Townhall Review | Commentaries

The Supreme Court took a principled—and unified stand against interference with democracy. In a 9-0 per curiam decision, the court ruled that the people get to choose their candidates for president, not state judiciaries, prosecutors, or bureaucrats.

Colorado had disqualified Donald Trump under the 14th Amendment by declaring him an insurrectionist. The unanimous court struck down that effort, rebuking their usurpation of Congress’ authority. “States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency,” they ruled. In fact, as the court pointed out, the 14th Amendment exists to limit state authority, not to expand it to deny voters their choice of candidates for federal office.

In short, the Supreme Court defended actual democracy and the norms of the republic. The effort to deny Trump access to the ballot despite the support of his party’s voters was the real attack on democracy, an attempt to set up the judiciary as a star chamber inserted into the electoral process.

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We are entering high political season just now, and the national media is exploiting the prejudices of certain Republican voters here and there who find some of our prospective nominees distasteful, from the presidency to House and Senate races across the country. Such Republicans need to get over themselves.

When Barry Goldwater lost an effort at the nomination for the presidency in 1960, he told an unhappy Republican convention to “Grow up” and support the ultimate nominee because the alternative would be a Democratic victory that would install a “blueprint for socialism.” Goldwater’s words. His message is apropos today.

Socialism is no longer a blueprint here, it is alive and well and active throughout the Democratic party.  Given all the stakes for our country, Republicans must act more maturely and grow up. As Lincoln once said, we have the choice to nobly save or meanly lose this, “the last best hope of earth.” That choice is upon us now. Let’s grow up and save this country.

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No one has ever mistaken Donald Trump and Jeb Bush for bosom buddies. That’s why it’s significant that Jeb Bush—along with co-author Joe Lonsdale—recently took to the pages of The Wall Street Journal to denounce legal decisions against Donald Trump in New York and Elon Musk in Delaware.

Bush rightly points out that one needn’t be a fan of either Trump or Musk to have serious concerns about the decisions. Both suggest that our legal system is being used to punish people disliked or feared by our country’s elites.

The U.S. economy will suffer if entrepreneurs decide their assets here are at risk because of capricious legal judgments. Worse yet, if ordinary Americans decide there is no longer equality before the law, respect for the law will disappear. Once that happens, our country is changed forever — and not for the better.

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When a staff revolt broke out at the New York Times over the decision to run an opinion essay by Senator Tom Cotton in 2020, the paper pinned the blame editor Adam Rubenstein. This week, Rubenstein struck back in a lengthy essay at The Atlantic. In it, he made clear what had long been obvious to conservatives: the Times is more like a cult than a news organization and they treat non-progressives as heretics.  

From the ideological struggle session at his orientation to his eventual departure, Rubenstein relates how the Times rejects fact-based reporting for political narratives. The enforcement of ideological cult-think permeates the organization, even its Human Resources functions. The Cotton episode is the most prominent he explores, but we have myriad other examples—and not just at the NYT. 

This confirms mainstream media’s radical-progressive cult, but their product continuously reveals it. They don’t exist to report the news. They exist to report progressive narratives.

We’re indebted to Adam Rubenstein for making that abundantly clear.

We’re facing a malevolent mainstream media cult.

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Last week, Laken Riley, a University of Georgia nursing student, was murdered on an Athens, Georgia running path. Her murderer was not just an illegal migrant—he was an illegal migrant who had been arrested in New York for injury to a child and in Georgia for shoplifting. He also had an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear in court over the shoplifting charge.

Laken Riley was failed by three different governments—the US government, who let her murderer cross the border, and then the state governments of both New York and Georgia.

Now Ms. Riley is being failed by the media. Many reports fail to mention her killer’s immigration status. Some even discuss whether women should feel safe running alone.

Shame on the media. Rather than demanding that the government protect its citizens, it’s protecting politicians from accountability for their horribly failed policy decisions.

