Month: February 2017

If you’ve read the federal law that Trump is relying on for his immigration order, you may be excused for wondering what the litigation over the order is all about.  The language of the statute is written in plain English.  You don’t need to be a lawyer to read and understand it.  Trump’s smarter than the average bear, he’s read the law in question, and he can’t understand the problem.   But then, he’s not a lawyer.

The 14th Amendment, and its due process clause,  were ratified in 1865, 108 years before the Roe v. Wade decision.  For over a century legal scholars had studied, written about, and litigated the due process clause.   Then came a truly  brilliant lawyer, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who saw something no one had ever seen before  — a penumbra, surrounding the due process clause, containing within it the right to privacy, and a woman’s right to an abortion.  Justice Douglas did not say that the right to privacy was the only right that was within the penumbra.  Ever since that decision, people have been trying to find one, but no luck so far, and Douglas, with his super vision, is long dead.  Even to this day, there are people like me who look at the due process clause, and we don’t see any penumbras.  Is that because he was smarter than we are, or does it mean he came up with the idea when he was stoned?

These judges on the Ninth Circuit ought to be impeached.  They’ve all sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution, but by their decisions you know that their legal philosophy does not require them to stick to the Constitution, which, to them,  is a living document.  And here’s where it gets tricky.  To understand the evolution of the Constitution, from its original form into what it is today, you have to be a lawyer, preferably from Harvard.  This is heavy intellectual lifting.  Only brilliant legal scholars can see all the penumbras out there.

They don’t defend the Constitution, they gut it.  Other than parts of the Bill of Rights, they’ve made a hash of the entire federalist system designed by the Framers.  Who knows if it can ever be put back together.

We’ll start with Article V, and the Nashville Balanced Budget Amendment Convention (NBBAC) on 11-7-17.  The Tennessee Senate, through the leadership of Sen. Brian Kelsey, has passed the formal Call for the Convention today.  The House, with Rep. Dennis Powers leading, will pass it soon, and a formal invitation, and a signed and sealed copy of the Call for the Convention, will be sent by the Speaker of the House Beth Harwell, and Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally to all of their counterparts in the other 49 States.  We’re confident we’ll get a quorum of 26, and from there the sky’s the limit.  We may wind up getting 45 States.  The ones that don’t come are going to look foolish.

It’s going to be a good Call.

Every Don needs his consigliere, and Trump has his own, personal Rasputin in the person of Steve Bannon, who’s a piece of work.  The more I read about him, the more alike he and I seem.  Among other things, Bannon is a half-assed intellectual, just like me.  His favorite book is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.  And one of the main lessons it teaches is that, “All warfare is based on deception.”

Bannon and his boss are in a war, and they know it.  They’re up against not just the elite media, but the whole liberal establishment that constitutes our ruling class of elites.  This includes a whole lot of people, concentrated densely in the liberal metropolitan enclaves on the coasts.  They have a lot of weapons at their disposal, and they’ll throw everything they’ve got against Trump.  So forget bipartisanship, and working things out together.

My theory is that all these impulsive tweets, and this dumb statement about Shwarzenegger, and all the crazy stuff Trump is doing are part of the act.  He wants the disdain of the elites.  It validates him to his base.  And it helps deceive his enemies, by distracting them from more important matters.  And, he’s trolling them.

Bannon is also a history buff, and is a believer in The 4th Turning, which says all of history can be explained in four generational cycles.  This is batshit crazy, and makes me worry about this guy.  But at least he thinks, and is a unapologetic champion of our Judeo-Christian culture.

It’s interesting that these liberal enclaves all want to be sanctuaries.  Maybe we can work out a deal with them, like the one India used to have with the Portuguese enclave of Goa.  Give them a separate status, as a dependent enclave.  Be creative, maybe try something no one’s ever done before.  They want to leave, we want them to leave, so why can’t we cut a deal?

Sex and the city, maybe that’s part of it.  People go to the city for sexual liberation, and go back to the country to raise their families.  Some people get so liberated they never leave the city, and a lot of them don’t have families.  This is the land of confused sexual identity and the metrosexual.  It’s a different world.

Fixing Obamacare is going to take a while.  Simply repealing it won’t work, because, in the larger sense, Obama has won.  He succeeded in making it unacceptable that so many people lack health insurance.  He expanded the scope of governmental dependency.   For a man like Obama, that’s a pretty good legacy.

