gerrymandering

Progressive Poison Potpourri…[UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Imagine: that woman blathering such nonsense in the clips above is considered a Democratic Party “star.” By what possible measure can blacks be called the creators of democracy in the U.S. ? What color is the sky on the planet where I.C.E. is as AOC describes it? Meanwhile, the podcaster, Ilana Glazer, just nods and agrees with everything the illiterate socialist Congresswoman says.

I won’t make a habit of focusing on just unethical progressives in posts like this, I promise. But the party and ideology of nascent totalitarianism and its Axis allies had a particularly unethical week, and attention should be paid.

1. Virginia Democrats, led by House Speaker Don Scott and Attorney General Jay Jones (you know, the one who said the he believed killing the children of political adversaries could be justified?), filed a motion asking the state supreme court to pause its ruling from taking effect while they appeal for an emergency hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. Good luck with that. They have to know their Hail Mary to SCOTUS is futile (among other reasons, it is doubtful that SCOTUS has jurisdiction), but they are doing this solely to be able to complain later that the Supreme Court is partisan and needs to be “packed.” I’m sure the Justices will be impressed by a motion that misspells Virginia as “Virgnia” and, below that, Senator as “Sentator”…

2. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), concerned about the “humanitarian crisis” in Cuba, traveled to the Communist country last month and says she spoke with foreign ambassadors about getting oil to Cuba despite US sanctions. This is illegal. The Logan Act, rarely used but still on the books, bars unauthorized individuals from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes involving the United States. Conservative commentator Andrew McCarthy, a former U.S. Attorney, said this week that he thinks the ballot box is the way to punish Jayapal and not prosecution, but Jayapal’s voters are actively hostile to the current government of the United States, just like she is. Such figures as Jesse Jackson, John Kerry and Jimmy Carter have defied the Logan Act with impunity, and should not have been allowed to get away with it. Jayapal presents an opportunity to revitalize the law.

3. Tennessee’s House just passed a redrawn congressional map to eliminate the only Democrat seat in the state by eliminating a district that was racially gerrymandered, an act that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. Democrats are ethically estopped from complaining about such moves—not after their foiled outrageous attempt in Virginia and the current rigged maps in New England, which make GOP representatives all but impossible. But they will complain anyway, even when it makes no sense. The sole majority black district in Tennessee didn’t even elect a black Democrat to the seat, but the Axis is calling the new map “racist” anyway.

4. Here’s an interesting chart…guess which side of the ideological spectrum is less tolerant of opposing political views? (I know you know…)

Nice!

5. Here’s another:

Getting rid of DEI is like getting rid of bedbugs, but bedbugs are not as insidious.

6. Actor Mark Hamill posted the vile meme and message below. It demonstrates how sick the Left has become that any public figure would dare publish something like that about an American President. In a healthy and ethical political environment, condemning such a sentiment would be bipartisan and unanimous, even if it didn’t follow close on the heels of another assassination attempt.

Supreme Court Partisan Hacks Unmasked!

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

The Supreme Court today refused to strike down California’s new gerrymandered congressional map designed to give Democrats five additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, and turned down a request from a group of California Republicans that would have required the state to continue to use the map in place while their judicial challenge to the map proceeded. If anyone dissented on the Court, he, she or they kept it to themselves.

This is called “following precedent.”

Two months ago the conservative bloc on the Court, over dissents from the Three Little Maids of Kneejerk Progressivism, granted a request from Texas to allow it to use its new map intended to allow Republicans to pick up five additional House seats in that state. In Abbott v. League of United Latin American Citizens, a lower court had sided with Democratic challengers that the “legislature’s motive was predominantly racial,” making the redistricting unconstitutional. (Once again, crying racism was the Left’s default claim.)The majority reversed that ruling in its December 4 order. Justice Alito issued an opinion (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorusch) explaining that “it is indisputable … that the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map…was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

The Republicans who challenged the California map were counting on a lack of integrity from the conservative majority although the issue was exactly the same as in the Texas case. But the six conservative, Republican-appointed Justices declined the bait. They ruled for the Democrats just as they had ruled for the Texas Republicans, which was the legal, ethical, fair and objective result. Even those conservative devils Thomas and Alito!

Another false partisan narrative bites the dust.

If the three Democratic women possessed similar integrity, they would have dissented in this case too, as they had in Abbott. But they didn’t, did they?With their votes, they showed that their principles only hold when their favorite party benefits from them.

They are the hacks.

Unmasked at last.

The Unethical And Deliberately Misleading”Senate Popular Vote” Talking Point, Or “Why Is The Left Trying To Make The Public More Ignorant Than They Already Are? Oh, Come On! You Know Why…”

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

Look at those crazy shapes! GERRYMANDERING!!!!!

Progressives and the news media have decided that they don’t like the Constitution, so they are actively trying to confuse the public, which is depressingly easy.

We know Democrats and the mainstream news media hate the Electoral College and don’t view it as “legitimate.” The latest anti-Constitutional spin is that there is a national “popular vote” that should rigidly dictate the party representation in Congress. Vox’s Ezra Klein suggested that a revolution was coming if the imaginary Congressional “popular vote favored Democrats and Republicans held the House, but that’s Ezra and Vox—I assumed that this was an aberration. No! The same wacked-out theory was all over social media. The concept is based on regarding the Democratic and Republican Parties as Borg-like hives, with there being no legitimate distinction between on party candidate or another, as if no voter actually cares about experience, character, the record, skills, or any of those minor matters. Party is All.

