The Scalia Effect Round Two: Politics at the Middle of the Presidential Primary Season

Justice Antonin Scalia died six weeks ago, almost exactly 11 months before a new president will be inaugurated in 2017.  What since then? 1) Senate Republicans met and signed a paper that they would not put up for vote any person Pres. Obama put forth to replace Justice Scalia.  2) Conservative Justice Alito said the court "would manage" without a ninth justice.  3) Democratic voters have leaned toward the more centrist president candidate, although they have their far-left kicked into a pretty high gear.  4) Republican voters have leaned--strongly--away from the centrist candidates, with Marco Rubio dropping out after he couldn't beat Donald Trump in his home state of Florida.  5) Obama nominated Merrick Garland (another white male--we'll do a post later on how this is the court of the white males, for the white males, by the white males--note I'm a white male), called a consensus builder, previous supporter of Democratic candidates, and centrist.  6) Trump has gone on winning primaries and people like Lindsey Graham, a thoughtful Republican, have voiced concern that not only does he have almost no chance of winning in November, but that he is likely to push a bunch of senate races into the democratic column.  7)  Apparently worried about the same thing, Senator Hill, R-Ill, yesterday became the first Repub senator to say he will talk to Garland.  8) Trump in Arizona came closer than ever to winning half of the primary votes, with 49%.  9)  CNN did a poll saying that 64% of those polled thought there should be hearings on Garland by the Senate. 10) Ted Cruz has come on stronger against Trump, and centrist John Kasich won his home state of Ohio, but Kasich seems to have no practical chance of being nominated.  After all, he's actually been caught negotiating with Democrats in the past.

Ted Cruz, in a showdown over raising the deficit a couple of years ago, proved he was willing to ruin the full faith and credit of the US government before he would negotiate with anybody.  Had he got his way, the feds would have been unable to pay their bills, then some banks would have failed, then . . . .  Ask the citizens of Puerto Rico and Argentina if having your gov say it ain't gonna pay is a way to have fun.   They've had that experience in recent years, and Greece is teetering on the brink of it.  What is it in Greece?  30% unemployment, with 1/3 of people working for government?  I guess the Great Recession wasn't great enough for Mr. Cruz.  He hoped to bring wicked modern US society all the way to its knees.  Then maybe it would get back to God.  Had he succeeded in that, the insolvent government certainly wouldn't have been as able to fight terrorists.

Back to the Scalia effect:  To me, when the Justice died, the odds that Trump and Clinton would be nominated and Clinton would win looked like 50-50.  Now our odds of having the first female president in history seem closer to 2-to-1.  Surprises are inevitable, and there could be an upset either in primaries or in the general election.  That leaves us with questions: 
First, is the Republican Party as we have known it since, say, Herbert Hoover in the act of disintegrating, or is it just in the much smaller act of handing the Dems a presidential election? 
Second, who might a President H Clinton nominate?  Not someone as centrist conservative as Merrick Garland? 
Third, is it time for all those libs to be quietly grateful that the Repub Senate is playing into their hands?   Will it end up with Ms. Clinton nominating an genuine liberal who also isn't another white male? 
Fourth, will Mr. McConnell try to keep her from putting anybody on the High Court for four years? 
Will Mr. Trump go on making up his mind on the spot about questions like, "So do you think women who have abortions should be fined or go to jail?"   To be fair, I had never thought about that myself, even though I was already 23 years old before abortion stopped being a crime.  In the 43 years since, I had never imagined that anyone would suggest aborting women might be treated like criminals again.  Yet as this blog has pointed out, it took a Supreme Court decision about 1967 (Griswold v. Connecticut) to decriminalize Giving Birth Control Advice, for heaven's sake!   Somehow giving birth control advice doesn't seem quite as nefarious as giving certain other kinds of advice, like how to overthrow the gov or kill the pres or blow up the skyscrapers or the Pentagon.  Hadn't Connecticut heard the saying, "Free advice is worth every penny you pay for it?"

Stay tuned for the next twists and turns of our national drama.  Unless I get a job and this blog goes silent again.  How could any of us live without these lines?

