RICK PERRY TALKS ABOUT RACE: Rick Perry’s speech last Thursday at the National Press Club haven’t received much attention in the mainstream media over the holiday weekend, until today’s Wall Street Journal editorial, which observes:

But his remarks are far more than a mea culpa. He also lays out a rationale and a specific agenda for how the GOP can earn—and deserve—the support of black Americans. In particular he points out how Republican policies have improved life for all races in Texas. And he contrasts those results for blacks in progressive states that purport to do so much more for minorities but have left them behind economically.

“There is a lot of talk in Washington about inequality. Income inequality. But there is a lot less talk about the inequality that arises from the high cost of everyday life,” Mr. Perry says. “In blue state coastal cities, you have these strict zoning laws, environmental regulations that have prevented builders from expanding the housing supply. And that may be great for the venture capitalist who wants to keep a nice view of San Francisco Bay, but it’s not so great for the single mother working two jobs in order to pay rent and still put food on the table for her kids.”

That’s a nice turn of the equality argument against Democrats. Mr. Perry does the same on education, pointing out that “in too many parts of this country black students are trapped in failing schools.” He notes that in 2002 Texas ranked 27th in high-school graduation rates; by 2013 it was second, and its most recent graduation rate for blacks was first.

Mr. Perry also stressed Texas’ impressive record on prison and sentencing reform, especially for nonviolent drug offenses.

I like Perry’s approach, and it’s clear that he’s learned some hard lessons from his 2012 quest for the GOP nomination. His speech wasn’t pandering to minorities, but articulating how conservative policies help their everyday lives in far more palpable ways than the race-baiting, divisive, blaming, entitlement approach of the liberals/progressives. My favorite line from Perry’s speech:

If we create jobs, incentivize work, keep nonviolent drug offenders out of prison, reform our schools, and reduce the cost of living—we will have done more for African-Americans than the last three Democratic administrations combined.

The question is: Will black, Hispanic and Asian voters open their minds to the GOP policies or have they been permanently brainwashed by the political left elites’ incessant accusations of racism?

RELATED: Steven Hayward at PowerLine has some interesting observations in support of Perry’s attempts to reach out to minority communities.

EUROPEAN ENABLERS: John Fund warns, “Beware of Greeks Casting Blame.”

Now the Greek people, although many of them profess that they still want to be part of the EU, have effectively blown up any chance they can continue using the euro, the linchpin of the EU’s monetary policy.

I fear that this track record will not sway European Union die-hards. Belgium’s Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of liberal forces in the European parliament, has already called for giving Greeks “a second chance” to stay with the euro.

There will be other calls to forgive Greece its debt in order to keep the troubled country within the euro zone. Doing so would set a terrible precedent for other countries and be patently unfair to the Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese who have suffered under austerity measures over the last five years to pay off their debts.

The rhetoric of Greek’s far-left leaders has been so outrageous and over-the-top in recent months as to invent a new chapter in “non-diplomacy.” Tsipris has already warned Brussels in the aftermath of Sunday’s vote that Greece is going through a “humanitarian crisis,” the clear implication being that if euro-zone ministers don’t acquiesce to his demands for debt forgiveness and more loans, any human suffering will be on their conscience.

Yep–this is what happens when you let progressives run a country. They spend like drunken sailors, then demand a bailout from others, accusing them of bigotry and hatred if they don’t acquiesce. Most families have at least one of these types. They have the emotional and financial maturity of a two year-old (sorry, two year-old readers out there). By repeatedly caving into these childish demands, the EU acts like parents who enable their children’s prodigal habits. It never turns out well.

WISCONSIN’S SHAME: David French’s latest on the human side of the John Doe investigation into conservatives: “He could have been shot. Over politics.”

It was still dark outside when “Jonah” (not his real name) heard the pounding on his front door. As luck would have it, he was awake — or mostly awake. He’d gotten up at 4:00 a.m. on October 3, 2013, to see his parents off to the airport. They were leaving on a quick trip to raise money for the children’s charity his father runs. Jonah was 16 at the time, old enough to stay home alone for a short time, but not old enough to deal with what awaited him on the other side of the door. . . .

Jonah’s father may have been the target of the raid on his home, but according to the family, investigators went well beyond the scope of the warrant to seize business records in his mother’s possession, including confidential donor and financial information for two conservative Wisconsin nonprofits, which were paralyzed for weeks as a result. Yet despite the overly expansive search, to this day, no one in Jonah’s family has been charged with a crime.

