Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
On Covid and Texas, Biden Courts a Constitutional Crisis
When Donald Trump was president, we heard a lot about Norms® and Standards.™ Trump was accused of violating this vague collection of unwritten rules, a convenient tactic when they couldn’t prove actual crimes. The good news was that Biden’s election would restore this Beltway-approved system of etiquette. How refreshing.
Eight months into his administration, Biden has folded, spindled, and mutilated our Norms® and Standards,™ even those mandated by the Constitution. Trump was erratic but Biden is openly courting a constitutional crisis.
Pressured by far-left backbencher Cori Bush in August, the White House reinstated an eviction ban already declared illegal by the Supreme Court. Biden knew it was a violation but said: “by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time.”
As expected, SCOTUS immediately crushed it stating, “if a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it.” Just as it says in the Constitution.
On Thursday, Biden made two more obviously unconstitutional moves. First, he ordered hapless Attorney General Merrick Garland to sue the state of Texas over its new abortion law. The administration was furious that the Supreme Court actually followed the law and refused to issue an emergency stay. The DOJ bizarrely claimed that a state exercising its rights will “nullify the Constitution of the United States.”
Later in the day, the President announced a six-point plan to tackle Covid. Called “Path out of the Pandemic,” his executive orders require millions of Americans to get vaccinated or lose their jobs. The groups include federal employees, employees of contractors that do business with the federal government, and workers in hospitals, home health care facilities, and other medical facilities.
Biden also ordered all private employers with 100 employees or more to require weekly Covid testing, and they are required to give employees paid time off to get vaccinated.
“This is not about freedom or personal choice,” Biden said in a national address. “We’ve been patient but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us.” After attacking Americans, the President took on the states. “If these governors won’t help,” Biden said, “I will use my powers as president and get them out of the way.”
Back in December, Biden promised that he would not make vaccines mandatory. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki repeated this in July. But Biden’s promises are irrelevant, as Americans and allies still stranded in Afghanistan have learned. Wanting voters to forget the crisis overseas, he is creating new ones on the homefront.
The White House has no authority to do any of this, of course. The White House knows they have no authority to do any of this. Biden is doing it anyway.
Norms®? Standards™? Not for Biden. He has chosen constitutional crisis.
Published in Politics
“Erratic (adj.) not even or regular in pattern or movement; unpredictable.” Trump was erratic in personnel decisions, volatile in temperament, and consistently waded into counterproductive fights which created new enemies he didn’t need.
And here is why I don’t relitigate, grovel, or abase myself for an article I wrote nine months ago. In many, MANY previous threads where I’m blasting Biden, commenters have complained about that article. The thread is immediately hijacked to shift the blame from Biden to me (like Comment #1 here). I am always called Never Trumper.
Then I note the complicating fact that I voted for Trump, as noted earlier in this thread. That fact is immediately dismissed and the attacks are rejiggered to my not being properly deferential to Trump, never attacking Democrats (what?), and always attacking Trump (again, what?). I have engaged the critics and explained myself repeatedly, all to no avail.
When I write another article blasting Biden, the same critics call me a Never Trumper and the cycle replays. This handful of critics have decided I am an enemy of the Republic, facts be damned. You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
This has gone on for nine months. This tiny minority has zero interest in coming to any understanding. They are furious I refuse to bow a knee to their emotional reaction to words. I will not don a Kente cloth (or a red cap), kneel, and beg their forgiveness. I’ll leave that to the left.
I wrote an article they didn’t like nine months ago. Many Ricochetti disagreed with it. Just as I disagree with many articles published here, which I then promote to the main feed. I have no interest in scouring the archives for posts I disagreed with in January so I can demand retractions and apologies from the authors.
After nine months of responding to these two-three naysayers, I’m done. The attacks are in bad faith and a response is a waste of everyone’s time.
January was eight months ago.
January was eight months ago.
January was eight months ago, not nine.
January was eight months ago.
Anyway, the main “objection” I see was not that you’re “Never Trump” but that you jumped instantly on an(other) anti-Trump bandwagon with perhaps minutes of actual information, when you knew – or at least should have known – how unlikely it was that you were getting valid information worth forming ANY judgment on, certainly not such a bilious one. And then you stick to it even after facts come out showing that the initial one-sided, distorted, and even outright false reporting was – Surprise, Surprise! – one-sided, distorted, and even outright false.
Percival (View Comment):
Start counting with 1 and stop with 9. How many is that?
Are you now or have you ever been an employee of Dominion Voting Systems?
This demonstrates my point so perfectly. Thank you, kedavis.
If you start at 1, and count to 9, you get 8. Start from 1. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. That’s 8 counts, PAST the starting point of 1. (Years don’t have a month 0.)
Inclusive/exclusive etc, confuses many people.
December was 9 months ago. Not January.
This is month 9. September.
Last month, 1 month ago, was month 8. August.
The month before that, 2 months ago, was month 7. July.
The month before that, 3 months ago, was month 6. June.
The month before that, 4 months ago, was month 5. May.
The month before that, 5 months ago, was month 4. April.
The month before that, 6 months ago, was month 3. March.
The month before that, 7 months ago, was month 2. February.
The month before that, 8 months ago, was month 1. January.
See how easy?