Round Three or Maybe Four on the Right to Privacy

First I'll say that to make my blog more interesting, even to me, I found one--no--several ways to include sex a certain number of lines down this.  Nothing too drastic, but slightly spicy.
As a paralegal whose main talent is unpaid legal research and writing, I decided to delve further into the law of privacy by making a trip to the University of Arizona law library near downtown Tucson.  To get there I had to drive on streets clogged with huge numbers of other "winter visitors" like me.  Once I attained the quiet of the library, I was the only person there without a laptop.  Despite that disadvantage, I found Corpus Juris, one of two well-known US legal encyclopedias, and made a long set of notes.  The following comes rather slavishly from Corpus Juris.  I forgot to note the year, which is bad form in legal citation.  Volume 16B, approximately sections 1001 - 1040.  It gives us (or at least me) a more general set of ideas about this right.

The privacy right is a fundamental personal right--can't you imagine a tall dark-haired legally trained speaker sounding very serious?  Go ahead; try to imagine that; I am.  Isn't Ted Cruz a lawyer?  He'll do.  Donald Trump is not dignified enough for this part.  Cruz intones "fundamental personal right."    It is to be accorded the same deference as the right of free speech.  Don't you love it when a court "accords" something, especially deference?  It has been called the "most comprehensive right." Sounds important.  Now if we just knew what it meant.  More comprehensive than the right to a jury trial?  I guess.  Applies to the most varied situations?  Who can tell?  Wait, though--it is limited--hear the audience gasp.  It's comprehensive yet limited!  Oh, the law.  We're lost already.  But we must try to go on.  With Ted Cruz' help, we shall.

These are our Rights we're figuring out here--the things that may keep us out of jail if we--pardon the indelicate term--"jack off" and President Cruz passes a law against it.  He never does that himself.  He has a wife.  Who ever heard of anyone with a wife amusing himself in private?  Look, I have a book-length draft about those kinds of subjects you may be able to read on request, but not here.  My son Eric, a perceptive type not at all interested in reading about either his father's sex or legal opinions, noted at age 15 that a law against teenage boys "amusing themselves in private" would be hard to enforce.  Back to that old, or rather, young privacy right, which is limited to rights that are fundamental to the concept of ordered liberty.  The concept of ordered liberty, I can tell you from a lot of unnecessarily legal reading, is, as Bill Murray put it in Ghostbusters, "very big in Gozer," or at least very big in US courts. We could even do a blog some day on ordered liberty.  (One on Gozer might draw more readers.  I've actually been working a little on a place related to Gozer, which is where a demon comes from.  It's called Ashtar, claims to be quite a bit closer to Earth then Gozer ever was, and has mostly only white witches.) Nobody else would learn anything from that sort of blog--you don't think anybody besides Alan Rasmussen reads this stuff, do you?  There's no "you" in "you" here.  Kind of like certain small towns in southern Utah--no there there.  Well, the blow, I mean the blog.  Beware of alluding to sex in essays; Freudian slips occur.  The blog does have about 175 page-views that don't seem to be me.  Who knows?  Maybe "we" will educate the masses!  If so we will hurry to tell them that privacy includes mental privacy, which should be a relief to everybody.  I seem to have the right to think about any damned thing I want to.  With or without the help of the Supreme Court.   This blog should serve as some demonstration of that.  Do I need mental privacy protected by law when I already possess absolute privacy to my thoughts, at least on this side of the veil?   
Constitutional Privacy has two strands.
First it avers one's independence, and
second, it avoids or blocks disclosure. It shields activities so private or personal as to be of no concern to others, and yet I think masturbation is illegal in 11 states, and oral sex in 26, but I didn't verify it on Wikipedia.  So there are some others concerned whether the Constitution thinks they should be or not.
Those concerned people will be relieved to hear that the right protects only a reasonable expectation of privacy. Out in public few if any privacy rights hold sway.  I used to have a knock-em-dead-lovely girlfriend Andy Gentry.  Died of breast cancer; wasn't quite that lovely after a while with cancer.  Anyway, back in the lovely days, Andy thought it would be exciting to make love between the bushes at the edge of a public park, or in the car a little out of the way but not too far.  The thought of getting caught, hopefully not by people wearing blue uniforms, was spicy to her, but she wasn't protected by privacy law.  You wonder if we were foolish enough to test her fantasy?  I won't say, except to note we were fairly foolish, as lovers can be.  And to say we were never summoned before a court of law for anything we did together although she was still divorcing when . . .  I'm off the subject, but it's more interesting than the subject, isn't it?  Maybe I'm doing the wrong blog.   

