☕️ THE COURT GIVETH ☙ Saturday, June 29, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden debate debacle continues; Supreme Court drops three terrific mega-decisions; and Oklahoma throws the book at secular liberal public school educators. Plus lots more.

Good morning, happy C&Cers, it’s Saturday! And, oh, what a beautiful Saturday! It is, perhaps, the most glorious Supreme Court Saturday since, well, the Justices ruled that the little ‘prize’ at the bottom of a Cracker Jacks box was no prize at all, but actually mostly rubbish, and frankly a highly disappointing, BAD surprise, like a sticker that says “Cracker Jacks!” But I digress. Today’s outstanding roundup is packed with real prizes: The Biden Debate Disaster continued sinking into the Potomac River all day yesterday, with the United States’s political problems becoming even more fantastic and indescribable and causing our Allies to quietly start transferring their American chequing accounts to the Cayman Islands; no fewer than three Supreme Court blockbusters dropped, finally, and every one was terrific; and Oklahoma throws the Good Book at public schools in the most encouraging development of all.

🗞 C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖🪖 We begin with a moment of silence for one of our very favorite Representatives, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, 52, whose wife of 35 years, Rhonda, died suddenly on Thursday.  Rhonda was mother to their four children and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT. We pray for the peace that surpasses all understanding for the Massie family.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 We have wandered so far off the political map at this point that the boy scouts are crafting rough spears from local bamboo and starting to date the native women. Regardless of how our unprecedented and unimaginable political scenario ultimately plays out, Thursday’s debate will almost certainly become one of those global psychological demarcation points when the world changed forever in a single moment, like that time you ignored your wife’s advice and climbed the ladder to clean the gutters in your flip-flops. In other words, we will forever remember what the world was like before the Great Biden Debate Disaster, and marvel at how different it is now.

At 6pm Eastern Standard time last night, the Editorial Board of the New York Times launched a journalistic SCUD missile at the Democrat’s presumptive nominee, eloquently headlined “To Serve His Country, President Biden Should Leave the Race.” It began with the hysterical, hand-wringing claim that Democracy will Die if Trump gets re-elected. Since no weapon is off the table in the mission to “save Democracy” (for future drag queens), the Times’ Editors did the unthinkable and previously unforgivable: they called Democrat Resident Joe Biden unqualified for office:

If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards, and so the editors also had it both ways. No matter what, they still ain’t voting for the Orange Man. “If the race comes down to a choice between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden,” the Editors two-facedly gassed, “the sitting president would be this board’s unequivocal pick.” They darkly warned NYT readers, “That is how much of a danger Mr. Trump poses.” It’s even worse than the terrifying risk of carbon monoxide detectors running out of batteries in the middle of the night.

The Times’ vow to vote Biden but hopefully not Biden describes the sort of profound spiritual crisis now facing the Democrat party. It’s Democrats because they were the only folks surprised by what happened Thursday night. Compliantly gaslit by media, they had believed Biden was “at the top of his game” and “sharper than anybody,” capable of eating mint chip ice cream and performing complex quantum mechanical calculations at the same time. Now they aren’t even sure he can eat the ice cream by himself.

Democrat certainty in Biden’s mental qualifications was only possible through ceaseless cognitive dissonance. But not everyone bought the media’s “cheap fake” lies. If anything, after Thursday’s debate debacle, Republicans felt vindicated.

Amidst all yesterday’s hot takes, wild speculation, conspiracy theories, and a full spectrum of terrible opinions, one truth emerged: the denial phase is over. The Democrats can no longer pretend their octogenarian candidate is anything other than, as the Times put it, only a flickering shadow of a public servant.

In other words, yesterday, the country experienced a political earthquake of 9.0 on the Richter Scale, and the national conversation surged over the cliff of willing disbelief and headed straight down into Surreality Canyon.

To say the awful reality of Biden’s diminished capacity shattered Democrat world views too-narrowly skates over the even more profound implications. For just one example, everyone just found out, beyond any legitimate argument, that the White House and the entire media have been covering for Biden, lying in other words, about the single most important fact about the single most important decision facing the entire world: can Biden put on his pants one leg at a time like everyone else?

Beyond the confirmed disclosure of coordinated media dishonesty, there are a thousand thousand more implications, all exploding from the debate in slow motion like shards of shattered glass.