The damage to the family’s reputation was immense. Soon after the raid, and despite court orders mandating confidentiality (orders that prevented the family from publicly defending themselves), their names leaked to the press. Jonah’s father — working to help the most disadvantaged kids — found himself struggling to defend a professional reputation under siege. In both his day job as a political consultant and his nonprofit work, even the slightest rumor of illegality can cause clients and donors to shy away. As he puts it, when you’re hired as a consultant, “No matter how good you are, you can’t become the issue.” A consultant whose home was just raided by law enforcement is, most definitely, an “issue” for any politician or political movement.

I strongly suspect there is much more to be revealed about the vast scope of Chisholm’s John Doe investigation. It will make the Salem witch hunts look restrained.

As for Chisholm and his cohorts: Tar, feathers, Sicilian bull–or at least a substantial civil rights lawsuit victory.

A CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO “DIGNITY”: Jonathan Turley has an intriguing oped in the Washington Post, discussing why Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in the same-sex marriage case, Obergefell v. Hodges, may portend a much broader and more nefarious right to “dignity”:

In reality, he has been building to this moment for years, culminating in what might now be called a right to dignity. In his 1992 Casey decision, he upheldRoe v. Wade on the basis of “personal dignity and autonomy [that] are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.” Kennedy wove this concept of protected dignity through a series of cases, from gay rights to prison lawsuits, including his historic 2003 Lawrence decision striking down the criminalization of homosexuality. These rulings on liberty peaked withObergefell, which he described as an effort of the petitioners to secure “equal dignity in the eyes of the law.” He used the word “dignity” almost a dozen times in his decision and laid down a jurisprudential haymaker: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” . . .

Dignity is a rather elusive and malleable concept compared with more concrete qualities such as race and sex. Which relationships are sufficiently dignified to warrant protection? What about couples who do not wish to marry but cohabitate? What about polyamorous families, who are less accepted by public opinion but are perhaps no less exemplary when it comes to, in Kennedy’s words on marriage, “the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family”? The justice does not specify.

Nor could they specify, even if they wanted to (which they don’t). The progressives have long dreamed of constitutionalizing a right to “dignity,” precisely because it’s so amorphous.  In many ways, Turley’s piece echoes a longer recent piece by Jeffrey Rosen in the Atlantic explaining the vast, subjective possibilities it offers for progressive judges and its dangerous incompatibility with the First Amendment:

I won’t rehearse here the objections to reading the text and history of the Constitution at such a high level of generality; with this approach, the connections to the specific concerns that animated the framers is hard to discern. Suffice it to say that Justice Louis Brandeis, the greatest defender of the right to privacy in U.S. history, originally tried to persuade courts to recognize a new right to dignity, after confessing that American law, unlike Roman and European law, had not, traditionally protected offenses against honor and dignity.

But, as Neal Richards demonstrates in Intellectual Privacy, Brandeis changed his mind about the wisdom of constitutionalizing a right to dignity—defined as the right to restrain the press from publishing truthful but embarrassing information about celebrities—after concluding that it clashed with the First Amendment guarantees of free press and free expression. Instead, Brandeis came to embrace a more carefully defined notion of intellectual privacy and freedom of thought and belief, more closely rooted in the text of the First Amendment itself.

In the ultimate irony, the progressives so excited by a right to dignity are the ones have intellectually led the charge against recognition of economic liberties, such as the right to contract, exemplified in cases such as Lochner v. New York (1905), on grounds that they are too subjective.  There is far more substance and historical/founding era support for a right to contract than a right to dignity, but of course we all know the progressives don’t care about being consistent or original meaning; it’s only the ends that matter.

GOOD TRY, BUT I’M NOT BUYING IT:  George Will on Chief Justice Roberts’ interpretive methodology: “A Wrinkle in the ACA Decision.“

LEAKED DETAILS OF OBAMATRADE: Politico has a story, “Leaked: What’s in Obama’s Trade Deal” that suggests it contains goodies for U.S. pharmaceutical companies:

A recent draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership free-trade deal would give U.S. pharmaceutical firms unprecedented protections against competition from cheaper generic drugs, possibly transcending the patent protections in U.S. law.

POLITICO has obtained a draft copy of TPP’s intellectual property chapter as it stood on May 11, at the start of the latest negotiating round in Guam. While U.S. trade officials would not confirm the authenticity of the document, they downplayed its importance, emphasizing that the terms of the deal are likely to change significantly as the talks enter their final stages. Those terms are still secret, but the public will get to see them once the twelve TPP nations reach a final agreement and President Obama seeks congressional approval. . . .

