United Liberty

It is difficult to quantify the impact on the nation of the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Adored by conservatives/originalists, and reviled by progressives and the “living Constitution” crowd, Scalia was not only arguably the greatest legal mind of his generation, but one of the most brilliant and articulate legal scholars in all of America history. Combining rapier wit with a towering intellect, he shaped the legal thinking of conservatives and liberals alike in the judiciary.

In recent years many of the most controversial rulings handed down by the Supreme Court have come in the form of 5-4 rulings, typically with Justice Anthony Kennedy being the swing vote. The loss of Scalia leaves the Court with eight justices, increasing the likelihood of 4-4 decisions that, rather than establish constitutional law precedent, leave issues unsettled and keep in place lower court rulings.

The sun had not yet begun to creep up over the horizon on Tuesday morning when my alarm clock went off, and I was awakened to the somber voice of a news reporter describing the scenes of carnage in Belgium after a series of Islamic terrorist attacks rocked the city of Brussels just a hours earlier as Belgians were on their way to work.

Initial reports indicate that passengers at the Brussels international airport heard gunfire around 8AM local time, followed almost immediately by an explosion at a passenger check-in desk. Moments later, as passengers panicked and fled the area, a second explosion hit inside the terminal. Within minutes rescue operations had begun. Just over an hour later, at 9:10AM local time, a third explosion hit a train at the Maelbeek Metro subway station, near the European Union headquarters. At least one of the explosions has been determined to be the result of a suicide bomber.

Barack Obama has a history of gravitating toward the worst of humanity, being an apologist and a cheerleader for them, accommodating them, and seeking to expand their influence.

He got his political start in the home of domestic terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn. Frank Marshall Davis, a devout communist and likely pedophile, was like a father figure to him. His mother, father, and stepfather all hated America. In his autobiography “Dreams From My Father”, Obama spoke of how, as a college student, he gravitated towards Marxist professors and leftist radicals.

Before he ran for president, he spent two decades in the church of the racist, hate-spewing “Reverend” Jeremiah Wright. After being elected president, Obama cancelled a missile defense system with our Eastern European allies that would have protected them from Russian aggression. When Iranians took to the streets in peaceful protest following the rigged election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama was virtually silent as Iranian police and the Basij (paramilitary) clubbed, kicked, beat, and shot the demonstrators.

Deeply embedded in his ideological DNA, Obama has followed this pattern throughout his presidency, so it was disgusting, but not all that surprising, when Obama in 2014 announced that he was reversing decades of U.S. policy regarding the murderous, communist Castro regime, and re-opening the U.S. embassy in Havana as part of a resumption of diplomatic relations. This week, Obama announced that he would be the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since President Calvin Coolidge in 1928, though that was under far different circumstances.

“The Constitution is not a living organism…It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.” ~ Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

At about 8:45PM last Saturday night, I grabbed my favorite blanket and the remote and sat on the couch to watch the fireworks that were sure to be on display in the rancorous GOP presidential debate. I’d had a wonderful, news-free day out with my wife, and was not really in the mood to watch the debate, but I felt it was my obligation as a citizen, preparing to exercise my constitutional privilege to vote, to listen to each man make the case for their candidacy. I was gratified to watch as, unbidden, my 17, 15, 12, 11, and 6-year old children joined me.

Moments after the candidates had been introduced, the moderator asked his first question, and that was when I first learned of Scalia’s death. It was like a kick to the gut. My eyes opened wide in shock and I let out an audible gasp of dismay, and my eyes watered. Though Clarence Thomas edged out Justice Antonin Scalia as my favorite Supreme Court justice, it is inarguable that Scalia has been the anchor of the conservative wing of the court. His loss is devastating and cannot be overstated. His jurisprudential brilliance and his sharp wit were legendary, and even though he spent most of his career on the Court in the minority, he had more influence in the minority than his lesser colleagues had in the majority. Such was the high quality of his legal reasoning.

Though it seems this election season started the morning after the 2014 midterms, last night marked just the second state to have cast votes for a presidential nominee. Historically, Americans have rarely chosen senators as their presidents, turning instead to governors (or generals) with a leadership record that can be examined. But this is no ordinary election year.

On the Democrat side, the only remaining candidates (not that they had many in the first place, with the DNC telegraphing a coronation) are former Senator (and Secretary of State) Hillary Clinton, and sitting Senator Bernie Sanders. On the Republican side, the current frontrunners are casino mogul Donald Trump, and Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio (though the last is a huge question mark after a disappointing fifth-place finish in New Hampshire).

Writing recently in the New York Times, Timothy Egan praises the “accomplishments” of the Obama administration, and laments that Obama has not been an effective cheerleader for his “successes”, and berates the American people for their inability to see Obama’s brilliance, mainly because “Much of the country is now more openly intolerant, quick to hate and nasty…a home for xenophobes, defeatists and alarmists.”

