What do you know? He's not dead.

Pat Buchanan.

Today's column is a celebration of the Buchananite takeover of the GOP in the person of the Duce, Donald Trump.

For him, in utter delirium, Buchanan even abandons his decades of anti-Israeli sentiment and propaganda and celebrates Trump's Zionism.

Not entirely happy with the Duce's current hostility toward China regarding Hong Kong, however.

He doesn't see it part of the virus-connected shift for the election year.

He's very please with all the stuff about NATO and Putin and trade and Iran and global warming and and and.

And race.

A Most Consequential Presidency

A reminder of Pat's preference for authoritarian populism over rule of law republicanism and popular government.

A preference that emerged only when the rise of the Duce emboldened Buchanan.

A bad idea and a worse idea. Quite apart from the constitution.

Drafting men is the bad idea for any but the military purpose of pretty clearly true blue and honest to gosh national defense.

Does that include drafting men to participate in any mess we might get into because of our far flung Cold War alliances like Article 5 of NATO?

I hesitate to say aye or nay to drafting men to save Riga from the dreaded Russkies.

Yes, I suppose, given the alliance. But that is another argument against that alliance.

The even worse idea is drafting women.

Male-Only Military Draft Is Constitutional, Federal Appeals Court Rules

A federal appeals court upheld the constitutionality of the male-only military draft system on Thursday, overturning a lower court ruling.

In an opinion issued Thursday, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans noted that the Supreme Court upheld the male-only draft in 1981 and said the 5th Circuit is a “strict stare decisis” court and “cannot ignore a decision from the Supreme Court,” adding that only the Supreme Court may revise its precedent.

. . . .

After arguments before the 5th Circuit in March, a federal commission recommended extending the draft to include women as well.

“The Commission concluded that the time is right to extend Selective Service System registration to include men and women, between the ages of 18 and 26. 

"This is a necessary and fair step, making it possible to draw on the talent of a unified Nation in a time of national emergency,” a summary to the commission’s final report said.

Do American blacks hate whites and white America the way Arabs hate Jews and Israel?

No doubt.

More than seventy years of liberal shouting about white racism and black rage and about how they, too, would riot and destroy and hate white people have had a marked impact, encouraging black rage and black belief in white racism.

As was intended, all that time.

White people are aware.

And the hate propaganda becomes earsplitting during election years, especially presidential years.

Why do you suppose so many whites think black hatred of them, "reverse racism", is the biggest problem in American today, bigger than white hatred of blacks?

All those decades of left wing hate propaganda had an impact on whites, too.

And yet they (we) put Obama in the White House, twice, though we knew he had very sore toes about race.

Twice.

And to this day those whites think he may have been the finest president in a long time.

The most presidential in a very, very long time.

Really excellent video

The Abolitionists, a PBS American Experience series.

And very, very far from allowing any sort of moral equivalence to obtain between these folks and the slave owners and their broader alliance, the opponents of the abolitionists all over the country, including the mobs of the North.

Who, watching this, does not see that struggle as continuous with the struggles not only of the Civil War, but also of Reconstruction, and of the Civil Rights Era?

Or the struggle even today?

Oh, and last night there was the chilling Hitler on Trial, also on amazon video.

Also, in its way, the same struggle.

For liberté, égalité, and fraternité.

Die-hards haven't all died, yet

Ted Rall.

If Trump Wins, Don’t Blame Progressives. This Is on You, Centrists.

It's not Sanders. It's the Bernie Bros.

Universal sexism

It appears the universal conviction of popular culture that for a woman in authority to get the necessary respect her underlings must address her as a man.

They must call her not "Ma'am" but "Sir", not "Boss" but "Boss Man".

Catherine the Great, Queen Elizabeth I ("Gloriana"), the Queen Empress Victoria, Golda Meir, and Mrs. Ghandi would all have found this conviction profoundly sexist and misogynist.

As do I.

A crime in public is still a crime. A crime boss acting in public is all the more egregiously a crime boss.

Not just Ukraine, Trump now calls for China to probe Bidens

What the media not in his corner and Democratic blogs claim is proof he is a narcissist is proof he is a psychopathic (sociopathic?) criminal like the Al Capone character of The Untouchables.

Why they prefer to hit him with a shrink-speak label they have to explain every time they use it to just calling him the crime boss and thug he is, citing exactly the same proofs, something that would need no explaining, is a mystery of the liberal mind.

