Pat Buchanan Wants Trump and the GOP to Silence the Courts
Recently Patrick J. Buchanan, who has said a ton of other “smart things” in the past, wrote a commentary for the far right propaganda rag, World Net Daily. He basically showed us just how little respect he has for our Constitution, and our checks and balances, and just how much he wants Trump to become all powerful. He says that “Trump must break Judicial Power”
“Disheartening and demoralizing,” wailed Judge Neil Gorsuch of President Trump’s comments about the judges seeking to overturn his 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from the Greater Middle East war zones.
What a wimp. Did our future justice break down crying like Sen. Chuck Schumer? Sorry, this is not Antonin Scalia. And just what horrible thing had our president said?
A “so-called judge” blocked the travel ban, said Trump. And the arguments in court, where 9th Circuit appellate judges were hearing the government’s appeal, were “disgraceful.” “A bad student in high school would have understood the arguments better.”
Yes, because its its obviously “not” a bad thing when the president oversteps his bounds and has no respect for the court’s authority.
Did the president disparage a couple of judges? Yep.
Yes and he insulted them for doing their job, the fact that he didn’t like their decision, shouldn’t matter. Even if banning everyone including refugees, from entering the United States from seven countries that don’t even include the biggest exporters of terrorism, was justified, and wasn’t unconstitutional, and even ignoring that it was motivated by anti Muslim bigotry, Trump’s reaction to the court’s decision would still be inappropriate at best.
Also Mr. Buchanan, how do you know how Scalia would feel about Trump’s response to the 9th Circuit’s ruling? I certainly don’t agree with the late Supreme Court justice on a lot of things, but most likely I imagine that he would understand why it would be a bad thing for a president to disrespect the courts. How do you know that he wouldn’t have felt the same way as Gorsuch? Also what Gorsuch did wasn’t “wimpy.” What would have been “wimpy” would have been for him to refrain from criticizing the person who nominated him for fear that he would try to sabotage his nomination.
Yet compare his remarks to the tweeted screeds of Elizabeth Warren after her Senate colleague, Jeff Sessions, was confirmed as attorney general.
Sessions, said Warren, represents “radical hatred.” And if he makes “the tiniest attempt to bring his racism, sexism & bigotry” into the Department of Justice, “all of us” will pile on.
Now this is hate speech. And it validates Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s decision to use Senate rules to shut her down.
Yeah, obviously in spite of the fact that Jeff Sessions has behaved like a racist, he is “not” a racist. Never mind that he tried to keep black people from voting. Never mind Sessions’ support for a racist law. Never mind what Coretta Scott King ( The wife of the late civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King ) wrote about Sessions when Reagan tried to get him appointed to a federal judgeship in 1986.
These episodes reveal much about America 2017
Okay, that’s actually something I agree with you on, except I don’t think we’re going to agree on the specifics.
They reflect, first, the poisoned character of our politics. The language of Warren – that Sessions is steeped in “racism, sexism & bigotry” – echoes the ugliest slander of the Hillary Clinton campaign, where she used similar words to describe Trump’s “deplorables.”
Sorry, given the fact that Sessions is racist, as well as a sexist, has done and said racist and sexist things, that is not slander. It is also not slander to call people who are literally Nazis, and want to make America “great again,” by making it “white again,” “deplorable!”
Such language, reflecting as it does the beliefs of one-half of America about the other, rules out any rapprochement in America’s social or political life. This is pre-civil war language.
No they are accurate descriptions, and thankfully I doubt there will be another civil war anytime soon.
For how do you sit down and work alongside people you believe to be crypto-Nazis, Klansmen and fascists? Apparently, you don’t. Rather, you vilify them, riot against them, deny them the right to speak or to be heard.
Wait, didn’t you just defend Mitch McConnell silencing Elizabeth Warren? What about her right to speak and be heard?
And such conduct is becoming common on campuses today.
And do you intend on backing up that claim, Buchanan? You intend to show us how people with differing viewpoints are being silenced on our campuses?
As for Trump’s disparagement of the judges, only someone ignorant of history can view that as frightening.
Um no, quite the opposite. Only someone who is ignorant of history can view that as not frightening.
Thomas Jefferson not only refused to enforce the Alien & Sedition Acts of President John Adams, his party impeached Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, who had presided over one of the trials.
Apparently you are unaware of the fact that they failed to impeach him or why it would be a bad thing to be able to impeach judges simply because you disagree with their rulings.
Jackson defied Chief Justice John Marshall’s prohibition against moving the Cherokees out of Georgia to west of the Mississippi, where, according to the Harvard resume of Sen. Warren, one of them bundled fruitfully with one of her ancestors, making her part Cherokee.
Yes Jackson did defy the Supreme Court, even through he clearly had no right to do so. His “John Marshal has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” was a sign that he lacked respect for checks and balances. Are you telling us that the trail of tears was not a tragedy? To me, as well as most present day Americans, it sounds like a really good reason as to why presidents shouldn’t be able to disobey the high court’s rulings. Beyond the fact that the Indian Removal act was clearly unjust and racist, innocent people had their lives ruined and even died because of what Jackson had done. Even if Warren had an ancestor who was Cherokee, how does that change that reality?
When Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that President Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus violated the Constitution, Lincoln considered sending U.S. troops to arrest the chief justice.
You do realize that the nation was in the middle of an extremely bloody civil war at the time? The nation was in serious danger of being violently split in two. Did you somehow forget that? Those hardly count as “normal” circumstances.
FDR proposed adding six justices to emasculate a Supreme Court of the “nine old men” he reviled for having declared some New Deal schemes unconstitutional.
I find it strange that Buchanan is suddenly praising FDR, of all people. Even so, FDR’s behavior was a bit immature in that case. As far as I know, No other president has suggested packing the court, when they didn’t get their way.
