Somebody needs to stop me before I jump on the Trump bandwagon!

Last night I watched the House hearings questioning FBI Director James Comey on the decision not to indite Hillary Clinton. As I watched my disgust and anger grew. Somebody now needs to stop me before I jump on the Trump bandwagon!

I still think Trump is a danger to the Republic, most fearful he may start trade wars and fearful that he may do something stupid like default on the national debt or really try to deport 12 million Mexicans. I still think he is an ill-mannered, egotistical, bully with unknown political views and unfit to be president. It is not that I think any better of Trump, but I am so outraged at the thought of Hillary becoming president, that I would almost rather pull a random name from a hat to be president rather than trust Hillary. 

I am outraged at the long list of Clinton scandals. I am outraged she mixed her private, Clinton Foundation, and State Department email on an unsecured server and then when the emails were subpoenaed she deleted 30,000 of them! Any normal citizen who destroyed evidence in that fashion would be in jail. She showed reckless disregardful for the security of our country and destroyed evidence. She has contempt for our nation's security and the rule of law. I am outraged she got by with it. Nixon did nothing coming close to her criminality. 

I wish we had a better alternative than Trump, but I may prefer to risk reckless rude Trump than put the country in the hands lying criminal Hillary.

It is clear that she mishandled classified information and it is clear she destroyed evidence and she has gotten by with it. That she got by with it is the real crime and that her supporters don't give a damn is the real outrage. This should not be the end of it, however.  It is crime to lie to Congress.  The House should ask the FBI to open criminal investigation into allegations that Hillary Clinton lied to Congress.  Unfortunately, It may not matter.  I have the feeling that the fix is in and Clinton will get a free pass from the Obama Justice Department no matter what she does.  Clinton probably sealed the deal on that private airplane in Arizona. The Obama administration has demonstrated it's contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law.  The vast federal bureaucracy is only a tool for handing out favors and punishing enemies. The rule of law is dead.

If charges had been brought against Clinton for the mishandling of classified material and destruction of evidence, then most likely she would have withdrawn from the race for President and the nomination would have most likely fallen to Joe Biden.  For those who want Trump to be president, what happened with Hillary is probably not a bad outcome. Trump probably has a better chance against Hillary than he would Joe Biden.  While in a normal election year I would have agree that this was a good outcome, I really do not want a Trump presidency.  In a choice between Trump and Biden, I could have reluctantly welcomed a Biden presidency.  Justice should have been served and Hillary should have been indited.

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(update) Grand jury says Ramsey, Harwell should face charges

(9/28/2014 update) Frank Daniels editorializing in today's Tennessean says he has lost a lot of respect for newly elected DA Glenn Funk, because Funk is refusing to indict Ramsey and Harwell. See, Will Nashville's new DA ignore grand jury?

NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) -  A Nashville grand jury is recommending Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey and Speaker of the House Beth Harwell face charges for manipulating the rules when it comes to judges.

Ramsey and Harwell have not been charged with anything at this point, it is simply a recommendation from the grand jury for the district attorney to consider. (link)

My Comment: I would hate to see either indicted, but maybe they should be. I like both Harwell and Ramsey, but elected officials should not just ignore the law when they don't like the law.  That is the same thing President Obama has done time and time again. President Obama should not ignore the Federal Constitution and Ramsey and Harwell should not ignore the State Constitution.  Elected officials should follow the law.

What this is about is appointments to the  Judicial Performance Evaluation Commission which makes recommendation as to which appellate judges should be retained or replaced. The Commission no longer exist as of June 30, 2014.  However, the law that was in effect the last time appointments were made said that the commission should "mirror" the state in its makeup of women and minorities. It did not. The last commission was comprised of seven white men, one white woman and one African-American woman.

Harwell's office said she appointed four commissioners, two men and two women, including a Hispanic person and an African-American person. Assuming that is true, Harwell did follow the law, but not Ramsey. Just because you don't like a law (and I don't like this law) it should not be ignored. The rule of law is too important to allow laws to be ignored. (For more on this, follow this link and this link.)

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Boehner On New Obamacare Delay: ‘What the Hell Is This? A Joke?’ (VIDEO)

House speaker John Boehner (R–Ohio) ridiculed the latest Obamacare delay today, sarcastically saying that President Obama “hasn’t put enough loopholes into the law already. The administration is now resorting to an honor system to enforce it.”

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that people would be allowed to sign up for Obamacare past the March 31 deadline, as long as they stated they had tried to sign up before.

“This is part of a long-term pattern of this administration manipulating the laws for its own convenience,” Boehner added, “and it’s not hard to understand why the American people question this administration’s commitment to the rule of law.”

I believe this is the 38th unilateral change President Obama has made to the health care law. This is contempt for the rule of law.  Obama is not acting like a president who is the leader of a democracy but like a king with absolute authority.  

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When Presidents Upheld the Law

The Foundry, Morning Bell - Today is known as “President’s Day,” a three-day weekend retailers use to lend an air of Founding-era seriousness to their sales. But its legal name is Washington’s birthday—and how appropriate to reflect on a President who took his bearings from the Constitution while serving in office.

George Washington “understood himself to be the President of a Republic in which the people, through their elected representatives in Congress, make laws,” Heritage’s David Azerrad writes. As the chief executive, Washington recognized that his constitutional charge to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” was a duty rather than an optional responsibility to exercise at will. Laws, no matter how unpopular, had to be upheld, so long, of course, as they were constitutional.

