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. When he claimed the ObamaCare Penalty for not participating was a tax, he was dead wrong; it was extortion, the price of choosing the “not to play” option that should have been free. 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 empty suits and the only tool left to fight them with is satire, the meaner the better, the unfairer the funnier.

____________

*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 DC 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. (All of this goes a long way toward understanding that jokes about “lipstick on a pig” are not sexual but helpfully metaphorical.)

None of these are men. And, yes, in this sense, women can be men too, but almost never are. A man does 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.” The not showing what’s really there.

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 someone 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. 

That’s Boasberg on the left, Max in the middle, and actor Frewer on the right.

Yes, there was a physical resemblance. I tend to find those in faces. Part of my knack for pattern recognition. But Max Headroom struck me as a subtle point that didn’t have to be headlined in my use of his face. Anyone who digs will find that the image I used for Boasberg was Matt Frewer, who rose to stardom by hosting an MTV show in the ‘80s as the first virtual veejay in the emerging video-dominated world. Max Headroom didn’t exist, but there was a real person reading the lines and being filmed to provide the raw material for computer graphics artists to transform into an iconic TV presence. Best of all for me, Frewer’s face has a skeletal flavor that makes Boasberg more sinister looking. I played with it for my own amusement.

Beryl Howell and James Boasberg

Two marionettes of the Lawfare Left

Interestingly, the Boasberg story kept getting more sinister as the months rolled on. Via ‘news-blog-online,’ this past March:

So Boasberg wasn’t just the guy who made the absurd ruling that U.S. aircraft in flight over international waters had to turn back because a District Ciurt judge said so, he was elbow deep in other anti-Trump shenanigans with at least a suspicion of involvement by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. The news-blog copy:

The recent revelations of Chief Justice John Roberts’ connections to Judge James Boasberg have sparked controversy and raised serious questions about judicial impartiality. These ties within an elitist legal circle have brought to light potential conflicts of interest and have called into question the integrity of the Supreme Court.

It has been discovered that Chief Justice Roberts was the one who nominated Judge Boasberg to the DC FISA Court, a highly sensitive and secretive court that oversees surveillance requests from the government. This revelation is particularly concerning considering Judge Boasberg’s history of openly criticizing President Trump and his policies. It begs the question, how can we trust a judge who has shown clear bias against the current administration to make fair and impartial decisions?

But the connections between Chief Justice Roberts and Judge Boasberg go even deeper. It has been revealed that they were both members of an elite, invite-only lawyers’ club called the Chevy Chase Club. This club is known for its exclusivity and has been described as a “haven for the rich and powerful.” The fact that these two influential figures were part of the same elitist circle raises even more concerns about their objectivity and impartiality.

The Chevy Chase Club is not just any ordinary club. It is a place where the wealthy and powerful come together to network and socialize. It is a place where connections are made and favors are exchanged. And now, it seems that these connections have extended to the highest levels of our judicial system.

The implications of this revelation are significant. The Supreme Court is meant to be the ultimate arbiter of justice in our country, and its decisions have far-reaching consequences. It is essential that the justices who sit on this court are impartial and free from any conflicts of interest. But with these recent revelations, it is clear that this may not always be the case.

Chief Justice Roberts, as the leader of the Supreme Court, has a responsibility to ensure that the court remains free from any biases or outside influences. And yet, his close ties to Judge Boasberg, and their shared membership in an exclusive club, call into question his ability to do so. How can we trust that Chief Justice Roberts will make decisions based on the law and not on personal connections or biases?

 

I had already been tracking the dilatory and reluctant support for the rule of law by SCOTUS under Biden’s lawfare against Trump and then their failure to prevent or stop the judicial insurrection by partisan district judges. At Facebook and in the Instapunk Times I made it a recurring visual joke:

Then, when it became clear that Boasberg had hidden connections inside the Supreme Court itself, I merely had to add to what I had already done:

With the more recent turn of events, the DOJ investigation of Boasberg and the SCOTUS shift toward blocking Trump’s Article I powers he can ignore anyway, I suspected more kibitzing by Boasberg and the politically incestuous DC social network of left-leaning lawyers. Hence the admittedly inflammatory video about the romantic entanglement of Roberts and Boasberg.

Is that fair? No. I have no evidence that Roberts or Boasberg are gay. But is it justified to suggest there is some kind of closeted relationship between them and others on the DC social circuit that would embarrass them deeply to reveal? Yes.

I use graphics to get under lefty skin and make my readers laugh, even if they don’t always know why they laugh. It’s what newspaper Op-Ed satirists and political cartoonists have done forever. I enjoy it because it helps me to figure out who looks like who, reminds me of who, and why, and what that says about them, the situation, their Talking Points, and their often bafflingly self-destructive activism against their own people. My readers can look carefully at what I’m doing or not. I say things indifferent ways, hoping to reach people one way or another. I write seriously for those whose attention span doesn’t break down in less than five minutes. I make visual jokes for those who will get the gist — and the ones who will grasp and even revel in the subtleties. It’s not necessary for them to recognize that my stand-in for the Solicitor-General is an AI-animated photo of Red Skelton in skit costume. It’s just fun if you realize that the reference dates you and me both and may be over some of these youngsters’ heads.😎