So many surprises

That For Greater Glory is on Netflix, about this.

And that Peter O'Toole is in it, even in a absurd role.

Playing a martyred priest!

Liberals used to be for freedom of religion, and not only for freedom from it.

But not for many years, now.

Of course, it is not a surprise that so many critics panned it.

Remember The Passion, which was a really brilliant and moving film, and the reception it received from our contemporary liberal and Jewish critics?

In Mexico and elsewhere the cultural revolution against Christendom was quite forthright, violent, and frank, back in the day.

Coexistence, in that time, did not seem a viable option to enough of the population and the classe politique.

And the question is forced upon us.

How can we compare a society ruled by the traditional Christian sexual morality and one ruled instead by the post-Christian, liberal and libertarian alternative?

The latter, other things equal, would be much better for adults.

The former would be better for children, both born and unborn.

For openers.

The too far left.

Is wealth immoral?

Why would anyone make this movie?

Sounds pretty much like a right wing attack on liberals and their attitudes, though for days the rwnm has been spinning it as a product of liberal hatred of right wingers, defaming the latter.

But I guess Trump didn't see it that way.

Perhaps he would have preferred a film in which the roles of predator and prey were reversed.

The Hunt: Universal Pictures cancels film release

The Hunt, a satirical film in which liberals hunt Trump supporters and kill them for sport, was due to be released on 27 September.

Marketing of the film had already been put on hold following the El Paso and Dayton shootings.

Universal said the decision was made after "thoughtful consideration."

The Hunt's storyline is intended to reflect the divided nature of US politics.

One trailer for the film was pulled by ESPN. 

It was said to open with the sound resembling an emergency broadcast signal.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the liberal characters refer to their prey as "deplorables", a term used by Hillary Clinton to describe some of Mr Trump's fans in the run up too the 2016 elections.

Without naming the film, Mr Trump tweeted about an upcoming Hollywood release.

He said: "The movie coming out is made in order to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence and then try to blame others. They are the true racists and are very bad for our country!"

It's true. The slightly further and even further left are making the argument.

The Case for Opening Our Borders

Google "open borders" and you'll get hits at leftier sites like this one and even The Nation, just for starters.

So far as I know, the Democrats have not adopted this even as a long-term aspiration, though they are flirting with moves in that direction with their talk of decriminalization of illegal immigration.

CATO and other libertarians support this position, too.

Forget the wall already, it's time for the U.S. to have open borders

The left regards any consequent decline in the standard of living of American workers or Americans relying on Social Security, etc., as a price those Americans are morally obliged to pay in order to be fair, equitable, just, etc. to the people seeking entry.

The argument that American policy ought to serve the interests of Americans strikes cosmopolitan policy wonks whose own positions are not at risk as ignominiously selfish and deeply immoral.

The standard issue right regards all that as a feature, anyway, and not a bug.

Both sides try to downplay those risks, but neither bunch of partisans can be trusted.

Just another case in which powerful forces on both ends of the spectrum are prepared to undermine the position of the American working class in order to better serve the interests of others.

The cosmopolitan left and the Wall Street right agree: American workers are way overpaid and have it way too good.

Including working class retirees.

Undermining NATO?

Setting a moral view above realism and practicality?

Sanders backs Warren after Liz Cheney attacks 'no first use' nuclear policy

This issue was fought out during the Cold War, when the view emerged that a first use of nukes would be immoral and the US and NATO publicly and even ostentatiously refused any commitment to a "no first use" policy.

Both they and the Warsaw Pact nations knew the latter would quickly crush the former in a purely conventional war.

The only way NATO could effectively deter that was by leaving the door open to first use of nukes on the battlefield.

And so they did.

The issue was not, I must say, first use of strategic nuclear weapons against anybody, against any Warsaw Pact nation or, in particular, against the Soviet Union.

Lacking a first strike capability as everybody then was, a threat of that sort would be (a) a threat to commit suicide and hence (b) not very credible.

The NATO theory was that first use of tactical nukes on the battlefield would cause any Warsaw Pact invasion of the West to fail without so endangering the Soviet Union as to provoke them into use of strategic nukes against anyone on the NATO side and setting off a global thermonuclear war.

And that the Russians, knowing this, would not launch such an invasion.

Reagan's deployment of cruise missiles was also a necessary piece of the deterrence puzzle, given the unwillingness or inability of the NATO countries to match or surpass the conventional forces on the Soviet side.

