Parker Snider: Beware the rule of the philosopher kings
According to ancient Greek philosopher Plato, it is the great philosophers who are best suited to govern society. Known as “philosopher kings,” they use wisdom, Plato says, to determine how society should operate. Ours is not a country governed by philosopher kings. The Founding Fathers, instead, predicated our government as a government of the people. And it is Congress, the gathering of popularly elected representatives, which is given that weighty law-writing authority. When Roe v. Wade was overturned last month by the Supreme Court, the political left learned this lesson the hard way. For decades, the left duped themselves into believing that America is a nation led by philosopher kings. It is hard to blame them for this. Over and over again, the great thinkers – the philosopher kings – on the Supreme Court awarded the left win after win. In 1973 through Roe v. Wade, the Court created a right to abortion through the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy. Even though many states had already banned abortion while others limited it, Roe unilaterally forced the states to allow abortion. It was then considered a constitutional right that could not be overruled by state or federal law as the agenda of the left was accepted not only as legal but as the only constitutional possibility. Following the decision, state legislatures and Congress could not overpower Roe even if such a challenge garnered a unanimous vote. This decision was reaffirmed in 1992 through Planned Parenthood v. Casey, another “philosopher king” decision that decreed the left to be the political victors even though there was no consensus among the American people. The left won in a similar fashion with same-sex marriage. Before 2015, states were split when it came to recognizing same-sex marriages, with no consensus nationally expected any time soon – that is, until the philosopher kings got involved. On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that there was a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex couples. All states, therefore, had to recognize same-sex marriage. Surprisingly enough, this was supposedly a right found in the 14th Amendment. Another win for the left, courtesy of the philosopher kings. No legislature could say otherwise. There are more rulings that could be listed here. What’s important to recognize is that, for the left, these victories simply could not be rivaled by legislative wins. Supreme Court decisions, which were seemingly permanent, could silence dissenters who knew the chances of reversal were slim. To the left, the Supreme Court offered a potential final word on an issue, a loss that conservatives could not come back from. Aiming for judicial decisions, many on the left have become democratically lazy. They have not come to divisive policy discussions with hopes of arriving at a consensus. Instead, they argue through the media that their view is the only morally just view, that their positions are not simply opinions but “rights” that should be protected (or created) by the Supreme Court. Their success in this arena has led them to exchange the democratic ideals of consensus and compromise for dictates from the philosopher kings sitting just east of the Capitol. This summer showed us just how bad a value judgment this was for the left. The reversal of Roe reveals that the left never considered what might happen if the philosopher kings weren’t their philosopher kings. It is unsurprising that such a question might not cross the progressive mind. They assumed there was no way the philosopher kings on the Supreme Court, who are highly educated and mostly from liberal Ivy League schools, could not be at least marginally on their side. Now that Roe is overturned, the left is trying diligently to convince Americans that the philosopher kings have simply been switched. The liberal philosopher kings no longer rule the Court, so now the conservative ones do. The left wants you to believe that six conservative justices now make all the decisions for our country. This is not true. Think about this. The conservative justices could have made abortion illegal throughout the nation if they desired. They could have philosophized their way to the desired position fairly easily and used the Constitution to argue their case, using the 14th Amendment again, perhaps. This is exactly what the liberal majority did in Roe, Casey, and Obergefell, all of which made the majority’s opinion the law of the land in every single state. But they didn’t. In overturning Roe, in fact, the majority decided to shed the philosopher king label altogether. Instead of assuming that they were the ones who were rightfully in charge, the Court gave the authority to make decisions about issues not explicitly in the Constitution back to the legislative branches of government. This is how our government was designed to operate. Congress and legislatures are to write the laws, not the Supreme Court. It is a good thing that both liberals and conservatives alike are wary of philosopher king elites. Both groups now have before them the hard work of convincing not nine men and women with law degrees of their position but the majority of the American people. While Plato may not like it, the Founding Fathers would not have had it any other way. Parker Snider is the Director of Policy Analysis for the Alabama Policy Institute.
