Our Idiot Judiciary

 

Yeah, I did that.

Am I fair? I’m principally a thinker and writer, which often but not always go together. As a thinker I use writing as a tool for thinking, because writing forces you to deal with matters of order, precision, logic, and moral context in testing your thinking. If you can’t write a thought down and agree with what you’ve written, you haven’t thought it through. I tend to be, try to be, fair in that process.

But being a writer also offers the opportunity to go the next step beyond documentation. Because much of what I think is not popular, generally accepted in its positions, or understood by undisciplined minds, I also tend to create a kind of commentary called satire. Satire is inherently UNfair, in that it is meant to provoke readers to do their own thinking when they are angered or offended by a satirical provocation. For those who are inclined to agree with the unfairness, there is the collateral benefit of laughter. Funny requires no justification. It  just is, to those find it so.

For example, I created this too and haven’t posted it anywhere till now:

Metaphors are one of the greatest tools of thought. 

Sex is one of the most useful metaphors for satire.*

All of the above is prelude. The purpose of the video is not a crude punchline. It’s to highlight an absurd thought by presenting it in an absurd light. No need for anyone to understand this. If they are prompted to watch more than once and listen to what Clem Kadididdlehopper says at the end, they have something to think about. (For those who are interested in how this and similar vids came to be, there’s much more Below the Fold.) what I want to do here is explain why the SCOTUS justices and especially the Solicitor-General were full of shit.

Lawyers are taught relentlessly to make their arguments in the narrowest possible context in order to focus legal debates in matters stark enough to become yes/no to a judge, jury, or higher judicial authority. Why they consistently have enormous difficulty perceiving simple truths. Most of the relevant evidence is ruled why the justices wanted to blow past questions about the Constitutional intent of the three separate but equal branches of government to the yes/no question of whether tariff authority is entirely in the hands of the executive or the legislative branch. Which is a fatal error.

As a thinker, my tool is not narrowing definitions to yes/no alternatives, but pattern recognition, which is the exact opposite. When Roberts claims tariffs are a tax on citizens, he is not identifying a key decision variable, he is preventing the the Solicitor-General from returning to his loftier argument about Title I authorities granted by the Constitution to the President. As a well trained lawyer, the SG is not nimble enough to beat the Chief Justice’s lame argument into the ground. You’s have to stand back from the picayune catfight in progress to see the correct state of the case.

What Roberts is incorrectly implying is that anything which causes a citizen to shell out money for a product or service is a tax, which is exclusively the purview of Congress. For this to be true, all of government must be declared illegal and shut down.  

The simplest example is that neither Congress nor the President have authority over the Federal Reserve or is composition. By tradition and habituation, the Fed chooses and approves its own small list of board member candidates, from which the other branches must pick one when’s slot opens up. When the Federal Reserve raises the Prime Rate, Roberts’s logic, the immediate increase in mortgage rates by civilian consumers is a tax. The fact that individual consumers can elect not to apply for a mortgage under the higher rate wouldn’t change the rate’s status as a tax. Not buying a BMW because tariffs have increased its price is just like the mortgage rate. The option “not to play” is the same in both cases.

I suppose we could say the Fed is the exception that proves the rule. But it isn’t. Standing a bit farther back from the case in point (watch out for dizzy justices dropping to the floor around you), we can look at the whole big picture of the hundreds of regulatory agencies that are nominally under the control of the executive branch. Such agencies generate regulations about every kind of activity involving transfer of money from citizens to the federal government for what is considered a regulatory infraction. Individual regulations are not approved by the Congress but the Executive branch. Here, even “not to play” is not an option. What is really happening is that bureaucrats in the Executive branch are taxing American citizens to the tune of billions of dollars every year without any specific authorization by Congress. A much clearer example of a tax as Roberts would define it. Yes, Congress approves the budget for the regulatory agency in question, but those funds are not a license for ex-post-facto revenue-producing regs that are generated for the express purpose of augmenting —  not living within — the budget passed by Congress,

And one can stand still farther back (till justices are plummeting, screaming, off a cliff…) at everything the federal executive does to increase the costs of specific available products and services without express Congressional approval. When a President stops enforcing the laws governing the borders of the United States, he is imposing a huge cost on civilians in terms of direct outlays of money. Citizens using illegal drugs that wouldn’t have crossed over a well managed border become addicts or dead, where doctors bills, rehab treatment, and funeral and grief counseling services, all with the option “not to play” of course, result in the involuntary purchase of ever more expensive services. When children are abducted and raped, murdered, or trafficked by unidentified noncitizens, the same is true. When millions of noncitizens compete for scarce resources in health care, public education, and the level of necessary law enforcement, the same is true. Congress has passed no tax on the public to pay for the products and services consumed by people who have no money, but the deficits and debt not recognized or addressed by the legislative branch are still a very real tax levied on the citizenry. 

