Pressure Point: Revving Up To "Turn" Justice Roberts During The Coming Supreme Court Term

Ann Althouse takes note of the inevitable effort to repeat last year's successful effort to mau-mau Chief Justice Roberts into declaring Obamacare to be constitutional.

if you want to say Roberts is a hypocrite because his writing is equally disingenuous or worse, that's another matter. It's what Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic is doing in an item titled "The Nerve of John Roberts": 

Disappeared the scope? That's Cohen's way of referring to the identification of some limit on the scope of the commerce power, so that it didn't reach a private citizen's failure to purchase insurance. Congress has power under the Commerce Clause to regulate nearly everything else, which to Cohen's eye is no power at all. Unless it's everything, it's nothing. Disappeared! 

Yes, yes, roll out your list of Supreme Court decisions you wish went the other way. That's not in the same category as deceptively stating the facts of a case, which is simply not acceptable in lawyers' briefs. The Solicitor General's office disserved us. The Chief Justice called the lawyer on a deception and — with restraint — said he "found it a little disingenuous." 

What I find disingenuous is the criticism of the Chief Justice. And after all he did for you upholding Obamacare! (He used the tax power instead of the commerce power).
But no thanks will be forthcoming. Pressure must be kept up. This is a big term for the Supreme Court — gay marriage (probably), affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act — and Roberts's vote may be required to reach what the media know are the right results. Roberts needs to know that any love for him is purely contingent. He's being watched.

A little disingenuous. This from a judge who disappeared the scope of the Commerce Clause in the Affordable Care Act case.

This from a judge who gutted decades of First Amendment precedent in the Citizens United case after reaching out, unilaterally, to expand the scope of that campaign finance case.....

All I can say is I hope (but doubt) it's true that Roberts is playing a long-game whereby upholding Obamacare as a tax was actually a poison pill, and that he is trading his Obamcare vote for three decades of hard-nosed conservative opinion writing. Reality is that Roberts has shown weakness in a manner that Renquist never displayed, even when he was dying from cancer.

(as an aside, isn't it it depressing how W's "best" appointments - those being Roberts and Petraeus - have failed us so badly? Republican problems go far beyond SuperPACs, consultants, and moderate presidential candidates).


But still, forget Roberts. What are we supposed to think of the President and his minions aggressively demanding, directly and through their sympathizers in the media, that the Chief Justice vote the "correct" way? What happens if Roberts does uphold Prop. 8? Or strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act? Remember how the media focused so intently on Roberts's young children and his wife during his confirmation hearings? I'll bet he does.

Obama et al. can get away with smilingly threatening the Supreme Court - a supposedly co-equal branch of the federal gov't, believe it or not - because they must know the 50.9% of voters who supported them in November approve of this sort of behavior. Further proof that these are people who must be beaten, not just defeated in an election.

That's Lena Dunham's "when you do it the first time, do it for Obama" ad that queasy conservatives have been mocking all day. Watching it, I am struck by a number of questions:

Does Lena Dunham like it rough?

Has she ever done the walk of shame?

Does she have trouble finding contraceptives?

How many people watched this and wanted to see her naked?

Are Today's Young Men attracted to mannish-looking, vaguely lesbian-ish, girls?

Are we supposed to believe this asexual tart actually has "Experience?"

If she does have "Experience," doesn't it seem likely that her's was a one-night stand with a tall dark stranger?

Sorry to reduce her to her sexuality, but, uh, wasn't that the point of the ad?

Does she know what the Lily Ledbetter Act does?

Are the three most important issues in American life birth control, Lily Ledbetter, and gay marriage?

Anyone thinks it's weird that Lena Dunham's name sounds earily like Stanley Ann Dunham?

Anyone ever seen these pictures of Mama Obama?

Do Democrats think single, college-aged women do anything besides f*** and get tatoos?

I've asked this before, and I'll ask it again: the GOP may be the Stupid Party, but what do you call a party that has Ivy Leaguers crafting arguments designed to appeal to stupid people?

UPDATE: These comments at Althouse are classic. "The first time Romney governs you, he might scare you a little. Because he's a Republican, and he knows how to do things..."

The Forgotten Man: The Effort To Bury Christopher Stevens

Althouse asks a question that has bugging me throughout the Obama Administation's contorted attempts to avoid the truth of attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi: why is the death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens being so quickly swept from the scene?

