There Are Two Fundamentally Irreconcilable Constitutional Visions

  • It’s been a momentous couple of weeks at the Supreme Court. As usual, they saved the big cases for the end. This year the big three were Bruen (gun rights), Dobbs (abortion rights) and West Virginia (administrative regulation of CO2).

  • All three cases were decided 6-3 along ideological lines.

  • These cases involved the most basic issues of what the Constitution is and how it is to be interpreted. On those issues there is virtually no hope of one side ever convincing anyone from the other side. There just are two fundamentally irreconcilable visions of how this should work.

  • The two visions can be summarized in just a few sentences each:

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And The Winner Is, Germany!

And The Winner Is, Germany!
  • Just over six months ago, in December 2021, I asked the question that was on the tip of the tongue of everybody who follows the subject of the ongoing massive “green” transition to fossil-fuel-free energy. Actually, that’s a lie. The question I asked was not on the tip of the tongue of everybody who follows the subject, or even of most of the people who follow the subject, for reasons that to me are completely inexplicable.

  • The question was : “Which Country Or U.S. State Will Be The First To Hit The Green Energy Wall?”

  • The candidates that I nominated in that post as potentially the first to hit the “green energy wall” were California, New York, the UK and Germany. At the time, I thought it was obvious that one of those jurisdictions would hit the wall sooner than almost anybody expected. Indeed, I was quite bold in the short time frame that I predicted:

  • A prolonged period of unfavorable weather (calm and overcast) could cause a serious energy crunch to hit one or both of Germany or the UK as soon as this winter. Or they could get lucky and go another year or two.

  • Now here we are in June 2022, and I think it’s hard to deny that Germany has in fact hit the “green energy wall.”

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Candidate For Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever: Harry Blackmun

  • Yes I know, the competition for the title of Worst Supreme Court Justice Ever is stiff. A decent rogue’s gallery of candidates might include , for example, the likes of William O. Douglas, Earl Warren, and William Brennan. There may be a good case to be made for any of those, and plenty more.

  • But none of them has the distinction of having authored Roe v. Wade. So for today, permit me to make the case for Blackmun.

  • Blackmun did not author any large number of important Supreme Court decisions. One might surmise that his colleagues did not trust him with the tough ones. If you wonder if that might be true, try reading the Roe decision.

  • In any event, the Roe decision by itself is a strong qualification for the Worst Justice Ever award.

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Progressive Utopian Vision Versus The Constitution

  • It’s already been a bad week in the Supreme Court for progressive shibboleths. Just today, the key provision of New York’s gun restriction regime — under which the authorities had discretion to deny you a gun permit if they thought the reason you gave for wanting one was not good enough — got struck down under the Second Amendment.

  • For what it’s worth, I’ve long thought that that provision was obviously unconstitutional, and that the Second Circuit’s decision upholding it was not a good faith application of existing Supreme Court precedent. In practice, the authorities denied almost all requests for gun permits except from politicians, big political donors (to Democrats) and celebrities. The decision has caused a good deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth over in the precincts of the Left.

  • And there’s plenty more to come. Without doubt you are already familiar with the case involving Mississippi’s abortion law, likely to spell the end of the long reign of Roe v. Wade.

  • But today I’m going to focus on another high-impact case, West Virginia v. EPA. This one was argued back in February, but the decision still has not been issued. They tend to issue the decisions in the most important cases at the very end.

  • In the West Virginia case, there is significant potential that the Supreme Court could significantly rein in the regulatory assault that the Biden Administration is currently waging against the fossil fuel industries, and maybe some other regulatory assaults as well.

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Amazingly, Buzzfeed Readers Don’t Realize They Did This to Themselves

Amazingly, Buzzfeed Readers Don’t Realize They Did This to Themselves
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Some Thoughts on Netflix’s Support for Free Expression

  • A month or so ago, Netflix CEO Ted Serandos took a lot of criticism from the LGBTQIA+ community for saying Netflix was going to support its creators’ right to free speech.

  • Serandos’s response to employee complaints included sending an internal memo last month stating that if employees had a problem with Netflix’s “breadth of content,” then perhaps they should find a job elsewhere.

  • In an interview with Maureen Dowd for The New York Times, published May 28, Serandos stated that standing up for free expression “wasn’t hard” because a creator like Dave Chappelle is “by all measure, the comedian of our generation, the most popular comedian on Netflix for sure.”

  • Evidence suggests Serandos is receiving market signals that his audience is most interested in the content he’s being warned not to publish.

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