Some of the most contentious provisions involve “patent linkage,” which would prevent regulators in TPP nations from approving generic drugs whenever there are any unresolved patent issues. The TPP draft would make this linkage mandatory, which could help drug companies fend off generics just by claiming an infringement. . . .

The opponents are also worried about the treaty’s effect on the U.S. market, because its draft language would extend mandatory patent linkage to biologics, the next big thing in the pharmaceutical world. Biologics can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for patients with illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis, hepatitis B and cancer, and the first knockoffs have not yet reached pharmacies. The critics say that extending linkage to biologics—which can have hundreds of patents—would help insulate them from competition forever.

“It would be a dramatic departure from U.S. law, and it would put a real crimp in the ability of less expensive drugs to get to market,” said K.J. Hertz, a lobbyist for AARP. “People are going to look at this very closely in Congress.”

Well, it’s good to know President Obama is making good on his goal of prioritizing the concerns of the middle class. No wonder establishment GOP types supported Obamatrade.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR SPIES: Hudson Institute senior fellow Gabriel Schoenfeld on “The Central Inclusiveness Agency.”

The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.”

What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.”

Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness. . . .

The report is unsparing. Senior positions at the “highest levels of the CIA” are “consistently occupied by white male career officers.” While minority officers make up 23.9% of the CIA workforce, the higher echelons of the CIA don’t come close to that number. For example, the Senior Intelligence Service, the crème de la crème of the spy agency’s personnel, manages only a 10.8% minority composition. Spies with disabilities and LGBT spies, according to the report, are no better represented in the CIA’s upper leadership, though women are generally faring well.

Yeah, I was just thinking to myself the other day, “Why, oh why, aren’t there more disabled and LGBT spies?” And of course there’s only one logical answer (at least to the Obama Administration): discrimination.

The solution? For one thing, “all leaders, managers, and supervisors” in the CIA should be subject to “mandatory stand-alone diversity and inclusion training.” This must include such “well-established tools” as “unconscious bias training” so that all CIA officers can “learn how societal forces and their own experiences mold their daily decisions and perceptions.” 

I’m glad my tax dollars are now going to go toward remedying this atrocity. Because, you know, how on earth can we gather reliable intelligence if we don’t have enough transgendered or gay spies? They will be particularly useful in our efforts to infiltrate ISIS, I’m sure.

UPDATE: Fixed broken link.

OBAMA VISITS WISCONSIN, SMEARS WALKER: President Obama is visiting the Badger State today, greeted at the airport by Gov. Scott Walker. Despite Walker’s hospitality, it didn’t take long for the Campaigner-in-Chief to take the lame duck presidential gloves off and attack Walker and the GOP policies he’s implemented:

He said neighboring Minnesota had raised the minimum wage, implemented all-day kindergarten and made it easier to go to college while raising taxes on the top two percent. Obama said the results are that Minnesota has a lower unemployment rate and $9,000 higher median income than its neighbor.

Obama said all of the Republicans running — he joked that he’s lost track of how many and suggested they could start their own Hunger Games (video) — all have the same governing agenda of giving breaks to the rich while everyone else is on their own. That’s the same policies, Obama said, that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

He even joked that the Republicans were like having a crazy Uncle Harry — somebody you love but “you don’t want to put in charge.”

And he said that the fight is also about values.

“Being an American is not about taking as much as you can from your neighbor before they take as much as they can from you,” he said. “We are not a bunch of individuals out here on our own. We are a community, we are family. We are all in this together.”

Ah yes, it’s always heartwarming to hear the Dear Leader President speak of communist communitarian values that are so deeply antithetical to the individualist values upon which this country is based. And of course it’s much better, for a republic such as ours, to have only one candidate for President rather than a choice. Who wants a choice anyway–that’s so Hunger Games and individualistic, to have a bunch of competitors vying for the nomination.  As for a “crazy Uncle Harry,” let’s just say that “crazy Uncle Joe,” even crazier “Uncle Bernie,” and the pathological liar-cat lady “Aunt Hillary” aren’t individuals I would want to have the metaphorical keys to the nuclear arsenal, either.

RELATED: Scott Walker’s retort: Welcome to Wisconsin, Mr. President.

I SURE HOPE SO:  Philip Klein: Social Conservatives and Libertarians Will Get Married.

The Republican Party, broadly speaking, is comprised of many factions that are often at odds with one another. Prominent examples are the battles between the grassroots and the national party establishment and between defense hawks and non-interventionists.

Perhaps fiercer than any of these fights is the long-standing conflict between social conservatives and libertarians. But when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage last month, they created an opening for a wedding between these two groups, which could benefit the Republican Party ahead of the 2016 election. . . .

