If you believe Andrew McCarthy — and Obama uses his plenary pardon power to issue his immigration dictates — the answer is yes:
[…] here’s the problem: Obama has no more elections to worry about; and, other than impeachment, the rest of the arsenal designed by the Framers is impotent when it comes to most of his immigration scheme.
That scheme implicates three closely related but importantly distinct considerations: the lawless status of the aliens in question; non-enforcement of the immigration laws against them; and the conferral of legal status on them. On the first two, the president’s power to forgive law-breaking and refrain from law-enforcement is plenary. The abuse of these powers is essentially irresistible . . . except by impeachment. As for the third consideration, even though the president has no direct power to confer legal status or benefits (e.g., work permits) on aliens, that technical deficiency could be overcome by the abusive exploitation of the aforementioned powers he undeniably has.
I acknowledge in Faithless Execution that to refrain from invoking impeachment as the credible threat the Framers intended it to be is a rational political choice. My point is that it is a choice fraught with consequences. We have to face those consequences. We don’t get to avoid them by being reasonable, moderate people who recoil from the I-word. Nor, in the matter of illegal immigration, is there any funding cut or loopy congressional lawsuit that can dissuade this president. There is either a credible threat of impeachment or a transformational mass-amnesty. That’s it.
Executive Order Confusion
The public debate over Obama’s anticipated amnesty proclamation has wrongly focused on executive orders. So sullied has this term become that it is now a standard talking-point of Obama apologists that he has issued fewer such directives than his predecessors. It is a red herring.
There is nothing wrong in principle with an executive order — no more than there is with a statute. Congressional laws are problematic only when they exceed Congress’s powers in violation of the Constitution. Same with executive orders: The president’s powers are broad, the executive branch through which he exercises them is extensive, and there is consequently nothing improper in his issuance of executive orders to manage the conduct of legitimate executive functions — just as there is nothing invalid in Congress’s enactment of statutes consistent with its capacious constitutional authorities or a court’s issuing rulings within its proper jurisdiction.
Executive orders are offensive only when the president employs them to usurp the powers of the other branches — in particular, the legislative authority of Congress. If the president issued an executive order directing the IRS to collect taxes on a rate-schedule he unilaterally prescribed, that would be a serious violation of law. The fact that there was only one such executive order rather than, say, 500 would be quite beside the point.
With that backdrop, let’s go back to our three considerations in the immigration context.
1. Lawless Status of the Aliens.
The Constitution vests the president with “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offenses against the United States.” It is an awesome power — wholly unreviewable and nearly limitless — although one explicit limit is crucial, and we’ll get to it in due course.Any offense against federal law is subject to pardon, and the Supreme Court has held since the Civil War that pardons remove “any of the penalties and disabilities” that would flow from a conviction. In fact, nothing in the Constitution prevents a president from pardoning his own law-breaking. The pardon power does not apply prospectively — the president may not license future law-breaking. But once the law has been broken, the president can pardon the offense; there is no need for an investigation to have occurred, much less a prosecution or conviction.
Pardons, moreover, need neither be individualized nor actually sought by the person to be pardoned. As George Mason law professor James Pfiffner recounts in the Heritage Foundation’s excellent Guide to The Constitution, President Washington granted a blanket amnesty to collaborators in the Whiskey Rebellion; Presidents Lincoln and Johnson pardoned pro-Confederacy seditionists. On his first day in office in 1977, President Carter fulfilled a campaign promise by pardoning hundreds of thousands of Vietnam draft evaders.
It is occasionally claimed that illegal immigration is beyond the pardon power because it is “civil” wrong not a criminal offense. This contention is largely incorrect, and it rests on a dubious assumption. Illegal entry into the United States is a criminal offense, albeit a misdemeanor. Reentry after deportation is a felony. And illegal aliens often commit various crimes to sustain their unlawful presence in our country. It is certainly true that an alien’s being unlawfully present in the United States — for example, overstaying a visa or remaining here after illegally entering — is a civil violation, not a criminal one, but it is serious enough to render an alien deportable. The Constitution, in any event, enables a president to pardon federal “Offenses” — it does not say criminal offenses. While it is a reasonable deduction that the Framers’ use of the word “offense” was meant to imply crimes, not civil wrongs, why should we assume that federal courts now stacked with Obama-appointed judges would see it that way? Why should the word offense be any less “organic” than, say, the term equal protection of the laws? Besides, the point of a blanket pardon would not be to confer lawful status on the aliens, something the president has no power to do. The point, as we shall see, would be to pave the way for the courts to finish the job.
