Last Week Was a Keg of Lib Tears and It's Time to Party Down

Townhall 

I have never understood people who say that you shouldn’t celebrate utterly defeating your opponents; that sounds like loser talk to me. And defeating our opponents is what we’ve done in the last week.  We've used them, abused them, and generally treated them like a straight white cisgender Christian male from Dallas in the Harvard Womyn's Studies Department. This calls for a celebration. You should be partying. You should be clinking glasses. And you should be throwing their defeats back into their ugly, scrunched faces. Raise a toast of liberal tears and beer-bong it like an SEC linebacker at a kegger.

Last week was just beautiful. Remember, when we went into it, we were being told by all the smart people of smartness that the Democrats’ masterstroke in further gerrymandering the states was going to win them a bunch of new seats and consign us to House oblivion. They started it, initiating the g-wars by trying to erase Republicans in New York State, but they didn’t figure on us finishing it. And finishing it, we did by hammering a stake through the heart of their communist dreams. Now that the House is in play, with the new and fair districts, Republicans are going to make all the ridiculous Hakeem “Maximum Warfare” Jeffries curtain-measuring of the last few weeks a waste of time. We won in the Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act. We won on the Virginia gerrymander. We won with Southern red states from Florida to Tennessee, immediately redistricting to eliminate the race-based blue seats. We also saw the pothead author of the Virginia gerrymander get her house searched as a prelude to getting indicted, got great economic news, plus we bombed those seventh-century semihumans again. And, as a cherry on top, we watched a reality television star humiliate a couple of half-wit communists in the Los Angeles mayoral debate.

It's been a welcome change from the last few months, where we couldn't seem to catch a break. But now we've owned the libs across the board, and they’re really sad, which makes it so much better when you make fun of them. But some are angry, and they’re threatening to defy the courts, secede, or even launch a violent revolution. That last one is Hassan Piker’s idea. I don’t see that dog-tormenting rich kid suiting up and locking and loading – that's for the dummies, like the genius who rushed the White House Correspondents Dinner – but if he did, I know about 20 million right-wingers with gun safes full of 5.56mm freedom who would be totally down with that. Yeah, roll those dice, tough guys. You Democrats have a bad track record of starting a civil war when Virginia doesn’t get its way.

They will cry and whine and fulminate on Bluesky, but they will swallow their humiliating defeat because they can’t do anything about it. They’ve lost control. They don’t control the government. The regime media has been neutered; we can’t be browbeaten by the Washington Post anymore. And most of all, their social sanctions engine is firing on empty cylinders. Oh no, eliminating Voting Rights Act districts in the South makes us racist! Except they were calling us racist before, and even if we accepted the bizarre concept that the Constitution allows you to set aside congressional districts for Black Democrats, they would just call us racist for something else. Republicans have unlocked the power of not caring what they say, and it is glorious.

That glorious Justice Samuel Alito–written decision in Callais was both legally correct and based. Obviously, the Constitution does not allow you to set aside districts for Black Democrats. Note that the "Democrat" part is the important part—they’re having a collective wetting of their collective panties over Tennessee gerrymandering its one remaining Democrat district into oblivion because it’s the most racist thing in the racist history of racism ever, except the Democrat tool holding the seat is as white as any Romney, and the Republicans are likely to nominate a Black woman to replace his jive turkey booty. That particular battle also highlighted one of the most hilarious imagesin recent history, one that the libs think is some sort of iconic demonstration of oppression. There’s a white cop who’s just trying to do his job standing there, and in his face is this ridiculous radical with a stupid Afro, smart guy glasses, and his hand stroking his chin, trying to channel Malcolm X but looking like the version you get at a discount at the 99 Cent Store. There was a time when that kind of ham-handed propaganda worked, and people might fall for it. Now, the only people who don’t side with the exhausted cop who is dealing with the idiot getting in his face are the middle-aged, sexually-unsatisfied wine women who now set the agenda for the Democrat Party.

