The end-of-session decisions of the Supreme Court reinforce the adage that elections matter.
A vote for Donald Trump in 2016, despite his character flaws, led to a Supreme Court that overturned the Chevron case, and, with it, the ability of unelected bureaucrats in the deep state who have, for decades, been burdening Americans with often costly and draconian regulations.
For decades, conservatives have been complaining that unelected bureaucrats have been imposing their political biases through deep-state mandates that far exceeded the intent of Congress when the laws were written.
Well-intentioned, simple tweaks from bureaucratic agency leaders wound up costing the average consumer an additional $3,000 on the purchase of a car.
The litigation that led to Chevron’s overhaul was initiated by fishermen who balked at the feds forcing them to have to pay for federal agents to accompany them on their boats to monitor their catch.
We’re not sure how those fishermen voted way back in 2016, but a Hillary Clinton victory would have tilted the court in a way that would not have ended well for them.
The court also injected common sense into the homeless issue. Far-left courts had backed the ACLU’s ludicrous position that homeless people could set up encampments on city streets and in city parks. The issue finally got to the Supreme Court where the six conservative justices overruled three lefties who would have left cities powerless to stop the encampments and the drug dens that accompanied them.
The most controversial decision was the court’s ruling on immunity. In the end, they split the baby, which is what most legal scholars predicted. That didn’t stop the crazy leftist mainstream media to parrot Democrat leadership crying that this was an affront to democracy and that it absolved a president from being prosecuted for murder or just about anything else. What nonsense. The court clearly said that a president could be prosecuted for criminal acts that were outside the scope of what could be considered an official act. Immunity was wisely upheld for official acts. All future and even past presidents should be relieved.
Take Trump out of the picture for a moment. If the liberal media had its way, the door would be open to prosecute former president Barack Obama for ordering the assassination of a hostile actor who nevertheless was an American citizen and Joe Biden would be open season for Republicans, who want him prosecuted or paroling millions of illegal aliens into our country.
The court made a major error, however, by refusing to rule on the merits regarding the administration’s First Amendment violation of threatening, or colluding with, social media companies to remove posts that they, the government, didn’t like.
The court disappointed many by punting on making a decision on the merits by claiming that the various attorneys general bringing the suit did not have standing to sue.
Biased newspapers, including the AP, misleadingly claimed that the Supreme Court exonerated the administration, but nothing could be further from the truth. This was not a validation of their unconstitutional actions. Nevertheless, the decision left us scratching our heads. If attorneys general cannot sue on behalf of the free speech of all of its citizens, who can? It cannot be forgotten that a federal District Court held that the Biden administration’s actions in this matter constituted the greatest violation of the First Amendment in our nation’s history. That is saying something. And the Supreme Court did nothing about it.
This issue is not over with, but it’s a major setback for those who want to maintain free speech in America. The party that claims to be the champions of democracy have been found by a district court to have engaged in the suppression of free speech.
This case will likely be revisited at a later time. The composition of the court matters, and so do the elections that ultimately determine the makeup of the court.