Thus, fully within his constitutional authority, President Obama could, right this minute and without any congressional approval, pardon every illegal alien in the United States — indeed, every illegal alien anywhere who has been deported after violating federal law. He could do it by executive order and, while outrageous and condemnable, it would indisputably be within his Article II power. (As I have been pointing out since before Obama’s 2008 election, his longtime friendship with former terrorist Bill Ayers is rooted in their shared radical notions about the American criminal-justice system — which Ayers, in a book Obama gushingly endorsed, condemned as the racist equivalent of Apartheid South Africa. If I were in Congress right now, I’d be asking the Justice Department a lot of questions about preparations for pardons in Obama’s last two years. If you’re a convict not named Dinesh D’Souza or Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, I imagine you’ve got a shot.)
2. Non-enforcement of the Immigration Laws
As I explain in Faithless Execution, while the Constitution grants much raw power to the president, it also constrains its exercise by placing limits on the legitimate uses of executive authority. A textbook example of illegitimate exercise of a legitimate power is Obama’s abuse of prosecutorial discretion.
Prosecution is an awesome executive power. The Framers realized that, throughout history, the joinder in a single official or governing body of the powers to make law and to prosecute was the road to tyranny. So they took pains to separate legislative and prosecutorial authority. The executive branch was given plenary authority over federal law-enforcement: It is entirely up to the president and his Justice Department subordinates to decide what offenses and offenders will be investigated and prosecuted. Congress can try to pressure and prod, but it has no ability to coerce the Justice Department to enforce laws. (It is worth noting that the just-described sweep of the pardon power similarly reflects the Framers’ purposes to divide law-making from law-enforcement and to check potential legislative overreach.)
Pre-Obama, prosecutorial discretion was understood as an unremarkable resource-allocation doctrine specific to the criminal law. Enforcement resources are finite. It is neither possible nor desirable to prosecute every single violation of law. Therefore, policymakers, prosecutors, and police must exercise judgment about which violations merit attention and which ones can be overlooked. Mind you, the overlooking does not excuse the law-breaking; it is simply a concession to reality — there are more pressing threats to society than pot-smoking, petty fraud, etc.
Obama, however, has contorted prosecutorial discretion into a license to ignore, “waive,” rewrite, and otherwise violate congressional statutes — including laws such as the Affordable Care Act that are far afield from criminal-law enforcement. In sum, “prosecutorial discretion” has become the camouflage for Obama’s usurpation of the powers to write and conclusively interpret the law — powers the Constitution vests in Congress and the courts.
Faithless Execution outlines a litany of Obama-administration directives that the immigration laws go unenforced. In combination, they already amount to a large-scale amnesty. This, like abuse of the pardon power, can rightly be described as outrageous and condemnable. But, once again, such executive orders are indisputably within the president’s Article II power in the sense that neither Congress nor the courts can compel him to enforce the law.
3. Conferral of Legal Status
Under the Constitution, the power to determine the qualifications for American citizenship is legislative. Obviously, Congress’s prescriptions must be signed by the president to become law (unless lawmakers have the numbers to override a veto). The president, however, has absolutely no authority to confer legal status or positive benefits (e.g., work permits) on aliens who are in the United States illegally. If the president attempts to do this by executive order — and, as Faithless Execution recounts, Obama has already done it, albeit on smaller scales than what is now being contemplated — that would patently exceed his authority, in violation of both the Constitution and statutory law.But it is never that simple, is it? Let’s say Obama pardoned some millions of illegal aliens. The effect of a pardon is to expunge a violation of the law and its attendant effects. In the eyes of the law, it is as if the offense never happened.
Well, the legal and moral case against conferring legal status on illegal aliens is that doing so would excuse their law-breaking, encourage more law-breaking, and give the lawbreakers an unfair preference over aliens who have tried to immigrate lawfully. But a pardon would thrust us into a legal fiction in which we’d have to pretend that the aliens had never broken our immigration laws in the first place. What, then, would remain of the rationale for complaining about the preference given law-breakers over law-abiding aliens? Or for continuing to saddle the aliens with illegal status? Anyone want to bet me on how the nearly 400 judges Obama will have put on the federal bench by 2017 would come out on those questions?
