The Constitution, Citizens' Rights, and Elections
We haven’t delved directly into politics for a while. The happenings directly involving our industry’s beef production chain have overridden everything, even though the lockdown has involved politics to a ridiculous degree. And the next few months will be nearly as riveting and challenging as our industry adapts to new conditions. But a few things struck us this week that invites some reflection. After all, the political scene that affects us all as agricultural participants and as American citizens is currently as dramatic and consequential as any time short of war.
Joe Biden, (we heard the audio), said 120 million Americans have died from Covid-19. The real figure is 120,000 but you won’t hear the general mass media telling anyone that. The death rate both worldwide and in the U.S. is five percent. Not that anyone can’t mess up, but Biden’s list of goof-ups is legion. Trump has been known to exaggerate but Biden is often answering a different question than that asked, not as a typical politician’s deflection but his obvious confusion or a question only he “understands.”
Now the mass media is starting a campaign to get rid of presidential debates entirely as “boring,” etc. A debate between Biden and Trump might be horrifying for the Democrats to watch but most assuredly would not be boring. Remember the riveting drama from a simple airship docking in 1937? (Look up “Hindenburg” on your phone, young ’uns). We watched the denouement on a TV show last night between a knife-wielding man attacking a teenage girl wielding a backpack, her kicking feet, and a medium-sized dog. The girl won. Now that was drama. The Democrats and their media arm are suddenly fearful of a Biden-Trump tussle. Can’t imagine why.
Then there is this week’s Supreme Court decision the miss-media is not telling you about because Trump and the administration not only won it, got some concessionary agreement from two liberal justices but won it on bedrock, literal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. Countless times in recent years we have screamed at the television that noncitizens don’t have citizens’ rights under the Constitution. Finally, SCOTUS agrees.
The court ruled that the government has the right to “deport unauthorized immigrants seeking asylum, ruling that a noncitizen apprehended shortly after crossing the border has no Constitutional right to challenge immigration officials’ `expedited removal’ orders in federal court,” (High Court Eases Path to Deportation,” Wall Street Journal, 06/26/2020).
A 1996 immigration law “crafted a system for weeding out patently meritless claims and expeditiously removing the aliens making such claims, “Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. “It was Congress’ judgment that detaining all asylum seekers until the full-blown removal process is completed would place an unacceptable burden on our immigration system and that releasing them would present an undue risk that they would fail to appear for removal procedures.”
Alito could well have added that events have proven unequivocally that that is exactly what has been happening for years. Four other justices joined the opinion, Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg agreed on “narrower grounds,” and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissented.
Alito further clarified that aliens could be freed back into their own country but the law does not require that “aliens be permitted to remain in a country other than their own” to seek asylum.
Conservatives in the trenches have been complaining that Republican politicians have not been speaking out enough about the pure anarchy demonstrated by rioters across the country. They are afraid of political and media retribution. Worse, perhaps, has been big corporations rolling over in subservience and coughing up big sums of money to support groups bent on the destruction of governmental authority, private property rights, and replacement of a democratic republic with a Marxist state. The corporations are afraid of bad media, broken windows, stolen merchandise, and dissing in social media.
Constitutional principles and the long-term consequences of bowing and scraping to bullies aren’t in the calculation.
This reminds us on a national level all too much of the way the Casa Nostra used to rule neighborhoods -- we’re now in control, pay us protection money or we’ll destroy you and your business. It is funny how the far left uses violence that the near left claims to eschew to frighten both left and right to cede dominance.
But those who point out that this is a wave of violence pitting efforts to establish a Marxist society against Americanism as we have traditionally understood it are correct. The Marxists -- aided by a couple of generations of young people who are unaware of the death, destruction, and anti-human tradition of Marxism and Communism -- dominate the TV screens and social media.
We will find out how many Americans prefer their American society and governmental structure, even with its flaws, this November. We could be overly optimistic, but the Democrats could be gunning for the McGovern and Mondale records for states won in a presidential election. This election will be that fundamental, that crucial, that much of a referendum on America’s Constitutional form of government -- if the electorate recognizes that fact.
By the way, in case you’ve forgotten or weren’t around, that record is one (1).