But as the dust settles on the Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage, it’s becoming clearer that the debate over the issue is going to shift to one of religious freedom. And on that issue, there’s much more of an opening for libertarians and social conservatives to get along. . . .

But with gay marriage legal, the cultural debate has been moving to issues such as: Should a religiously observant baker or photographer be forced to participate in gay weddings? Or, should a Catholic Church be forced to perform gay marriages?

Whatever their differences on the underlying issue of homosexuality and gay marriage, it will be hard for many libertarians to justify any sort of government coercion forcing individuals to violate their deeply held beliefs. As a result, they’ll find themselves increasingly — and begrudgingly — on the same side as social conservatives on many of the looming debates.

What this means for the Republican Party in 2016 depends in large part on how candidates campaign on the issue once the debate moves beyond the stage of the initial reactions. The most unifying message for Republican candidates would be: Whatever your views on same-sex marriage, government shouldn’t prevent individuals from living their lives in accordance with their values.

I agree with this advice for GOP presidential candidates. Don’t waste your energy trying to put the gay marriage genie back in the bottle. Focus on stopping the hemorrhage and defend the First Amendment like it’s constitutional life or death–because it is. 

OKLAHOMA SUES TO BLOCK OBAMA’S CLEAN POWER PLAN: Oklahoma filed a lawsuit yesterday afternoon in the Northern District of Oklahoma, challenging the EPA’s overreaching “Clean Power Plan,” a unilateral, executive branch global warming climate change transformation, ostensibly grounded in the Clean Air Act, that will require an unachievable 30 percent reduction in carbon emissions from coal-fired plants and threaten the reliability and affordability of electricity:

But in the complaint filed Wednesday, [Oklahoma Attorney General Scott] Pruitt argues that the court has authority because Oklahoma is already experiencing the effects of the EPA’s rule, and there is nothing that could happen, short of judicial intervention, that could stop it.

“Unless this Court intervenes, Oklahoma will have no meaningful or adequate remedy to enforce the limitations that the Clean Air Act and the Constitution place on the authority of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and its Administrator and to avoid injury to its sovereign, quasi-sovereign, fiscal, and economic interests,” Pruitt wrote in his complaint.

The state also asks the court for a preliminary injunction to immediately stop the EPA from moving forward on the rule while the court proceedings go on.

Pruitt, a Republican, has been one of the most vocal opponents of President Obama’s EPA in general and the climate rule specifically.

He told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in May that “the EPA, under this administration, treats states like a vessel of federal will. The EPA believes the states exist to implement the policies the administration sees fit, regardless of whether laws like the Clean Air Act permit such action.”

The EPA has repeatedly defended the regulation has a legal and necessary exercise of its authority under the Clean Air Act.

The lawsuit presents some intriguing constitutional claims, asserting that the EPA’s proposal coerces and commandeers the States, and thus violates the principle of federalism. Liberal constitutional Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe has made similar constitutional assertions, a position for which Tribe has been criticized by fellow leftists for “selling out” because he has agreed to represent an energy company, Peabody Energy, in other legal challenges against the EPA’s plan. That lawsuit was dismissed recently by the D.C. Circuit because it did not have jurisdiction to issue a writ of prohibition because the EPA’s Clean Power Plan is not yet a “final” rule. The Oklahoma lawsuit, by contrast, does not request a writ of prohibition, instead relying on a series of cases allowing challenges to ultra vires, pre-final agency action. In the name of full disclosure, I am one of the lawyers working on behalf of Oklahoma.

SHE SPEAKS THE TRUTH:  Katie Pavlich: America is not racist.

It’s interesting how those on the left, in this case Obama and Heschel, make broad, general statements about how far we have to go on race issues but don’t give specifics about what’s left to fix. What do white churches have to do with the Charleston killer? They’ve offered support and unity. Is that something they should hang their heads over? The answer is no. And despite what Obama says, racism is not passed along in DNA through the generations. If that were the case, America wouldn’t be the tolerant, multi-racial country it is today.

Yes, America, like the vast majority of the rest of the world, at one time participated in slavery. While the sin of slavery is not justified, it is important to acknowledge that the sin of slavery isn’t a uniquely American sin, but rather one of mankind throughout the course of history. Further, owning slaves is not a sin unique to white people; in fact, black Africans sold other blacks into slavery (and still do today). Slavery is uniquely human, but societies and countries that respect human dignity, like America, have stopped the horrifying practice.

