Only Congress Should Make the Laws

 Today at Townhall.com Tom Knighton reports that the Firearms Policy Coalition Takes to Court to Argue Only Congress Can Create Laws. This has been a hobby horse of mine for as long as this blog has been running. The Constitution sets clear limits to the powers of each of the three branches of government. Congress makes the law, and the Executive branches...well executes the laws. If you are in an executive agency, you are not asked whether you agree with the law or not, or if you think the law should be changed. You are expected to faithfully execute the laws as written.

I am sure that I am not the only one who has been upset about this, but it is nonetheless good to see someone is attempting to get this very real problem of our federal government back in line.

Through the years, Congress has passed numerous laws. It's hard to keep up with exactly what is and isn't legal nowadays, though most of us manage to figure out the broad strokes.

As bad as that is, federal agencies have been empowered by Congress to essentially create new laws with the stroke of a pen. These regulations have the force of law but are created by faceless bureaucrats rather than our elected representatives. This has created issues regarding guns, the environment, commerce, and pretty much every aspect of American life. Now, an organization is doing something about it.

No, the Firearms Policy Coalition isn't the only one that has tried, but it's the one taking action at the moment:

Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) announced the filing of a brief with the United States Supreme Court in the case of FCC v. Consumers' Research, which is set to address the question of when and how Congress may delegate its authority to administrative agencies. The brief can be viewed at FPCLaw.org.

“Amici have a particular interest in this case for two reasons. Amici litigate cases in federal court around the country, and the question added by the Court concerning the availability of mootness exceptions is of great importance to Amici,” the brief explains, as “firearms cases frequently risk becoming moot, and the contours of the mootness doctrine are thus extremely important to Amici. Of even greater import to Amici is reigning in unconstitutional delegations of legislative power. Individual liberty, including the right to keep and bear arms, is routinely violated under the guise of broad delegations to administrative agencies.”

Knighton puts a very nice spin on why the Congress first started delegating law making powers to the Executive branch:

Look, I understand why Congress started empowering federal agencies to create regulations. Passing laws is time-consuming, and a lot of times, it's just not going to happen even when it probably needs to. By allowing agencies to enact regulations and interpret law, they can be more agile and, arguably, less beholden to political whims.

I am not so sure. I suspect that legislators are first of all political animals, not really interested in getting into the weeds of most issues. Most of them are lawyers, and don't want to do the work to become experts themselves, so pass the actual lawmaking on to the "experts." But this blurs the lines between the two branches. Rather, with fewer agency bureaucrats in the Executive branch, Congress could afford more specialists to do some of the heavy lifting while writing the bills. But while executive branch "experts" tend to stay on, Congressional staffers can come and go more freely. Moreover, by having Congress make the law, and preventing the Executive from making laws, we restore the balance making Congress more powerful while making the presidency less so.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

 Anyone who has been paying attention will know that the Biden administration was anti-gun, at least for guns in your and my hands, from the top on down. And while the Biden administration has been the most anti-gun, they are alone.  I think every administration has been anti-gun to a greater or lesser degree.  Of course, they all loved guns in government's hands.

Now, I have never understood this philosophy.  Being against a tool, an inanimate object, really doesn't make sense.  In many ways guns are like fire extinguishers.  You have them in case of need, but no sane person hopes to have a need.  Unlike Hollywood, where the police, for example, are drawing their guns on every show, most police officers never draw their guns, much less actually shoot them except to qualify annually.  Yet they all carry them, just in case.

Mike McDaniel at the American Thinker has a post today entitled Citizens stop armed attackers; the FBI lies in which he makes clear the degree to which the Biden administrations animus toward guns in private hands has distorted the FBI's statistics. McDaniel does this by comparing the FBI statics to similar ones from John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center. As he notes, Lott has been rather famous in the gun community for carefully researched statistics, which he showed us in his book 'More Guns, Less Crime.' Here he looked at the effects of crime and gun laws on a county-by-county basis over time for all counties in the United States. It was stunning, and he made his research available to other statisticians. Nobody could refute Lott's statistics or his conclusions. So gun grabbers did what they always do: tried to impugn his character.

McDaniel writes:

But there’s another area of data collection and dissemination where the FBI has been deceiving the public, and Lott, once again, exposes their lies:

I’ve seen many cases of politicized data. Until January 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases identified between 2014 to 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

The FBI’s lack of accuracy on this issue is no surprise. One of the most enduring D/s/c narratives is the idea that Normal Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have guns. They’ll just shoot themselves or their families, and worse, they might shoot criminals! Only the police should be armed because they’re the professionals. So of course, the FBI would support that narrative by claiming citizens virtually never stop active shooters.