What happened to Chris Stevens? I don't trust that we've learned the whole story. Why wasn't he protected? Was he an inconvenient man? We saw such an effort to create static around his death. Look — riots over here, here, and here! Offensive video on the internet! Man with a "towel" around his face! And hey check out the most important thing that happened all week: Romney said "47%" to some people back in May! 

The very fact that we're thinking about Nakoula — and futzing with Romney rhetoric — makes me feel that Chris Stevens got stuffed down the memory hole.

Who wanted that forgetting and why?

I think we all know the answer: the sacking of the embassey and the murder of the US ambassador were a disaster for the US. If W were still president, it would be treated as such, but he's not president, is he? A Democrat president can stuff whomever he likes down the memory hole.

All of this shows how cold our progressive betters are. Somewhere, there must be a picture taken on the day Stevens was appointed ambassador, and surely Obama and/or Hillary must be in that picture, along with Stevens's family. They sent him into harms way, without any sort of security (because they didn't want any of that bad Bush-era big footprint in the Middle East), and now that he's dead, they don't seem to want to have anything to do with him. Has there been a funeral? Did Hillary or, God forbid, Obama go? It's easy to imagine Ronaldus, or Bush 41, or Slick, or W front and to the left at the gravesite, next to Stevens's grieving widow, but it's not so easy to imagine Chillary or the former head of the Choom Gang doing so.

Also, the State Department is in a huff because CNN managed to wander into the Benghazi consulate and pick up Stevens's diary - four days after the attack. You know, the attack that the Obama administration says they're investigating night and day. That investigation does not seem to include visits to the actual consulate. Not surprisingly, CNN reported that Stevens wrote that he was concerned about the security situation. Rather than hide its head in shame, the State Department's response has been to knock CNN for taking evidence from a crime scene. Hey, send some marines in to secure the place if you care so d*mn much.

The murder of an American ambassador should be infuriating to the president, regardless of its cause. But I haven't seen much righteous anger out of DC, beyond Hillary's saying she couldn't believe the people of Benghazi, a city we saved from a medieval sacking, would turn on us so quickly. Frankly, it should be infuriating to the Loyal Opposition, too, but the GOP seems to have been intimidated into silence (yet again) by the media's ganging up on Romney for being the one guy in American politics to express any sort of anger with the events in Libya.

The need to protect Obama and his "legacy" is so great we apparently must sacrifice the memory of Christopher Stevens.

The Silent Coup: How Do Wisconsin Protesters Have Permission To Occupy The State Capitol Building?

Ann Althouse asks a question that's been bugging me: how is that leftist protesters in Madison have been able to occupy the State Capitol Building, covering the Rotunda with signs, and even sleeping there? If this were happening in, say the Republic of Georgia or The Ukraine (and actually, it did happen there), people would wonder if the government was about to fall. So what the hell is going on?

In the current Wisconsin situation, the protesters are being allowed to do many, many things that ordinarily no one does. It's hard to imagine how the state could operate in the future if other groups were given equal treatment and permitted to stay overnight for days on end, to post thousands of signs all over the historic marble walls and pillars, to prop and post signs on the monuments, to bang drums and use a bullhorn in the rotunda to give speeches and lead chants all day long for days on end. Tell me then, what will happen when the next protester comes along and the next and the next? Hasn't the state opened the Capitol as a free speech forum in which viewpoint discrimination will be forbidden under the First Amendment?

Even asking the question, I know the answer: during the early days of the protests, the teachers and their allies entered the Rotunda en masse and simply haven't left. Gov. Walker, and the Capitol Police (or whoever it is has jurisdiction over the building) have quietly concluded that forcibly removing them would not be worth the hysterics and bad publicity that would entail. And, that's fine. The point of the last two weeks is to reform the way public employee unions organize themselves and negotiate with the state, not to pound on hippies. Still, why is it that left-wing goons can benefit from this sort of restraint while others would be evicted post haste?

Althouse looks at the question from a free speech perspective: what is to stop other groups from occupying the Capitol now that the unions have set the precedent? I think the more important question is political: doesn't the state have a sort of privacy right that would protect it from invasions of this sort? Althouse has cited the fact that the Rotunda had previously been a solemn, contemplative place befitting its dignity as Wisconsin's legislature, and the occupiers have ruined that. But, the state's dignity seems more a matter of tradition than of law. It hasn't previously occurred to anyone to invade the Capitol. Having debased the state in this manner, I can promise you that it will be hard to recover, not because everyone will want to occupy the Rotunda, but because the occupiers will either not want to leave, or will consider it their special right to return at their whim.