I realized all this when I read about a statement my Tea Party Congressman, Tom McClintock, made about Obamacare.  We can’t just repeal it, he said.  There are too many people relying on it, and we can’t take away what they’ve been given.  Case closed.

This was the dying breath of the progressive project, and it’s as far as they’re going to get.  But we’re a rich country, and we should make the health and welfare of our people our priority.

This far, and no further.

 

The Gold Country of California is an economic backwater.  Young people leave to look for work.  The population is steady, but only because it’s a relatively inexpensive place to retire.  Commercially, there’s really nothing happening.

Except in Calaveras County, where marijuana farmers are injecting new life.  There may be as many as a thousand of them, half legal, half illegal.  The legal ones welcome taxation and regulation.  The illegals are, of course, uninterested.

A couple years ago three thieves were on an illegal grow, and they were shot and killed.  The first degree murder trial is underway, and it’s, let us say, bad PR for the whole industry.  The timing of County Measure M, which would put the legal growers out of business, couldn’t be worse.

The legal farmers already pay substantial taxes, and they’re going to pay more, $12 million a year more, and they don’t mind.  The Sheriff’s office has expanded, with new equipment.  But they publicly acknowledge they don’t have the resources to take out the illegal growers.  There are just too many of them.  Taking out the legal growers won’t solve the problem.  It will reduce revenue to the County, which will have to cut back on enforcement.

Public opinion is against the growers, as shown in the recent election.  The new Board of Supervisors was elected on a wave of anti-grower sentiment. Thus, Measure M.

It just so happens that the Gold Country has an ideal marijuana growing climate.  If you’ve got a southern exposure on your land, that’s all you need.  Special soils are imported for the growing pots, and the plants need to be watered daily.  Farming marijuana is similar to farming tobacco, just like the first English-Americans did in Virginia.  It is very labor intensive, but the rewards are huge.   If you’re willing to put in the work, for a fairly small investment you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A lot of this money is circulated in the local economy, since most of the growers live and are raising their families there.  Little towns like Mountain Ranch are bustling, and you see a lot of new pickups.  This is the first real money a lot of these people have ever seen.

I’m with the growers, since some of them are my friends.  And, of course, I’m a libertarian.  I found out about Measure M over the weekend, and I got the impression that the growers weren’t organized for the fight of their lives.  I got a call from someone heavily involved, and it turns out I was wrong.  They are organized, they have professionals working for them, and they seem to know what they’re doing.  I’ll stay involved from the sidelines, since I naturally have a lot of amazing ideas, but lack the ability and means to implement them.

Working on campaigns is the one thing I’ve done in my life that I was best at.

In “What Went Wrong?”  Bernard Lewis describes the rise of Iran, beginning in 1501 with the rule of the founding Shah, Ismail Safavi.  He converted the country to the Shiite sect, as opposed to the Ottoman Sunnis, his great enemy.  Over the course of the next few hundred years, Shiite Iranians fought Sunni Turks for control of the Middle East.  The Iran-Iraq War of 1980 to 1988 was just the latest chapter of a conflict that remains unresolved after 500 years.  (Iraq is mainly Shiite, but its leader, Saddam Hussein, was Sunni.)

These people seem to hate each other with an intensity it’s hard for us to appreciate.  Back in the day, maybe it was like this between Catholics and Protestants, but that was long ago.  For a people consumed with their religion, it’s the most important thing on earth, worth dying for.  For every westerner recently killed by Islamic fanatics, there are a thousand Sunnis and Shiites who have been slaughtered by their Muslim rivals.  You get the feeling this won’t end soon.

For humanitarian reasons we don’t like seeing Sunnis and Shiites killing each other, but we should nonetheless realize that this conflict is the most important in the Middle East, and we should take advantage of it.  We want the balance of forces led by Shia Iran to balance with those led by Sunni Saudi Arabia, currently allied with Israel, our one friend in the region.  We must accept Iran’s existence in its current form.  Regime change would be nice, but the Ayatollahs would only be replaced by hard core Iranian nationalists, devout Shiites.  And we aren’t in the regime change business any more, so we deal with Iran as it is.

Israel will always want to be more secure than it is.   It’s perfectly understandable, but they must accept the fact that there is risk in every balance of power arrangement.  And isn’t that the best outcome in the Middle East, an equal Sunni-Shia balance of power?Along with the Russians, we could play the role of balancer, trying to prevent either side from gaining a decisive advantage over the other.

