Two more excellent Supreme Court rulings

 This:

The Supreme Court on Friday invalidated President Joe Biden’s student loan debt relief plan, meaning the long-delayed proposal intended to implement a campaign trail promise will not go into effect.

The justices, divided 6-3 on ideological lines, ruled in one of two cases that the program was an unlawful exercise of presidential power because it had not been explicitly approved by Congress.

The court rejected the Biden administration's arguments that the plan was lawful under a 2003 law called the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act. The law says the government can provide relief to recipients of student loans when there is a “national emergency,” allowing it to act to ensure people are not in “a worse position financially” as a result of the emergency.

Chief Justice John Roberts said the HEROES Act language was not specific enough, writing that the court's precedent "requires that Congress speak clearly before a department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy."

The plan, which would have allowed eligible borrowers to cancel up to $20,000 in debt and would have cost more than $400 billion, has been blocked since the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary hold in October.

About 43 million Americans would have been eligible to participate.

The student loan proposal is important politically to Biden, as tackling student loan debt was a key pledge he made on the campaign trail in 2020 to energize younger voters.

And this:

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that an evangelical Christian web designer could not be forced to work on wedding sites celebrating same-sex couples because it would violate her First Amendment right against compelled speech.

The 6-3 decision settled the 2016 case brought by Lorie Smith, 39, who sued the Colorado Civil Rights Commission over the state’s anti-discrimination laws that barred her from advertising that she won’t create websites for couples of the same sex. 

But the high court found that to compel Smith to make sites “celebrating other marriages she does not” would be “an impermissible abridgment of the First Amendment’s right to speak freely,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

Under Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act, businesses are barred from denying the public goods and services based on race, gender, sexual orientation and religion — and they can’t post notices doing so either.

But Smith — a married mother of one who owns graphic design firm 303 Creative LLC — has claimed the Centennial State law clashes with her right to refuse business that conflicts with her religious beliefs.

 Some thoughts:

• The student loan forgiveness scheme was rank redistribution. The money owed doesn't just go away. The obligation to pay it back is merely shifted to taxpayers.
• As I noted last August, this was bound to become a court case. Biden never offered even a  flimsy attempt at justifying a purely executive-branch move. Congress was completely sidelined.
• As I also noted then, student loan forgiveness encourages a shrugging-off-responsibility mindset throughout our society. If a precedent is set, how long is it before progressive policy types start opining that car loans and home loans need forgiving? It erodes the principle at the heart of the free market: that an economic transaction occurs when two parties, a buyer and seller, agree on the value of the good or service to bee exchanged, and each understands the obligations he or she is undertaking.
• Administrative bloat is the main reason the cost of higher education has gone up so much.
• Let's nip in the bud any notion that taking a pass on providing wedding services for a same-sex couple is discrimination in the sense that denying lodging, a restaurant table, or the opportunity to look at houses to buy in particular neighborhoods was when racial bigotry met little challenge in this country. There is no explanation for such denials but bigotry. Romans 1 and Leviticus 18 and 20 are, for Christians, God-breathed pronouncements about wrong ways for human beings to use their sexuality. 
• All three of these decisions came down 6 -3, as was entirely predictable.
• No, this doesn't mean the Very Stable Genius was a great president. Any Republican president circa 2017 - 2020 would have made similarly great federal court appointments.

In many ways, these decisions and the one yesterday regarding affirmative action offer us an opportunity to revisit the whole concept of rights - what a right is, what, by definition, cannot be a right, how humankind came to get clear about these matters. I think this will be the subject of my next Precipice post, which I shall spend the afternoon composing. 

More at peace with myself by the day for writing in a presidential choice in 2020

 This post deals with a matter that's a recurring theme over at my Substack, Precipice, namely, the ever-narrower sliver of ideological terrain I inhabit.

My latest post here at LITD, "The Institutional Right In America Is At Least As Sick As It's Been for Eight Years," mentioned a couple of recent developments that particularly stand out as substantiation for my assertion. There are some updates for those. Not only does the speaker lineup for this year's CPAC make clear that that gathering has devolved into an irredeemable sewer, but it now appears organizer Matt Schlapp has a scandal issue, having allegedly felt up a Hershel Walker campaign worker, as well as in-the-pits staff morale.  And the documented coverup by Fox hosts and executives regarding MAGA claims of a stolen 2020 election has now gotten real.  Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are collectively suing Fox for $4.3 billion in damages. (Fox only has $4 billion in cash on hand.) News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch said under oath in a Dominion-case deposition that he let the on-air talent continue to spew nonsense because it ensured the greatest flow of dollars to Fox.

I offered a whiff of that narrow-sliver-of-terrain stance by mentioning my misgivings about The Bulwark and Principles First. 

The shorthand for why I harbor misgivings is this: many prominent figures associated with those entities have publicly stated that they voted for Joe Biden in 2020.

That's a bridge too far for this conservative.