If the president refuses to enforce the immigration laws and grants something close to a blanket amnesty, we will be on an inexorable course toward citizenship — and, crucially, voting rights — for millions of illegal aliens, also known as Democrats waiting to happen. It is the Left’s dream of a permanent, unassimilated, post-American governing majority.
Is that where we are headed?
Abuse of Power and Impeachment
As we noted earlier, the president’s pardon power is nearly limitless. There is a single exception, explicit in the Constitution’s Article II, Section 2: “Cases of Impeachment.”
The president can prevent incarceration and other legal punishments for any unlawful acts; but he cannot prevent impeachment — his own or any other official’s — based on the abuses of power that flow from those acts. Impeachment is a political remedy, not a legal one. It is about the removal of political power because of breaches of the public trust, not legal prosecution and punishment. Indeed, the Framers considered narrowing the pardon power to prevent the president from granting amnesty for his own lawlessness; they opted against it precisely because they believed the specter of impeachment would be sufficient disincentive.
As we’ve seen, the president’s pardon and prosecutorial powers are formidable. They do not, however, exist in a vacuum. They exist in a constitutional framework wherein the president’s core duties are to execute the laws faithfully and preserve our system of government. The fact that an act is within a president’s vast lawful power does not make it a faithful, constitutionally legitimate use of that power. As Faithless Execution elaborates, an act need not be criminal or indictable in order to be impeachable. There is far more to fiduciary responsibility than acting within the margins of technical legality.
To offer an analogy, a judge who sentenced a defendant to 20 years’ imprisonment for handing someone a single marijuana cigarette would be imposing a legal sentence (i.e., within the governing statute) but would demonstrate himself unfit to be a judge. Likewise, lawmakers have the power to impose a 100 percent tax on income, but doing so would be an intolerable abuse of power. Similarly, a president who uses the pardon power and prosecutorial discretion as pretexts for usurping Congress’s power to make immigration law, for encouraging law-breaking, and for remaking the country in a manner that imperils the economic and security interests of American citizens, commits grievous impeachable offenses.
To be blunt, there is no real power-of-the-purse check on the president’s pardon power. Congress could threaten to withhold funds necessary for other Obama agenda items in an effort to discourage a blanket amnesty — although it would not be a very credible threat with the soon-to-be Senate majority leader having already pledged to refrain from using Congress’s control of the purse-strings as leverage. But let’s face it: While many of his abuses of power cannot happen without congressional funding, the president doesn’t need a dime to pardon people. He doesn’t even need his phone — just his pen.
The only real check on the pardon power is impeachment.
At this point, would a credible threat of impeachment be much of a check on this president’s designs? I’m not sure. Obama’s stated goal is fundamental transformation of the nation, and a blanket amnesty would accomplish that. From his standpoint, it might be worth the risk. Plus, even if the amnesty suddenly ignited public sentiment for the president’s removal from office (a dubious supposition), nothing in Washington happens quickly. Obama would still have many months if not most of the rest of his term to abuse his awesome powers (including by issuing additional pardons) in transformational ways.
But I do know this: Absent a credible threat of impeachment, President Obama cannot and will not be stopped from granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, who will in short order be awarded citizenship and voting rights. […]
— And it turns out many in the GOP establishment don’t much care, and in fact are likely hoping Obama does issue dictates — amounting to pardoning the crimes of illegality and identity theft — so that they can run against amnesty in 2016, having gotten the very amnesty many of their closest cronies have pushed them to adopt in the first place.
That is, they benefit politically and with respect to their cronies, who are demanding cheaper labor. And like Jonathan Gruber, they believe us too stupid to see what’s going on.
Taking the shutting down of government off the table, working on an omnibus spending bill that will further entrench ObamaCare (another political bonus for the establishment GOP, who will run against ObamaCare yet again in 2016), and eschewing any talk of impeachment as immature, etc., is part and parcel of a modern-day GOP that will put politics and special interests ahead of the people who put them in power.
This is not representative government.
And it’s time to take back that representative component of the federal government by way of reining them in through the constitutional powers granted to the states. The article V convention movement must pick up quickly, however, or a permanent voting majority — based around creating a burgeoning welfare constituency — will fall to the Democrats, who have every intention to complete and institutionalize their project of fundamental transformation.