We need more direct refutations of the “racism” accusation like this. Liberals/progressives talk incessantly about racism, yet there are spectacularly few examples of the phenomenon, so they pounce on every conceivable black-white interaction–think Ferguson and Baltimore–even if the facts don’t support their immoral, divisive accusations.

The Charleston shootings have given race-baiters an excuse to ramp up their rhetoric and double down on their strategy of divisiveness. Too bad the good folks in Charleston keep disappointing the progressive/liberal racism promoters with their acts of good faith, unity and charity. One can almost feel the race-baiters’ frustration that a random evil act didn’t spark race riots. But hey, they are at least getting traction on their longstanding agenda to erase all memory of Confederate soldiers and, of course, the Confederate flag.

IT’S GREEK TO THEM: Steven Hayward on “The Decadence of the Liberal Mind in One Sentence.“

ANOTHER WISCONSIN CONSERVATIVE BRINGS RETALIATION LAWSUIT: This time it’s Cindy Archer, a longtime aide to Governor Scott Walker, whose home was raided, SWAT-style, as part of an investigation witch hunt against conservatives in the state initiated by Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm.

Archer has filed her civil rights-First Amendment lawsuit against Chisholm in Wisconsin state court. Explaining her decision to file the suit in the Wall Street Journal, Archer reveals:

I was a close adviser to Scott Walker in the county executive’s office and then in the statehouse, but it never occurred to me that my own happiness would be collateral damage in a political vendetta.

Nothing could have prepared me for waking up to the shouts of men with battering rams announcing that they were about to break down my door on that morning in 2011. It was so unexpected and frightening that I ran down from my bedroom without clothes on. Panicked by the threatened show of force, I was then humiliated as officers outside the window yelled at me to get dressed and open up. I quickly retrieved clothing and dressed as I unlocked the door.

Agents with weapons drawn swarmed through every part of the house. They barged into the bathroom where my partner was showering. I was told to shut up and sit down. The officers rummaged through drawers, cabinets and closets. Their aggressive assault on my home seemed more appropriate for a dangerous criminal, not a longtime public servant with no criminal history.

After they left, I surveyed the damage. Drawers and closets had been ransacked. My deceased mother’s belongings were strewn across the floor. Neighbors gathered in small clusters at the end of their driveways and the press arrived in force.

What had prompted the raid? My guess: As an adviser to Gov. Walker, I had played a lead role in drafting and implementing public-employee labor reforms that would propel him to the national stage.

The governor’s reforms, commonly referred to as Act 10, prompted angry union protests. The reforms also enraged many politicians, including, as I would later find out, Mr. Chisholm and members of his staff. My ties to Gov. Walker and Act 10 made me a prime target for Mr. Chisholm’s campaign to intimidate anyone close to the governor.

In other words, I was targeted because of my politics—in plain violation of the First Amendment and federal civil-rights statutes.

Like so many Walker and union reform supporters who were targeted by Chisholm’s “John Doe” investigation, Archer was never charged with a crime. Her reputation has been irreparably damaged, and Archer states that she lost her job working for Walker because she was a target of the investigation:

I have also been subjected to derogatory headlines and made the butt of jokes on talk radio and anti-Walker websites about everything from my personal appearance to my sexual orientation and mental stability. Neighbors became distant and suspicious.

Worst of all, I have discovered that my demotion as Gov. Walker’s deputy director of administration, which came four weeks before the raid on my house, appears to have been engineered by the governor’s team after word reached them that I had been targeted by the district attorney. Subsequently, I have not been given any role in the administration that may bring public attention.

Archer is now working as the Chief Information Officer for the Wisconsin Public Defenders’ Office. Her lawsuit will provide a much needed opportunity to discover more information about the motive of Chisholm’s investigation, including what should be some very interesting depositions. A similar First Amendment retaliation lawsuit filed by Eric O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth had early success in a federal trial court, but the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the lawsuit dismissed due to its belief that the federal civil rights claims should be resolved by the Wisconsin state courts.

Now, with the Archer lawsuit, the facts can finally be discovered. I am hoping O’Keefe and the Wisconsin Club for Growth consider refiling their lawsuit in Wisconsin state court, too.  It ain’t over ’til it’s over.

OBAMA: “IT’S BEEN A GOOD FEW DAYS FOR AMERICA“: President Obama takes to the Huffington Post to praise the Supreme Court for rewriting the laws and our Constitution, and to push his new agenda for higher wages:

This week, I’ll head to Wisconsin to discuss my plan to extend overtime protections to nearly 5 million workers in 2016, covering all salaried workers making up to about $50,400 next year. That’s good for workers who want fair pay, and it’s good for business owners who are already paying their employees what they deserve — since those who are doing right by their employees are undercut by competitors who aren’t.