The debate over replacing Biden is a red herring. It is not at all clear that a Biden switcheroo is possible. He’s not like a blown fuse. Well. Maybe he is like a blown fuse, but not in the sense he can be just switched out with the spare from the bottom of the fuse panel. First of all, yesterday Biden doubled down, and said sorry, he’s not going anywhere. In other words, Biden and his handlers responded to calls for his resignation with an offended, “over Joe’s dead body:”

The Democrats also face some intractable legal quandaries. Biden has already been “democratically” elected as the party’s nominee in every state. Changing him out would, by definition, violate the will of the voters, not to mention fifty different state ballot-qualifying laws. Nor under federal campaign finance laws could the Biden campaign just stroke a check to transfer their financial war chest to a new campaign. So it’s no secret that any replacement candidate would instantly be mired in pesky Republican lawsuits.

Days before the debate, for instance, the UK Daily Mail ran a story headlined, “How conservatives could make it very hard for Democrats to replace Biden on the 2024 ballot if he has a disastrous debate or steps aside.”

Nor do Democrats have a clear replacement. The Democratic bench is thin. There are many possibilities, but no obvious front-runner. To replace Biden, they must endure a painfully accelerated period of compressed primary campaigning, focus group testing, and market research. The Democrats face a difficult, divided base: Should a new candidate support or oppose Israel? And don’t forget Biden loyalists, who will be racing around behind the scenes trying to sabotage and undermine the process at every step.

At his own rally yesterday, Trump said he doesn’t think they’ll replace Biden, because Biden out-polls all the possible alternatives. President Trump —who has better polling data than anyone except the Biden campaign— remarked, “It’s hard to believe, but crooked Joe Biden polls better than any of those people.”

If it doesn’t end the discussion, note that former President Obama —and thus his entire political apparatus— supports Joe. It was just a bad debate night:

My opinion, worth no more than anyone else’s, is that the current public controversy over Biden’s nomination is just another narrative shell game. The debate about needs to happen to ease Democrat voters into Biden’s therapeutic hot tub. And that debate needs to happen quickly. The goal, as the Times Editors promised, is for Democrat voters to vote for Joe Biden anyway, purely to block Trump, even if the nation dissolves into a dementia-addled nightmare and World War III.

It’s the ultimate protest vote. All or nothing.

I remarked yesterday that the fallout includes harder questions soon emerging. It didn’t take long. Yesterday, historian and scholar Victor Davis Hanson asked whether Biden’s fragility will fuel our enemies to act quickly and take advantage:

Similarly, the New York Times ran an article originally headlined, “U.S. Allies Watch the Debate With Shaking Heads and a Question: What Now?” Same as the rest of us.

The article’s sub-headline noted, “Across Asia and Europe, the debate stoked concerns about American stability, both domestically and on crucial foreign policy issues like Washington’s commitment to alliances.” In other words, can our allies trust a president who’s likely to forget they even exist? What you really don’t want is being four months out and experts invoking “terminal decline:”

Famed independent journalist Seymour Hersh called up his many Democrat contacts, who seemed just as confused about what to do as everyone else. Hersh ended his Substack yesterday wondering: who is really running things at the White House? Since it’s obviously not Biden. And he ended by invoking the same 25th Amendment question I predicted yesterday:

To wrap up this segment, electing a creaky 82-year-old president would be another historical breakthrough as well as an apt metaphor for “terminal decline.” Compare that awful possibility with previous presidential ages: Teddy Roosevelt, 42; John F. Kennedy, 43; Bill Clinton, 46; Ulysses S. Grant, 46; Barack Hussein Obama, 47; and George W. Bush, 54.

So.

As I said, we’re off the map and GPS is on the fritz. I’m not even going to try predicting what happens next.

Now, on to all today’s truly terrific news. Let’s start with the three monster cases the Supreme Court unleashed yesterday.

🔥🔥 The New York Times reported the first case —a stellar return to national sanity— under the headline, “Supreme Court Upholds Ban on Sleeping Outdoors in Homelessness Case.” In other words, pitch your tents elsewhere. You don’t have to go home, but you can’t camp here.

My home town. Really.

The homeless invasion, invisible to corporate media, is causing the controlled demolition of our cities and creating a constant eyesore of rubbish and clouds of pungent B.O. and pot smoke. It wasn’t the disorganized homeless, who’d pee on the courthouse rather than file any kind of lawsuit. Whoever is behind this used a pincer-like dual strategy. First, some black-hearted billionaire who should be in jail started giving bums fancy camping tents. And second, an army of leftist advocates unleashed a blitzkrieg of lawfare against municipal governments who were ill-equipped to resist.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court struck a mortal blow against the invasion’s second front.

The 6-3 decision, split along party lines, upheld a small but fiesty Oregon city’s ban on bums sleeping on sidewalks. But, as the Times reported, the decision will “reverberate far beyond the West Coast as cities across the country grapple with a growing homelessness crisis.”