Even federal politicians from the minority party grow fat and powerful under an expansive centralized Leviathan. Through corporate welfare and cronyism do both parties now run, and sadly, the GOP would rather see the expansion of progressivism than the grass-roots swell of constitutional conservatism.
One has only look at the smug, dissembling face of John McCain or Mitch McConnell to see the future of the GOP.
Old script, new version.
I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not make a law with that man, Dr. Gruber. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you
Gruber, the model.
they believe us too stupid to see what’s going on.
Or too impotent to stop them.
See how that works? Never actually a member of staff, so pffttt, gone. Never had anything to do with Obamacare at all. Dear Leader is not amused.
The fact he may disagree with the opinion (he doesn’t) is irrelevant.
The future of the GOP looks wrinkled and jowly.
Wait a minute. Unless I am missing something, the President can pardon all these law breakers for illegally entering the country and whatever else they did to stay here but, how can he pardon the ongoing violation of staying here? We can forgive someone’s trespass but, we still expect them to leave.
Sure, he can refuse to enforce the law but, that wont stop the next guy.
open and transparent.
I like that they are now saying every part of the bill was debated openly etc and then are “surprised” that the bill does not include subsidies for federal exchanges.
It was debated openly in private meetings at the White House. meeting between Obama and his advisers, political and technical.
And the same “open debate” will be found to have taken place on this amnesty too. It will be an open debate on the best way to advance an agenda, one which the majority of the American people oppose, and the debate is on what is the best way to fool them again, fool them long enough to get the left-ratchet clicked a few notches.
Mass-amnesty it is then.
Next video:
Gruber: Ooh, baby, you are so talented!
[looks into the camera]
Gruber: And they are so *dumb*!
Any way to change the style sheet so that blockquotes aren’t italic? I see a big block of quoted material like that and it’s tl;dr.
With plain text not so. Maybe blockquotes could be a half-point smaller? Sans-serif? Something.
There is a way; I did it on my WordPress site when I was still blogging.
I don’t have that access here, though.
Impeachment: another way of creating President Martyr. Impeachment is one surefire way Obama gets his high approval numbers back.
And how exactly does a presidential pardon bestow citizenship, and specifically grant voting rights? The path to full USA Citizenship should be more than “easy button” easy, so as to not allow juat any old President Bumblefuck to make it so with the stroke of a pen.
Anything done by executive action can be undone by further executive action.
So maybe the smart play is to loudly and publically embrace this as a way of getting illegals out into the open so we can round them up and deport them in 2017. Further, add that promising to overturn Obama’s executive action is going to be a prerequisite for a Republican candidate seeking to win the Party’s nomination in 2016. The prospect of a messy and quite probably self-defeating fight over immigration in 2016 ought to be enough to get the amnesty supporting establishment wing of the party to start opposing this thing –or at least shut the hell up and not undermine Congressional opposition.
Probably wishful thinking on my part. The establishment gentry has itself convinced that the peasant base will happily eat a shit sandwich if they starve it long enough.
So maybe the smart play is to loudly and publically embrace this as a way of getting illegals out into the open so we can round them up and deport them in 2017.
We can send them home on all those flying pigs.
Years ago, Rush proposed legalizing them with the proviso that they couldn’t vote for X number of years.
Have to remember to make it non-severable though, lest the courts muck it up.
If you like your democratic republic, you can keep your democratic republic.
The last of the broken promises.
Years ago, Rush proposed legalizing them with the proviso that they couldn’t vote for X number of years.
Will they also be exempt from paying taxes during that time?
Because, you know…
No sweat — let ’em live in Puerto Rico.
>Will they also be exempt from paying taxes during that time? <
greencards pay taxes and don't vote i think.
Top Democrat: GOP Can Withhold Funding For Obama’s Amnesty Orders
The only reason the president has so much leeway is that Congress has delegated so much authority to him. Because it was the only feasible way for the federal government to exercise so much power over the citizenry.
Obama’s tyranny is the natural consequence of 100 years of federal aggrandizement and congressional abdication.
The Split-Level World
>congressional abdication.<
bobby "kkk" byrd understood such stuff
Pardon has two other limitations, and both of those are completely beyond the power of the President:
1) Presidential pardons are only for Federal laws, and have nothing to do with State laws, even if Federal law might supersede State law on any given issue. Thus, the President cannot issue a pardon for, say, driving without a driver’s license/insurance or murder (unless the murder occurs on Federal lands, such as a military base or national park), because those are violations of State laws. Thus, States can limit the issuance of IDs to only those people who can prove that they were born in the US or legally naturalized, rather than merely being pardoned for the violation of Federal immigration laws, and then make the lack of having such an ID for things such as holding a job or renting/buying a house a State crime. The President couldn’t do anything about that.