It seems hardwired into us, whether by history or education, to view the occupation of government buildings as somehow romantic, while the defense of such buildings by the state as somehow autocratic. One thinks of Boris Yeltsin, the man on the tank, sending in tanks of his own when recalcitrant leftists refused to recognize that the old order was well and truly gone (hmmmm). But, the state - even one as earnest and progressive as Wisconsin - has a claim on defending its dignity from invaders, even earnest progressive ones.

Circus Maximus: Madison Protests Descend Into Farce

Wisconsin Democrats continue to hide in an "undisclosed location" (while giving press conferences, so some in the media know where they are, but won't report that) and deny the State Senate a quorum to vote on fiscal bills. Senate Republicans are showing a spry sense of parliamentary humor in putting the screws to their colleagues. They have passed a rule change requiring State Senators to pick up their paychecks in person on the Senate floor.

An oddity, however: the vote on the rule change passed 3-2 on a party line vote. Party line vote? I thought all of the Dems had fled to Illinois! Turns out you can participate in committee votes remotely. Or you could up until yesterday. Now, GOP senators have eliminated that rule too. They have already passed a Voter ID law out of committee despite the phoned-in presence of an obstreperous Dem.

Republicans on a state Senate committee approved a bill Tuesday to require voters to show ID at the polls, in their latest effort to entice Democrats to end their boycott of Senate proceedings.

The committee made significant changes to the bill in a meeting that included a bizarre element. Sen. Jon Erpenbach (D-Middleton) participated in the meeting by phone, but Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin), the committee chairwoman, refused to let him vote because he and the 13 other Senate Democrats left the state Thursday.

Senators routinely participate in committee meetings by phone and are allowed to debate, offer amendments and vote on measures. But Lazich said she wasn't allowing Erpenbach to vote because he had an invalid reasons for being absent.

"I won't extend courtesies for unethical behavior," Lazich told Erpenbach.

"Do you want the headline to be, 'Republicans won't let Democrats vote,' even though we've allowed that many, many times?" Erpenbach said.

Erpenbach's name was not called as the clerk took the roll, but he repeatedly yelled, "No!" over the speakerphone. The committee's three Republicans voted for the bill.

Hilarious. But, also, not so funny when you realize how it is virtually impossible to pass even common sense laws like having to show ID to vote without a crazy circumstance like the mass decamping of the Democratic caucus.

Speaking of "funny/not funny," The Daily Show appeared on the streets of Madison along with a camel - the better to make the link between Wisconsin/Cairo and Walker/Mubarak - but quickly found that bringing a camel into an icy Wisconsin public square will not lead to happy results.

The show's comic actor John Oliver was on the scene. Obviously, the idea was to play on the comparison between Egypt and Wisconsin, which has been pushed by the local protesters.

Truly nauseating. The linked piece in the Isthmus says it "ends happily" because the animal is eventually able to stand up again. Ithmus is a newspaper of sorts. Let's see if — instead of smiling on camera and calling it a happy ending — the reporter finds out where the TV crew got the camel, who thought it was acceptable to bring a camel out in the ice and snow, who decided to put a collapsible metal fence around the animal, what training the handlers had, why the owners of the camel entrusted its welfare to these people, and what ultimately happened to the animal?

Yep, John Stewart and the Daily Show are just common sense moderates! That's why they're playing up the sort of nonsensical "Madison=Cairo" comparisons pushed by middle aged drama queen liberal educators. (who are acting more like Mubarak's apparatchiks clinging to their perks than they can ever admit). The first comment on the linked post is classic, btw: "As God is my witness, I thought camels could walk on ice."

Liberals continue to hold the line both in Wisconsin and elsewhere, demanding the continued payment of bloated salaries and unsustainable pension benefits to public employees to the exclusion of everything else. Perhaps to prep the battlefield for more "shared sacrifice" by the public, some are already suggesting low-cost sources of nutrition as a way to cut personal budgets further. Are you ready for...the benefits of eating insects?

Could beetles, dragonfly larvae and water bug caviar be the meat of the future? As the global population booms and demand strains the world's supply of meat, there's a growing need for alternate animal proteins. Insects are high in protein, B vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc, and they're low in fat. Insects are easier to raise than livestock, and they produce less waste. Insects are abundant. Of all the known animal species, 80% walk on six legs; over 1,000 edible species have been identified. And the taste? It's often described as "nutty."