I hate to keep pointing out that the Left is behaving, speaking and thinking increasingly like totalitarians, but the Left is behaving, speaking and thinking increasingly like totalitarians. Here’s what one of my Facebook friends, a lawyer and pretty openly a militant socialist, wrote yesterday (in part):

If you are on the left, fight for your ideal candidate in the Democratic primary and then vote Democrat in the general. The primary is the time for “who should represent the left in this election.”The general is the time to support the left over the right.

I don’t care if that nominee is “too far left” (Gillum) or “too centrist” (Sinema or McCaskill) or just “not exciting enough.” In every general election in the United States there are two candidates who have a chance to win. The Democrat is on the left, the Republican is on the right.

There is never a situation in which the agenda of any self-identified progressive or liberal or marxist or socialist or lefty or whatever is advanced by a win by the Republican. Never.

As anyone who has read Ethics Alarms for any length of time knows, I reject that argument absolutely. It is unethical, flat out. The agenda of our representative democracy is to have qualified, dedicated representatives and leaders whose judgment we can trust. It is, however, a nice summary of how someone can rationalize voting for people like Hillary Clinton, Bob Menendez, Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters. Or Jack the Ripper, as long as he ran as a Democrat.

But I digress. Totalitarians can only prevail by misleading the public, and so the “popular vote” confusion is apparently deemed worth promoting. ABC’s News’s Matthew Dowd brought up the fact that more ballots were cast in favor of the total number of Democratic candidates than Republican candidates running for U.S. Senate. That’s a nice piece of meaningless trivia, but he raised it as if it meant something. It doesn’t, but “The View’s” Joy Behar—remember, this woman has a daily platform to spout her analysis of news and politics—finished Dowd’s thought by saying, “Because of gerrymandering.” Continue reading →

Ethics Quote Of The Week: The Washington Post

/ Jack Marshall / 26 Comments

“The court’s legal analysis in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission was something of a reach. But the ruling’s practical implications are unequivocally positive.”

—–The Washington Post in an editorial praising the Supreme Court’s approval of Arizon’s unconstitutional solution to the persistent problem of gerrymandering abuse.

"IGNORE WHEN INCONVENIENT" Really?

“IGNORE WHEN INCONVENIENT” Really?

The Post’s quote means nothing more nor less than “the ends justify the means.” “Something of a reach” is a shameless equivocation: John Roberts’ dissent to the 5-4 majority’s “legal analysis” —there really is none—resembles Mike Tyson slapping around Honey Boo-Boo. The decision’s argument approving the Arizona end-around the Constitution’s Elections Clause that reads, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof” can be fairly summarized as “this will work, so the Constitution be damned.” It’s not a “reach.” It’s  obvious defiance of what the document says.

It that so bad? It depends on what you think is more important, integrity or solving a problem. All of the big Supreme Court decisions in the past week have essentially raised this ethics conflict, and it is clear that the liberals on the Court is on the side of solving problems—at least as they see them— even when it means compromising what the Constitution says and what the Founders intended who drafted it, with the libertarian Justice Kennedy, who tends to lean away from laws constraining citizens anyway, often joining the  colleagues to his left. This issue is as stark an example as there can be,

Gerrymandering is unethical and anti-democratic. It was not foreseen by the authors of the Constitution, who can’t be expected to have predicted every devious political maneuver their successors would come up with to pollute their ideals. Unfortunately, the Constitution doesn’t provide a way for the public to stop the practice, other than electing less corrupt legislators, and legislators use gerrymandering to make that exceedingly difficult. A tweak of the wording in the Constitution could carve out an exception, but the Founders also made amending the Constitution in any way at all an almost impossible chore, including amending it to allow easier amending.

What’s a country to do? Well, sometimes the ends really do justify the means: that’s what utilitarianism means. If the Court can kill or limit gerrymandering by, as John Roberts felicitously put it in his dissent, gerrymandering the Constitution, it might be a good choice on balance. It benefits democracy. The conservatives argue, however, and legitimately so, that such a decision also creates a dangerous, even sinister precedent despite its good intentions (none of the Justices seem to think that gerrymandering is anything but unhealthy for democracy). What other laws that violate the plain words of the Constitution will the Court approve because its “practical implications are unequivocally positive,” to the cheers of partisans?  How many times can the Court do this before the Constitution is a dead letter, and any executive–or despot— can claim that government action, regardless of what Constitutional guarantees oppose it, is to be rubber stamped because it solves a real problem? Continue reading →

The Progressives’ Attacks On Shelby County v. Holder: Unethical and Ominous

/ Jack Marshall / 67 Comments

How DARE the Supreme Court not defer to Congressional judgment when it knows Congress is incapable of competent decision-making!

How DARE the Supreme Court not defer to Congressional judgment when it knows Congress is incapable of competent decision-making!

After reading more of the hysterical, sneering attacks on the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, I have concluded that I initially neglected to recognize the deep bias and contempt for basic rights that underlie them. The critics have no legitimate arguments to support allowing the current formula set out in the Voting Rights Act to continue, except that they believe trampling on innocent citizens’ rights is acceptable government practice if it makes the civil rights establishment happy, and allows the myth to be perpetuated that Republicans sit up late at night trying to figure out ways of stopping blacks from voting. “It may be unconstitutional, but it works!” is the best of their claims, a pure embrace of that hallmark of corrupted ethics, the ends justify the means. Note that this is also the justification being offered by the Obama Administration for drone strikes, PRISM, and tapping the phones of reporters. This isn’t an argument but a philosophy, and one that is offensive to core American values.

The Times, no longer the premiere news source in the country but certainly the premiere Democratic Party ally masquerading as a news source, clinched it for me. In its scathing editorial condemning the decision, the only arguments it could come up with were… Continue reading →