The decision overturned a truly awful earlier decision from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which includes California, Oregon, and Washington. That prior decision somehow declared it cruel and unusual punishment for cities and states to penalize people for sleeping in public spaces if the local governments don’t give bums free apartments.

The liberal Justices agreed with ‘homeless advocates’ that housing is a human right, which is even better than a Constitutional right. Justice Sotomayor furiously read her illogical dissent in open court yesterday. According to her, local laws that impose fines and potential short jail sentences on people “sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, effectively punish people for being homeless.”

But Justice Gorsuch, writing for the conservative majority, patiently explained that it’s not about homelessness. It’s about camping. “It makes no difference whether the charged defendant is currently a person experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation, or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building,” he explained logically.

Cities can, once again, enforce their anti-camping laws against vagrants, tramps, drunks, and hobos. The War on Cities may not be over, but the Supreme Court just moved the battle lines a long way toward reality.

🔥🔥 Next, and possibly the most significant and exciting of all, the Hill ran its historic story yesterday headlined, “Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal agency power in Chevron case.” ‘Sledgehammer’ was no exaggeration: the 6-3 decision was even better than I’d let myself to hope. The Court didn’t just improve the Chevron Doctrine, by putting it on a diet or trimming its hair. The Supreme Court flushed the Chevron Doctrine, completely overturning it. Buh bye!

It’s been nearly 40 years since the Supreme Court first held in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that courts must defer to executive agencys’ reasonable interpretations of any “ambiguities” in federal law. This single “Chevron Doctrine” fueled the largest expansion of Executive Power since the New Deal, birthing scores of new administrative law courts separate and shielded from real judicial review, and causing business regulations to multiply like rabbits munching on Viagra.

Chevron made suing the federal government much more difficult and complicated. Even top conservative Justice Scalia, who initially supported Chevron, quickly became skeptical as he saw how liberal agencies wildly abused their new right to interpret laws. Before long, Scalia loudly opposed the horrid doctrine, right up until the day he died.

But now, “Chevron is overruled,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote simply. It’s over.

The decision is perhaps not quite as world-changing as was Dobbs, which overruled Roe v. Wade. But it is in the same category. Even if we got no other help from the Court during this session, this Loper Bright decision made the session a historic win.

We can thank President Trump for both Dobbs and Loper Bright.

🔥🔥 The third and final case that exploded out of the Court’s chambers yesterday is most likely to be the conservative crowd favorite. It was also the decision that triggered furious waves of anger from the left. NBC indignantly ran the story headlined, “Supreme Court rules for Jan. 6 rioter challenging obstruction charge.” Like the two other decisions, this one came down 6-3. But this time, liberal Justice Jackson joined the majority, and Amy Coney Barrett unaccountably joined the minority.

The case involved a January 6th defendant charged with an Enron-era statute intended to prevent the shredding of business documents. But Biden’s DOJ shredded the statute’s language, applying it to anyone who entered the Capitol on January 6th, and to President Trump for making an “insurrection.”

The DOJ warped the statutory language, applying it in a novel, creative, historic way never before used, because the other charges like trespassing were just misdemeanors. But this Enron law was a felony, providing prosecutors up to 20 years of potential prison time per count. Prosecutors charged all the J6ers with their creatively interpreted statute. And the DC judges ate it all up, except for one.

Yesterday’s wild liberal backlash against the decision, featured prominently in the dissent, complained that the majority had “bent over backwards” to corral the statute back into its intended boundaries. But the majority patiently noted that at least one DC judge —Joe Fischer’s judge— had also found the statute inapplicable to strolling into the Capitol. Plus, one of the three liberal DC appellate judges who heard Joe’s appeal agreed. Plus, liberal Justice Jackson agreed with the majority in a concurring opinion, and one of the conservative Justices disagreed.

It was clearly bipartisan. So don’t fall for the narrative that it was about conservative Justices helping out Trump. And yesterday’s hot rhetoric looks pretty fake in light of the questions the Justices asked months ago at oral argument, which correctly signaled how things were going.

Independent journalist and J6 advocate Julie Kelly called this Fischer decision an “unprecedented defeat for Biden” and a “massive victory” for January 6th political prisoners:

A bunch of January 6th prisoners are about to get out of jail much sooner than they would have. I got several excited texts yesterday from lawyers defending J6 people. It will also probably drain the gas out of the DOJ’s continuing prosecutions, which are still being filed as fast as the DOJ can manage.