Please go read the entire post and be aware that the government has been gaslighting you on this issue as well.

One Can't Have Public Virtue Without Private Virtue

 Selwyn Duke has an article at the American Thinker entitled As a Matter of Fact I DO Care What People Do in Their Bedroom. The title is a shocking statement to the modern ear. One imagines Duke to be some sort of busy body, a Karen. But Duke then clarifies what he means:

As to my meaning, no, I’m not Enid Strict The Church Lady (I don’t look good in a dress and I tend more toward Paul Harvey than Dana Carvey). Nor would I, as emperor, put CCTV cameras in everybody’s home; I’ve no interest in uber-intrusiveness. But I do have a strong interest in preserving civilization — and in restoring it in the first place.

Now, I so boldly made my statement to that woman because, in part, I aimed to strike a tiny blow against the very modernistic social norm of assumed libertinism. But the real problem with the “I don’t care what people do in their bedroom” line is that, translated, it amounts to (whether the person intends this or not):

I don’t care about character.

Or perhaps, “Character doesn’t matter.”

Here we get to the real issue. Christ said that the greatest commandment was to love God with all our hearts and minds. But the second was like it: to love our neighbors as ourselves. But man has a decidedly limited ability to love. With all that I have on my plate now, can I afford to love someone I hardly know? Yet we are called to this, and there is good reason to care, and care deeply, about what others do in private.

The elders among us may remember that the above line was used to justify Bill Clinton’s gutter-rat morals during his 1992 White House run. But “you can’t be one kind of man and another kind of president,” responded his general-election opponent, then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush. Really, though, Bush was just echoing greater thinkers, such as our Founders. To wit:

“Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private [virtue], and public virtue is the only foundation of republics,” stated our second president, John Adams.

John Witherspoon, a minister and fellow Declaration of Independence signatory, issued an even sterner warning. “Let a man’s zeal, profession, or even principles as to political measures be what they will,” he said, “if he is without personal integrity and private virtue, as a man he is not to be trusted.”

Yet, we may often be reluctant to advocate for private virtue thinking that our own short comings will likely be thrown back in our face. It probably has or will happen to you, and it is quite humiliating. Yet, as I have quipped to my granddaughter, "don't make my mistakes. Be an original and make your own."

This said, Chastity is just one of the Virtues (out of style though it is); as I illustrated in “Where Have You Gone, George Washington?” there are numerous others. Moreover, there have been individuals who struggled with Chastity but still did great things and even were, in reality, virtuous in other dimensions. Paul of Tarsus might have been one (it has been theorized that the “thorn” in his flesh could’ve been sexual temptation). And Augustine of Hippo certainly was, with his famous supplication, “Lord, make me a saint — but not today!” Yet there’s a profound difference between such men and those unabashedly living, as we euphemistically put it now, “alternative lifestyles” (as if at issue is embracing an organic diet).

This difference is implied in ancient Chinese sage Confucius’s lament, “It is not that I do not know what to do; it is that I do not do what I know.” It’s one thing to value and promote virtue but, owing to weakness, fall into vice.

It’s quite another to value and promote vice.

In Romans 3:23 Paul says that everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Elsewhere Paul in Romans confesses that "For the good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice. Now if I do what I will not to do, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me." So, despite even Paul's sins and iniquities, yet he provides a profound witness for Jesus as the living God coming to us as a man subject to all our temptations and weaknesses.  The Left has tried to paint Trump as a flawed human being but has failed in that mission because their candidates are also flawed and visibly so.  I think what voters have seen in Trump is his acknowledgement of this nature and yet he advocates for morally right positions both privately and publicly. Because it matters.

Duke closes with this:

We would do well to remember that apathy is not a virtue — and that the future belongs to those who care.

It is often too easy to decide that I just do not care. I have been at this for a long time, and sometimes I feel the weariness of it. Duke reminds me why I must keep on, because Truth matters, because virtue matters, just as He commanded.

Rearming the Military

 John Farnum has an interesting idea that deserves to at least be considered.  The idea, written about at Ammoland entitled Trump Should Order All Our Military Officers and NCOs To Carry Concealed At All Times. Obviously, there would need to be special training. Carrying concealed here at home is much different from carrying overseas and carrying in a war zone. It might involve renegotiating our Status of Forces Agreements with foreign countries where we have bases. But certainly, the President can order military members to carry on base even overseas.

With DJT now in office, we have a window of opportunity to officially endow our military Officers and NCOs with the very “good faith and confidence” to which we now give only hollow lip service.