That’s how America should do business. In this country, a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. That’s at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America.

Notice that the President does not articulate any arguments for growing the economy or ensuring that anyone has a job to begin with. It’s all so very European of him— high wages, high unemployment, high government unemployment benefits.  How depressing.

THOMAS SOWELL: Supreme Court disasters.

Many people are looking at the recent Supreme Court decisions about ObamaCare and same-sex marriage in terms of whether they think these are good or bad policies. That is certainly a legitimate concern, for both those who favor those policies and those who oppose them.

But there is a deeper and more long-lasting impact of these decisions that raise the question whether we are still living in America, where “we the people” are supposed to decide what kind of society we want, not have our betters impose their notions on us. . . .

When any branch of government can exercise powers not authorized by either statutes or the Constitution, “we the people” are no longer free citizens but subjects, and our “public servants” are really our public masters. And America is no longer America. The freedom for which whole generations of Americans have fought and died is gradually but increasingly being taken away from us with smooth and slippery words.

This decision makes next year’s choice of the next President of the United States more crucial than ever, because with that office goes the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. Democrats have consistently nominated people who shared their social vision and imposed their policy preferences, too often in disregard of the Constitution.

Republicans have complained about it but, when the power of judicial appointment was in the hands of Republican presidents, they have too often appointed justices who participated in the dismantling of the Constitution — and usually for the kinds of social policies preferred by Democrats. . . .

Can the Republicans — or the country — afford to put another mushy moderate in the White House, who can appoint more mushy moderates to the Supreme Court?

ANOTHER CONSTITUTIONAL REWRITE: This time it was a Supreme Court rewrite of the Elections Clause, in the Arizona State Legislature vs. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission decision.  While the Court majority upheld the state legislature’s standing to sue, it also upheld the validity of the ballot measure that transferred the power to draw legislative districts from the state legislature to an independent commission.  According to the Wall Street Journal editorial:

In 2000 Arizona voters approved a ballot measure to amend the state constitution and give a five-member commission the power to draw the map for Congressional districts. The idea was to take redistricting away from politicians who invariably use it for partisan advantage.

Good intention, but the Elections Clause says the “times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.” And the legislature didn’t sanction the referendum.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg nonetheless writes for the liberals and Anthony Kennedythat when the Framers wrote the word “legislature” they didn’t mean “legislature.” They meant it loosely because “the people themselves are the originating source of all the powers of government.”

The Founders weren’t perfect but they were more precise wordsmiths than the average Supreme Court Justice. For example, when they meant “the people,” they wrote “the people.” So when they wrote “the legislature,” confidence is high that they meant “the legislature.”

It’s been a bad week for words at the Supreme Court.  

YEP, GOVERNMENT CENTRALIZATION LEADS TO DEMOCRATIC DEFICIT: John Fund on how the latest Greek banking crisis exemplifies the EU’s persistent democratic deficit:

But for all the perfidy of the Greek government, it is, at least in its moment of crisis, returning to the roots of the democratic ideal: that it is the people, not experts or elites or aristocrats, who should have the ultimate say on those matters that must ultimately be settled politically. Here’s hoping the Greeks wake up their fellow Europeans to the fact that if they want to ensure a prosperous and free Europe for their children, politics is too important to be left to non-transparent Eurocrats.

Yep–the EU is a progressive’s dream: lots of elitist bureaucracy by “experts,” with little opportunity for republican or democratic participation by the unwashed masses. It’s a phenomenon that sounds increasingly familiar to American ears in the Obama era.

IT’S BAD ON MULTIPLE LEVELS: My Los Angeles Times oped today with David Rivkin, “The Supreme Court’s Bad Call on the Affordable Care Act.”

When judges take it upon themselves to “fix” a law — or to bless an executive “fix” — they diminish political accountability by encouraging Congress to be sloppy. And they bypass the political process established by the Constitution’s separation of powers, arrogating to itself — and the executive — the power to amend legislation.

This leads to bad laws, bad policy outcomes and fosters the cynical belief that “law is politics.”

The progressive left’s belief that “law is politics” is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Andrew McCarthy pointed out in NRO this weekend, there was no speculation about whether one of the four liberal/progressive Justices would vote in any of the recent high profile, controversial cases precisely because liberal/progressive Justices don’t “wander off the reservation.”

