Posted on 04/23/2018 9:41:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last year, George Will – the Washington Post’s conservative intellectual in residence – reviewed Alvin S. Felzenberg’s book, “A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr.” The piece lauded both the book and the historical figure it covered.
Will said that Buckley, “infus[ed] conservatism with brio, bringing elegance in advocacy and altering the nation’s trajectory while having a grand time.” He contrasted Buckley against modern conservatism, which he found to be “soiled by scowling primitives whose irritable gestures lack mental ingredients.”
A basket of deplorables, in other words.
Will concluded that conservatism should make its way into public policy by the nimble arguments of its most deep thinkers. People like him is what he really meant. He finished his book review with a flourish:
“’[Buckley’s] true ideal,’ Felzenberg writes, ‘was governance by a new conservative elite in which he played a prominent role.’ And for which he would play the harpsichord.”
What Will did not say was that Buckley got his wish. There has been a conservative elite in Washington for going on 40 years.
Reagan campaigned for office on a platform to cut the size of government and won a 44-state landslide. Once in power, though, he did not significantly reduce the federal bureaucracy. It was the same behemoth as existed under Carter, except it was now led by smart republicans.
These best and brightest conservatives figured out creative ways to wield their newfound power. Anne M. Gorsuch was Reagan’s appointee to head the EPA. Environmental regulation at the time was a process where Congress would pass a who-could-argue-with-that sounding law like “The Clean Air Act” and leave it to the EPA to fill in the blanks.
Carter’s EPA filled in the blanks by placing onerous regulations on new manufacturing plants. Gorsuch’s EPA changed that, by adopting a different interpretation of the law that favored manufacturing.
An environmental protection group filed a lawsuit and the Reagan Justice Department defended Gorsuch’s bold act by successfully arguing in the case Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), that when laws as drafted are ambiguous, courts must defer to a federal agency’s interpretation.
This came to be known as the Chevron Doctrine, paradoxically enacted at the behest of a president who had promised to diminish the influence of government. It ceded to administrative agencies legislative powers in cases where Congress did not directly address the precise question at issue.
The Chevron Doctrine vectored political power into the hands of unelected minions. Congress began to go out of its way to pass vague laws that didn’t really say anything, with a wink and a nod to their agents in the bureaucracy to implement the desired public policy.
This reached the pinnacle of ridiculousness with President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was 2,700 pages of triteness that delegated the big calls to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. She was the one, and not Congress and the president, who decided that the Little Sisters of the Poor were required to buy condom insurance.
People quickly discerned that this was government by bureaucratic fiat, and not of, by, and for the people. The backlash that led to Trump’s rise was rooted in this sense that Washington was governing according to its own prerogatives without regard for what anyone wanted.
On August 23, 2016, perhaps sensing this shift in the Zeitgeist, a federal judge on the Tenth Circuit issued a concurrence that strongly criticized the Chevron Doctrine, stating: “Maybe the time has come to face the behemoth.”Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, 834 F. 3d 1142 (10thCir. 2016).
Cosmic symmetry being what it is, that judge’s name was Neil Gorsuch, the son of the Anne Gorsuch. When Trump became president, he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
Recently, Justice Gorsuch drew fire from the conservative elite for siding with liberal justices in the case Sessions v. Dimaya. Stripped to its fundamental principles, though, Gorsuch’s decision was maybe the most conservative thing a Supreme Court justice has ever done.
He defied the party that appointed him to strike down a purposely vague statute that left crucial decisions about deportation to Justice Department officials.
It was a shot across the bow to Washington. The Administrative State loses its power when people stop asking them “what did Congress mean by this?” If they are not the oracle of Congressional intent, they are just a bunch of functionaries, as it should be.
William F. Buckley did not live long enough to see the conservative elite fail to succeed in doing anything even remotely conservative and then use their residual stature to oppose first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump.
Likely, he would have been horrified at the spectacle.He certainly would not have played the harpsicord.
Justice Gorsuch took the first step in restoring Constitutional rectitude by telling the Attorney General if he wants to deport a class of immigrants, get Congress to pass a law that says so.
Take that Jeff Sessions, you Washington insider who doesn’t even know the difference between a basis for recusal and a political dirty trick. Anne M. Gorsuch created your species of middling conservative bureaucrat in a laboratory accident in 1984. Her son has arrived to fix his mother’s mistake.
Will can hide his lack of intellect behind a big vocabulary, but not his effete distaste for the average American.
He is right about Bill Buckley, it was nice having an intellectual with a sense of humor to comment on society.
Nothing like it today.
Note: Better described as "conservative pseudointellectual."
Then, there's also the question, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, as to "what the meaning of 'conservative' is," when it comes to Will and those who no longer can be even considered to be "conserving" the principles and ideas underlying the Constitution of the United States of America," as framed, described in the 85 Essays of THE FEDERALIST, and understood by early Presidents and Justices!
Will needs to stick to baseball!
As such, it has been rather comical to watch two men labeled as "Conservatives" blow it year after year.
For those of us who did get Conservatism, it was however very frustrating to watch as they fumbled the Conservative football weekend after weekend after weekend.
Of course, in reality, the Conservative viewpoint was never presented.
There was never any push-back against Leftist ideology.
This resulted in those who cared about the U. S. Constitution and adherence to it, being seen as some sort of radical right. And of course this resulted in them being seen as NAZIs or Ractists. This enabled the Left to call them Hitler's pals or members of the KKK.