Get that? The same people who once voted for Obama, cheered for Obama, gave money to Obama, praised his election as “historic” and “transformational”, are now racists and hate-mongers because they expressed dissatisfaction with the fact that Obama’s record has fallen far, far short of his rhetoric.

A few days ago I indulged in a dose of intellectual masochism by engaging in a Facebook debate with a liberal. The main gist of his argument was that he applauded Obama’s use of executive orders, his selective enforcement of the law, and his use of the federal regulatory apparatus as a bludgeon to enforce his will when Congress “would not act”. In short, he approves of Obama’s petulant tantrums when Republicans don’t give him his way. These tantrums and abuses of power will be Obama’s legacy.

One can’t help but wonder if they’d have such a favorable view had George Bush engaged in such lawlessness as president. For example, what if Bush had issued an Executive Order directing the IRS not to pursue collection of capital gains taxes, or to cease auditing wage earners who fall in the Top 1%? What if he had directed the Border Patrol to focus on deporting Mexicans, but to ignore those trying to get into the U.S. from Cuba (Cubans tend to vote Republican)? What if he issued an EO directing the IRS to set up an mechanism whereby the Social Security taxes of American workers were directed into a private investment account of their choosing (you know, since Congress had “failed to act” on Bush’s efforts at partial privatization of that bloated, bankrupt program)?

Yet because Obama shares their progressive, statist, totalitarian worldview, they embrace a powerful executive who implements his agenda by sheer force of will, regardless of the Constitution, our traditions, or the will of the people. Yet if they were intelligent they would fear such a precedent, realizing that “their guy” will not always hold the reins of power, and precedents, once set, are hard to reverse.

If we have learned nothing else from the Obama years, it is that Obama cannot be trusted. In his first days in office he insulted one of our strongest allies, England, when he returned a bust of former Prime Minister Winston Churchill (and in the first attempted assassination by boredom, Obama later sent to Queen Elizabeth an iPod containing a collection of his speeches). This was followed by truly dangerous actions, which put our allies in harm’s way, as with his decision to renege on our commitment to Poland and the Czech Republic to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe as a firewall against Russian aggression. Obama instead sent Hillary to Russia with a “reset” button for Putin, and we all know how disastrously that turned out.

Yet none have felt the consequences of Obama’s betrayal as harshly as have our allies whom he abandoned in Iraq and Afghanistan after making the decision to unilaterally withdraw U.S. forces against the recommendations of his senior theater commanders and top military advisers. Claiming he was leaving behind a “stable, sovereign, and self-reliant Iraq”, Obama left them to fend for themselves. In the vacuum created by the exit of American forces, we have witnessed the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as the rise of the most brutal, murderous Islamist terror regime we’ve seen to date, ISIS.

While is clear that both scientists and the public continue to debate whether there is any significant amount of global warming occurring, or the separate question of whether human activity on the Earth is causing it, it is clear to many that the advocacy of public policy supposedly remedying “climate change” is a separate issue. While leaders of many nations convened in Paris to work out another global warming accord, the United Nations, with the support of several partnering groups, organized a campaign to convince the world to support the global warming agenda.

The agenda becomes very clear when it’s revealed what the goal of the campaign really is to gain support for a massive international re-distribution of wealth from the wealthiest nations to the less economically successful nations of the world. There is no doubt that much of the costs of this will be paid by U.S. taxpayers.

“Whether anything substantive happen[ed] at all in Paris is still up in the air, as developed and developing nations squabbl[ed], among other things, over whether and how to provide a $100 billion annual transfer from rich to poor nations as part of the agreement, and over how the greenhouse gas promises might actually be measured,” Fox News reported.

The campaign, designed to create a “bandwagon effect” of mindless support for the extreme global warming agenda of wealth redistribution, carbon taxes, etc. was organized by the UN and is supported by the United Nations Foundation and the Energy Future Coalition.

Last night’s GOP debate focused on foreign policy and national security. It’s a good thing, too, because the stratospheric levels of unbridled incompetence and militant political correctness that is the hallmark of the Obama administration should terrify each and every American. Even in the aftermath of the ISIS-inspired attack in San Bernardino, which left 14 dead and 21 wounded, the Obama administration is doubling down on its PC policies, and in the process putting the lives of each and every American at increased risk.

With multiple investigations underway into Islamist terrorists Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik following the San Bernardino attack, reports are revealing that what can only be termed political correctness on the part of the Obama administration has directly contributed to an inability to prevent the deaths of U.S. citizens.

Despite strong protests from senior officials within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Obama administration refused to end a secret policy which prohibited security officials from reviewing the social media posts of foreign citizens attempting to obtain visas for entry into the United States. This was due to the fear of DHS Director Jeh Johnson that the policy might create “bad public relations”.

Speaking to ABC News, former acting Under-secretary for Intelligence and Analysis at DHS, John Cohen, reported that “During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process…The primary concern was that it would be viewed negatively if it was disclosed publicly and there were concerns that it would be embarrassing.”