Why Did The Climate Change Denier Cross The Road?

Mark Steyn has them rolling in the aisles at the 10th International Conference of Climate Change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEBeF_Rz1MU

And for a more sober look at how the climate change industry exploits the scientific illiteracy of the general public, watch Dr. Tim Ball's talk immediately following Steyn's.

The Politicians At SCOTUS

A brilliant piece by Andrew McCarthy on the overt politicization of the U.S. Supreme Court. Excerpted at length below.

“But this Court is not a legislature.” Chief Justice John Roberts actually published that sentence in his same-sex marriage dissent on Friday . . . a mere 24 hours after his maestro’s performance in the Supreme Court’s legislative rewrite of the Affordable Care Act — formerly known as “Obamacare,” but now etched in memory as “SCOTUScare,” thanks to Justice Antonin Scalia’s withering dissent. Roberts’s denial that the Court legislates is astonishing in its cynicism: In saving SCOTUScare, the chief justice not only usurped Congress’s law-writing role with gusto; he claimed the powers, first, to divine legislative purpose from its contradictory expression in legislative language, and, then, to manufacture legislative ambiguity as the pretext for twisting the language to serve the contrived purpose.

...Already, an ocean of ink has been spilled analyzing, lauding, and bemoaning the Supreme Court’s work this week: a second life line tossed to SCOTUScare in just three years; the location of a heretofore unknown constitutional right to same-sex marriage almost a century-and-a-half after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment; and the refashioning of Congress’s Fair Housing Act to embrace legal academe’s loopy “disparate impact” theory of inducing discrimination. Yet, for all the non-stop commentary, one detail goes nearly unmentioned — the omission that best explains this week’s Fundamental Transformation trifecta. Did you notice that there was not an iota of speculation about how the four Progressive justices would vote?

There was never a shadow of a doubt. In the plethora of opinions generated by these three cases, there is not a single one authored by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, or Sonia Sotomayor. There was no need. They are the Left’s voting bloc. There was a better chance that the sun would not rise this morning than that any of them would wander off the reservation.

 

How can that be? Jurisprudence is complex. Supple minds, however likeminded, will often diverge, sometimes dramatically, on principles of constitutional adjudication, canons of statutory construction, murky separation-of-powers boundaries, the etymology of language, and much else. Witness, for example, the spirited debate between the Court’s two originalists, Scalia and Clarence Thomas, over a statute that, in defiance of Obama policy, treats Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory.

...If the justices are going to do politics, they should be in electoral politics. If John Roberts is going to write laws on the days when he isn’t posing as powerless to write laws, if Anthony Kennedy truly believes the country craves his eccentric notion of liberty (one that condemns government restraints on marriage 24 hours after it tightens government’s noose around one-sixth of the U.S. economy), then their seats should not be in an insulated third branch of government. They should be in an accountable third chamber of Congress.
 

...Today’s Court has been called “post-constitutional.” That’s accurate, but it’s not complete. Its latest rulings are post-law. The SCOTUScare case, King v. Burwell, was not a constitutional case at all; it was a straightforward matter of statutory interpretation. What made it ostensibly straightforward was the law: a statute that says, “an Exchange established by the State,” cannot possibly mean “an Exchange not established by the State.” If we were a nation of laws, such a case would never make it to the highest court in the land. But we are a nation of will, the will of a determined political movement, so the law never had a chance.

Another perceptive article written by David French, (a lawyer, as is McCarthy), also highlights John Roberts' extrajudicial arrogance.

This result (ruling the other way) would have been catastrophic for Obamacare — gutting a key provision — but whether it would have been catastrophic, meaningless, or even potentially beneficial for individual Americans would have been entirely up to the elected branches of government. After all, a Supreme Court decision applying the clear language of the statute wouldn’t have mandated any particular congressional or presidential reaction. Congress would have been free to reform Obamacare, rewrite it to include federal exchanges in the subsidy scheme, or enact entirely new policies.

The Supreme Court, however, decided not to take any chances on democracy, so — in an opinion long on insurance-economics analysis and short on statutory or constitutional reasoning — it effectively changed the statute. Why? Because of the entirely speculative real-world effects. Here’s Justice Roberts:

"Here, the statutory scheme compels us to reject petitioners’ interpretation because it would destabilize the individual insurance market in any State with a Federal Exchange, and likely create the very “death spirals” that Congress designed the Act to avoid."

Yet this is pure conjecture on Justice Roberts’s part. He does not, in fact, know whether insurance markets would be destabilized because he does not know the congressional response to a contrary ruling. He distrusts Congress, so he’s going to “fix” their mess.
 

He made this distrust manifest earlier in the opinion when he took a swipe at the drafters, noting that Obamacare “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting” and that “Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors, rather than through ‘the traditional legislative process.’” But despite (or because of?) this mess, the Court felt the need to preserve the Obamacare they wanted to see, not the Obamacare Congress drafted and the president signed.