Maybe all that has changed with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the partial dismemberment of the Soviet Union, leaving behind a considerably smaller and less powerful Russia with a much enlarged NATO crowded right up against its borders, but I don't know that it has.

Anyway, the current flap seems to be about a different issue, first use of strategic nuclear weapons, what people used to call a first strike.

And that seems odd.

Nation A was said to have a first strike capability against nation B just in case A could launch a strike that would prevent significant nuclear retaliation by B.

Back in the day, it was considered destabilizing and hence highly undesirable that either side, NATO or the Warsaw Pact, should have such a capability.

So far as I know, that is still the standard view and nobody actually has a first strike capability.

So I don't really see what this is about or how it fits into the strategic picture.

Bernie Sanders has defended his rival for the Democratic presidential 2020 nomination, Elizabeth Warren, after her policy against pre-emptive use of America’s nuclear weapons was attacked by the daughter of one of the architects of the Iraq war.

Warren reiterated her support for a “no first use” policy on nuclear weapons during the second round of Democratic presidential debates this week.

“It makes the world safer,” the Massachusetts senator said during the debate. “The United States is not going to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively, and we need to say so to the entire world.”

Liz Cheney, a Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, attacked Warren’s policy on Twitter, asking “which American cities and how many American citizens are you willing to sacrifice with your policy of forcing the US to absorb a nuclear attack before we can strike back?”

Cheney's attack was inconsequent enough, but Sanders' rejoinder was equal to it.

“Taking national security advice from a Cheney has already caused irreparable damage to our country,” Sanders wrote on Friday, in response to Cheney’s attack on Warren.

Cheney’s attack on Warren echoed the [equally mystifying- PV] response of one of Warren’s Democratic rivals during the debate, the Montana governor, Steve Bullock, who said he did not support a “no first use policy” because, “I don’t want to turn around and say, “Well, Detroit has to be gone before we would ever use that.”

How to speed the death of the EU

Europe’s patchwork of abortion laws is absurd. Rights must be made universal

That will thrill the voters in Poland.

Brexit effect forces women to go to Netherlands for abortions

Of course, the objection isn't that rules need to be all the same, but that rules need to be all equally permissive of abortions throughout Europe.

Or some women interested in killing their unborn babies might find it inconvenient, confusing, and annoying, poor things.

A stronger push for control of the laws regarding sex throughout Europe by the post-Christian, PC, feminist, liberal morality, and especially laws regarding abortion, will help drive the breakup of the EU almost as much as liberal, post-national and post-nationalist convictions regarding the morality of immigration and the rights of prospective and actual migrants have done.

That is unfortunate in many ways, for Europe and for Europeans.

But the truth is that liberals, like anybody else, are only willing to tolerate kinds of diversity that they just don't really care about.

Those they hate they want to outlaw, persecute, and abolish.

Leaving the EU is an obvious way for more conservative European countries to escape domination by the nearly universal post-Christian moral orthodoxy.

The more liberal countries, on the other hand, would be free to legalize infanticide at will, suicide and assisted suicide, and euthanasia, probably rather more often than I would.

And I am confident they would.

Wrong-footing white people. Again. Of course.

"White privilege" is about wrong-footing white people. Again.

It's a way to put white people in the wrong. Again.

It's a way to blame white people for not suffering the indignities, whatever they are, of minority status.

It's a way to blame them, not for what they do, but for what they don't suffer.

And we always need more and new and better ways to blame white people.

And that's racism, folks.

The racism of non-whites and the orthodox American left, from mainstream liberals onward.

Harping on it is almost as popular in liberal venues as screaming denunciations of Donald Trump's racism.

Though not quite, I admit.

I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked.

Not a day goes by without repeated and vicious attacks on white people of one sort or another, lots of them, echoing across the left wing noise machine, all over America.

When politicians turn moral philosopher

Someone once spoke of the concept of human rights as an essentially contested concept: whether there are any, what they are rights to or against, which rights truly exist and how we are to know that, whose or what's actions or behavior - if anyone's or anything's - are supposed to comport with, honor, guarantee, or fulfill them, and what all such talk could even mean.

Quite true, and that is because it is an empty concept, other than in its legal use, a mere mystification helpful in securing obedience or deference.

And it is abundantly clear that this is, has been all along, and must be a political contest, far too important to be left to the philosophers.