And then, of course, there was the Virginia Supreme Court making the legally correct ruling that the election was flawed because it didn’t abide by any of the rules that govern referendums that propose to change the Virginia Constitution. My favorite part is how the Democrats expressed their shock that the court ruled after the votes were counted, even though the Democrats begged the court not to rule before the election happened. All you have to do is read the actual decision instead of listening to one of the lefty nitwits on the Twitter machine, but apparently that’s too much to expect. If you’re as much of a fan of bad online lawyering as I am—it’s this lawyer’s version of going and watching a demolition derby — you are living your best life right now. Every take is awful, except mine and a few lawyers I personally approve of.

But what’s even better is that the Republicans are totally unrepentant. Gov. Ron DeSantis is down there further gerrymandering Florida, and he’s going to get away with it, too, even though there are potential constitutional arguments against it. Oh well. This is about power; Republicans have finally figured out how to use it. We’re not going to be constrained by alleged norms and alleged principles and alleged guardrails anymore. You can call us racist all you want, and we don’t care. You might as well call us hamsters. It doesn’t matter to us because it’s all baloney. It’s all a scam. This is a bare-knuckle political fight, and we’re finally throwing fists. It’s great to see us landing some blows, and we figured out that the Democrats have glass jaws.

See, they didn’t have to fight before. The regime media never challenged them. They never challenged each other. They just had to get out there and say things, trying to shame us into obedience. But now we’re not letting that work. Now, we’re using our power, and we are putting wins on the board. They’re not used to it. They can’t handle it. You saw that debate with Spencer Pratt, who’s running for mayor in Los Angeles against the fat black communist and the thin Indian communist. He destroyed them. He treated them like they treated the Pacific Palisades. Oh, they’re going to still win the election, because people in Los Angeles are either affluent Champagne socialists, o poverty-stricken welfare cases begging for government handouts, the normal people having left for redder pastures. But Pratt demonstrated conclusively, in memorable clips, that these people don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, that they’re totally incompetent, and that when they’re faced with actual pushback, they collapse like California’s population.

The last week has been great. We’re finally fighting back, without apology and without quarter. This is the way it has to be. We didn’t make the rules. We’re just applying the rules as a suppository to our Democrat enemies. They’re going to cry. They’re going to scream. They’re going to call us racist even harder. And we will probably see some violence, more threats, more assaults, more murders. There's likely to be a low-grade insurgency, as we saw in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when another set of pampered commie brats decided to try to kill their way to power.

Well, they'd better hope it remains low-grade. We’ve been down this road before, and we’re not doing it again. Remember, there are at least 20 million guys out there absolutely ready to get kinetic. Democrats better hope that these patriots just satisfy themselves by celebrating their enemies’ misfortune, and the left better think twice before they provoke them to put down their beers and pick up their AR-15s.

Podcast thread for May 11

 

Drama free. just drama free.

The Ties That Bond Marxists and Islamists

Townhall 

In 1782, John Fawcett wrote a Christian hymn titled "Blest be the tie that binds." I remember singing this as a little fella at Fort Street United Methodist Church in the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood in Atlanta. The first stanza is memorable: "Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love; the fellowship of kindred minds is like to that above." As this hymn came to my mind recently during a morning run, I thought about the tie that binds the Marxists to the Islamists, and is in full display here in America.

Just recently, we witnessed another round of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic protests outside a historic Jewish synagogue in Manhattan. There have also been sprayings of swastikas on Jewish structures. We remember the horrific protests on US colleges and universities in support of the Islamic terrorist organization, Hamas. Who can forget the recent vehicle-borne attack by an Islamist from the Dearborn, Michigan, area, whose relatives in Lebanon were Hezbollah associates?

And yet, little to no condemnation from the Marxist leftists in America. As a matter of fact, they elected a Marxist/Islamist Hamas supporter as the Mayor of America's largest city. Even the NY Times hosts someone who is a supporter of political violence, Hasan Piker, and dares not challenge his assertions. And this is the same person who campaigns with a virulent anti-Jewish candidate for US Senate from Michigan, running on the Democratic party ticket.

We do hear Marxists trying to use their sly whispers and deflective language to make us believe that being anti-Israel is not anti-Semitic. Right! When you read the Hamas Charter, as I have, it calls for the destruction of the modern-day State of Israel, and Jews worldwide, meaning Jews in Australia at Bondi Beach. It was quite telling how the leftist PM of Australia responded to that Islamic jihadist attack...we need more and better gun control. He said little to nothing about needing less infiltration and the metastasizing of the Islamist cancer in Western civilization.