And Fischer greatly complicates the “insurrection” case against President Trump. It might even end it entirely.

For some reason, liberals were madder about Fischer than they were about the greatly diminished Administrative State after the fall of Chevron. Weird.

🔥 But the most encouraging and least reported story of all unexpectedly winged out of Oklahoma yesterday. The Wall Street Journal ran the headline, “Oklahoma State Superintendent Orders Bible Be Taught in Schools.”

Fearlessly igniting an Apocalyptic legal battle, Oklahoma’s Republican state superintendent of public instruction, Ryan Walters, cast the first stone by courageously ordering all of Oklahoma’s public schools to teach students about the Bible and the Ten Commandments. His opponents are not planning to turn the other cheek.

The move closely followed last week’s similarly provocative Lousiana law, which required public school classrooms to prominently display the Ten Commandments.

Defending the new Oklahoma directive, Ryan cited the inarguable fact that the Bible lies at the beating heart of American history and Western Civilization itself. Our culture, traditions, politics, and legal system cannot be understood without referencing the country’s Christian roots. “This is not merely an educational directive, but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country,” Ryan explained.

“This is a historical argument,” Ryan said. “The left can be offended, but that’s our history,” he shrugged.

Aghast atheists and other opponents can’t believe their ears. To them, Oklahoma’s law is literally one million times more dangerous than the worst excesses of the French Revolution. (And we all know how that unpleasant affair turned out.)

Critics were anguished and distressed. They cried, What is happening in this country? They asked, didn’t we spend the entire 1960’s getting the Bible out of public schools? The wanted to know, was it all for nothing?  How can public schools force kids to even think about the Bible?

It didn’t stop there. They demanded, was The Handmaid’s Tale predictive programming? Is Christian Nationalism really Christian Totalitarianism? And so forth, and so on.

The answer to all those questions is calm down. One state’s rebellious challenge to the Separation doctrine does not mean women* are about to be herded into fertility camps, or whatever dystopian fantasy Bible opponents conjure up in their paranoid imaginations. (*definitions may vary.)

Oklahoma has a solid argument about the Bible’s historical significance. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. Nothing else even comes close.  It’s also the most effective self-help book ever published. You’d think people would want to study the top bestseller in history.

Even our language, English, is packed with Biblical words and phrases. Like “the writing on the wall,” “scapegoat,” “forbidden fruit,” “the blind leading the blind,” “an eye for an eye,” a “Good Samaritan,” and many many others. Our systems of justice and government were established on Biblical principles.

For just one example, the Founders carefully designed our “checks-and-balances” style of government on the threshold assumption that all men are tempted to evil, even themselves, and no one is righteous enough to be trusted with unchecked power. How can we understand the Founders’ intent without appreciating the original rationale for their distrust of human forms of government?

The Bible also recounts thousands of years of ancient World history that have proven deadly accurate. Time after time, archaeologists have confirmed Biblical accounts of unlikely events and civilizations previously unknown to historians who thought the Bible’s accounts were just mythological.

The Bible’s ancient histories remain relevant. How can anyone truly understand the controversy over Israel and the deep ties between America and that country, without understanding Israel’s Biblical roots? How can students understand the fiery debates over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, without understanding the religious significance of the Temple?

The Bible also teaches basic philosophy in an unmatched way. For just one example: does objective morality exist? Or does morality only come from democratically-based human laws? In other words, is forcible rape always wrong, even if a particular culture’s democratic majority approves of raping women who refuse to wear a head scarf? If so, why?

We should always be patient with people, including C&Cers, who worry that teaching the Bible in public schools violates rights just as much as the DOJ’s weaponization of the Enron document-shredding statute. This issue won’t be resolved in a single conversation.

To secular readers, I would pose one question. If Western Civilization is in fact Biblically based, to whatever extent, what happens when you unceremoniously yank the Bible out of it? And could that yanking explain, at least partially, America’s simultaneous long, undeniable slide into social and moral confusion?

Putting the Bible back into public schools, assuming it sticks, will not create a Theocratic Dictatorship. We had no theocratic dictatorship from the founding till 1962, when Separation became fashionable. By many metrics, the Country was doing well, maybe even better than now, before the great anti-Christian crusade began in the 1960’s. Maybe we should give it a chance.

Kudos to Oklahoma’s courageous state leaders who are deliberately taking on some of the most well-funded and well-organized adversaries of all! I personally pray for a trend. What do you think?

Have a wonderful weekend! C&C will be back on Monday morning, rain or shine, with another educational and informative essential news roundup.

I cannot do it without help. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds.  I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can:  ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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