For some reason, it’s the GOP-nominated Justices who turn out to be unpredictable.  As I said this morning on Fox & Friends, the GOP-nominated Justices are, to paraphrase Forrest Gump, like a box of chocolates: You never know what you’re gonna get.

RAND PAUL:  Government Should Get Out of Marriage Business:

While I disagree with Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage, I believe that all Americans have the right to contract.

The Constitution is silent on the question of marriage because marriage has always been a local issue. Our founding fathers went to the local courthouse to be married, not to Washington, D.C. . . .

The government should not prevent people from making contracts but that does not mean that the government must confer a special imprimatur upon a new definition of marriage.

Perhaps the time has come to examine whether or not governmental recognition of marriage is a good idea, for either party.

Since government has been involved in marriage, they have done what they always do — taxed it, regulated it, and now redefined it. It is hard to argue that government’s involvement in marriage has made it better, a fact also not surprising to those who believe government does little right.

So now, states such as Alabama are beginning to understand this as they begin to get out of the marriage licensing business altogether. Will others follow?

I have long agreed with the basic premise that marriage is a contract and should not be a “license” granted by government.  The contractual approach isn’t a panacea for societal division over the meaning of marriage, however, as presumably many would still like to prohibit practices such as (adult) incest and polygamy, which contract law, alone, would not do.  A contractual approach would also necessitate (presumably) temporal limitations on marriage contracts, such that a “marriage for 30 minutes”–prostitution–would not be legal, as it is in Islam.

So for better or for worse (pun intended), government will remain in the marriage business to some extent, either by limiting those eligible for a “license,” or limiting those eligible to “contract.” Dispensing with the license-based marriage in favor of contract-based marriage may not lessen government regulation, but it would likely eliminate government benefits, such as joint filing for income tax purposes.

EARLY BIRDS: JOIN ME TOMORROW MORNING: For those of you who like to rise and shine early, I hope you’ll tune into Fox & Friends at around 6:45 am EST, to watch me debate the proposal for Supreme Court retention elections, and other possible means for reigning in a Supreme Court that appears increasingly unmoored by statutory or constitutional text.

THE “LEAST POLITICAL BRANCH” NO MORE: Andrew McCarthy: Let’s Drop the Charade: The Supreme Court is a Political Branch, Not a Judicial One.

Already, an ocean of ink has been spilled analyzing, lauding, and bemoaning the Supreme Court’s work this week: a second life line tossed to SCOTUScare in just three years; the location of a heretofore unknown constitutional right to same-sex marriage almost a century-and-a-half after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the refashioning of Congress’s Fair Housing Act to embrace legal academe’s loopy “disparate impact” theory of inducing discrimination.

Yet, for all the non-stop commentary, one detail goes nearly unmentioned — the omission that best explains this week’s Fundamental Transformation trifecta.   Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote?There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation.

McCarthy’s right. Leftists believe that “law is politics,” so they’re not particularly interested in how they get there: What matters, to the political left, is simply getting there.  The ends justify the means. 

Given this reality, proposals to reform the Supreme Court–to make it more politically accountable–are becoming increasingly attractive to conservatives.  If Justices are going to act like politicians in robes, they ought to be more politically accountable to the people. Any of the proposals being floated–such as Senator Cruz’s proposal for Supreme Court retention elections, or perhaps term limits–would require a constitutional amendment.

Americans haven’t ratified any “new” amendments (and here I am excluding the 27th Amendment, which was proposed by Madison with the original Bill of Rights, but not ratified until 1992) since the 26th Amendment gave 18 year-olds the right to vote, back in 1971.  We the People haven’t been very constitutionally active in my lifetime, and maybe it’s time to change that, as there are numerous important constitutional changes now worth considering.

PROGRESSIVES NEED PERSPECTIVE: . . .according to Bari Weiss, who writes about “Love Among the Ruins.”

On Friday my phone was blowing up with messages, asking if I’d seen the news. Some expressed disbelief at the headlines. Many said they were crying.

None of them were talking about the dozens of people gunned down in Sousse, Tunisia, by a man who, dressed as a tourist, had hidden his Kalashnikov inside a beach umbrella. Not one was crying over the beheading in a terrorist attack at a chemical factory near Lyon, France. The victim’s head was found on a pike near the factory, his body covered with Arabic inscriptions. And no Facebook friends mentioned the first suicide bombing in Kuwait in more than two decades, in which 27 people were murdered in one of the oldest Shiite mosques in the country.

They were talking about the only news that mattered: gay marriage. . . .