Dan Sutter: Making sense of woke business
Major League Baseball’s moving the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta over Georgia’s new voting law symbolizes businesses’ new willingness to take sides on political issues, typically the progressive side. Businesses previously avoided offending potential customers or employees. Selling to both Republicans and Democrats maximizes profit! Vivek Ramaswamy explores the causes and consequences of “woke” business in Woke Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam. The book offers numerous valuable insights and creative analyses. Mr. Ramaswamy is the child of immigrants from India who grew up in Ohio. He attended Harvard for undergrad and Yale Law School and worked in pharmaceuticals including as CEO of Roivant Sciences, before stepping down in 2021. Progressive business leaders emphasize “stakeholders” (workers, suppliers, communities, etc.) over stockholders, the owners. Mr. Ramaswamy sees stakeholderism as a ploy. A CEO serving many masters need not follow orders from any: “By becoming accountable to literally everyone, they become accountable to no one.” Managers with a fiduciary duty to the stockholders can be held accountable. Many companies cultivate glowing reputations to cover their misdemeanors. Mr. Ramaswamy highlights Volkswagen, hailed as the world’s most sustainable automaker. “Clean diesel” cars briefly made VW the world’s top automaker. Except the company was using “defeat devices” to cheat on emissions tests. The author views finance’s wokeness as an arranged marriage. The financial crisis bailouts sparked Occupy Wall Street and big fines from the Federal government. Goldman Sachs and others led on wokeness to deflect attention from their misdeeds. Employees often push wokeness. Mr. Ramaswamy notes that Roivant’s Ivy League grads arrived woke. The New York Times’ newsroom staff have similarly staged numerous woke revolts. Leftists view everything as political, so making all institutions advance progressive social goals fits the game plan. Mr. Ramaswamy believes that corporate politics seriously threatens our democracy. Politics – based on one person, one vote – should decide questions like inequality or climate change. CEOs have excessive influence when corporations do politics. Making businesses maximize profit was “about protecting the rest of society from a Frankensteinian corporate monster.” Woke business involves firings for politically incorrect views. Google fired engineer James Damore in 2017 for questioning its’ gender equity hiring policy. Just this month, software company Outreach fired Griffin Green for his Tik Tok videos. Sexist and racist behaviors can disrupt workplaces; as a free market economist, I grant managers significant discretion on company business. But managers seem to be placating the social media mob while performing scant due diligence. What to do about this? Mr. Ramawarmy suggests using existing laws against religious discrimination: “[S]ince wokeness is a religion, employers can’t impose it upon their employees.” Does “wokeness” qualify as religion? Columbia University’s John McWhorter provides a strong affirmative argument in Woke Racism. Social media censorship is another element of woke business. Let’s grant social media bias against conservatives. Again, the question is what to do. I believe that only governments can censor. A media company only denies a speaker the use of its platform and cannot prevent the speaker from using other platforms. Mr. Ramaswamy offers another intriguing suggestion. Criminal law holds that the police cannot have someone conduct an otherwise illegal search. Twitter and Facebook act as government agents in censoring political speech. Again, existing law can address a problem. The problem of woke business, I think, goes beyond an opportunistic scam. Corporate America’s use of wokeness as a cover for making profit likely stems from an unwillingness or inability to defend the morality of business. Notre Dame’s James Otteson observes how many people believe that business should “give back.” But only those who have done wrong must give back. Professor Otteson argues that “Honorable business is neither morally suspicious nor even morally neutral: it is a positive creator of both material and moral value.” Wokeness will not protect business for long because progressives, as Mr. Ramawarmy notes, are hostile to business. This arranged marriage will not produce lasting bliss for corporate America. Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
Parroting Donald Trump, GOP primary losers cast doubt on elections
It was no shock that state Rep. Ron Hanks and Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters handily lost their recent Republican primaries in Colorado for U.S. Senate and secretary of state. Hanks was outspent 14-to-1 by his rival. Peters, who was vying to become Colorado’s top elections official, had been indicted on seven felony charges alleging she helped orchestrate a breach of her voting system’s hard drive. But this past week, both candidates formally requested recounts of their primary elections from June 28, suggesting widespread irregularities seen by no one other than their own campaigns and allies. “I have reasons to believe extensive malfeasance occurred in the June 2022 primary,” Peters wrote in her recount request, “and that the apparent outcome of this election does not reflect the will of Colorado voters not only for myself but also for many other America First statewide and local primary candidates.” America First is a coalition of conservative candidates and officeholders who, among other things, promote the falsehood that Democrat Joe Biden did not win the 2020 presidential election. This idea has seeped deeply into this year’s Republican primaries, which have revealed a new political strategy among numerous candidates: running on a platform that denies President Donald Trump’s defeat two years ago. As some of those candidates lose their own races, they are reaching new frontiers in election denial by insisting that those primaries, too, were rigged. “There’s a clear reason they’re doing it, and it’s a much broader, coordinated attack on the freedom