All our military Officers and NCOs should routinely “go armed” (concealed pistols) at all times, on and off base. The authority to do so will be federal, and thus, it supersedes all local and state laws and regulations.

Of course, this will require compulsory training since military personnel, regardless of rank, currently have scant idea of what to do with a pistol (the unhappy case for the last one hundred years)!

Discreet, professional concealed carry is an art that requires specific equipment, training, and philosophical grounding and needs to be taught by experienced instructors who do it routinely.

Specific knowledge of how all this fits into our criminal justice system, indeed the entire “concealed-carry lifestyle,” including guns in the home, is also essential since these Officers and NCOs will be armed all the time, no matter where they go.

Please read Farnum's article. It is short, and of course short on details. But one must understand that he is talking about officers and senior enlisted, not your buck privates. It does require specific training and understanding of what a concealed carrier should do. Just because they carry concealed does not mean that they should go looking for trouble. Rather, they should be ready and able to defend themselves and others if the need arises.

The Truth About Covid Is Coming Out Slowly

 Over at PJ Media today, Ben Bartee has an article claiming that COVID Shots Cripple Immune System - Possiblt Permanently. You need to read the whole article, but the bottom line is that if you got the two Pfizer shots, your immune system suffered to some degree, and this may be a permanent fact of life. To quote Alex Berenson, "I don't use the term VAIDS (vaccine-induced AIDS), but I'm not sure how else to describe the T-cell changes the Yale team is finding." Bartee also critizes people like Sean Hannity who told us the jabs were safe.

The truth is slowly coming out. It is hard not to think that on some level this may be part of the globalist scheme to decimate the population of the world. But it is equally possible that the mRNA "vaccine" experiment was a case of extreme hubris and arrogance gone wild. In any case, read the story and make up your own mind.

No Second Amendment Means No First Amendment Either

Who is an adult, and what does it mean to be one? The Left seems to think that a child can make the momentous decision to permanently remove his or her sex organs because he wants to "trans." They also believe that a 14-year-old can make the decision to abort the child growing in her womb without parental consent. But an 18- or 19-year-old, while he can join the Army and carry a gun in war, cannot buy one for himself. This is what is at the heart of a federal lawsuit entitled Escher vs. Mason in Massachusetts.

 Ronald Beaty has an article at the American Thinker highlighting the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) lawsuit against the Massachusetts law banning those adults 18 to 20 years of age from possessing firearms. The article Massachusetts vs, the Second Amendment is about more than just the Second Amendment though. As Beaty points out, the Second Amendment protects the First Amendment and indeed all the other amendments in the Bill of Rights.

The rights acknowledged by, but not granted by, the Constitution are rights granted to each person by our Creator. Think about it for a moment: does the state have the ability to give you something it does not possess?  The state is a construct in which the people agree to grant it certain of their individual powers for the common good.  It is only legitimate so long as it operates within the boundaries of its constitution and that of the Constitution of the United States.  

In Massachusetts, a legal battle is unfolding that should resonate with every conservative who values the sanctity of the Second Amendment. Escher v. Mason isn't just about firearms; it's a litmus test for how we view adulthood, responsibility, and constitutional rights in contemporary America.

The Massachusetts law in question, House Bill 4885, strips legal adults aged 18 to 20 of their right to purchase, possess, or carry semiautomatic firearms and handguns. This isn't merely overreach; it's a direct assault on the clear text of the Second Amendment, which does not discriminate by age among "the people." If we are to take our Constitution seriously, we must defend the rights of all citizens, not just those deemed "mature enough" by the state's paternalistic gaze.

At the heart of this legal challenge lies a fundamental conservative principle: the inviolability of individual rights. The Founders did not carve exceptions into the Second Amendment for age. They understood that freedom and responsibility go hand in hand, which is why 18-year-olds have been historically recognized as adults -- capable of voting, joining the military, and, yes, bearing arms. The Militia Act of 1792, enacted shortly after the ratification of the Second Amendment, explicitly included 18-year-olds in the national defense, expecting them to be armed like their elders.

This historical precedent is not just a footnote but the bedrock upon which the plaintiffs in Escher v. Mason stand. They argue that there is no traditional basis for denying these rights to young adults. The Supreme Court's decisions in Heller and Bruen have made it abundantly clear that firearms "in common use" are constitutionally protected. Semiautomatic firearms and handguns are the dominant tools of self-defense in modern America. To deny these to a segment of the adult population is not only anachronistic but egregiously unconstitutional.

For a greater perspective on the Second Amendment and its relation to the First (and the rest of the Bill of Rights), also read Joachim Osther's post, also at the American Thinker today entitled Protecting the Second Amendment is protecting the First. Osther points to a book which should be in every conservatives library entitled No Second Amendment, No First: God, Guns and the Government.

