Don's Tuesday Column

            THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson   Red Bluff Daily News   7/10/2018

  Compelled speech, “weaponization”

What stands out about the Independence Day commemoration—that “these united colonies” proclaim their freedom from foreign, British rule—is how the very concepts of “liberty” and “independence” have fallen into disuse and even disfavor among much of the electorate. The idea that we are each free to pursue life, liberty and “happiness,” (rather than “property”) has become passé to the progressive crowd.

That is unless they can force us to support, proclaim and participate in whatever form someone else’s “happiness” morphs into. The “gay marriage” versus wedding service providers issue provides a particularly bold example: Witness the cultural and judicial left’s obsessive, convoluted rationalizations for the imposition of one group’s expression of “happiness” over another group’s (individual bakers, florists, photographers and planners of traditional weddings) devout objections.

Other stark examples of progressive political and judicial inventiveness have to do with immigration and President Trump’s repeated issuance of travel bans. The third iteration of his executive order finally found a majority of Supreme Court justices acknowledging his clear “plenary” —or complete, irrefutable and supreme—power under longstanding applicable law, to direct the exclusion of any individuals or group from entry into America.

The law states: “Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he deems appropriate.”

“Oh, it’s a Muslim ban.” Well, it’s not, since the countries affected contain less than 10 percent of the world’s Muslims—but banning Muslims would be allowed under law. The only European countries that have seen no Islamic terrorist attacks from their own population are the ones that refused to accept immigrants, so-called “refugees,” from the Muslim hell holes of the Middle East.

Can Muslims assimilate and police their own, becoming honorable, productive and law-abiding citizens and residents of non-Muslim nations? Apparently “yes” in America but “no” in Europe; however, that would be “in most cases” for our and Europe’s experience. Evidence and examples of the refusal of some Muslim immigrants to abandon “sharia law,” which is incompatible with the Constitution and America’s legal system, can be found in Minnesota and elsewhere. Evidence of assimilation in Europe? No.

The current iteration of America’s “immigration problem,” also known as the “broken immigration system,” has unfolded under every president, not just Trump as the Democrat/media partisans would have you believe. I have said that this issue, like homelessness, only becomes a controversy and point of protest when the president is Republican. Mass incarceration and family separation under Obama was a “nothing to see here, move along” situation. The political and news media left were operating under a “wink and nod” policy whereby those who illegally crossed our border with Mexico were going to be allowed to stay and become the next wave of pleaders for “regularization,” meaning future Democrat voters and welfare gougers.

The now-accepted, even over-sized, role of the judiciary in these and other public policy and legal issues has made the selection of judges and Supreme Court Justices a crucial aspect of each party’s governing strategy. Rather than confine their rulings to whether enacted laws conform to a strict reading of the Constitution, judges have chosen to expand “judicial review” to the point of creating rights and obligations where none previously existed, as in the “right” to abortion, or the “right” to privacy. They’ve even mandated certain public funding (schools, for example) and prison medical practices (California).

Constitutional law attorney Jenna Ellis—the director of public policy at the James Dobson Family Institute—put several recent Supreme Court decisions in context as “compelled speech cases.” Whether it was “allowing a Christian cake designer to refuse to use his art to celebrate gay marriage…preventing California from forcing abortion advertising on anti-abortion pregnancy centers…or allowing public employees to work without funding leftist unions,” the court declared that “the government cannot compel you as an individual to participate in or subsidize speech that you fundamentally disagree with.”

The importance of Trump’s judicial choices—meaning his list of conservative jurists—could not be made starker than by reading the words of Obama’s Justice Kagan in her dissent over the compelled funding, by workers, of public employee unions. She accused the court of “weaponizing the first amendment” as if the inherent right of anyone to the “fruits of their labor” is somehow a “weapon” inflicting apparent harm to those who’ve become accustomed to the forced “sharing” of said fruits with the unions’ political coffers. Unions then ply complicit candidates and office-holders with those funds, inducing (bribing, some might say) those public recipients to do the unions’ bidding. Unfunded, unsustainable employee benefits, anyone?

Kagan castigates the conservative majority as “black-robed rulers overriding citizens’ choices.” That twisted logic is how she dismisses the “laws made by representatives elected by the majority of voters…If the rule of law can be overridden by the emotions of the people, the machinations of officials or the prejudices of courts, we can no longer depend on equal treatment or representative government. Given the fact that most of the above cases were decided by only one vote, news of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the court comes as something of a relief. Kennedy has been an unreliable vote for liberty and if Trump can put another Gorsuch-like constitutionalist in there, all of our freedoms will be safer” (Ellis).

A movement away from the fanatical leftist cesspool, which the Democratic Party has become, is taking shape under the moniker, “#walkaway” and it is growing. Many who’ve found the intolerance and bullying of anything or anyone perceived as insufficiently progressive, are joining. Cheers and kudos!