2) Just because the President issues a pardon does not require that the pardonee accept it, because there is an implicit assumption that needing to be pardoned means that the person being pardoned has, in fact, broken the law, and accepting it is an admission in the eyes of the law that he/she is admitting having done so, and are making that admission publicly, even though they need never fear actually being prosecuted for that violation. For instance, Marc Rich can never make a claim that he was really innocent and that he never actually cheated on his taxes after accepting Clinton’s pardon for those acts. (That is a SCOTUS precedent, fwiw.) If the act being pardoned has risen to the level of a felony, that felony is still on that person’s record (which can affect eligibility to do things like vote, receive government benefits, own a gun, etc.), and will be for all time.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B2lWXFsIIAAWb8F.jpg
Ernst: Mass-amnesty it is then.
Jeff:
Seems to me that the Article V Convention will come too late to save The Republic if the Tyrant does as Mr. McCarthy says he can. Add to the mix the fact [not speculation] that the GOP Leadership in the Congress will not Impeach the Tyrant.
Perhaps we should forget about the Article V effort and concentrate on gaining control of several of the Several States, from where we can effect a separation, because that is where this whole situation seems to be leading if we want to have a chance of preserving the Freedom and Ordered Liberty gifted to us by The Founding Fathers.
Is this our 1775 Moment?
If we continue to waste our time in fruitless efforts are we merely making it easier for the Left to triumph over us?
>the GOP Leadership in the Congress will not Impeach the Tyrant.<
well don't impeach him. send 2 bills. 1st 90% of fed gov't funded. 2nd his idiot views not funded. at some point you have to fight a clowndisaster.
Apparently nobody ever called him a liar to his face. (And mumbling “that’s a lie” doesn’t count. Apparently nobody ever called him a straight up fraud to his face. And I wonder why not. Surely, not respect for the office. A respect not extended to his predassor xxxxx predisessor xxxxx predesessor xxxxx Bush.
And who is a afraid of a race war when the federal government operatives are already ginning it up in St. Louis, and already have ginned it up with Travon Martin?
Impeach the bastard. And squeeze him by taking away his toys. Put him on the short leash until he regrets ever taking up politics.
What a disgusting ass.
Want to squeeze him? Find out exactly what Obama wants; expose what his (hidden) intentions are, and thwart them, one by one. ObamaCare is coming unglued; that’s his signature prize, ready to topple. This widespread amnesty can be nullified if qualifications for it are set at levels these illegals find difficult to overcome: they must learn the English language, USA’s laws and history, and adapt to our existing culture (you know, all the original qualifiers that worked well for centuries). Minimal challenges, but these tasks will thwart many of this current crop of low-IQ, streets-paved-with-gold-seeking migrants. Just set the bar high enough so that they won’t want to work hard enough to hurdle it.
Oh, and no voting until all those qualifiers are met; that’ll take the political reinforcement Democrats get for embracing free-load amnesty away. Remind voters of the negatives that come with granting easy access citizenship to low-end migrants: if they piss enough in the pool, the water will become fouled, and the chlorine it’ll need for sanitizing will burn everyone’s eyes.
A lot of the suggestions here hinge on Democrats respecting the law in some manner, at some level. They do not, while we often do. That’s one of the reasons they continue to win.
But now, Cranky, the GOP Establishment have joined the Democrats in not respecting The Rule Of Law – they have made common cause with the Despots.
And both groups, along with their Bureaucrat toadies, are in Power And Control of the national government.
Impeachment is probably the only option theoretically…trouble is it isn’t a practical option. If the friggin Keystone pipeline can only get 59 votes in the Senate, how in the hell do you impeach him?
What needs to be done is enrage voters on how Democrats are selling out their jobs for their own political gain. But until you have that upsurge of populist support, you don’t have anyway to counter this.
“Jagurs cornerback arrested — after trying to use *burble* gum as money”
…
When Uncle Bill Quit Dope
*Jagwires*
Politicians should be wary of eliminating lawful means of checking their behavior. The alternative ain’t pleasant.
Victory for Protein Wisdom?