It would be easy, and quite imbecilic, to just contend that the tie that binds Marxists and Islamists is just a virulent hatred of Israel, but it is something greater. This thing we call the Red-Green alliance is rooted in a vitriolic angst against Western civilization, and that means the Judeo-Christian faith heritage. The essence of our independence is individual rights, freedom, and liberty. Neither Marxists nor Islamists embrace that fundamental ideal. It was Barack Obama, the OG of the Marxist/Islamist unholy alliance, who quipped in 2008, "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America." It was the same Barry Soetoro who, when he spoke at the University of Cairo, invited members of the Muslim Brotherhood front and center... and supported their candidate for Egyptian President, Mohammed Morsi.

If anyone dares not recognize the tie that binds Marxists and Islamists, it was found in the inaugural address of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani when he stated, "We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism." As they say in tennis, game, set, match.

Marxism is rooted in a desire to subjugate the individual to a collective, similar to the Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame. Remember the line of the Borg, "Resistance is futile, you will assimilate." As well, the very word "Islam" means submission. Dating all the way back to Muhammad's letter to Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, there are only three options: convert, submit, or be killed.

How did we come to the point that we have allowed two actual extremist ideologies to take hold in our America? One could also ask the same question of Western Europe, especially the United Kingdom, where a missive such as this would land me in jail. While Islamic rape gangs roam freely. What happened in our society, our culture, that we would find ourselves engaged in a Second Civil War of an ideological sort that has every potential in becoming a direct conflict?

Marxism and Islamism are delusional and deranged systems of totalitarianism and tyranny that seek to mask themselves as legitimate governing systems and religion. Truth be told, the pursuit of the LGBTQIA+, gender dysphoria, dismembering of our unborn, DEI, and other leftist agendas has become a religion of the left. And similar to Islamists, rejection of such is met with threats, coercion, intimidation, fear mongering, and ultimately, violence.

Once again, we make the mistake of relegating this to a simpleton belief that it is about one person, and what we refer to as Trump Derangement Syndrome. This tie that binds the Marxists and Islamists exists not because of one person, but because of what this Republic exemplifies, the ideal of the indomitable, entrepreneurial, freedom-loving human spirit. Marxism and Islamism cannot stomach such, and here, in America, is where they are allied in a quest to defeat it. As Barack Obama said, in trying to denigrate liberty-loving Americans," They cling to their guns and religion."

Yep, we certainly do, as enshrined in our First and Second Amendments. Marxists and Islamists must break our Judeo-Christian foundation. They do not care for faith-based schools or parental freedom in educational choice because those minds are not exposed to their dangerous ideological poison.

In the end, we must recommit to the tie that binds us, which John Fawcett composed. The future of our America lies in the balance, and it is a Republic, not a democracy. And it damn well ain't ever gonna be a Marxist/Islamist tyrannical totalitarian regime. Not on my watch!

Paying Avaricious Uncle Sam: The Significance of the Tax of Taxes

 Paying Avaricious Uncle Sam: The Significance of the Tax of Taxes

Gregory Bresiger for Mises.org

The federal income tax, which we recently paid, is the crown jewel of a massive welfare-warfare state. Without it, it would be well-nigh impossible for the government to run up some 37 trillion dollars of debt. (It’s actually much more but the government does the counting).

That’s why the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 dramatically extended the power of the federal government. The government’s taxing power under the income tax, which initially affected only a small percentage of the wealthiest Americans, was established. Libertarians then and now warned its effect would hurt capital formation and lead to big government.

Along with the Federal Reserve—a central bank that can fix vital money prices—these taxing institutions have been opposed by libertarians through the centuries as ways to destroy property and promote backdoor socialism. Marx favored central banks and a deeply progressive income tax.

The income tax was later extended during wars to affect almost everyone and contributed to a little known 18-month depression just after World War I. The income tax was so oppressive that President Harding’s Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon complained—in a little masterpiece of a book called Taxation—that many rich people wouldn’t invest in stocks because tax rates were oppressive so they put their money into municipal bonds and other tax shelters. When Harding cut taxes, money came out of tax shelters, and went into stocks. The economy boomed until President Hoover—the true father of the New Deal according to economist Murray Rothbard—and his destructive policies ruined the booming economy of the 1920s. FDR continued the damage and the Great Depression continued.