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So much attention in recent days has been given to the report of the Special Counsel indicating the loss of mental acuity on the part of the president of the United States.

It’s an inconvenient issue for the Democratic party as they want to focus on something else in the 2024 election cycle: That would be abortion.

They believe the abortion issue is the accelerant for their hopes in elections statewide, nationwide and in congressional districts. 

One recent article simply indicated that the Democratic Party is afraid that the issue of immigration and the border crisis could actually compete with abortion in terms of voter interest and that would derail their plans.

They will continue to argue that the Supreme Court “took away a woman’s right to abortion” or they’ll argue about “a woman’s reproductive health choices”—using the language of moral evil.

Notice the language: The Supreme Court did not take away a right. There was no such “right,” and never has been, and never will be—in truth—such a right. Keep that clearly in mind. 

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Illegal immigration is already taking an enormous toll on America. It costs American taxpayers almost $151 billion dollars yearly to provide essential benefits and services to migrants. And that doesn’t even include the deaths from fentanyl and other drugs flowing over our border.

Now, the Biden administration’s illegal immigration may well have spawned a generational crime problem. El Tren de Aragua, a brutal international crime syndicate from the Venezuelan prison system, has killed in the US for the first time, in Florida. They are also in Chicago.

Tren’s now likely to spread throughout America the way El Salvadoran gang MS-13 has. The FBI even fears the two cartels may temporarily join forces.

Jail is preferable to letting these criminals roam the streets—but they use prison to recruit more members.

Our children and our children’s children will be dealing with the fallout of Biden’s dangerous open border policies.

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Russian pro-democracy activist Vladimir Kara-Murza is the name you need to know right now.

Kara-Murza is the highest profile Russian dissident left after the murder of Aleksei Navalny. Kara-Murza is a permanent resident of the United States. His wife and children are American citizens. Kara-Murza has survived two poisoning attempts and is now imprisoned in one of the Russian dictator’s Gulag 2.0 camps.

Putin doesn’t worry much, if at all, about what President Biden thinks about this because President Biden talks a tough game but does nothing when his bluff is called. Navalny, was Biden’s “red line” with Putin, and like Obama’s “red line” with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, dictators often ignore both presidents have paid no price.

British journalist Douglas Murray wrote in The Telegraph: “Under President Biden America has been seen continuously as being in retreat from the rest of the world.”

Murray was right.

We’re watching a downward spiral

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It is insulting to banana republics when we compare them to our nation’s use of the courts to silence and stop Donald Trump.  Banana republics of yore had a shame about it—they did their cloak and dagger work in the dark, as quietly as possible. They didn’t parade and strut the way our judges and prosecutors do as they indict and try Donald Trump at federal and local levels.

No—What we are seeing in the lawfare against Donald Trump to obtain what cannot be won at the ballot box, namely: his defeat—is Putinism. Vladimir Putin struts and parades his use of the apparatuses of government to silence and retribute against his political foes. He has no shame about it. He sees the publicity of it as a tool and message: “Come against me politically—face state-sanctioned punishment.”

Those who denounce Putin, wake up: the rapidity of it all is different here—the ends, and increasingly, the means, are not.

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No man, no problem.

That’s the way Joe Stalin put it.

Totalitarian regimes and dictators know how to deal with problems. They disappear. And when it comes to human beings, that often means they disappear by murder.

In this case, of course, we're talking about Alexei Navalny who died Friday in a Russian penal colony in or near Siberia. He died just a day after appearing to be extremely healthy in a video appearance related to his legal situation.

Navalny was a part of a generation that was horribly offended by the corruption that is reflected in the Russian government.  He named things for what they were. He exposed them. And he sought to organize opposition. He believed that the formation of opposition parties could eventually lead to the overthrow of Russia’s corrupt regime. But predictably, and given the history of Russia following a very familiar pattern, the regime struck back.

Will this in time strengthen or weaken the Russian regime? Well, we’ll be watching them closely.

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