The barbarians are at our gates. But inside our offices, schools, churches, synagogues and homes, we are posting photos of rainbows on Twitter. It’s easier to Photoshop images of Justice Scalia as Voldemort than it is to stare evil in the face.

You can’t get married if you’re dead.

True that.

IT’S WORTH CONSIDERING: Ted Cruz: Constitutional Remedies to a Lawless Supreme Court.

The Framers of our Constitution, despite their foresight and wisdom, did not anticipate judicial tyranny on this scale. The Constitution explicitly provides that justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” and this is a standard they are not remotely meeting. The Framers thought Congress’s “power of instituting impeachments,” as Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers, would be an “important constitutional check” on the judicial branch and would provide “a complete security” against the justices’ “deliberate usurpations of the authority of the legislature.”

But the Framers underestimated the justices’ craving for legislative power, and they overestimated the Congress’s backbone to curb it. It was clear even before the end of the founding era that the threat of impeachment was, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “not even a scarecrow” to the justices. Today, the remedy of impeachment — the only one provided under our Constitution to cure judicial tyranny — is still no remedy at all. . . .

The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. . . .

Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. . . .

I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections. Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years.

It is time to give serious consideration to such a constitutional amendment. Very few lawyers are exposed, in today’s law schools, to any method of constitutional interpretation other than “living” constitutionalism. Accordingly, the existing and future generations of Supreme Court Justices–drawn mostly from law schools such as Harvard and Yale, which are dominated by elitist progressive, living constitutionalist faculty–cannot be counted on to appreciate, much less adhere to, public meaning originalism. If this is the case, neither the remote threat of impeachment nor the replacement of Justices with new ones will check runaway Justices intent on acting like super-legislators.

Giving more power back into the hands of We the People is desirable. But do the American people care enough to mobilize to the extent required for ratification of a constitutional amendment? It takes 2/3 of both Houses of Congress (or 2/3 of States acting in convention) to propose a constitutional amendment, and then 3/4 of States must ratify.  I don’t know.

YEAH, SURE, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?: Obama administration to release former bin Laden bodyguard from Gitmo.

Abdul Rahman Shalabi, 39, has been cleared by the Periodic Review Board to return to Saudi Arabia after a nine-year hunger strike protesting his confinement, The Associated Press reported.

The board, which was set up by the Obama administration in 2011, “acknowledges the detainee’s past terrorist-related activities,” but will send him to a Saudi rehabilitation program for Islamic radicals anyway, AP reported.

The al Qaeda associate’s lawyer said in April that his client, who was never officially charged, has been force-fed through a nasogastric tube for nine years.

Being fed through a nasogastric tube for nine years? Good thing he’s not some radical or anything. And sending a former OBL bodyguard who is so nutty that he’s refused food for nine years to a “Saudi rehabilitation program for Islamic radicals” sounds like a reasonable move by the President. I mean, it’s not like the Saudis are radical or anything–I’m sure they’ll have a terrific twelve-step rehab program — a Terrorists Anonymous or something.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.

BYPASSING SEPARATION OF POWERS TO “FIX” SLOPPY LAWS:  My SCOTUSblog take (with co-author David Rivkin) on the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell decision.

In King v. Burwell, the Supreme Court surprised many Court watchers, ruling six to three that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) permits individuals who buy health insurance on the federal exchange to receive taxpayer subsidies. The decision represents a decisive victory for ACA supporters, and an equally decisive loss for the rule of law.  With King, the Supreme Court has signaled (again) that it is willing to “save” important laws by rewriting them, thus behaving as an all-powerful, unelected, politically insulated, unconstitutional Council of Revision. . . .

[B]y departing from the “natural reading” of a law that is patently poorly drafted, the Court has short-circuited the entire political process.  When judges take it upon themselves to “fix” broken legislation like the ACA, they diminish political accountability by encouraging Congress to be sloppy when drafting legislation. And when it comes to the quality of legislating, judicially drafted “legislation” is always worse than even hastily drafted congressional statutes.

Moreover, when faced with a poorly drafted law, the executive branch has every incentive to amend laws unilaterally, rather than working with Congress to amend them.  It may be expedient for presidents to issue regulations pretending legislation says whatever the president wants it to say, but such de facto executive-lawmaking inherently lacks the deliberation and compromise that permeates the legislative process.

The Court’s decision in King is a disaster for the rule of law, particularly the separation of powers. One can only hope its sloppy reasoning is a “one off,” designed specifically to save (again) the ACA, that won’t be extended to other situations. Otherwise, the current Roberts Court is signaling that it thinks it has free constitutional reign to use inchoate “contextual” reasoning to bypass plain statutory text.