Contrary to the fantasy promoted by Obamacare supporters, the restriction of subsidies to exchanges established by the state and only by the state was not an oversight or a clerical error or some intern playing a joke. It was a deliberate attempt to incentivize states to set up their own exchanges, getting the federal government off the hook. Congressional Democrats were betting that the states would jump at the prospect of getting federal taxpayer money for its constituents as well as having some influence on setting health exchange rules. Well they lost that bet. Thirty-six states decided not to set up their own exchanges. That such a large majority of states would reject federal assistance might have been a surprise but it was certainly not out of the realm of possibility. The democratic process dictates...demands that Congress' shortsightedness and lack of imagination is for Congress to fix (or not to fix), not the courts.

Leave it to John Roberts explain the pernicious effect of SCOTUS intervening where it doesn't belong.

"Supporters of same-sex marriage have achieved considerable success persuading their fellow citizens—through the democratic process—to adopt their view. That ends today."

This from a guy who seeks to end the ongoing democratic process to reform health care.
 

Questions For Democrats

George Will posts a series of questions for Hillary Clinton, questions which all Democrats should be obligated to answer.

In March 2003, Bush launched a war of choice to accomplish regime change in Iraq, mistakenly believing it was developing weapons of mass destruction. In March 2011, Barack Obama and you launched a war of choice against Libya for the humanitarian purposes of preventing, it was said, as many as 10,000 deaths at the hands of Moammar Gaddafi. Since March 2011, in Syria, where the regime continues to use chemical weapons that it supposedly agreed to surrender, the civil war has killed more than 320,000. Why humanitarian intervention in Libya instead of Syria? Bush sought, and you as a senator gave, approval for his war of choice. Obama and you, arguing that the thousands of airstrikes that killed thousands of Libyans did not constitute “hostilities,” never sought approval for the Libyan war. Who was more lawful, Bush or Obama and you? What criteria suggest that the world is safer than before you became secretary?
 

In this month’s Wisconsin Democratic convention straw poll, you defeated Bernie Sanders 49 percent to 41 percent. Sanders says he is a “socialist.” Do you have fundamental differences with him? If not, are you a socialist? He does not think a 90 percent top income-tax rate is too high. Do you? He says “almost all of” America’s wealth “rests in the hands of a handful of billionaires.” Forbes magazine says the combined net worth of America’s 536 billionaires is $2.566 trillion. Is it a grave problem that the 536 have 3 percent of America’s $84.9 trillion wealth? Is it deplorable that the Waltons became a family of billionaires by creating Wal-Mart, America’s largest private-sector employer? Do you regret that Apple products made Steve Jobs a billionaire? Are any of your however many phones iPhones?
 

Sanders vows “to make tuition in public colleges and universities free.” Do you agree that the 68 percent of Americans without college degrees should pay the tuition for those whose degrees will bring them lifetime earnings significantly higher than the earnings of the non–college graduates who will have paid much of the cost of the “free” tuition?

 

...And so on.

In a better world James Lilecks would have a show on Comedy Central. Here's his take on the Confederate flag kerfluffle.

 

And Kevin Williamson examines the insane left.

 

For the Left, it feels like time is running out. So it isn’t sufficient that same-sex marriages be legalized; bakers and florists must be locked in prison if they decline to participate in a gay couple’s ceremony. It isn’t sufficient that those wishing to undergo sex-change surgery be permitted to go their own way; the public must pay for it, and if Bruce Jenner is still “Bruce” to you, you must be driven from polite society.

 

...You have to credit the Left: Its strategy is deft. If you can make enough noise that sounds approximately like a moral crisis, then you can in effect create a moral crisis. Never mind that the underlying argument — “Something bad has happened to somebody else, and so you must give us something we want!” — is entirely specious; it is effective. In the wake of the financial crisis, we got all manner of “reform,” from student-lending practices to the mandates of Elizabeth Warren’s new pet bureaucracy, involving things that had nothing at all to do with the financial crisis. Democrats argued that decency compelled us to pass a tax increase in the wake of the crisis, though tax rates had nothing to do with it. A crisis is a crisis is a crisis, and if a meteor hits Ypsilanti tomorrow you can be sure that Debbie Stabenow will be calling for a $15 national minimum wage because of the plight of meteor victims.

...When the South actually was a segregationist backwater that African-Americans were fleeing by the million — when Democrats were running the show — they were ho-hum. Today the South is an economic powerhouse, dominated by Republicans, and attracting new African-American residents by the thousands. And so the Left and its creature, the Democratic party, insist that Southern identity as such must be anathematized. The horrific crime that shocked the nation notwithstanding, black life in Charleston remains very different, in attractive ways, from black life in such Left-dominated horror shows as Cleveland and Detroit, and the state’s governor is, in the parlance of identity politics, a woman of color — but she is a Republican, too, and therefore there must be shrieking, rending of garments, and gnashing of teeth.