My Comments: Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University, a Democrat, and frequent guest on Fox News. He’s also one of the most consistent defenders of the First Amendment at a time when the principle of free speech has few defenders and a man who’s writings on the subject deserve the attention of all who love liberty.
In this post, he argues against the extreme views of some Democrats who want to destroy democracy in order to save it.
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Below is my column in the Hill on the Maine decision and how it is illustrative of Justice Louis Brandeis’ warning of the danger of zealots. Shenna Bellows has long embraced extreme political and historical viewpoints, including denouncing the electoral college as a “relic of white supremacy.” Challengers knew that they “had her at hello”…
— Read on jonathanturley.org/2024/01/02/destroying-democracy-to-save-it-maine-shows-the-danger-of-zealots-in-our-legal-system/
Talking about “our democracy” has become a big thing in recent years. Hardly a day goes by, or so it seems, that I don’t hear some politician or another spouting off about “our democracy,” usually in the context that we’re about it lose it if such and such a thing is allowed to happen.
Such and such a thing very often turns out to be the prospect of the reelection of Donald Trump, which Pelosi described as “a nightmare scenario” in the article quoted above.
Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis charged Donald Trump and 18 others with meddling in Georgia’s 2020 election, taking advantage of the state’s broad RICO statute. (John Bazemore / Associated Press)
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
That famous saying, attributed to the head of Joseph Stalin’s secret police, Lavrentiy Beria, is the best summary there is of the term “weaponized law.” It is also now the unofficial slogan of the Biden Regime’s Department of Justice (sic) and of the American legal system more broadly.
In a proper, Christian legal system, you start with the evidence of a crime, investigate the matter to determine the suspect, and bring charges against that person. That’s the way America’s legal system worked, or at least was understood to work, for most of the nation’s history.
But in just the last few years, it is obvious that things have changed. Instead of beginning with evidence of a crime and working to determine who committed it, American “justice” now begins with the man and goes looking for crimes with which to charge him.
On May 30 of this year, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign released the following statement, “As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship.”
Trump continued, “My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries.” You can read Trump’s full statement here.
This is an excellent statement from Trump. A critic may raise the point that Trump talked about this as part of his 2016 campaign, but never pursued the issue seriously during his term in office. That’s a fair criticism, one that I share. But his inaction during his first term in office doesn’t negate the truth of what he said in his press release. Further, as far as I’m aware, no other current Republican candidate has made a statement on birthright citizenship reform.
Under the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the children born on American soil to illegal aliens, birth tourists, foreign students, etc. are granted the status of American citizens, regardless of the citizenship or immigration status of their parents. In other words, it is foreigners, not the American people, who determine who becomes a citizen and who does not. This situation is entirely unacceptable to anyone who believes in the principles of Westphalian sovereignty established under the Peace of Westphalia, in which the nation-state was established as the highest form of government, where each nation-state was treated like a legal person in international law, and where the people of each nation-state could order their own internal affairs as it saw fit.
I’ve written on the issue of birthright citizenship (BRC) reform in the past, but it has been a while and the importance of the issue remains. For these reasons, I’ve decided to write a series on this topic. In this author’s opinion, reforming BRC to remove the nation-destroying incentives that encourage foreigners to violate American immigration law is the single most important legal step needed to end Rome’s illegal alien invasion of the United States. Note, I do not say that it’s the only legal step needed, but it is the most important one. It’s more important than building a wall, which was the primary immigration initiative of the first Trump administration. You could argue that reforming BRC is, in effect, a sort of internal, invisible, legal wall.
The logic of BRC reform is simple, if you remove a huge incentive for illegal immigration, you’re going to get less illegal immigration.
The first page of the U.S. Justice Department’s charging document against former U.S. President Donald Trump and his employee Waltine Nauta, charging Trump with 37 criminal counts, including charges of unauthorized retention of classified documents and conspiracy to obstruct justice after leaving the White House, is seen after being released by the Justice Department in Washington, U.S. June 9, 2023. REUTERS/Jim Bourg/File Photo
“The Bible is for the Government of the People, by the People, and for the People.”
John Wycliffe
Americans are familiar with the closing words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
What many Americans don’t know is that these words are not Lincoln’s own, but he was quoting John Wycliffe from the prologue of his English translation of the Bible.
Wycliffe, often called the Morningstar of the Reformation, lived and wrote at a time when the Roman Catholic Church and the nobility allied with Rome considered it subversive to translate the Scriptures into the common language of the people. Rome and its royalist supporters believed in a government of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite and ruthlessly enforced this teaching. One of the ways of enforcing their tyranny was to keep the people ignorant of the Bible, feeding them instead on a diet of doctrinal fables dispensed by the Church of Rome.