to vote across the country,” said Joanna Lydgate of States United Action. Her group supports election officials who recognize the validity of the 2020 election. Noting that she coaches youth basketball, Lydgate added another reason: “Really, what this is is people who are sore losers, people who don’t want to accept defeat.” The primary losers have an obvious role model: Trump himself. After his first election loss during his 2016 run for the White House, in the Iowa caucuses, Trump baselessly claimed fraud and demanded an investigation. When he was elected president later that year, he claimed that fraud was the reason Democrat Hillary Clinton won more votes than he did. Trump set up a commission to try to prove that. That commission was disbanded when it failed to produce any evidence. After his 2020 defeat, Trump and his supporters lost 63 of 64 legal challenges to the election. Trump continued to blame fraud without evidence, even after his own attorney general and election reviews in the states failed to turn up any widespread wrongdoing that would have any impact on the outcome. This year’s post-primary election denial may be a preview for November when Republicans face Democrats in thousands of races across the country. The GOP is expected to do well — an expectation that could set the stage for more false claims of fraud when some of those candidates lose. Still, some Republicans aren’t waiting for Democratic voters to weigh in before making unsubstantiated fraud claims. Some recent candidates who have done that are relatively marginal ones. In Georgia, Trump’s two recruits to challenge the state’s governor and secretary of state — former Sen. David Perdue and Rep. Jody Hice — admitted defeat after they lost the May primaries. But Kandiss Taylor, a fringe candidate who won only 3% of the primary vote for governor, refused to concede, claiming there was widespread cheating. In South Carolina, Republican Harrison Musselwhite — who goes by Trucker Bob — lost his primary against Gov. Henry McMaster by 66 percentage points. Still, he complained of problems with the election to the state party, as did another losing GOP contender, Lauren Martel, who ran for attorney general. The party rejected their claims. Others who have cried fraud are more prominent. Joey Gilbert, who came in second in the Nevada Republican primary for governor, posted a Facebook video days after the June tally showing him 26,000 votes short. “These elections, the way they’ve been run, it’s like Swiss cheese,” he said. “There’s too many holes.” Gilbert, who attended Trump’s rally near the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, before the riot at the U.S. Capitol, demanded a recount. The results appear unlikely to substantially change the final tally. He did not return messages seeking comment. In Arizona, former newscaster Kari Lake won Trump’s endorsement in her quest for the party’s nomination for governor, insisting that he won the presidency in 2020. This past week, she told supporters that her top opponent in the primary “might be trying to set the stage for another steal” in next month’s primary. That earned her a rebuke from Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who has endorsed Lake’s chief rival, Karin Taylor Robson. “The 2022 elections haven’t even been held yet, and already we’re seeing speculation doubting the results – especially if certain candidates lose,” Ducey tweeted. “It’s one of the most irresponsible things I can imagine.” Lake’s campaign did not return messages seeking comment. In Colorado, county clerk Peters immediately questioned the primary results once the tally showed her losing badly in the secretary of state’s race. Claiming fraud as she trailed former county clerk Pam Anderson, a regular debunker of Trump’s election lies, Peters said: “Looking at the results, it’s just so obvious it should be flipped.” She and Senate candidate Hanks repeated Trump’s election lies, a position that had won them strong support last spring at the 3,000-strong GOP state assembly, a convention attended by the party’s strongest activists. Both candidates, in letters to the secretary of state’s office this past week demanding a recount, cited that support in explaining why they could not have lost their primaries. Hanks referred a reporter to an email address for media for the two candidates, though no one responded to questions sent to that address. The activists who attend the GOP gathering are just a small fraction of the 600,000 who voted in the June primary. According to preliminary results, Peters lost by 88,000 votes and Hanks by 56,000 votes. Their recount letters gave reasons why the candidates believed those vote tallies were “being artificially controlled.” The Colorado Secretary of State’s office said
Fiscal year through June: More than 2 million encounters at southern border
More than 2 million people have been encountered/apprehended at the U.S. southern border in fiscal 2022 through June, according to official data released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. It’s the greatest number recorded in a fiscal year in U.S. history. They total 2,002,604 from over 150 countries. In June, a record 207,416 people were apprehended, the highest number recorded in June in the history of the Department of Homeland Security. The total includes those apprehended and encountered by U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations staff. They exclude gotaways first reported by The Center Square, which includes at least another 50,009 people. The total for June, including gotaways, was 257,425, a record high for the month. “Gotaways” is the official term used by Border Patrol to describe foreign nationals who enter the U.S. illegally and don’t surrender at ports of entry but intentionally seek to evade capture from law enforcement. They are currently in the U.S., and no one in law enforcement knows who or where they are. The last time encounters were nearly this high was the last summer of the presidency of Bill Clinton. In June 2000, 117,469 people were encountered/apprehended at the southern border, excluding gotaways. In May, CBP reported the highest monthly total of apprehensions at the