1. Climate change,
It’s easy to get caught up in the deeply flawed character of Donald Trump. We also need to recognize the policy catastrophe of his presidency.
Compare the trumped-up problems he’s been focusing on with the real problems facing this country. Last week, for example, Trump ordered an end to the Obamaera executive action that shielded around 800,000 young undocumented immigrants — often called “Dreamers” — from deportation under what’s been known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.
For what reason? There’s zero evidence Dreamers are taking jobs away from native-born Americans. In fact, evidence points in the opposite direction: They’ve been generating economic activity that’s created more jobs.
Trump’s other recent policy decisions reveal the same pattern — alleging that some group is part of a problem that doesn’t really exist.
A few weeks ago, he gave the Defense Department authority to expel transgender people from the military and barred the Pentagon from recruiting transgender troops.
Why? Transgender people have bravely served this country.
There’s only one reason why Trump is doing these things — to shore up his base.
Meanwhile, Trump is neglecting or worsening five genuinely big problems facing America:
as exemplified by ever larger and more destructive hurricanes and coastal flooding.
Trump’s response? Taking the United States out of the Paris accord, reversing every major initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, and filling his administration with climate-change deniers.
2. The undermining of our democracy
through voter suppression, gerrymandering and interference in our elections by foreign governments.
What’s Trump’s response to this? Alleging, with zero evidence, that 3 million to 5 million fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election, and then setting up a commission to find evidence of this in order to justify more voter suppression by states seeking to minimize minority votes.
3. The proliferation of nuclear warheads
and missiles around the world, and most recently the danger posed by North Korea.
What is Trump doing about this? Trying to get America out of its nuclear deal with Iran, thereby giving Iran an excuse to revive its nuclear program.
4. Widening inequality
and a growing population of poor in America.
Trump’s response? Proposing a tax plan that will make the rich even richer. And submitting to Congress a budget that cuts low-income housing, job training and food assistance, funds to keep poor families warm, even Meals on Wheels.
5. Racism, hatefulness
and divisiveness.
What is Trump doing about this? Fueling even more of it by equating white supremacists with those who oppose racism, by militarizing the police, and by legitimizing discrimination against Muslims, Latinos, gays, transgender Americans and African-Americans.
Trump and his administration have been at it for less than eight months. We will be paying the price for years to come.
Seems that for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, being a believing Catholic is enough to disqualify a candidate for a federal judgeship.
Feinstein stated as such at confirmation hearings for Notre Dame law professor Amy Barrett, nominated by President Trump to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
“I think whatever a religion is, it has its own dogma,” explained the senator. “And I think in your case, professor, when you read your speeches, the conclusion one draws is that the dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s of concern when you come to the big issues that large numbers of people have fought for years in this country.”
In follow-up clarification from Feinstein’s office, we learn that what’s foremost on the senator’s mind is abortion.
“Professor Barrett has argued that a judge’s faith should affect how they approach certain cases. Based on this, Feinstein questioned her if she could separate her views from the law, particularly regarding women’s reproductive rights.”
But Barrett is already on record, and widely quoted, that a judge should recuse himself or herself when deliberating a case that conflicts with his or her religious convictions.
Most fundamental, however, is a judge’s willingness and ability to think clearly, rigorously and honestly.
How is it that religious principle is “dogma,” but left-wing doctrine, spontaneously emerging from the minds of men and women with certain political predispositions, is not?
“Women’s reproductive rights”? Where does this come from? What exactly is the authority to the conclusion, and codifying into law, that a woman has a “right” to destroy her innocent unborn child? From what incontrovertible eternal truth does this absurdity emerge?
I would put it, and Feinstein’s inquisition, more in the category of the famous quote of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
We have arrived at a sad state of affairs where many falsehoods have been widely peddled in society and ultimately accepted as truths. And the process whereby this has occurred is frighteningly like the process described by Goebbels. Alleged “facts,” emerging from politically interested parties are repeated in the media until these “facts” are widely accepted as truth and then preserved by suppressing dissent.
After many years, many of these distortions have found their way into courtrooms and into law.
Now liberals like Feinstein, after having succeeded in rewriting much of our social script, and purging the biblically rooted truths that informed our law and replacing them with the premises of the secular humanism promoted on our college campuses, want to move forward with the rest of Goebbels’ program.
In their view, a legal scholar who happens to believe that to destroy life in the womb is murder, should be disqualified to be a federal judge.
Is their opinion the same regarding a legal scholar who happens to believe that marriage is a holy sacrament between a man and a woman?
Feinstein and company should be on notice that, despite their inclinations, America remains a free nation and still, in the eyes of many, a free nation under God.