But keeping up the ruse took a lot of effort. Access to the Word of God had to be forbidden. For if people learned what the Bible actually taught and compared it to what Rome said the Bible taught, Rome’s lies would be exposed and her government of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite would be in danger of overthrow.
For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
1 Corinthians 15:1
I’m a natural pessimist. A glass half empty kind of guy.
Yesterday I took some time to watch the Cincinnati Reds play the Philadelphia Phillies. The Reds are coming off a miserable season that saw them lose 100 games. The Phillies, on the other hand, were the National League champs last year. But going into the bottom of the ninth and against all odds, the Reds held a slim 2-0 lead, needing just 3 outs to claim the victory. My comment at the time was, they’re probably going to find some way to choke. And sure enough, they did. The Reds’ bullpen imploded, giving up 3 runs, the lead, and the game.
Oh well.
As the line from the movie A League of Their Own goes, “There’s no crying in baseball.”
Now in the ranking of life’s disappointments, watching your favorite team snatch defeat from the jaws of victory rates as a minor thing. But it is an example of the disappointments we all encounter in life. Maybe you didn’t make the varsity team in high school. Maybe you didn’t get into that college you set your heart on attending. That big promotion you thought you were going to get; it went to someone else. And to these examples can be added countless others.
I spend a great deal of time on this blog analyzing the news. Have you heard any good news lately? If you’re like me, probably not very much. It’s ugly out there.
Maura Healey of Massachusetts became one of two openly lesbian candidates to win a gubernatorial election on November 8, 2022.
The news was flying thick and fast last week. So much so that I ended up with a superabundance of clipping from the week and had a hard time deciding what to cover. Then I thought, well, why not cover ‘em all. Or at least as many as I can. So here we go.
Queering America One Vote at a Time
Largely lost in all the mid-term election day news is that America achieved a first on November 8th with the election of not one, but two openly lesbian governors. CBS News reports that Maura Healey of Massachusetts and Tina Kotek of Oregon were elected as governors of their respective states. Not only have these states delighted to impose the Monstrous Regiment on themselves, but to make matters worse, they have elected to impose a lesbian version of it.
Worth noting is the close logical and practical relationship between feminism and lesbianism. Feminism is usually defined as the belief in social, economic, and political equality of the sexes. It seems to me that the logical endpoint for this philosophy is the complete erasure of all distinctions between men and women. And if there are no distinctions between men and women, then this lack of distinction logically extends not only to matters of politics and careers but to marriage. Hence the calls for legalizing same-sex marriage. It is not an accident that the homosexual movement, which traces its beginning to 1969, followed the rise of second-wave feminism, which began with the publication of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.
One article on Second Wave Feminism summarized Friedan’s book by saying it, “criticized the postwar belief that a woman’s role was to marry and bear children.” Now any Christian worth his salt knows full well that the idea that a woman’s role is to marry and bear children is not some strange and exceptional “postwar” belief but is the consistent message of the Scriptures themselves. “And I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man…Nevertheless she will be saved in childbearing if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with self-control,” “that they [older women] admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.”
There is perhaps nothing that will get feminists riled up faster than to quote these and other verses from the Bible. But they express God’s mind on the subject and cannot be dismissed by Christians without pain of contradiction. If we believe the Bible is the infallible and inerrant Word of God, we must accept this teaching, however much it may conflict with the prevailing ideas of the world.
The U.S. Senate has been hard at work to ensure that the Biblical definition of marriage as between one man and one woman will be buried as deeply as possible. According to the Politico article “Same-sex marriage protections clear critical Senate hurdle,” 12 Republicans voted along with all Senate Democrats to advance this legislation. Unsurprisingly, the 12 Republicans included Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who seems determined to do as much damage to America as he can before he retires in January.
Per the article, the bill is to include protections for religious liberty. “The bipartisan amendment clarifies that the bill would leave intact protections from a 1993 religious freedom law, which outlaws placing a substantial burden on people’s ability to exercise their religion. In addition, it states that nonprofit religious groups would not have to perform marriage services and that the bill would not impact their tax treatment.”
It’ll be interesting to see how long these legal protections last. My view is that the LGBTQ lobby will not be satisfied until it has queered every last corner of society, including Christians and Christian institutions that have the temerity to refuse to bow before the almighty LGBTQ agenda. This likely will come in the form of legislation attempting to force churches, regardless of their theological convictions, to perform same-sex marriages or face having their tax exemption removed or something far worse. It also could encompass a prohibition of freely teaching what the Bible says about homosexuality by making it a hate crime.
Lux Lucet 