Long-lasting freedom requires citizens to practice ongoing gratitude.

CNN commentator Scott Jennings came off the top rope in response to Paul Begala’s assessment of President Joe Biden’s (brief) speech attacking the Supreme Court’s opinion in Trump v. United States, which delineates and clarifies the scope of presidential immunity, liberal pants-soiling about executive power notwithstanding. Watch as Begala and Jennings open a broader segment that ultimately ends up being about continued political fallout over President Biden’s catastrophic debate performance: KAITLAN COLLINS: My team of top political sources joined at the table now, and Paul Begala, when you look at President Biden coming out tonight, clearly he wants the headline coming out of this to be Biden's response to the supreme court ruling, but it's also people were looking at him, how he came out. It- was he going to take questions which, I should note, he did not. He did read off a teleprompter during those remarks. PAUL BEGALA: Yeah, I thought he did fine. He showed strength. He clearly knows about this. Really quite radical for Joe Biden, who is an institutionalist. Really took on the cCourt, which is very fertile territory. Americans hate the Supreme Court. They think it's biased and corrupt. Why? Because it's biased and corrupt. Two thirds of Americans, 67%, support term limits. 75% support binding ethics codes. Sheldon Whitehouse, the senator from Rhode Island, has bills that would do both of those things. If I was Biden, I would ride that horse. People hate the Supreme Court, they're they’re in the tank for Mr. Trump. They believe, I do, too. So I think that's a great issue for him.  COLLINS: But do people's disdain for the Supreme Court outrank his concern- the concern that voters potentially may have, we'll wait to see what the polling shows, from last Thursday's debate? SCOTT JENNINGS: Of course it doesn't! Joe Biden, after cannonballing into an empty swimming pool on Thursday night, came out tonight and spoke for four minutes off of a teleprompter. He's good for four minutes today, as long as somebody else wrote it. After having this completely tone-deaf sort of announcement coming out of this meeting that you wrote about with his family this weekend, where his son the notorious influence peddler and crack addict Hunter Biden says “you gotta keep going”. Also, they were hanging out with Annie Liebowicz(sic), the photographer, which I wasn't even aware she was taking mugshots now. This entire thing, since Thursday, has been one tone-deaf political disaster after another. Tonight, he comes out and attacks the Supreme Court and says, oh, the president cannot do whatever he wants. The same guy, by the way, whose centerpiece of his speeches is: “the Supreme Court tried to stop me, they blocked me but they'll never stop me on student loans”. I don't know what they are doing because they don't know what they're doing. And no one in America knows what they're doing. And that's why Donald Trump's beatin’ his brains in right now. Begala couldn’t help but wince during that exchange, so thoroughly was his talking point recital shot down. Jennings continued to expose the ghost in the room, Biden’s fitness to remain as president let alone remain as a candidate for president.  Jennings made note of one very important point. Biden does go around touting his defiance of the Supreme Court on student loans. The Regime Media often overlook this defiance in the interest of serving Biden’s agenda. It’s going to be very difficult for them to continue to do so while at the same time caterwauling about all the new, expanded executive powers supposedly created in the Trump ruling. If it weren’t for double standards, the media would have none at all.  

Scads of people around the nation are likley to enjoy dazzling fireworks displays later this week as they celebrate Independence Day, but in an opinion piece posted by the New York Times, contributing opinion writer Margaret Renkl suggested that people should give up the American tradition."The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be 'American' to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?" Renkl wrote.'We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein.'She pointed out that the lound noises from fireworks frighten animals, like pet dogs, and can cause fires."We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July," Renkl wrote. "And all that's on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation.""It would be so easy to find a new way to celebrate the founding of a nation. So easy, at the very least, to limit fireworks to public celebrations meant to bring communities together. When those communities use low-noise fireworks, as well, they limit the stress on people and animals, and they mitigate some of the dangers to local wildlife," she asserted.Renkl's piece also seemed to advocate for people to eat less meat and to set their thermostats to higher temperatures in the summer and lower temperatures in the winter."Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple," she wrote. "But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter."Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled for the first time that former presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. We talk to Joel Richard Paul is a professor of law at the University…

Do you want the good news first, or the bad news?

Ohio, known as the Buckeye State, is home to bustling cities, charming small towns, and a rich history that reflects the heart of America. However, like any