And so, of course, it never has been.

Trump’s Ominous Attempt to Redefine Human Rights

For the Trump administration to establish a “Commission on Unalienable Rights” to examine the meaning of human rights, as it did this month, is a little like Saudi Arabia forming a commission on multiparty democracy or North Korea a commission on how to end famine. 

It would be hilarious if it weren’t so ominous.

Announcing the composition of the new body, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration “takes seriously the founders’ ideas of individual liberty and constitutional government.”

. . . .
The administration has excised reproductive rights from the annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights. 

It watered down a recent United Nations Security Council resolution on victims of rape in armed conflict. 

It has withdrawn from the United Nations Human Rights Council. 

The United Nations Human Rights Committee and Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination are both without a United States member.

So what is Pompeo’s game when he asks, “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right?” and continues, “How can there be human rights, rights we possess not as privileges we are granted or even earn, but simply by virtue of our humanity?”

The author of the article, Roger Cohen, affirms his faith as a true modern liberal believer,

Modern human rights are grounded on the dignity inherent in every human being. 

They are not God-given rights, or Trump-given rights, and they apply to people of all faiths and to those who have none. 

That is not at all, and is flatly contrary to, what the Declaration of Independence, a key American founding document, says, though it is not at all contrary to every traditional, Enlightenment, or contemporary view of the question.

They include freedom of speech, the press, assembly and religion, and the “right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,” as the Universal Declaration puts it. 

They involve combating discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, gender or sexual orientation.

The United States, through the State Department and other means, has been a consistent advocate for these rights. 

The intention of Pompeo, an evangelical Christian whose beliefs infuse his policy, appears to be to turn back the clock.

In May, The Federal Register said the commission would provide “fresh thinking about human rights discourse where such discourse has departed from our nation’s founding principles of natural law and natural rights.”

I am not suggesting that Pompeo wants to go back there, but the “natural” rights of 1776 are not the human rights the United States helped codify in 1948.

In 1995, Hillary Clinton declared, “Women’s rights are human rights” and, 16 years later, “Gay rights are human rights.” 

. . . .

As head of the commission, he has appointed Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard professor known as a zealous opponent of abortion and same-sex marriage. 

Other political opinions are represented, but the body is predominantly conservative and religious.

Cohen admits he really has no idea where this is going, but he is very alarmed and, given his politics, he probably should be.

It is doubtful this commission will endorse the idea the Founders or the founding documents contain or endorse half the rights currently urged by liberals, or even all the rights contained in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Nor is it likely to urge that we should endorse or support them, all the same, in any theoretical or practical way.

Here is more.

“International institutions designed and built to protect human rights have drifted from their original mission,” Mr. Pompeo said. 

“As human rights claims have proliferated, some claims have come into tension with one another, provoking questions and clashes about which rights are entitled to gain respect.”

The announcement, along with a blunt commentary by Mr. Pompeo that was published in The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, raised worries among human rights advocates and Democratic lawmakers that Mr. Pompeo is moving to curtail State Department advocacy for some rights, particularly ones related to women’s health and reproduction and gay and transgender issues.

Some House Democrats are pushing a measure that would block State Department funding from being used for the commission, which falls under the agency’s policy planning office.

“This commission risks undermining many international human rights norms that the United States helped establish, including L.G.B.T.Q.I. rights and other critical human rights protections around the world,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Mr. Pompeo is an evangelical Christian who is open about how his religious beliefs help shape actions and policies. 

In March, Mr. Pompeo said the United States would withhold funding from foreign nongovernmental organizations that give money to foreign groups that perform abortions.

. . . .

Last month, officials in Washington told some American embassies not to fly gay pride flags after diplomats had asked to do so. 

By contrast, in 2011, Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, proclaimed in a speech that “gay rights are human rights.”

On Monday, Mr. Pompeo said: “What does it mean to say or claim that something is, in fact, a human right? 

"How do we know or how do we determine whether that claim that this or that is a human right, is it true, and therefore, ought it to be honored?”

To this day, liberals in general and black liberals especially love it

Though not if it affects their own kids.

Love what?

It used to be called "forced busing", but the author is perfectly right: it was never about busing per se.

It was about coerced imposition of racial uniformity of student bodies across entire school systems.

And that was mostly about ensuring equality of funding, quality of teaching, staff, and so on.

