rounds per minute.” While ATF initially ruled that this did not quality as a machine gun, four years later they changed their view but also determined that removal and disposal of the internal spring would render the device a non-machine gun under the statutory definition. Hence, ATF advised individuals who had purchased the Akins Accelerator that they had the option of removing and disposing of the internal spring, thereby placing the device outside the classification of machine gun and allowing the purchaser/possessor to retain the device in lieu of destroying or surrendering the device. Since then, bump stocks without springs have been legally available. In 2017, in the justifiably emotional aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in American history, the federal government began looking at their authority to ban bump stocks. At the time, the Department of Justice determined that they had no such authority. Even anti-gun former Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) noted, regarding ATF, “that current law does not allow the agency to ban or regulate bump-fire stocks.” (READ MORE from Ross Kaminsky: Universities and the ‘Common Good’) However, DOJ and ATF were pressured by President Trump to ban bump stocks … and so they did despite their own understanding that they had no such authority. The new rule was challenged in federal court by a man named Michael Cargill (thus the name of the lawsuit, Garland v Cargill) who owned two bump stocks, complied with the rule to turn them in and then sued to get them back. On Friday the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, ruled that ATF does not have the authority to ban bump stocks as machine guns and overturned the rule. The ATF had to know it was coming and that their action was not supported by the text of the law. Nevertheless, they made whatever arguments they could after being pushed initially by President Trump and subsequently under the maniacally anti-gun Biden administration, focusing more on “automatically” than on “a single function of the trigger,” both of which the Court’s majority rejected as a basis for banning bump stocks: A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a “machine gun” as defined by §5845(b) because: (1) it cannot fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger” and (2) even if it could, it would not do so “automatically.” ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machineguns. As usual, many pundits and many people are reacting to this case as if it is about whether a bump stock is a good idea. And as usual, those pundits and people are missing the real target. Anti-gun activists spent the day talking about how “bump stocks cause immense destruction and violence” (well, they sure did once but I’m unaware of any other time they’ve been used in a crime) and that the Court “has put countless lives in danger” (also manifestly not in evidence beyond that one tragic day.) One of my radio show listeners texted me: “Hey yeah Ross, you saw the result of those bump stocks. You see how great they are for massacring people…not good for accuracy but great for massacring people. Totally something we should have available to everybody, no problem.” But nobody in this case — as far as I can tell not even the plaintiff, and certainly not the Justices — argued either that bump stocks are a good idea or that they cannot ever be banned. Simply that they cannot be banned by current law. Indeed, just as bump stocks are not machine guns they are equally not firearms (or even weapons) of any kind. Therefore, they would have no Second Amendment protection should Congress or a state legislature pass a law to ban them. In his brief concurrence with the judgment, Justice Samuel Alito noted: The horrible shooting spree in Las Vegas in 2017 did not change the statutory text or its meaning. That event demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun, and it thus strengthened the case for amending §5845(b). But an event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning. There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machine guns. Congress can amend the law — and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act. The liberal dissent spends paragraphs talking about the history of machine guns and of their regulation, trying to convince us that a bump stock is a form of machine gun. To be fair, their argument is that by using one’s own power to pull a trigger once, a shooter using a bump stock can cause rapid fire of multiple rounds, thus functioning as a machine gun. The problem of course, is that in fact the trigger is being depressed for each round. The dissent says that the law regarding a “single function of the trigger” should be read as “a single human act” performed on the trigger but even that isn’t really true since the finger — albeit with non-human assistance — is pulling the trigger for each shot. (READ MORE: The Unsettling Truth About Climate Science and Politics) It’s worth repeating that it wasn’t just the Court’s majority that disagreed with the dissent’s interpretation; the ATF themselves disagreed until Donald Trump pressured them to pass a rule that the ATF knew to be extralegal. I don’t care about bump stocks. As a libertarian, my default is against government banning things and I think the fact that you can only name one time a bump stock has been used in a crime (albeit a truly terrible one) implies that, as usual, recency bias colored the conversation about them. That said, if a government (state or federal) banned bump stocks by a new act of law, it wouldn’t be a tragedy. What is a tragedy, what truly represents the erosion or intentional degradation of the rule of law on which civil society is based, is allowing bureaucracies to usurp the function of legislators, making law either at their own whims or at the whims of political executives driven by short-term emotion or electoral calculation. Those risks are especially high when the president of the United States is not restrained by Constitutional and legal guardrails, whether by temperament or by insufficient checks and balances. But the Constitution and the body of law that properly emanates from it are all that separate us from being the greatest nation in history and just another country that once seemed to have promise but inexorably drifted into bureaucratized tyranny. Bureaucrats cannot be allowed to write law. Whenever there is a dispute in which the question arises of whether a regulation is supported by actual law, courts’ default position must be against the regulation. And arguments about the purported (and maybe actual) beneficial impact of the regulation must be ignored in that decision-making process. (Fixing this problem will require the Supreme Court’s overturning of their egregious creations known as Chevron deference and Auer deference, the former of which is the subject of two current Supreme Court cases whose results we should get within a few weeks.) If we allow extralegal regulations to stand where we like the outcomes (and I’m not saying that was my position regarding bump stocks because, again, I really don’t care about them) what will be our firm ground from which to oppose extralegal regulations whose outcomes we don’t like? (READ MORE: The Cancer of Critical Race Theory) If government is to ban something, then ban it by clearly written law. When the law does not allow a ban, and even (or perhaps especially) when the law is ambiguous, agencies must not be allowed to nevertheless enforce one. Anything else is the path to tyranny. The post Missing the Target on Bump Stocks appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.