No Second Amendment, No First is divided into three parts. In the first section, which is aptly titled “How the Biblical Worldview Gave Way To a Progressive Hive Mind,” Zmirak sets the stage by investigating the radical lurch of secularism that threatens the first two Amendments.

The Judeo-Christian worldview that enabled self-governing and was foundational to the development of the Constitution has deteriorated at the expense of secularism. Zmirak uses the Second Amendment “as the test case, the prime example, of how our political masters are confiscating our rights in the name of protecting us from ourselves.”

...snip...

The right to self-defense against despotic governments or tyrants is tied to the assumption that a human life has value. The value of life is derived from a Biblical perspective, and Zmirak uses these chapters to illustrate that this is the “proposition on which America is built… every liberty we cling to, each institution we value, flows from that assertion.” This is why we have the right and the duty to protect ourselves and others.

The most effective arguments for the First and Second Amendments start with the principles and experiences that led the Founders to codify them, and Zmirak articulately unfolds this in Part 3 of No Second Amendment, No First.

Please go read both articles today. Neither will take very long, and both are important. I will be following Escher vs. Mason closely and will follow up as I have time.

The Left's Constant Chaos: Tribalism

 Andrea Widburg today, at the American Thinker has a post entitled Let's talk about Africa, which is where tribalism takes you that speaks to the dangers of balkanization that the Left keeps pushing on America. It's always the same with these people: women vs, men, blacks vs. whites, etc. And notice that all whites are classified under the "white Anglo-Saxon protestant" umbrella. But the term "white" can be applied with equal precision to peoples from Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the Indian Subcontinent. They have a wide variety of skin tones but are all one "race." However, all of the different "races" of men are the same species, and all are created by the same God.

Through recounting three stories from Africa, Widburg shows us the results tribalism has on the fabric of society.

Humans are inherently tribal. We put people into hierarchies of relationships that usually flow outwards from family. As nations developed, the tribal family might encompass all of Germany, France, or Russia, but it was still an “us” versus “them” allegiance. Marx believed that the workers of the world would unite but in 1914, Marxists were shocked to discover that the workers of Germany did not feel any fellowship with the workers of England.

In these old nations, tribalism still had a genetic component, as well as a historical one. I had a Welsh friend whose roots in Wales went back, as she said, “to Caesar’s time.” Tribes were familial, historical, and geographic.

It was different in America, a place to which people came because they were rallying around unique ideas. This does not mean, as leftists like to say, that America “is an idea,” justifying ignoring its borders. It is a full-fledged nation, complete with defined, defensible borders and an overarching rule of law.

However, it’s also a collection of people from disparate families, geographic regions, and historic allegiances who have come for the liberty that underlies America’s institutions (flowing from the Constitution) and its culture. It’s those beliefs that make America a very big tribe.

America is a place where one can move from one part of the country to another and generally be accepted wherever that is. While there are surely regional accents, and common memories that are regional in nature. But one can fit in pretty much anywhere. However, the more balkanized we become, we risk losing this ability.

Please read all of Widburg's stores of tribalism in Africa and what happened as a result. We may not be able to change Africa, but we surely can keep what we have.

Conan the Barbarian comes to mind...

I suppose I have become cynical in my old age.  After years of hearing Democrats describe spending as "investments" and the theft of our hard-earned money under color of law, and at gun point no less, as our "fair share," I have become numb to Democrat outrage.  It is all just Kabuki theatre to me.  Then someone like J. B, Shurk at the American Thinker comes along with a rip-snorter entitled Our Self-Important, Self-Deluding, Self-Unaware 'Elites' and I remember how I felt when I recieved my first pay stub. The notion that the government would take a huge amount of my money, and use it to fund things like "foreign aid" and welfare checks to people who wouldn't go out and earn it outraged me. But as I say, over 70 years I have become numb. But don't you become numb. Read Shurks screed. And whenever you read "Democrat" think "Democrat/socialist/communist." I'll provide some money quotes though:

Our self-appointed “ruling class” is insufferable. Two-plus weeks into the restored Trump administration, and the Democrat/media outrage template has become utterly banal:

(1) Trump delivers on a campaign promise.

(2) Democrats collapse onto fainting couches and wail, “He can’t do that!,” and then

(3) those same sobbing sad sacks get back up, clutch their pearls, and collapse in anguish yet again.

It would be amusing if their funerary pantomime were not so exhausting.