southern border in recorded U.S. history of 239,416, excluding another minimum 70,793 recorded gotaways. In April, CBP reported 235,478 total encounters/apprehensions; in March, 222,239; in February, 165,902; in January, 154,816. The totals all exclude gotaway data. CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said the June numbers represent a 14% decrease in encounters compared to May. “We are committed to implementing our strategy of reducing irregular migration, dissuading migrants from undertaking the dangerous journey, and increasing enforcement efforts against human smuggling organizations,” Magnus said. “We continue to rescue and provide medical assistance to those who are in distress.” And to those coming to the country illegally, he said, “My message to those considering taking this dangerous journey is simple: this is not an easy passage, the human smugglers only care about your money – not your life or the lives of your loved ones, and you will be placed in removal proceedings from the United States if you cross the border without legal authorization and are unable to establish a legal basis to remain.” The overwhelming majority of those apprehended in June – 68% – were single adults totaling 140,197. CBP says 44% of all adult encounters and 27% of family unit individuals were processed for expulsion under the public health authority, Title 42. Unaccompanied minors are not processed for expulsion. The number of unaccompanied children brought to the U.S. by alleged smugglers increased by 4%, totaling 15,271. In June, the average number of unaccompanied children in CBP custody was 752 a day compared to 692 a day in May. Despite a record number of people coming to the southern border, CBP says it “continues to enforce U.S. immigration law and apply consequences to those without a legal basis to remain in the U.S. “Current restrictions at the U.S. border have not changed; single adults and families encountered at the southwest border will continue to be expelled, where appropriate, under CDC’s Title 42 Order. Those who are not expelled will be processed under the long-standing Title 8 authority and placed into removal proceedings.” But this isn’t what’s happening, Republican governors and attorneys general nationwide argue. This week, 19 AGs filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a lawsuit filed by Texas and Louisiana. The lawsuit was filed in response to a directive issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that drastically altered deportation policy, which the states argue contradicts federal law established by Congress and allows more people to stay in the U.S. illegally, including violent criminals. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis implemented a range of policies to combat what he describes as the “Biden border crisis,” including suing over the Biden administration’s “catch and release” and other programs. Texas and Missouri have sued the administration over several border security issues, including halting border wall construction and reimplementing an Obama-era program allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the country. Texas and Arizona also have implemented a range of border security measures costing their states’ taxpayers a combined multiple billions of dollars to thwart criminal activity stemming from the southern border. And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says his state’s law enforcement officials have confiscated enough fentanyl to kill nearly every man, woman, and child in the U.S., which is brought into Texas illegally from Mexico. Republished with the permission of The Center Square.
Family members of Alabama’s former Secretary of State Mabel Amos file lawsuit
A lawsuit filed against Regions Financial Corp. alleges that the bank holding company mismanaged a charitable trust named for a former Alabama secretary of state — charging exorbitant fees and steering scholarship money to children of the trust board members. The suit, dated July 7, was filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court by family members of Mabel Amos, who served as Alabama Secretary of State from 1967 to 1975, al.com reports. The lawsuit contends that the board trustees benefited personally “using the funds in the Trust to educate their children at expensive out-of-state colleges and were not in financial need, while members of Amos’ immediate family were in financial need.” The suit seeks to remove Regions as the trustee bank and require it to pay back all distributions to the trustee children, as well as compensatory and punitive damages. In 1993, Amos filed her will, establishing a memorial trust in her name with Union Bank, which eventually merged with Regions. According to the lawsuit, Regions began charging “outrageous” fees when oil was discovered on Amos’ property, in contrast to “reasonable” fees when there were only natural gas wells there. For example, in the suit, the plaintiffs claim that Regions was paid about $7,000 for spending five hours a week administering the trust in 2010. Within a year, that same five hours a week cost $92,736. From 2002 to 2018, the suit claims, the trust paid more than $1 million in administration fees to Regions. At the same time, the number and dollar amount of scholarships also increased, from $21,794 through five scholarships in 2011 to $214,000 among 17 scholarships two years later. Among those scholarships were “thousands of dollars” for the children of two attorney trustees, the suit claims, who did not attend colleges in Alabama, which was not Amos’ intent in setting up the trust. In addition, Lagniappe Mobile reported the son and daughter of Alabama Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Albritton received $120,000 from the trust to attend the University of Texas. Al.com reached out to Jennifer Elmore, vice president of corporate media and public relations for Regions, who would not comment directly on the suit. “Regions’ fee is less than one percent of the market value of the assets under management, and that is consistent with our standard rates and competitive with industry rates,” Elmore stated. Republished with the permission of The Associated Press.