President Eisenhower called his Supreme Court choices Earl Warren and William Brennan two of the “worst mistakes” he made as president. History bears Ike out. And here we come to the heart of the matter.
He never said that, and if he had, history wouldn’t bear him out.
Whether the roll-out of the president’s temporary travel ban was ill-prepared or not, and whether one agrees or not about which nations or people should be subjected to extreme vetting, the president’s authority in the matter of protecting the borders and keeping out those he sees as potentially dangerous is universally conceded.
That a district judge would overrule the president of the United States on a matter of border security in wartime is absurd
First, how many of those countries that were included in the travel ban, are we currently at war with?
Second, there hasn’t been a terrorist attack on US soil even coming close to approaching Nine Eleven since Nine Eleven, and there wasn’t a similar travel ban under either George W Bush, or Barrack Obama.
Third, the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the United States have been carried out by non Muslims. You’re far more likely to be murdered by some random lunatic with a gun here, than a Jihadist with a suicide vest, who was able to sneak into the country pretending to be a refugee. Indeed, most terrorist attacks in the US were carried out by non Muslims, and most of them weren’t foreigners.
Fourth, as far as conceding the necessity for banning people from specific countries, Trump demanded that the intelligence agencies produce evidence that his travel ban was necessary. He even went so far as to try to cover up a DHS intelligence report that showed that the security threat from those seven Muslim countries was not substantial.
When politicians don black robes and seize powers they do not have, they should be called out for what they are – usurpers and petty tyrants. And if there is a cause upon which the populist right should unite, it is that elected representatives and executives make the laws and rule the nation. Not judges, and not justices.
Yes the Supreme Court deciding that a clearly unconstitutional policy, that goes against our values, especially religious freedom, are “usurpers and petty tyrants.” Why is it that almost every single time someone shouts about “Judicial tyranny,” they’re complaining about the courts striking down a law or policy that actually decreased freedom?
Indeed, one of the mightiest forces that has birthed the new populism that imperils the establishment is that unelected justices like Warren and Brennan, and their progeny on the bench, have remade our country without the consent of the governed – and with never having been smacked down by Congress or the president.
Um Mr. Buchanan, do you believe in the separation of powers, and the Constitution, or do you believe that the people should have the right to enforce whatever kind of laws or policies they want, regardless of whether or not they violate the constitution? You can’t have both. If you pick the latter, you are putting us on a path to tyranny and mob rule. It is necessary to have courts that can tell people that a law is unconstitutional, regardless of what the masses may think. Do you know what an independent judiciary means?
Consider. Secularist justices de-Christianized our country. They invented new rights for vicious criminals as though criminal justice were a game. They tore our country apart with idiotic busing orders to achieve racial balance in public schools. They turned over centuries of tradition and hundreds of state, local and federal laws to discover that the rights to an abortion and same-sex marriage were there in Madison’s Constitution all along. We just couldn’t see them.
Yes that nonsensical “Christian Nation” stupidity. Never mind that the founding fathers were secularists, supported the separation of church and state, and would be horrified by the religious right.
Also its not like Roe V Wade or Obergefell V Hodges, were without precedent and the Supreme Court just pulled their decisions out of thin air. The fact that people like you couldn’t see the justification for them in the Constitution doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there. Beyond that, “traditions” of not allowing abortion or same sex marriage were not harmless.
Women died in large numbers from unsafe, illegal abortions in the days before Roe V Wade.
Also how does allowing gay people to marry their same sex partner harm anyone? How does someone marrying someone of the same gender violate your rights or the rights of anyone else? If anything it has helped society, especially in that it helps to encourage people to treat gay people with respect and dignity.
Nor were those busing orders “idiotic.” They were necessary to achieve integration and make sure that Americans had equality of opportunity regardless of their “race.”
Trump has warned the judges that if they block his travel ban, and this results in preventable acts of terror on American soil, they will be held accountable. As rightly they should.
Even if Trump’s travel ban wasn’t a bigoted anti Muslim policy, and even if enforcing it, would somehow protect us from terrorism, I would rather the president not be able to control the courts because he disagreed with them. That risks making it so that the courts can’t hold the rest of the government in check. Do you not see the danger of the government becoming a tyranny, if those in the other branches of government can just ignore, or even worse, punish judges for rulings that they don’t like? Do you not see the importance of an independent judiciary or would you rather Trump have absolute power to “Make America Great again,” whatever that means?
Meanwhile, Trump’s White House should use the arrogant and incompetent conduct of these federal judges to make the case not only for creating a new Supreme Court, but for Congress to start using Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution – to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, and to reclaim its stolen powers.
A clipping of the court’s wings is long overdue.
Yes Mr. Buchanan, its about time the Republicans fully transformed America into a dictatorship. So much for checks and balances, so much for individual rights, so much for an independent judiciary that will be able to get rid of laws and policies that violate the Constitution like Trump’s Anti Muslim travel ban.
Don’t get me wrong, the courts, including the Supreme Court, have made some horrible decisions in the past, and they need to be criticized. We should work to get bad decisions overturned, but not the way that Buchanan wants us to do so. As I said before, If politicians can punish the courts for making decisions they don’t like, it is useless as a check on their power. It would mean that horrible laws that are clear cut violations of the Constitution, and human rights, would not only continue to be enforced, but federal courts, would basically be powerless to stop them.
Now if anyone insists that Buchanan cares about “liberty,” tell them about this. The irony is that if he got his way, America might well be on its way to becoming a dictatorship.
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Note : I originally mistakenly referred to Trump’s Travel ban as a law when I first wrote this, but than I quickly realized that it was technically not a law but a policy, since executive orders are not laws.