President Trump is no libertarian. He is an economic populist who recently said it would be good to end the income tax and replace it with tariffs.

“As time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern income tax taking a great financial burden off the people that I love,” the president said.

Nevertheless, with the passage of this gruesome, anti-capitalist, income tax amendment, the financial basis of the leviathan was in place. By the 1950s, the income tax rate in some cases was at 91 percent. Why would anyone work only to collect nine cents on the dollar?

The tax rate was not only destructive but counterproductive. High earners sought shelter. Comedian Jack Benny won his case claiming that his income was corporate, not individual. That saved him a bundle once he won in tax court.

Libertarians—from Victorian Era British Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone to 1940s American libertarian Frank Chodorov—believed the income tax hurt economic liberty. Gladstone—who consistently cut taxes—believed it was a moral issue that the government should not overspend. He went around 10 Downing State extinguishing unneeded fireplaces. Gladstone thought the government should return surpluses to taxpayers. Sir Robert Peel—who gave him his first cabinet appointment—abolished taxes on bread, ending the Corn Laws. That helped people of modest incomes. It also helped end a depression because Peel believed keeping costs as low as possible would promote recovery.

Gladstone—who in last ministry resigned in part because he thought military spending was excessive—earlier wanted to abolish the income tax. He opposed the income tax for many reasons. He believed the income tax would destroy the taxpayer’s privacy. “The Inquisition it entails,” Gladstone said, “is a most serious disadvantage and the frauds to which it leads are an evil such as it is not possible to characterize in terms too strong.”

Unfortunately, his efforts to end Britain’s income tax were ruined by the unexpected entry of Britain into the Crimean War on the side of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. The war was not only a budget buster; it was idiotic. It had insane cavalry charges and bad poetry. It began in part over a stupid debate over which set of monks would administer the Holy Lands.

For Chodorov—an opponent of both the expansion of government through the New Deal and American military alliances in the 1940s—the income tax not only hurt the economy, it represented an upending of the limited government traditions of the republic. Indeed, an income tax was unthinkable in the first years of the American republic, he noted.

“Certainly, no tax on incomes got into the constitution. That was unthinkable,” Chodorov wrote in The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil.

Chodorov called for a liberty amendment to revoke the Sixteenth Amendment. He said the income tax was once unthinkable among Americans because “they knew their freedom.”

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Antifa Radicals Issue Threats and Commit Assault During Demonstration Against Kash Patel

Townhall 

Antifa once again mobilized in Portland, Oregon to launch demonstrations outside of a hotel building hosting a key Trump official on Saturday night. Footage captured of the ordeal showed threats and violence issued against supporters of President Donald Trump.

The black-clad mob used megaphones and chants targeting FBI Director Kash Patel, who the Antifa members believed to be staying at the hotel at the time, in a move similar to what was seen across Portland and Minneapolis during the ICE surge earlier this year.

Investigative journalists and pro-Trump counter-protestors were present and provided footage of the incident on social media. One individual was captured bragging about how he would be the one “to f******g kill you” should you not support the Antifa agenda. “If you need to worry about any radical Antifa killing you…it’ll be me,” the Antifa member warned the individual filming.

Another Trump supporter who was livestreaming in the area was assaulted by an individual who quickly darted away into the cheering crowd.

It is unclear if Patel was present at the hotel during the demonstrations.

The Cuban Regime’s Fear of Its Youth

 The criminalization of young dissent in Cuba is not an aberration of authoritarian rule. It is the regime’s repressive logic.

Jonathan David Muir Burgos was arrested by the Cuban regime for attending a protest in March.

By Michael Lima

“Mom, how long am I going to be here?” asks Jonathan Muir Burgos, a 16-year-old Cuban Christian and one of the regime’s youngest political prisoners, during early-morning phone calls from Canaleta prison in Ciego de Ávila.

In that question lies the anguish of a generation protesting blackouts, shortages, and the absence of freedom in Cuba. Jonathan’s imprisonment starkly contradicts the repeated claims by Cuba’s unelected president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, that political prisoners do not exist on the island.