Survey says?
Yes!
linky
I once had a pet shrimp named Mitch.
She could swim like the dickens, but she still got deveined.
Bob Belvedere says November 17, 2014 at 7:56 pm
Yeah Bob, I’m of the opinion the Article V thing is about 45 years too late. We the people have proven time and again we’ll tolerate no end of political corruption, long as we’re entertained and got snacks. At this point Levin’s amendments are like gun control. When the laws you have are not respected, passing more is futile. Best to work on enforcing what you have.
Which brings us to impeachment, and our cowardly representatives that won’t impeach because they represent a cowardly people.
Is this our 1775 moment? Yes. Unfortunately we are no longer a 1775 people.
Some of us are, LB. And if we gather together, physically, we have a chance of preserving The Spirit Of 1776.
Didn’t the Supreme Court slap down Arizona for trying to do something like that?
Only 59 votes to save Mary Landrieu? So, not even her fellow Democrats like her.
Pray for a blizzard in Ferguson.
I’m just sayin.
I’m not hoping for that, Di.
Let it happen. Let the LIV’s and Dupes and Useful Idiots get a taste of the Helter Skelter Stew the Left has been slow-cooking.
Sometimes people have to be hit upside the head with a 2×4 before they wake up to Reality.
The Coming Murder of the US Constitution
Thought experiment of the day – various “victims” groups have a Day of Rage. What would happen if constitution-revering Americans had a Day of Righteous Indignation? What would be the result?
Just another day in the life of a Constitution revering American I reckon, R.I. What day passes without it?
Tomorrow though is a special day marking the 150th year since Lincoln’s great address.
151st! Apologies for the error.
>151st! Apologies for the error.<
a bridge too far methinks)
Let it happen.
What do you think the result will be? Given that Obama has been meeting with these thugs personally, they’ve obviously got something planned that this rioting will enable.
They’re thinking ten steps ahead of us, Bob. They’re thinking of things we don’t think of. They’re looking for Cloward-Piven, martial law, pretexts to do whatever…
It won’t be good. Even the useful idiots in the USSR wrote letters to Unca Joe, wondering if he knew about the gulag they’d just been tossed in.
They have to be stopped; they will never be clued in.
Fortunately for us, Steps 2 through 9 are “???” and Step 10 is “PROFIT!!!”
>They’re thinking ten steps ahead of us, Bob. <
Defeated By Psy-Ops (Psychological Operations) – Conservatives Fail Every Time
the stupid party should do some reverse cloward piven on the baracky:
the house should pass a short continuing resolution(march april 2015)
then
do a regular appropriations(all those bills bottled up in the senate) for 2015 bill by bill as sent to harry reid’s senate
let baracky veto them one by one
this ASSUMES the rethuglican losers want to fight the clowndisaster™
‘The Coming Murder of the US Constitution’?
It was pronounced dead when Obamacare was passed the way it was.
Didn’t the Supreme Court slap down Arizona for trying to do something like that? – See more at: https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=55568#comment-1160781
I think it was more that Arizona was trying to enforce Federal Laws by duplicating them, and then enforcing them only against illegals. If the new laws are required of all American citizens, and then making the lack of such ID for specific purposes a crime, it might pass, because the illegals do not need to have a job or a place to live or a bank account to be here in the US… or health care…
Since it is required by private corporations that we already have such an ID for those purposes (cashing a check, renting a place to live or buying a house, buying cigarettes, etc.), how can it be illegal for the States to require the IDs for those same purposes? They have already made it a crime to drive without a license, it should be permitted to make it illegal to hold a job without one…
>because the illegals do not need to have a job or a place to live or a bank account to be here <
or a effin' greencard
Penumbras and Emanations?
(Only Kennedy knows for sure.)
OT but perhaps this should be ET, every topic.
Exactly, GeoffB.
In matters like these, the Left In America does not need to run a grand conspiracy. They just have to say the right words, utter the proper phrases, and the troops know what to do — message received — so successful are their indoctrination efforts.
Stacy McCain uses this quote a lot, for good reason:
In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.
– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)
Unless Roberts decides that states enforcing federal immigration law without a federal subsidy constitutes a tax. Then Arizona would be golden.
Showcase “Noble Cause Corruption” once again.
Party Uber Alles.
[…] Roger Kimball thinks it is the former [tip of the fedora to GeoffB]: […]