patrick.net

I’ve often complained about what I call the “Superman fallacy,” which is the false but alluring notion that if we could just somehow elect the PERFECT person to the presidency, he would fix all our problems with one stroke of his mighty Montblanc fountain pen: he’d pull the plug on the WEF, abolish the UN and the FED, turn out the lights at the Department of Education and the EPA, shear the CDC, NIH, and the IRS, leash the intelligence agencies, broker world peace, stop China, return the USA to the gold standard, make communism illegal again, and forever end the detestable practice of adding fruit to perfectly-good pizza.

As we speak, some conservatives are battling it out in a bloody presidential primary Super Bowl, which I fear represents just another Lucy-and-the-Football style psyop, tricking us — again! — into pinning all our hopes on one single person, and distracting us from fixing the real problem, so that once again we will wind up flat on our backs staring up into Pigpen’s sad, muddy face.

The Superman fallacy is designed to distract us from the real solutions. ...

In North Carolina, Republicans have (finally) taken supermajority control of their State House and Senate, making the state’s feckless, inconstant governor Roy Cooper unnecessary. The legislature is now primed to pass laws that will bind the executive branch regardless of what the Governor does.

The solution bypassing the executive by electing a legislative seems harder, but is it still vastly superior to a flurry of executive orders signed by Superman, which even if they were legal (doubtful), are always promptly cancelled or overridden by the very next executive who sits down at the desk.

Even if they have no idea what they are signing or what day it is.

Think about how Joe Biden cancelled so many of President Trump’s executive orders. Those Trumpian executive orders felt very satisfying at the time they were signed, and many of us were extremely grateful for them, and Trump deserves tons of credit, but how did it feel when they were all wiped away on the very first day of the new Administration?

All the long-term positive change we’ve seen in the last two years has mainly come not from executives but from the federal and state legislative branches and the judiciary. Part of the reason for this is, obviously, because Biden is currently infesting the White House.

But if you think about it, the same thing is also true even about the four years before Biden.

Real, lasting change comes from Congress, the courts, and from state and local government. Not usually from the presidency, except to the extent that a president can encourage Congress to pass laws, or can help at the margins, like moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem or pruning regulatory burdens, as Trump did.

But on the other hand, look what happened to the dearly-departed fracking industry, which in two years had made the U.S. energy-independent, gave the U.S. the upper hand in nearly every aspect of foreign policy, and supercharged the economy. Fracking is a distant memory now, since all Joe Biden had to do to wreck everything was sign an executive order canceling Trump’s executive order. Boom.

(Despite the fact candidate Biden promised to NOT end fracking. But who cares, right?)

Here’s another example of how the Legislature can be just as important to our republic as a strong executive. This week, the House Committee on Weaponization of the Federal Government blew a hole the size of a Volkswagen bus in the side of the S.S. Narrative, even though corporate media did its best to ignore the story of courageous FBI whistleblowers exposing how politically-captured that law enforcement agency has become. ...

A just-declassified FISA court decision (entered April 2022) found the FBI has been abusing the national security “foreign intelligence” communications database, to illegally search the domestic communications information of Americans living in the U.S., without probable cause and without a warrant. The database is supposed to be limited to searching foreign nationals outside the U.S.

In other words, the FBI has been systematically violating the Fourth Amendment.

Most recently the FBI ran roughshod over the rules in its so-called investigation of the January 6th rally at the Capitol. Among other examples, the FISA court found between 2016 and 2020, the FBI routinely searched identifying terms of Americans appearing in police homicide reports, “including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses and suspects.”

Biden Administration officials called the law “one of the government’s most vital national security tools.” Uh huh. And the FBI says it has “retrained” employees to avoid future abuses, so don’t worry your pretty little head about all this. But Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — which controls whether FISA will be renewed this year — said “Director Wray told us we can sleep well at night because of the FBI’s so-called FISA reforms. But it was worse than we thought.”

Even some democrats are cheesed off. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said the newly disclosed opinion revealed “shocking abuses of FISA Section 702, in particular the FBI’s warrantless searches through FISA data for information on Americans.” Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.), top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the opinion shows the need for additional changes beyond the DOJ’s own reforms, “to ensure that the FBI and other agencies are faithful stewards of this powerful and irreplaceable national security tool.”

Indeed. The House will control renewal of the Section 702 FISA powers. Renewal seems like a more difficult prospect, given what we all just went through after the Capitol rally on January 6th.

Maybe some more progress is inbound.

Checking in with the judicial branch, which is equally important and not just at the Supreme Court, but yesterday, we did look at Justice Gorsuch’s statement, which reminded us that the independent courts were the very first branch of government to begin pushing back on what Joe Biden was doing during the pandemic. Even though corporate media is trying harder to ignore the story than a teenager trying to ignore a list of chores from mom taped to his bedroom door, the Associated Press actually covered the story yesterday...

Revoltingly, the Wall Street Journal didn’t report Justice’s Gorsuch statement at all, that I could find, and the New York Times only mentioned the Justice’s remarkable comments late in a story about Title 42...

Much of the Supreme Court’s defense of civil liberties during the pandemic can be found right in the footnotes to Gorsuch’s statement, but I’m also recalling lots lower courts like Texas’ Fifth Circuit, or even my own First District Court of Appeal in Florida, which granted my mask appeal and immediately made mandatory masking in much of Florida unconstitutional.

I cannot emphasize this enough: the state and federal appellate courts are the practical capstones of our justice system, arguably holding more sway than any other courts in the nation including the Supreme Court. A staggering 99% of appealed disputes will be ultimately resolved at the appellate level, since the Supreme Court can hear only a microscopic fraction of cases. Every year there are tens of thousands of federal appellate cases, and only a couple hundred of those are accepted by the Supreme Court.

Appellate judges can save your life or ruin your life. They can save businesses or wreck businesses. They can control bureaucrats and government executives or empower executive overreach.

The two political parties well understand the importance of appellate judges, especially at the federal level. But state appellate judges are also important. The judicial branch gets overlooked in all the presidential drama, with people seeming to think that, if Superman gets elected, then he’ll appoint the right judges and we won’t have to worry about it.

But the court system is under threat, since most law schools are now turning out hyper-woke, anti-constitutionalist lawyers — lawyers who will eventually become judges, and who will slavishly defer to any liberal executive.

These examples show how important the legislative and judicial branches are. They are at least as important as the executive branch (if not more so), and that remains true even though the federal executive branch is currently unconstitutionally overpowered.

The law school problem is a great example of a local issue being overlooked while everyone’s busy arguing about who the next Superman will be. Even if we elect Superman in 2024, he’s not going to do anything about local law schools churning out woke lawyers.