Jonathan was arrested for participating in the March 13, 2026, protests in Morón, Ciego de Ávila. He now faces charges of “sabotage,” a vague and politicized offense frequently used to criminalize dissent. He is being held in Canaleta, one of Cuba’s harshest prisons.

Jonathan’s case reflects a broader reality in Cuba today: young people are no longer a pillar of the political system, but increasingly one of the driving forces of opposition to it.

We still have not heard Jonathan explain in his own words why he joined the protests. Under the conditions of a maximum-security prison, he has little room to speak freely. Yet the injustices he experienced throughout his short life help explain why he ultimately took to the streets.

From childhood, Jonathan faced stigmatization because of his Christian faith and his family’s religious background. According to his father, Pastor Elier Muir, teachers mocked and isolated him, and at age 11 school authorities blamed him for classroom misconduct by other students, treating the incident as a “political case.” His story illustrates how education in Cuba can function less as a social right than as a tool of ideological indoctrination.

Jonathan’s father later lost his job after refusing to collaborate with state security, while the family became the target of acts of repudiation after founding the church Tiempo de Cosecha. According to Elier Muir, groups acting under state security instructions stoned the family after church services.

Seen in this light, Jonathan’s participation in the Morón protests was the culmination of years of exclusion and quiet resistance. His story unfolds within the emergence of a broader culture of protest in Cuba, where artists, students, and ordinary citizens have spent years demanding better living conditions, greater freedoms, democratic change, and the release of political prisoners.

As scholars such as Sidney Tarrow have argued, protest movements develop through shared symbols, collective identities, and recurring repertoires of resistance. In Cuba, this culture of protest has taken shape through the unifying power of the song Patria y Vida, the rise of social media activism following the expansion of internet access, and tactics such as livestreams, cacerolazos — pot-banging protests — graffiti, sit-ins, and public denunciations. Together, these methods helped sustain civic mobilization after the July 11, 2021, protests despite severe repression.

The Observatorio Cubano de Conflictos has documented tens of thousands of acts of protest and nonviolent resistance over the past six years, further illustrating the emergence of this culture of protest.

One of the defining features of Cuba’s recent protest movement has been the prominent participation of young people and minors, who have also become primary targets of the government’s crackdown. In July 2022, Justicia 11J and Cubalex reported that of roughly 1,484 detainees linked to the July 11 protests, 166 were between 12 and 20 years old and 566 between 21 and 35. By April 2026, at least 33 minors were believed to be imprisoned or facing politically motivated prosecution, according to Prisoners Defenders.

The Morón demonstrations deeply unsettled Cuba’s ruling elite. Led largely by adolescents and, according to recent reports, possibly the largest anti-government protests since July 11, 2021, they drew between 1,000 and 2,000 people, according to eyewitness accounts. What began as a protest over deteriorating living conditions quickly escalated into a direct challenge to the country’s one-party system and ruling ideology.

Demonstrators marched on the offices of the municipal Communist Party, occupied the building, threw documents and furniture into the streets, and lit bonfires outside. The state responded with beatings, tear gas, police dogs, and gunfire. Four adolescents were arrested, along with a total of 16 protesters.

More than a spontaneous outburst of anger, the demonstrations represented a symbolic rejection of the political order itself, reminiscent of the toppling of authoritarian symbols in other repressive contexts.

Authoritarian systems often target youth because they represent future leaders, organizers, and symbols of change. Jonathan’s ordeal illustrates this dynamic clearly. Authorities reportedly denied treatment for his chronic skin disease while forcing him to sleep on bug-infested mattresses. Official government accounts on social media also circulated staged and AI-manipulated images intended to humiliate him and undermine his credibility.

Yet research on character assassination suggests such campaigns depend heavily on the credibility of those carrying them out, something Cuba’s increasingly unpopular government appears to lack. Instead of discrediting Jonathan, the campaign against him has triggered precautionary measures from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, international denunciations by lawmakers, faith groups, and activists, as well as solidarity campaigns inside and outside Cuba. In Morón, residents have even signed a public document defending Jonathan’s character and values.