That’s right, the 35-45 trillion in debt (whatever it is by whose calculation at this minute) is itself a gigantic tax paid by citizens without (and because of) Congressional inaction and irresponsibility. Interest on the national debt is already a third (?) of all federal outlays and rising. And we haven’t even mentioned the costs (i.e., taxes) imposed by Executive warmaking and climate/ecological tomfoolery.

Where are we now on the relevancy and virtue-signaling of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court? His semantic games with the weird “tax” are meaningless nonsense at best. At worst they are malignly inimical because the President has adopted tariff renegotiation as a means of paying down the debt by making foreign trading partners pay a huge chunk of what American taxpayers would otherwise have to pay out of their own pockets an their quality of life.

Did the Secretary-General or any of the pundits on TV make the argument I’ve just made here? No. Because all the people who think they know so much shit don’t know shit. They’re emprpty suits and the only tool left to fight them with is satire, the meaner the better, the unfairer the funnier.

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*Satire. A lost art officially laid to rest by Evelyn Waugh, who said it was impossible in an age when the absurdity of real life was greater than the imagination of any writer.

Below the Fold

This is here because my wife said it was unfair that I change names and faces without telling readers the who, what, and why of it. My position has been that it’s the readers’ lookout to “arm themselves” (as Clint Eastwood put it in Unforgiven) “or don’t be displaying my friend’s body in the street.” But I value her opinions, so I’m going to be a little bit fairer in this instance. Why I’m going to show how the trick shots I fired above came about and why it doesn’t matter if they entertain nobody but me. Actually, my wife isn’t the only one who’s grumbled. A step-relative of mine texted me once to ask why I kept photoshopping politicians into drag makeup when there was no evidence or rumors that they were gay. I told her it was because I could.

I first did Roberts in makeup a long time ago, about the time he was confirmed to the Court. Can’t remember the specific context in which I posted it, but the idea of doing it was essentially a private joke. Clueless “W” had thought he could get away with naming a Texas girl to the Supreme Court. When the news hit the media that she had a bachelors and JD from Southern Methodist U., you’d have thought the sky had fallen in. This led Yale-Princeton boy George Will to write a column suggesting that Presidents should not be allowed to make SCOTUS nominations on their own, too important, by inference, to keep everyone but Harvard and Yale candidates in firm control. I responded with an animation of George Will turning into Alfalfa from Our Gang. I wrote something too, but it was the graphic that made people laugh.

After a lot of sneering stories by alphabet news anchors who hadn’t gone to Columbia J school but institutions of lesser renown than, say, SMU, disgraced candidate was replaced by a man from Yale and the one after that John Roberts from Harvard. Peace in our time and all that. So I was reminded of a fraternity ditty my Cornell dad used to sing about Harvard when one of them annoyed him — “You can tell a Harvard man about a mile away, because…something something(?)… and dimples in his rosy knees.”

I hadn’t been very much impressed by his smooth dodge-gotcha performance in the confirmation hearings, and I just hoped he wasn’t another Souter (Harvard/Oxford), the faux conservative Reagan got talked into appointing by prominent Republicans before we knew about RINOs and the Deep State. His performance over the years did nothing but increase my suspicions. His pivotal vote in legalizing ObamaCare was enough to keep him in lipstick in my eyes for good.

You see, for me the drag thing is an appropriate metaphor. Not about sex per sē until it makes itself so. It’s about the outing of something hidden, closeted, something they didn’t (used to) want generally known about them. RINOs are a good example and illustrate the variety of connotations about how many ways there are not to be men. There are RINOs who show up in Congress thinking they’re conservative until they realize that what they really are is social climbers. Then they discover who gets invited to the best parties and onto the highest rated TV talk shows, and they want to belong to the club the Congress is. There are others who think they’re reformers until they meet the lobbyists in Zac And their money and women and power. Still others in Congress and throughout the government who were never Republicans in the first place, or Democrats, just ambitious confidence men who lusted for fame, power, and all the sensory perks that go with it.

None of these are men. And, yes, in this sense, women can be men too, but almost never are. A man not say one thing and do another, he does not hide his real self behind an invented mask that can be cast aside as soon as no one’s looking. He has the courage of real convictions. He does not break his word to others or his solemn oath to a profession or nation. He does not lie his way out of consequences for something he has done wrong. He knows how to be a man about it. All of it. Including the heat when he or his ways are under attack.

What’s the woman part of drag. The makeup, the prettying up of what is plain and at times unsightly. The false messages consisting of layers of platitudes and woke coverups like “pro-choice” and ‘anti-choice” instead of “pro-abortion” and “pro-life.”

So in my satiric graphic idiom, drag makeup is code for inauthenticity, falsity, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and/or malicious cunning, depending. When I change faces, it’s because there’s a resemblance to someon or something else I find resonant and they would find uncomfortable at least. I don’t really care if there’s doubt about the identity of the substitution, even if I have specific reasons for all of them. What matters is that this person is not entirely who or what he/she says it is. Draw your inferences and conclusions.

When Boasberg first started making the news (he was DC and CHYOS, so I knew he would be back), I took one look at him and saw, just a hunch, Max Headroom.