Right now we’re tilted, hard, on the Sunni side of this equation, since they seem to be the ones under attack.  But it’s complicated, because ISIS is Sunni, and they are our number one target.  Once they’re eliminated, we might be able to have a more even handed policy.

My friend Dan Fleming brought four of his friends to my place for a Super Bowl party, and, as is traditional, left the morning of the game.  We got over to Calaveras County, the heart of the budding marijuana industry of California.  There are hundreds, if not thousands of growers, and they are under attack.  The Board of Supervisors called a special election for May 2nd, and if the referendum passes all these growers will be out of business.

I’ll be looking into this.

I’m a veteran observer of Republicans In Name Only, like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.  The State she represents is very conservative, so she can’t afford to show her true colors too often, or too close to an election.  She’s not up until 2022, so she figures she can afford to reveal her liberal inner core right now.  To her, it’s virtue signaling.  But if she does vote against Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary, she’s making a huge mistake.

The State of Alaska is in very deep trouble, in just about every way. 75% of the budget is coming from cash reserves, and 75% of the Alaska pipeline is running empty.  The two are related.  To maintain the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed (pay no taxes, have an enormous State government, and give yourself cash dividends) Alaska needs to fill that pipeline, and there’s only one way to do it.  And the time is now.

Eighty miles or so east of Prudhoe Bay and the pipeline sits the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve, or ANWR.  It’s virtually devoid of life, and is one of he most godforsaken places on earth.  But it’s the best prospect for oil in North America.  When petroleum geologists first looked at the data from the northern Alaska plain, back in the 50’s, this was the most promising prospect.  The fact that the damn stuff leaks on to the surface was a clue.  But the Department of Defense said it was off limits.  This is where NORAD was going to put its long range radar to detect a Soviet attack.  So the oil companies were forced to go to the west, to Prudhoe Bay.  They did just fine there.

ANWR is locked up right now, and it will take an act of Congress to open it.  Now is the time, with complete Republican control of Congress and the Presidency.  The problem is in the Senate, and the filibuster.  There’s a way around it, but it would require the active support of the Trump administration.  And Lisa Murkowski may be in the process of getting the Trump people pissed off at her, and thus not inclined to do any favors for Alaska.  Muy stupido.

The legislative maneuver which would be used would be the insertion of a clause opening ANWR in the budget reconciliation bill, which is not subject to filibuster.  This was done successfully in 1996, but Clinton vetoed it.  If it was done again, and sent to Trump, he’d sign it, ANWR would be opened, and the State of Alaska would reap a bonanza.

In order to do this, all the Republican leadership, House, Senate, and White House, would have to actively support it.   As Chair of the Senate Energy Committee, Murkowski could claim some of the credit.  But if she votes against DeVos, it will never happen.

My Article V mentor, Lew Uhler, called me late last night to ask me to send a message to Murkowski  — if you vote against DeVos, you will have a well funded primary opponent in 2022.  This is a vote that the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund, Heritage Action, and many other organizations are watching very carefully, and will remember.

I tried calling the Chairman of the Republican Party of Alaska, Tuckerman Babcock, but he didn’t pick up, so I texted him  the message from Lew, to pass along to Murkowski.  He’s probably getting a lot of calls right now.

After I left the Senate and went to the House, my secretary, Anne Williams, decided I needed a new secretary, which was Mrs. Tuckerman Babcock, whom I’d never met.  The thing was, she had this little boy, around 18 months, and she couldn’t afford day care.  So Anne took about a third of the office and made it into a play room for this kid.  And then she said she had a job in some other legislator’s office, and left me with Tuckerman’s young wife.  And the kid.  I didn’t mind.

We were in an annex a block from the Capitol, and very few people ever came to my office.  I didn’t encourage visitors.  I didn’t like being  bothered.  At this time I was scheming the downfall of Gov. Bill Sheffield, and I really wasn’t interested in anything else.  He had reapportioned me out of my Senate seat, and the main reason I even ran for the House was to try to figure out a way to destroy him.

This is when I met Tuckerman, over 30 years ago.  He came by to pick up his wife, and kid.  The little guy got out of his play room when his Dad came.  I was talking to Tuckerman when the kid punched me right in the groin.  I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but later I realized that this kid saw me as a threat to his mother, so he punched me.  I like kids like that.