Home and family are two "zones of privacy" for lawful acts. Intrusion into these zones must be for legitimate government interests. The privacy right does not confer the right to impose one's lifestyle on another whose privacy will be thus invaded. Try to tell them that in Utah, where imposing numerous elements of Mormon lifestyle on every soul is considered one of the sacred functions of both state and local government. If you hold contraband, your privacy right doesn't protect you from having this found out. Smoking pot is not a fundamental right of American justice, per courts in Washington and Massachusetts. There is no private right to watch obscenity in public, though you can at home, but beware of kiddie porn.  I'll tell you to destroy the stuff if I catch you.  Kiddies and porn don't mix.  About that I'm serious.

Donald Trump As A Threat To The Democracy John Adams Gave Us?

Since our last post 8 days ago, Donald Trump has swept to a wide range of victories on Super Tuesday, and all of his rivals for the Republican nomination have quit except John Kasich, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz.  Trump looks hard to stop.  Yet he is only averaging the vote of one primary Republican voter in three.

Also since then much of the general leadership of the Republican Party has spoken out in alarm against Trump.  Mitt Romney, presidential nominee four years ago, said this, with a little paraphrasing:  Think of Donald Trump's personal qualities, bullying, showing off, misogyny, greed [we might add 'lying'], and absurd third grade antics.  Imagine your children acting the way he does.  People in prominent positions need to show honorable conduct. Donald Trump is a phony [because he isn't the answer to who can lead our country].  He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.

One problem with Romney's critique is that he may have waited until it is too late to do much good. Yet I have to echo his statement of two self-evident facts:  Trump has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.

Walter Shapiro, an op-ed columnist who once ran as a Democrat, put it more strongly (again with a little paraphrasing):  Trump poses a mortal danger to the American experiment itself.  Imagine in 1968 if George Wallace had led the primaries.  Never in modern history has a serious presidential candidate displayed such contempt for responsibilities that come with the Oval Office.  Trump makes Napoleon look self-effacing.  If he prevails as Republican nominee only a wounded Hillary Clinton and a divided Democratic Party stand between him and the White House.  Trump is the gravest threat to our democracy in decades.

Shapiro says that Trump didn't know what the phrase "nuclear triad" meant.  I thought I knew but checked--that the US has nuclear bombs to be delivered by three methods: planes, submarines, and  missles.  This is a Sarah Palin kind of ignorance of presidential basics that reveals the person should not be running for that office.  That kind of person can't be given access to the nuclear codes that, if used, would either end human life on earth, or damage it so completely it would probably be the end of life as we know it.

John Adams, with Jefferson and many others, helped create us as a country based on the rule of law.  Trump has shown himself many times over to be a sort of personality that has no genuine respect for such notions of civilized government as "the rule of law."  He might not be able to even define what the rule of law is.  If president, he would become a law unto himself.  Nixon did that, almost accidentally and blunderingly, in numerous small ways.  Bush condoned torture and Obama is busy executing people without due process via our powerful new drones. Trump would, in poker terms, "see" these small acts of previous presidential lawlessness, and "raise" them brazenly and openly. Remember--Trump admires dictator Putin and hesitated before denouncing David Duke the white supremicist.  Our rights of privacy, along with dozens of other kinds of rights, cannot be trusted to a President Trump.

The deeper disease in America than Trump, of course, is whatever has happened in millions of American minds to allow them to think that Trump could actually help the country.  I'm not sure how we do something about that.  But one crisis at a time, eh?