Will and Kristol must be very proud.
The Supreme Court was arguing about whether burglary constituted an act of violence.
No one seems to have cared that the person in the case had two felony convictions. Based on that alone, he should have been deported forthwith.
Which is why Gorsuch said change the law to make such mandated by Congress, not justices.
The agency powers are a deliberate attempt to circumvent the 3 branches of government the Consititution set up. Federal Agency are grant power to make regulations so they are de facto lawmakers, they get the power to enforce the regulations so they are the executive, and they have the power to find you guilty of vioating their regulations and levy penalties which makes them the judge and jury.
Gorsuch seems like a Scalia textualist
As a side point - I know its anathema to many Freepers, but if Conservatives want true Constitutionalists and justices unafraid to dismantle the nanny-state, they should start to consider those serious legal minds who identify as Libertarians.
I admit to finding it a challenge to read beyond that line. But I did. And further down, I read this:
"...He defied the party that appointed him to strike down a purposely vague statute that left crucial decisions about deportation to Justice Department officials..."
What a miscarriage. Make no mistake. On the Left, this case had nothing whatsoever to do with "vagueness". Nothing at all.
The Left sees this, and rightly so, as their best hope to throw a monkey wrench into the immigration system, and in accordance with the principles of Alinsky, use this ruling as a tool to completely inundate the lower courts that deal with these issues to the point that every single deportation could be successfully litigated for years or decades, essentially shutting down efforts to curb illegal immigration.
It takes these illegal immigrant criminals out of the immigration system where they had every right by history and law to be, and have thrown them into the criminal system, where they should not be.
This is going to be a disaster of the highest magnitude, and while Gorsuch may turn out to be a very good conservative justice, he made a striking and far-reaching mistake here.
It is a disaster.
So I have to discount nearly every single thing in this article. I found the author to be just as snotty and wrong as George Will.
Read my reply at #9...the issue is going to be far larger and far reaching than a “vague law”. (I know I am likely preaching to the choir here...)
And you two demonstrate everything wrong with “Movement Conservatives” these days.
You are not really interested in “Conservatism”, just in using it to push your own emotion based poltical agenda.
The only difference between you and the left Wing fascists is what you want to use the Government to do.
What is that principle: Ambiguity in criminal laws should always be resolved against the Government's position. That is a corollary of the presumption of innocence.
Will is trying to sound profound. What he demonstrates is something very different.
It is entirely within the purview of the Immigration Service to deport anyone who has entered the country illegally. That is law. (Never mind we FLAUNT our OWN laws and ignore them)
The way I understand it, it has historically (and rightfully) been part of Immigration law and NOT of Criminal law. In the past, if someone was illegal and committed a crime (particularly a crime of violence, damage, or theft) they could be held in the legal and corrections system until the case was resolved, and then could either be kept incarcerated, remanded back to the immigration service for deportation, or both (serve the sentence and be deported upon completion) but in both cases it could go right back to the Immigration system for deportation if charges weren’t proffered.
Putting it into a court of law is a major, major mistake. Which is what this does.
How so? I have been called a facist by leftists, but this is a new one to me.
Please explain how these cases should be sent to our criminal and/or civil legal system for ruling on how someone who has entered this country illegally, instead of being in the Immigration system where by law, the person can be deported if we followed our own laws?
I don’t understand your hostility to that stance, which is proper, right, and followed by nearly the entire rest of the world.
Could you please explain without the hostility why that is wrong?
Dead-on, he is neither conservative or bright.
Just take his pet issue of “political speech” which he seems to think is the only formed of protected speech under the 1st Amendment. And by political speech, he means money and not speech.
However, any song, movie, book, or stupid kid fashion that offends him is reason for the government to enforce his will on others.
I don’t approve of adults wearing backward baseball caps either, but I ain’t going to pretend we should make a law about it..
Maybe they need to change the law to give Immigration Services the first bite at the apple? But that in turn could cause issues of its own. But since Congress codified the reasons to act, and those reasons are vague, IMO they need to specify felonies and level of misdemeanor that directs deportation.
I don’t agree that the statute is vague. You can be deported if you are convicted of something that can warrant a two-year prison sentence. The person in question did that twice.
Something like a million people enter the US illegally every year. If you have to treat each and every one of them as an individual criminal case, you will be unable to control your own border.
William F. Buckley did not live long enough to see the conservative elite fail to succeed in doing anything even remotely conservative and then use their residual stature to oppose first the candidacy and then the presidency of Donald Trump.
I think we agree there...but the criminal justice system has to have the first shot (in my opinion) at whether there should be criminal charges applied.
If there were personal injury (murder, rape, auto accident, property damage, you name it) then for the sake of justice, that person should be tried under our legal system with the appropriate protections that we give to our own citizens (as this is largely done by other countries, even to the detriment of US Citizens). Then, if charges are to be enforced, we can enforce them (throw the person in jail for twenty years or whatever the sentence for the crime is) and then deport them when the sentence is up. This gives the aggrieved US citizen the satisfaction of seeing justice applied (rather than the offender just being deported and being free as a bird for murdering someone, which can happen)
Or...if it is burglary, shoplifting, littering, whatever, or no crime at all except being found as an illegal alien, the immigration service should have a free hand and resources to deport at will...immediately and without recourse.
I was looking for something that talks about what this means in terms of immigration.
On its face, it is not positive. We CAN’T deport felons?
I haven’t been able to find good analysis of the impact of this, however.
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