"They" say that insects are part of many diets in the developing world. Pass. I thought the whole point was to become more civilized, not less.

The Untold Stories: What You Won't See On the Evening News

Did you know that there are doctors attending the pro-union protests in Madison, WI? And that they are writing "doctor's notes" to teachers? Presumably so teachers who have called in sick will have an excuse, and be able to collect sick pay? Althouse has the video, featuring smug, scruffy (must be abortionists) liberal MD's.

Did you know that, while unions have been busing people to Madison en masse (with gas and expenses paid for, at least indirectly, by the taxpayers), thousands of Tea Partiers showed up on 24 hours notice for a protest in support of Gov. Walker?

Did you know that China is trying to suppress a "Jasmine Revolution?"

Did you know that the Libyan regime has killed at least 100 protesters to the sound of absolutely no world-wide outrage (at least as compared to the outrage that follows Israeli attempts to build housing)?

Did you know that you don't have to believe in God in order to be a social conservative (a good post from Dan Rhiel. Read the whole thing)?

Did you know that an Islamist cleric gave a fire-breathing anti-Israeli speech to the masses in Tahrir Square in Cairo? Yeah, you might have heard that. But did you know that "martyred" (but he's still alive!) Google executive Wael Ghonin - the western face of the demonstrators - tried to make a speech too, but was prevented from doing so by the cleric's security team? William Jacobson puts it well: the Yuppie Revolution in Egypt is over. The Islamist Revolution has begun.

Union Sundown: Libs Protest In Wisconsin

Everyone's been focused on DC and the federal budget battle just gathering steam, but the real action is in the states, especially those Blue States grappling with the unsustainable deficits that come with feel-good-now progressive governance. Thus, America's slow boiling battle over deficits and public sector unions has gone nuclear in...Wisconsin???

The state's largest teachers union Wednesday night called on all 98,000 of its members to attend rallies in Madison on Thursday and Friday, which led school districts — including Madison — to cancel classes for Thursday.

"This is not about protecting our pay and our benefits," Wisconsin Education Association Council President Mary Bell said at a press conference on the Capitol Square. "It is about protecting our right to collectively bargain."

In an interview, Bell said her message stopped short of endorsing the kind of coordinated action that closed Madison schools Wednesday. She asked teachers who "could" come to the rally to come.

As of press deadline, several Madison-area districts had canceled Thursday's classes. Middleton-Cross Plains union president Chris Bauman said she was encouraging all members to come to the Capitol at

8 a.m. Thursday.

Schools and teachers were a central focus at a third day of protests at the Capitol on Wednesday as Madison teachers and students joined thousands of public union workers to blast a plan to strip them of collective bargaining rights. Madison canceled school Wednesday after about 1,100 union teachers — almost half of its staff — called in sick by late Tuesday.

"This is the scariest thing I've ever seen," Betsy Barnard, a physics teacher at West High School, said of the Walker proposal. "This is going to change Wisconsin forever."

Barnard and other teachers at the rally said they are willing to make wage and benefit concessions to help fix the state budget, but Walker's plan to effectively dismantle the 50-year-old collective bargaining process for public employee unions goes too far.

Don't bother looking at "regular" news outlets for information on these protests. Madison resident and A-list blooger Ann Althouse has plenty of graphic photos and videos of protesting teachers denouncing the inoffensive Gov. Walker as a Hitler, or - to avoid Godwin's Law - Hosni Mubarak. What this is supposed to accomplish, besides demean Walker and fill the union biddies with righteousness, I have no idea. Are there really people in Wisconsin who are going to see a picture of Walker with a Hitler mustache or Mubarak comb-over and say "Wow, I voted for Walker, but I had no idea he was a genocidal dictator!" Verum Serum sums things up nicely

These are Obama’s people. Indeed, the President spoke up for themyesterday. Where the Tea Party exists to demand fiscal accountability from government, the public sector unions exist to demand more spending from government. Where the Tea Party is concerned about loading debt on future generations, the Free-Lunch Party is concerned about guaranteed benefits for themselves.

It’s an irony that exposes the hollowness of so much of the President’s rhetoric. He talked during his State of the Union about “winning the future,” but his natural allies in the public don’t give a damn about the future, except their own narrow sliver of it. And they certainly don’t care about doing “big things” unless that’s limited to getting themselves big raises and big benefits. You can certainly say they’re self-interested, but it’s not an enlightened self-interest. They want their free lunch now, even if that means somewhere down the road the entire system collapses under the weight of their demands.