And this:

Unindicted “Russia collusion” co-conspirator and former acting director of the FBI Andrew McCabe ran to the Communist News Network to complain that all his old friends at the Bureau are terrified of being fired. He reported to fellow Democrat traveler Anderson Cooper that FBI officials are worried about how they’re going to pay their bills and take care of their families. “If you get fired,” McCabe explained energetically, like one toddler telling another toddler about the world, “you’re done. That’s the end of your reputation, your ability to get any job. You lose your pay, you lose your chance at a pension, you lose your health insurance.” Baby Cooper agreed with Baby McCabe that those consequences sound scary.

Yet neither had the requisite self-awareness to ponder, “Is this what J6 protesters felt like when the Gestapo FBI hunted down alleged trespassers as if they were America’s ‘Most Wanted’ criminals?” Watching the two Democrat babies cry about FBI agents losing their jobs and reputations after we have seen the Bureau do the exact same thing to law-abiding Americans for years is absolutely surreal!

Did Cooper and McCabe ever shed a tear for military veterans who were treated like domestic terrorists for merely showing up in D.C. on January 6, 2021? Did they call out the federal government’s atrocious actions when patriotic Americans with no prior criminal records were forced to choose between egregious plea “deals” and spending years in pre-trial confinement away from their families? Did they ever stop to wonder how ordinary citizens who don’t have the “elite” privilege of avoiding prosecution (as McCabe did) or the luxury of a side hustle on CNN (because the “most trusted name in news” regards liars and lawbreakers as “reliable sources”) were ever going to pay their bills or provide for their families?

Of course, it wasn't JUST the FBI who persecuted these people. There were the DOJ prosecutors and the Judges who kept people in prison for years without trial. The only reason to keep a person in jail pending trial is that they are a flight risk, or they are so dangerous that society needs to be protected from them. Neither applies to January 6th defendants. But the FBI agents should have refused to go after these people on the grounds that it was an illegal order. Had enough of them stood up, the whole nightmare would have collapsed. They deserve what Trump is handing out. And it is not revenge, it is justice.

Speaking of losers, Senator (up)Chuck Schumer ran to the Senate floor to complain about President Trump’s decision to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (which has always been a CIA front for fomenting revolutions and may have funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses in Wuhan, China), the Department of Education, and other nefarious limbs of the Executive Branch that essentially launder taxpayer dollars into the bank accounts of bad people. Ol’ (up)Chuck fumed, “This is just the beginning. ...Who knows? Next might be the IRS.” And the people of America rejoiced!

It was obvious even before Democrats started openly grooming children with “drag queen” story hours and encouraging them to have sex “change” operations in the fourth grade that the Jackass Party is totally delusional. But consider just how incurably delusional the Dim Dems must really be for their highest-ranking leaders in government to run to the cameras and cry about the possible elimination of the dreaded, politicized, corrupt, and well armed IRS.

I can't remember the first person who proposed a flat tax, but I have always like the idea. Under the proposal, everyone, with no exceptions, pays a flat 10% of their income to the fed. Someone once suggested, I can't remember who proposed it now, that we could file our income takes on a post card. Here's how much I earned, here's 10% of that amount. Done. The IRS would be much smaller and have much less power. Perhaps that is why the Democrats (read socialists and communists) are so apoplectic about losing it.

Please go read J. B. Shurk's article and enjoy the delicious outrage as Shurk unloads on the Democrats' crying.  Conan the Barbarian comes to mind.

DOGE is legal

According to Andrea Widburg at the Amercian Thinker Trump's attack on the Deep State is spectacular and almost certainly legal. Trump is using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as his personal agent to pry out the huge amount of wasteful, often immoral spending in which our government has been engaged. Certainly, a majority of Americans would not spend their own money on these things, which means neither should our government.

In the last few days, Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”) has effectively put an end to USAID, gelded the General Services Administration (GSA) tech division, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Treasury, and fired corrupt people in the FBI—and that’s just the short list. With the war on USAID, GSA, OPM, and the Treasury alone, DOGE is saving taxpayers at a rate of one billion per day. All of this has driven the Democrats into a frenzy as they insist that an elected president managing the government is a coup. Unfortunately for them (but not for us), they don’t have a legal leg to stand on.

Widburg is a lawyer and has a lawyer's understanding of the intricacies of the law. She lays out a case for why, despite the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the Democrats, what DOGE is doing is legal. Please read her case. On another note, however, certain people have doxed members of DOGE and even written of committing violence against these people. If Elon Musk or members of DOGE do commit crimes, they can be dealt with through the law. The idea that violence by private citizens should be taken suggests that Musk is correct, and these wasteful payments are indeed wrong. I would also point out that the fact that past presidents signed these things into law without calling out the wasteful spending doesn't speak well for our leaders.