Perhaps no law was more despised in Washington’s time than the excise tax on whiskey. It fell especially hard on farmers on the frontier of Pennsylvania, for whom whiskey was the drink of choice and grain the most lucrative crop. Washington saw the farmers’ violent resistance to the tax—the so-called Whiskey Rebellion—as a direct threat to the rule of law.

If “the laws are to be so trampled upon with impunity,” Washington noted, “nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected hereafter.” The President’s response was therefore swift and forceful: He personally led more than 12,000 troops to western Pennsylvania and quashed the rebellion.

What a contrast to President Barack Obama’s “I can do whatever I want” attitude toward the rule of law. In light of Washington’s constitutional leadership, Obama’s dereliction of duty when it comes to enforcing Obamacare—today’s most unpopular law and the President’s namesake—is especially clear. The President has unilaterally made changes to the law that was passed by Congress.


Other examples of the President’s selective enforcement of laws duly passed by Congress abound. Among those cited by legal experts Elizabeth Slattery and Andrew Kloster:

• Abdicating the Administration’s duty to defend and enforce federal laws.
• Gutting the work requirement from welfare reform.
• Implementing the DREAM Act granting amnesty to some illegal immigrants by executive fiat.

“We are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need,” Obama announced last month.

It is inconceivable that such words would have ever come out of President Washington’s mouth. The current occupant of the White House may want to take some time today to read up on how our first and greatest President understood his role.

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1st District Rep. Phil Roe questions if President has authority to pick and choose which law to enforce

From a Fox News story:

The administration announced early last week that it was delaying by one year a requirement that large employers offer access to health insurance. Officials described the delay as a common-sense concession to businesses who complained the rules were too onerous, and maintained the Treasury Department was within its right.

"This action raises a lot of questions about whether the Obama administration can simply ignore the law when it's convenient for them," Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., said in a statement.

He said he's asked the Congressional Research Service to "investigate" that issue -- "because I don't think any president has the authority to pick and choose what parts of law to follow."(link)

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4th of July DUI Checkpoint abuse in Rutherford County

At over a million and a half views already, this video filmed in Rutherford County of the police violating the right of a young man is going viral. It occurred on Independence day. The sheriff deputies know they are abusing their authority and admit so on camera. I know that this is routine but it should not be. The officers should be disciplined and the kid should be paid for any dog scratches to his car and he should get an official apology. Police are not "the law" and they should not be above the law.

"...but he's perfectly innocent and he knows his rights. He knows what the Constitution says."

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How Obamacare destroys the Rule of Law

I have several concerns about Obamacare. One is creeping nationalization. Healthcare accounts for 17% of the US economy. Obamacare appears designed to gradually destroy private health care and force more and more people to turn to the government for health care. Nationalization is contrary to the concept of a free people. I think we should be looking for ways to privatize services government already provides rather than nationalize services provided by the private sector.

Another concern, is that Obamacare will bankrupt our country; we just can't afford it. With the National Debt standing at $14.1 trillion dollars and entitlements and interest on the debt making up the bulk of annual government expenditures, we cannot afford another entitlement. The US holds a debt to GDP ratio of 94%! This is not sustainable. We are like a household that is living our lifestyle by financing it on credit cards and we keep getting an increase in the credit limit or get a new credit card every time we approach maxing out a credit card. Adding another entitlement is the last thing we need to be doing.

I am also concerned that government does not do very much very well. I fear the quality of health care will surfer with more government control.

I am concerned about the increase in government power and the unconstitutional nature of Obamacare. I believe our freedom is due primarily to the wisdom found in our constitution which places limits on government authority. If there are no limits on government authority, if the constitution is meaningless, then our freedom is at risk. Surely the Commerce Cause is not so broad that government can force people to purchase a product. If it is, the government can force us to do almost anything.

While all of these are concerns, I am equally deeply concerned about what Obmacare does to the Rule of Law. Rule of Law is not the same as law and order. Rule of Law means that the law is applied equally. Rule of Law means the government does not pick winners and looser.

The book club to which I belong recently selected The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek and I reread this classic. Below are excerpts on the topic of the Rule of Law from that work:

Noting distinguished more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles know as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government is all its actions is bound by rules issued and announced beforehand-rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authorities will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan ones individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge.

When the government has to decide how many pigs are to be raised or how many buses are to be run, which coal mines are to operate or what prices shoes are to be sold, those decisions cannot be deduced from principle or settled for long periods in advance. They depend inevitable on the circumstances of the monument and making such decision it will always be necessary to balance one against the other the interest of various person and groups.

It does not matter whether we all drive on he left or on the right-side of the road so long as we all do the same. The important thing is that the rule enable us to predict other people's behavior correctly, and this requires that it should apply to all cases-even if in a particular instant we feel it to be unjust.

We have already seen more than 700 waivers to the requirements of ObamaCare exempting those who got the waiver from a provision in the new health care law that bans annual limits on what an insurance company will pay for health care coverage.

This is an outrage! Many of those granted waivers are friends of the administration and campaign contributors, such as the United Federation of Teachers and locals of the SEIU. That is not government by Rule of Law but is autocratic grants to friends. That is not the way things are done in a democracy. That is not the way things are supposed to work in America

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