Betrayal: The First Slices

     Most breakings of important political promises are achieved through that ol’ debbil gradualism: slicing ever-so-thin slices off the promise, slowly, steadily, until an unsustainable tag end is all that remains. Once that end sits in full view, the promise-breaker can simply say “we can no longer defend this stance in the light of all these other developments.” It won’t get him perfect absolution – especially not from those who remembered who engineered the “other developments” – but it will usually get him past the Sturm und Drang to the next election...and in politics, that’s all that matters.

     The death of Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was immediately followed by pronouncements from prominent Republicans in the Senate that no new Justice would be confirmed to take Scalia’s place until after the inauguration of a new president. Many on the Right were relieved by those pronouncements...until they reflected on the natures and past behavior of those making them.

     This morning, our beloved Emperor Misha reports that the first slice has been pared from the promise salami:

     Even faster than we’d expected for the GOPe to spread their wrinkled cheeks for Obongo’s man meat, and we weren’t exactly expecting much of any resistance at all.

     Republican Senator Chuck Grassley isn’t ready to say whether he’ll convene a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on President Obama’s nominee to fill the opening on the U.S. Supreme Court.

     “I would wait until the nominee is made before I would make any decisions,” Grassley told reporters this morning. “In other words, take it a step at a time.”

     Kindly spare us the usual “that’s not really a commitment and, hey, he’s just saying that he might be prepared to discuss the thing” nonsense.

     That might, might have been convincing if we hadn’t been screwed over royally by an unbroken string of “Republican” majority defeats over the past several years that would make even the French army embarrassed.

     What we see is the first signal that the GOPe is letting the Prozi Party know, ahead of time before negotiations have even started as they always have done, that they’re quite prepared to accept whatever terms Herr Obama might dictate.

     Ponder that while I fetch more coffee.

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     Despite commanding, these past five years, Congressional caucuses that would enable them to block any and every Obamunist initiative, the Republicans we sent to Capitol Hill have surrendered on everything of substance. The most egregious of those surrenders have involved budgeting – Obama has never failed to get everything he wanted – and foreign dealings. The recent federal budget and the abject prostration to Obama’s “Iran nuclear deal” stand at the top of the list.

     Why? Why would politicians who campaigned against this president and his anti-American agenda – men we sent to Washington on the strength of their promise that they would curb his “fundamental transformation of America” – give in to him so spinelessly and so regularly?

     There are several possible explanations:

1. They secretly agree with him;
2. They’ve been threatened into compliance;
3. They’ve been bought off with promises of money or power;
4. They hope to use his expansions of the federal Leviathan for their own ends.

     These explanations are not mutually exclusive. In particular, #2 and #3 can easily be paired, given the depth of the Treasury and the immense enforcement power of the executive branch. That having been said. my money’s on #3 as the most plausible, with #4 running a close second.

     Politicians love power and prize it above all other things. I must have written that a hundred times by now, yet no one believes it. We continue to flock to the polls to vote for these sons of bitches as if they could be trusted to do as they’ve said. Yet once they have the power they’ve sought, all bets are off. It’s a whole new game, and we have no seat at the table.

     What’s our success / failure ratio? Since 1988, say? What percentage of our “elected representatives,” federal, state, or local, have actually been as good as their words?

     It provides some explanation for the growing support for a national dictator, at least.

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     Let there be no mistake:

There is no stability.
Neither anarchism nor any imaginable system of government will endure indefinitely.

     I concur with those who regard the Founding Fathers as geniuses of statecraft. Their Constitutional design is a thing of beauty unequaled in the history of Man. Isabel Paterson analyzed it from the standpoint of structural engineering, and found it “amazingly correct,” a thing of exquisite proportions, perfect balance, and superb stability. Yet their work has been sliced away ever so thinly, piece by piece, until there’s nothing left of it to protect Americans from the rapacity of those who lust for power above all other things.

     We approach a terminus: what Ayn Rand had in mind when she wrote:

     We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.

     On that score, Ol’ Remus has a few diamond-hard, scalpel-sharp thoughts for us today:

     Natural rights are not dispensed by men. One man can't give another man permission to be armed, it's not his to give. Permission schemes are worse than invalid, worse than fraud, worse than "pre-crime" star chambers, although they are all of these. Permission schemes are a denial of personhood itself. The right to be armed does not rest on its acceptability to others. No legislative or judicial body can claim authority to dispense the right to keep and bear arms and also claim legitimacy, and no person can apply for permission and see himself as, or be seen as, or be, a free man.

     For the past twenty-nine years, individuals’ rights have teetered on a razor’s edge. To the extent that the Supreme Court has guarded them, the credit belongs to a tiny group of men: Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Antonin Scalia. When John Roberts and Anthony Kennedy have stood with them, sanity has prevailed.

     Now Antonin Scalia has gone to his reward. The only hope Americans have of retaining even the tattered shreds of our freedom requires that his seat be filled by another Justice of similar originalist views. That won’t happen if Obama is permitted to select his replacement...and the Dishonorable Charles Grassley has just opened the door to that very catastrophe.

     Clean all your guns.
     Count your ammo.
     And pray.