Site has no Description

Politics Common Sense and Public Order Are Restored to America’s Cities The Ninth Circuit’s utopian jurisprudential experiment of ignoring human agency predictably ended in disaster. (Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) The Supreme Court on Friday corrected the inexplicable mistake it made in 2019, when it declined to grant certiorari (discretionary review) to overturn the atrocious decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Martin v. Boise, a case I wrote about a few years ago in The American Conservative (“Lawyers Cause Homelessness,” May/June 2022). In Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit struck down—in the entire western United States—all laws and ordinances forbidding “camping” in public areas on the grounds that punishing vagrants for sleeping in parks, on sidewalks, under overpasses, etc. amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of the Eighth Amendment because homelessness is ostensibly a status, not conduct. Unless cities provide adequate shelter beds for all vagrants seeking free lodging, the Ninth Circuit opined, bums, drunks, addicts, and the mentally ill have “no choice” except to sleep outdoors. Martin v. Boise thus provoked a tsunami of homeless encampments that overwhelmed—and despoiled—many urban areas. By preventing the enforcement of no-camping ordinances, the Ninth Circuit’s ruling contributed enormously to an explosion of the homeless population in cities from Seattle to Phoenix. Martin v. Boise was an absurd decision with sweeping—and disastrous—consequences for the 1,600 municipalities within the Ninth Circuit’s mammoth jurisdiction, which were rendered powerless to curb urban homeless encampments. Not coincidentally, the five states with the highest rates of unsheltered homeless were subject to the abomination of Martin v. Boise. It was, without exaggeration, one of the most destructive decisions issued in the past decade—one that I have ridiculed as “facially ridiculous.” Red city mayors throughout the nation, and even California’s progressive Governor Gavin Newsom, begged the Court to reverse the ruling. Fortunately, in an excellent 6–3 opinion written by Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, in another case from the Ninth Circuit, Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court last week reversed Martin. There is no constitutional right to vagrancy, and sleeping outside is not an “involuntary” act immune from criminal prosecution, the Court held. The Eighth Amendment proscribes only the form of punishment, not the types of conduct that are subject to criminal sanction. Cities and states are free to manage homeless encampments and the accompanying crime, drug abuse, and public health consequences, as they see fit. The jurisprudential nightmare unleashed by the Ninth Circuit is over. Grants Pass v. Johnson, although overshadowed by blockbuster decisions issued the same day overruling Chevron and invalidating J6 prosecutions under Sarbanes-Oxley, is a gem. The majority opinion in Grants Pass patiently debunked the Ninth Circuit’s flawed reasoning, concluding that “the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment serves many important functions, but it does not authorize federal judges to wrest those rights and responsibilities from the American people and in their place dictate this Nation’s homelessness policy.” Federal judges do not manage America’s cities; state and local elected officials do. At the heart of Gorsuch’s opinion, and the majority’s disagreement with the three liberal justices (Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson), was the difference between two Warren Court–era precedents, Robinson v. California (1962) and Powell v. Texas (1968). Robinson, a hoary relic of the Court’s period of extravagant activism, held that a California law making it a crime to be a drug addict violated the Eighth Amendment because drug addiction—as opposed to drug use, or possession—is a status, not a volitional act. The majority pointed out that “in the 62 years since Robinson,…this Court [has not] once invoked it as authority to decline the enforcement of any criminal law, leaving the Eighth Amendment instead to perform its traditional function of addressing the punishments that follow a criminal conviction.” Yet, in Martin v. Boise, the Ninth Circuit risibly relied on (and extended) Robinson to invent its novel “constitutional right to vagrancy.” This was an error, the majority in Grants Pass concluded. Without reconsidering or overruling Robinson, the majority made it clear that the 1962 precedent was an anomaly to be narrowly limited to its unique facts. (Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the majority in Grants Pass, wrote separately to condemn Robinson on originalist grounds, arguing that it was “wrongly decided.”) The majority contrasted Robinson with another, more sensible artifact of the Warren Court’s criminal law revolution, Powell v. Texas. In Powell, the Court had declined to extend Robinson more broadly, holding that a Texas law prohibiting public drunkenness criminalized conduct, not status. Accordingly, the law did not run afoul of the Eighth Amendment.  The amazing feature of this doctrinal tutorial is that the author of the Court’s plurality opinion in Powell was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the liberal champion of civil rights who, as an advocate, argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Marshall scoffed at the notion that public drunkenness could be regarded as a status: the defendant had not been convicted “for being” an “alcoholic, but for [engaging in the act of] being in public while drunk on a particular occasion,” Marshall insisted. Thus, Robinson did not apply. Accordingly, Marshall concluded, the Eighth Amendment does nothing to curtail a state’s authority to secure a conviction when “the accused has committed some act…society has an interest in preventing.”   The majority in Grants Pass rightly held that “This case is no different from Powell.” Banning sleeping in public is no different than banning public drunkenness. Both crimes entail volitional conduct, not status. Despite this simple and irrefutable logic, the three left-wing dissenters in Grants Pass wrote 30 pages of overheated nonsense defending the Ninth Circuit’s execrable decision in Martin v. Boise.  Justice Sotomayor’s paean to judicial activism begins with this drivel: “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime.” This is how divided the Court is in 2024. The three remaining Democrat appointees comprise a bloc of hard-left ideological zealots willing to embrace far-fetched theories that even Thurgood Marshall slapped down as silly during the heyday of “living Constitution” judicial activism during the 1960s. We thought that the Warren Court era was over, and it should be, but it lives on in the fervid rants of unhinged—and, thankfully, meaningless—dissenting opinions (albeit just two votes away from regaining control of the Court). Sotomayor and her colleagues are to the left of Governor Gavin Newsom, who praised the Court’s decision!  The conservative majority in Grants Pass provided a master class in originalist constitutional interpretation, restoring the ability of America’s cities to govern themselves. This is a victory for democracy, federalism, and common sense, and a major defeat for the National Homelessness Law Center, which spearheads litigation seeking to create a right to taxpayer-funded housing. Bravo! The post Common Sense and Public Order Are Restored to America’s Cities appeared first on The American Conservative.