And no, I didn't vote for the Very Stable Genius in either 2016 or 2020. I wrote in Evan McMullin and Ben Sasse, respectively, in those elections.

Joe Biden has been happy to take his administration as far to the left as the most progressive elements in his party want to go.

He has taken the phone-and-pen notion of law-making by executive fiat even farther than his old boss Barack Obama. 

The CHIPS and Science Act, duly passed by Congress and signed into law by Biden last August, was already a collectivist leap, all about "investment," read wealth redistribution, in making the US semiconductor industry impervious to what the Chinese were doing. Now, Biden says these subsidies come with conditions. US manufacturers will have to have onsite daycare for employees, limit stock buybacks, and share "excess profits" with the government.

I hope you don't need me to point out what makes this so pernicious.

But in case you find yourself in a discussion about this with someone less steeped in principle-driven thought, here are the most obvious objections:

• It blurs the lines between the executive and legislative branches beyond what is constitutional.
• It engages in social engineering - specifically, in weakening the family.
• It demonizes profit, which is the gauge by which business organizations monitor their health.
• It uses bribery to tell private organizations how to conduct their affairs.

Biden is using the same tactic with regard to student loan forgiveness.  Per Dan McLaughlin, writing at the New York Post:

On Tuesday, the Court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a trillion dollars cancelling the college and graduate school debts of 43 million people.

With whose money? The national debt, of course, because Congress didn’t appropriate funds for this or raise taxes or fees to pay for it. 

Biden claims to be using the emergency powers of the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to let presidents suspend some student loan rules for soldiers serving abroad. 

Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s own Department of Education warned him that he didn’t have the power to do this.

And as if his Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government executive order of January 2021 wasn't enough of an identity-politics intrusion, now comes the order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. It creates "Equity Teams" in every stinking agency of the Beltway leviathan that will  annually submit "Equity Action Plans" to the Office of Management and Budget.

A question: Does there come a point at which these "underserved communities" are no longer "underserved"? That is, does this annual-submission-of-equity-plans edict have an anticipated shelf life?

Actually, I have another question. What does "underserved," and, by inference, "served," mean? What kind of "serving" falls within the proper purview of government?

No, I can unequivocally state that voting for Joe Biden in 2020 was no act of rectitude. 

Now, here's where we get back to the narrow-sliver-of-terrain metaphor. The main reason the Biden is getting away with these crowbar whacks to our freedom is that nearly everyone decrying them is a Neo-Trumpist wackadoodle. They happen to be correct about the Democrats, even if they are every bit as poisonous to the American experiment. 

I didn't quit being a conservative when I quit being a Republican.

Some folks whose intellects would be useful right now did.

It's a good thing the gout in my right foot is subsiding. It's getting every harder to maintain my balance on this sliver. 

 

Elizabeth Warren is no moderate alternative to anything

There are some who want very much to position her as such, as a hedge in case Joe Biden flames out. Alas, it seems really unlikely that most voters are going to be anything but creeped out by her having "a plan for that."

She sure does. How about this one?

On Thursday, presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) came out in favor of legislation that has been equated to "gay reparations." Under the Refund Equality Act, same-sex couples would be able to amend their past taxes, readjusting with jointly-filed tax returns and accepting refunds from the IRS.

“The federal government forced legally married same-sex couples in Massachusetts to file as individuals and pay more in taxes for almost a decade,” Warren said in a statement, according to NBC News. “We need to call out that discrimination and to make it right — Congress should pass the Refund Equality Act immediately.”

"It wasn’t until marriage equality became law that gay & lesbian couples could jointly file tax returns—so they paid more in taxes," the Democratic presidential candidate posted to Twitter on Sunday. "Our government owes them more than $50M for the years our discriminatory tax code left them out. We must right these wrongs."

Yo, toots, you're talking about matters internal to the state of Massachusetts. Us taxpayers elsewhere in the country aren't the least bit interested in ponying up to "right these wrongs."

She's not done:

 . . . the far-left Democrat outlined her plan to "cancel" student loan debt for some 42 million Americans. "The ambitious student loan forgiveness plan would cancel student loan debt for more than 95% of borrowers, and would entirely cancel student loan debt for more than 75% of Americans with student loan debt," Forbes reported.

Plus, as reported by CNBC, Warren wants to “eliminate tuition and fees at all two-year and four-year public universities through a federal partnership with states to ‘split the costs of tuition and fees and ensure that states maintain their current levels of funding on need-based financial aid and academic instruction.’” 

When she's taking some birthday time off from announcing plans, she likes to chill at this place:

Kirsten Gillibrand . . . [and] Elizabeth Warren [ran into each other] on the campaign trail [and went in for a demonstration of candidate comity] . . . [at] that big Dem Planned Parenthood town hall.

The end of [the video] clip where Warren says, “What better way to celebrate my birthday than right here with Planned Parenthood?”

Moderate alternative? To what? She basically said to the nation, "Hello, I am a spiritually grotesque monster."