But the criminalization of young dissent in Cuba is not merely an excess of an abusive authoritarian system. It also reflects a deeper political logic. Since its early years, the Cuban regime grounded much of its legitimacy in the support of young people, portraying youth as the moral engine of the revolution. In a 1962 speech closing the First National Congress of the Union of Secondary Students, Fidel Castro declared that “youth is like the thermometer that points toward justice, like the compass that tells us where justice lies,” arguing that the “purity” and “brilliance” of a revolution could be measured by the attitude of young people toward it.

Today, however, growing rejection of the system among younger generations points to a profound crisis of legitimacy. The very generation once invoked as proof of revolutionary vitality has become evidence of its erosion.

The targeting of younger generations serves a dual purpose: punishing dissent in the present while discouraging future civic action by silencing potential leaders and organizers.

Jonathan’s case reflects a broader pattern of mistreatment against minors arrested in Cuba for political reasons. His detention and prosecution on “sabotage” charges carrying penalties of up to 15 years appear to contradict the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that detention of minors should be used only as a last resort and for the shortest possible time. Subjecting a 16-year-old to harsh prison conditions for peacefully protesting raises serious concerns under international human rights law.

As Michel Foucault argued, modern power does not merely punish; it disciplines and seeks to produce compliance through exemplary repression. In Cuba today, generational repression is not only about controlling the present, but also about limiting what future generations believe is possible.

Perhaps that is the regime’s deepest fear: not a single dissident or movement, but an entire generation beginning to lose its fear.

Michael Lima is a researcher and the director of Democratic Spaces, an NGO dedicated to fostering solidarity in Canada with human rights defenders and civil society in Cuba. He holds a Master’s degree in Latin American History from the University of Toronto.

https://www.thebureau.news/p/the-cuban-regimes-fear-of-its-youth?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1444443&post_id=197205555&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=rd3ao&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The Spine of Justice Roberts

The Spine of Justice Roberts

The Supreme Court’s chief justice seems to have something other than the Constitution as his top priority.

J. B. Shurk for American Thinker

I do not like Chief Justice John Roberts.  I think his loyalties lie more with defending the entrenched powers of the political Establishment than with defending the Constitution of the United States.  I find his jurisprudence squishy.  Although his decisions could be described as advancing, more often than not, conservative viewpoints, Roberts does not seem to have a consistent philosophy guiding his opinions.  

Roberts is a pragmatist.  He surveys the mood of the country and considers how the rest of the members of the Court will vote on any case, and he chooses a position that he feels will best preserve the institutional longevity of the Judicial Branch.  Roberts is, in other words, more interested in maintaining the power of the branch that he embodies than in making tough, but correct, decisions.  

None of Roberts’ rulings better exemplifies this pragmatic, amoral approach to jurisprudence than his 2012 decision to save Obamacare by redefining the individual insurance mandate as a tax, rather than as a penalty.  During oral arguments, the Obama administration barely addressed the possibility that the mandate could be seen as a tax.  Democrats did not want to admit that nationalizing health insurance would increase costs for Americans, and the word “tax” certainly implies that prices will rise (which they did).  

President Obama had been haranguing the Court for over a year that should it strike down his signature welfare legislation putting the federal government in control of American medicine, the decision would be disastrous for the American people and render the Court illegitimate.  Roberts lives in the D.C. bubble.  All his friends live in the D.C. bubble.  The Democrat-controlled corporate news media reflect the prevailing opinions of those who live within the D.C. bubble.  So Chief Justice Roberts chose to avoid leftist backlash (and to protect the Establishment’s sizable financial investments in government-controlled, socialized medicine) by aligning himself with Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.  

Obama celebrated Roberts’ valuable assist: “The highest court in the land has now spoken,” the president gloated.  It is worth noting that similarly squishy jurist Justice Anthony Kennedy (a man whom Democrats succeeded in elevating to the Court after scuttling President Reagan’s original nomination of Robert Bork and then his replacement nomination of Douglas Ginsburg) actually joined the conservative members of the Court in a dissent that would have invalidated Obamacare in its entirety.  Because Roberts joined the four leftist members of the Court in protecting Obama’s government takeover of the medical profession, healthcare is substantially more expensive and provides substantially worse treatment today.  