“How many (whole) numbers are between 1 and 10?” The correct answer is 8. “Between” excludes both end points, 1 and 10. So you have 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Those are 8 numbers.
Yes it does, you just seem to miss WHICH point.
You were wrong multiple times in that one comment, and you still stick to your mistake, and claim it’s about someone else.
And you also ignore the point about jumping on yet another anti-Trump bandwagon without any solid information.
That’s something to be expected from a Claire Berlinski.
I know what erratic means. I was hoping for an example when it came to abrogating the rule of law and trying to enact unconstitutional mandates or EOs.
Trump had severe limitations on his personnel decisions because so many of the ruling class didn’t want to be tainted by joining his administration.
Volatile temperament sounds like “mean tweets.” A little unpredictability is good in a president. Keep friends and enemies guessing.
And I think your last point is naive in the extreme. The Left was always going to be his enemy (or the enemy of any Republican who beat Hillary) and some on the Right couldn’t seem to grasp that piling on wasn’t going to affect his personality, but was going to be seen as helpful to the Right’s domestic enemies by people like me.
But, thanks for engaging.
Trump didn’t abrogate the rule of law or try to enact unconstitutional mandates. As I wrote, “Trump was accused of violating this vague collection of unwritten rules, a convenient tactic when they couldn’t prove actual crimes.” When the courts struck down one of Trump’s EOs, he often grumbled but obeyed their decision. To the contrary, Biden doubled down in violation, at least when it came to the eviction moratorium.
Which would seem to argue against your claim of Trump being “erratic.” At least in any important way affecting policy.
Yes, a big part of the problem seems to be the people who apparently can’t tell the difference between saying something like Harriet Miers was not a good pick for SCOTUS, versus calling Trump “loathsome” and “unfit,” etc.
To which the Dims responded, “You want to see loathsome and unfit? We’ll show you loathsome and unfit!”
Hold my beer.
Agree completely. Now we’re getting somewhere.
“And not just the President, we’ve got loathsome and unfit all the way down the ticket!”
True, plants at least do something useful.
Funny thing, I can’t do math with continuous numbers even though I know it’s exactly the same. I have to count it out EVER SINGLE TIME.
This. My primary problem is we pay incredible lip service to merit-based promotion when it doesn’t seem to be the case in any major venue outside a handful of locations. If it were, Jonah and David would not have jobs right now, because they were paid for thinking AND writing, not just writing.
I like Jon and I’m not really on this subject to the same extent others are, but it is frustrating that just one more person in pundit-like position gets to be so terribly wrong without any kind of acknowledgement of it.
I think he is nowhere near as awful as Jonah and David. But I do wish there was some kind of mea culpa offered, not for being turned off from Trump, but that the initial judgement was based in bad information and he shouldn’t have rushed into it without thinking. You know, think before you jump.
It read like that NRO guy who went after the Covington boys mere hours after it took off.
Why are you assuming whole numbers? When I talk about “last month” I mean August, not “August up until (but not including) the 11th.” If I mean elapsed time, I’ll say so. Most people communicate like that. I have no reason not to consider this month as a month.
Sure, but January was still 8 months ago, not 9. This is the 9th month. January was the 1st month. 9th back to 1st is 8 months, not 9. 9 months ago was December 2020. And if, in January, you said 9 months from NOW, that would be 1+9=10, or October.
And I specified “whole numbers” because otherwise – fractions and all – there’s an INFINITE number of numbers between ANY TWO numbers.
Don’t forget about the Republicans who promoted the Charlottesville Hoax.
I was thinking about that too, but I don’t remember if Jon was one who fell for that.
He’s not. I’m not going to hang that on him.
I’m kind of trying to make a very fine point. I don’t think Jon owes any of us an apology. However, WE feel wronged.
And apologies are the way to reconciliation. We need to ask for an apology in good faith and reconcile if it is offered.
But they should not be made if he doesn’t think he did anything wrong and it won’t be made if he thinks we’ll use it against him.
He may not care what we think of him and his job may not be as dependent on our opinions as Jonah’s and David’s should be, and he may even think he’s done absolutely nothing wrong.
I don’t want a fake apology from him. Gary already does enough of that.
It would be better if there were any hint that he’s learned something and will refrain from “jumping the gun” again. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
Btw. Sidebar. I was in a big box sporting goods store earlier today and the Land of Confusion theme started playing. Stopped me dead in my tracks. Then I found out it is some pop song. I had never heard it outside of your podcasts.
Maybe his book had a ghost writer.
Really? Genesis recorded that song in 1986.
I spent the 1980s listening to German music in Germany, Korean music in Korea, salsa music in Miami, and trying not to listen to Saudi music in Saudi Arabia. I haven’t even heard of Genesis.
But it didn’t just disappear from the end of the 80s until it started being used on the podcast.
Nope. Never heard it. Looked up their greatest hits and didn’t know any of them. We played classical music CDs in the car. I still do. My husband ‘s car doesn’t even have a Cd player because of all this digital stuff so we listen to symphony Hall on xm.
Note that you have to slice and dice pretty finely to criticize his use of the term “erratic.”
If I have a choice between getting a mea culpa and improved behavior, I’ll take the improved behavior every time. Political apologies don’t mean much to me. They remind me too much of Stalin’s forced confessions. Improvements in behavior mean a lot. Not making the same mistake again means a lot, and for that I just have to wait and see.