It’s time for responsible leaders to tell the Lunchers to either pony up like everyone else or find another job.

To add to the chaos, the entire Democratic delegation in the Wisconsin State Senate has apparently jumped on a bus and fled to Illinois, in order to deny Republicans a quorum. Didn't this happen in Texas a few years ago?

A three-day-long stand-off at the Wisconsin state capitol between union supporters and those backing the Republican governor’s budget cuts just went to another level Thursday as Democratic senators apparently fled the area to prevent a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill, which would cut public employee union collective bargaining rights and require them to contribute to pensions and health care.

Fourteen Senate Democrats have left the state to prevent the vote, according to AP sources in Wisconsin, attempting to force further negotiation on the bill, which would pass the Republican-controlled Senate if brought up for a vote. ABC News reports that 13 of 14 of the Democrats may have fled the state in a bus headed to Iowa. The move would stall a vote on the budget-repair measure and protect missing Democrats from a provision in Wisconsin’s constitution that allows lawmakers to compel their return to the capitol.

Earlier today, law enforcement was sent to find missing Democratic lawmakers, according to a Madison, Wis. ABC affiliate. State Sen. leader Scott Fitzgerald said only one Democrat is needed for quorum to vote on the controversial bill, which is expected to pass a Republican-majority Senate. The “Sergeant of Arms is going door to door to find Democratic senators.”

Very mature. How long do they have to stay away before they can be said to have abandoned their seats?

These jokers might be able to fill a public square in Madison with chanting crowds, but the number of people who voted Wisconsin Republicans into office is surely larger by orders of magnitude. I haven't seen or heard from Walker, which I guess means he's not a combative Chris Christie type. But, I hope he has plenty of quiet courage. And, yes, just think. We could have done all this in California back in 2003.

Enforce The 17th Amendment: the Dems' Appointed Senate Majority

Here's a comment I left at Althouse regarding the story about the hundreds of convicted felons who voted in the Franken-Coleman election in 2008 in large enough numbers to provide Franken with his winning majority. As I pointed out, Franken is not the only Democratic Senator whose seat was arrived at via less than democratic means:

The Senate has become increasingly unrepresentative. Right now, we have:

1. Roland Burris (appointed)

2. Kristen Gillebrand (appointed)

3. Mark Bennet (appointed)

4. Ted Kaufman (appointed)

5. Bob Menendez (appointed)

6. Al Franken (sued for his seat. benefited from "voting irregularities")

7. Mark Begich (narrowly beat Ted Stevens after Stevens was convicted of fraud, a conviction that was later overturned on the grounds of prosecutoral misconduct)

Maria Cantwell and Mary Landrieu have also won elections thanks to "midnight returns from Precinct 13" style maneuvers.

And don't forget Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy who each died in office after lingering for a couple years.

There's also Tim Johnson, who was incapacitated by a stroke, and has still not yet fully recovered...but won re-election in 2008 anyway.

Oh. I almost forgot Frank Lautenberg who managed to get on the ballot in NJ despite missing the deadline to get his name on the ballot. (The scandal plagued Bob Torricelli should properly have been on the ballot).

That's the Democrats' Senate majority right there. Are Republicans even trying?!

Powerline, which I think was the largest media outlet with a national following that covered the Franken election in any detail, has a lot more about the absolute failure by Minnesota to look to the integrity of its elections. Apparently, there is a well known phenomenon of college kids voting in Wisconsin and then crossing the border to vote in Minnesota. There's also the expected illegal immigrants and other non-citizens voting in see-no-evil urban districts. One commenter at Althouse claimed he saw a man "vouch" for some burqa-clad women who then proceeded to vote under his direction. Do you still believe in Minnesota Nice?

Meanwhile, there were doubtless thousands of actual American citizens who sat at home moaning that they "just don't have time to keep up with all the issues." People, this isn't a graduate school exam! Just get in there and git 'er done!

One thing is for sure: wherever you are, make sure you are registered to vote because you are not the sort of voter who is going to get the sort of extra-legal assist that Franken voters benefit from. If you are really interested in making a difference, make sure your registration is current. If you are going to be out of town, make sure to get your absentee vote in on time. We really can't afford to make any dumb mistakes, because only liberals are protected from their errors.