Roberts’ constitutionally illiterate and philosophically unsound Obamacare opinion permitted a nefarious government-corporate power axis to take hold that has killed private practices across the country, made every medical doctor a de facto government employee, replaced medical science with government-regulated treatments, and inserted a government bureaucrat inside every examination room.  But Roberts did preserve his standing in the D.C. bubble, maximize the profits of large insurance companies, bankrupt rural hospitals, increase the investment portfolio-generated wealth of insider-trading members of Congress, eliminate small practices that prioritized patient care, and let labor unions off the hook for healthcare obligations that they owed to their members.  Furthermore, an entire generation of young leftists — too ignorant to know that President Obama and his fellow Democrats are responsible for the horrible state of healthcare in the United States today — openly celebrate the assassination of health insurance company executives walking down the street. 

When the issue of Obamacare’s unconstitutionality came before the Roberts Court, the chief justice could have saved the country from all the harm that has come from forcing another illegitimate government power grab upon the American people.  But that would have taken guts, wisdom, and principle.  Roberts has none of those virtues.  He’s a judicial pimp who pragmatically defends the Establishment’s bottom line.  The medical profession in America is worse off and American patients are poorer and less healthy because of Roberts’ cowardice.

What I find particularly galling about the chief justice, however, is that he demands to be respected as some kind of impartial and inherently righteous judicial priest.  If he could admit that he lacks a jurisprudential backbone and primarily represents the interests of the Establishment Blob in D.C., I would grant him some small measure of respect for being self-aware enough to understand that he is little more than a swampy, Leviathan-controlled, gelatinous judge whose opinions can be molded into whatever D.C.’s “elites” need.  But Roberts is not honest enough to do that.  Instead, he pretends to be above venal politics and struts around in his priestly robes as if he represents a branch of government too holy to be tainted by the inherently corrupting influence of power.

Although Roberts never said anything when Obama and his Democrat goons were threatening the Court before its damaging Obamacare decision, the chief justice jumped into action in 2018 to reprimand President Trump during his first term.  Trump had publicly excoriated a 9th Circuit judge for usurping constitutional powers vested to the president of the United States.  In doing so, Trump called the judicial tyrant “an Obama judge.”  Well, that rather anodyne remark threw Chief Justice Roberts into a “Why, I never” tizzy, and the Judicial Branch’s limp caretaker found his way to a member of the Democrat-controlled press in order to correct the president’s errant thinking: “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.  What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

Uhhh…sure, Chief Justice Gumby.  Why would a grown man feel compelled to tell such a blatant lie?  The whole country knows that judges come with certain ideological proclivities that influence their decisions on the bench.  While Republican presidents have repeatedly stumbled into nominating raging leftists (among them, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice David Souter) to the Supreme Court, nobody has any doubt that federal judges are chosen for their perceived philosophical bent.  

This problem exists only because federal judges have proved incapable of performing their jobs with self-restraint.  In the past, Roberts has correctly defined the Judiciary’s obligations: “Our role is very clear.  We are to interpret the Constitution and laws of the United States and ensure that the political branches act within them.”  But that’s not how most judges act!  Instead of interpreting the Constitution, federal judges rewrite the Constitution.  Instead of interpreting laws written by Congress, federal judges rewrite those laws into laws of their own.  For Roberts to pretend that federal judges have not spent the last century imposing their will upon the American people makes him richly deserving of Queen Gertrude’s quip: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Eight years later, Lady Roberts is still protesting!  In a speech last week in Hershey, Pennsylvania, the chief justice claimed that judges are not “political actors.”  (Tell that to Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose opinions sound as if they were written by teenaged Marxists with dog-eared copies of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals!)  Roberts lamented how too many Americans “think we’re making policy decisions.”  (Perhaps that’s because too many judges are, in fact, making policy decisions!)  The chief justice also insisted that it is “not appropriate” for Americans to criticize individual judges.  

Well, perhaps Chief Justice Roberts should convince his federal judges to stop behaving as partisan hacks!  Rather than permitting, through his silence, individual judges to usurp the powers of the president of the United States, perhaps Roberts should call those tyrannical judges out by name.  If he wants the Judicial Branch to be perceived as “independent” and “nonpartisan,” then he should insist that judges exercise constitutional self-restraint!  

But he won’t do that.  Because Roberts has opinions but no spine.

Image: Chief Justice John Roberts.  Credit: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.