But it was also a finger in the eye of whites who did not want their kids subjected to the violence typical of black students, or their hatred.

And it was supposed to be, and still is.

It Was Never About Busing

To this day, whites of all ages and descriptions, and generally nonwhites who are not Afro-Americans, mostly try not to live in areas that are majority black, or even where blacks are too large a minority.

Ditto, in fact, for blacks who can find a way out.

Bear in mind that, back in the day, the oxymoronic PC expression "de facto segregation" was coined to refer to unevenness of the distribution of races in schools that was not mandated by law but the effect entirely of the residence patterns you would expect.

And the point of that was to disguise that segregation, legally mandated by definition, was not at all the issue, and the point of bussing was to coercively create race ratios in public schools that liberals of all races desired, for their own purposes, though most of the nonblacks affected positively opposed both that means and that goal.

This from Matt Yglesias at Vox is a good history lesson, though he does nothing to unmask the fraudulence of the expression, "de facto segregation" and instead himself commits the fraud, repeatedly.

[M]uch of the United States, most notably the entire South, had a longstanding policy of de jure school segregation into the 20th century — it was formally illegal for an African American student to attend a white school. 

It didn’t matter where you lived or what taxes you paid; some schools were for white students and others were for black students.

Such policies were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954[.]

. . . .

Then litigation began to turn toward de facto segregation and, crucially, to the North, based on a 1971 Supreme Court precedent from North Carolina that ruled that Charlotte’s formerly de jure segregated school system had to achieve actual racial mixing in its schools, even if that meant assigning students on a non-geographical basis. 

That legal reasoning proved to be a conceptually powerful lever for attacking de facto segregation in the North.

. . . .

A common situation in Northern cities was that there was no rule against black kids attending a white school. 

There was, instead, a long legacy of policy decisions (restrictive covenants, redlining) and informal norms that had created a stark pattern of residential segregation. 

School assignment boundaries were then drawn to reinforce the underlying pattern of residential segregation and create a situation where, de facto, the schools were segregated, even if there was no law preventing black students and white students from attending school together.

And here we are more than fifty years on from the last moment such chicanery could have restricted anyone's residential choices and liberals are still doing their best to brand this sort - or any sort? - of residential separation of races utterly illegitimate, along with the differences in racial makeups of student bodies in different areas that result.

A point that he as much as admits, thus.

An optimist 40 or 50 years ago might have hoped that de facto segregation would simply fade away over a generation or two, as the formal policies that undergirded de jure segregation were no longer there to support it.

But this hasn’t really happened. 

Measuring segregation across time is difficult because the underlying demographics have changed so much — these days, white kids are a much smaller share of the school-age population and Latino and Asian kids are a much larger one — but depending on how you look at it, progress on de facto desegregation has either stalled or reversed.

MY goes on to cite evidence suggesting that, even controlling for disparities in income and parental education, black students do better in schools with more whites while white students do worse in schools with more blacks.

He also pretty convincingly shows both white and black parents prefer that their kids attend schools where the students are as much as possible of their own race.

And that includes white liberal parents moving heaven and earth to keep their kids in the whitest possible schools.

AM Joy and Joe Biden

Too white, too old, too male, and too centrist (read: too happy with capitalism per se and not an early or enthusiastic supporter of the AOC/Bernie agenda; too close to Obama's and Hillary's positions on these matters, in fact).

The consistent line of the further left is that worries about electability favoring more centrist, white, male candidates like Mayor Pete, Joe B, and Beto are a trap and Republican Lite always loses to the real thing.

Cum grano salis, I think.

So being further left or more centrist, as the left now define it and really have defined it for years, is a question of not only class politics but what we generally call identity politics, the fruit and further pursuit of the civil rights, sexual, and cultural revolutions, rolled into one.

Hence the talk of reparations, of quotas for women, and the opposition toward not just Joe, Pete, and Beto but even Bernie based openly and squarely on race, sex, age, and, as it turns out, sexual orientation.

Recall how Pete in early days got a pass for much of his centrism because he is gay, and his stories of how he realized that and adjusted to it and is living it evoked great sympathy and admiration.

Democrats' ideology police have been hammering Joe Biden

Joe Biden Had A Very Bad Week

They already don't like him because he's an OLD, WHITE, MAN.

And they already don't like him because he's not exactly consumed with enthusiasm for the AOC/Bernie agenda, and not at all the guy to renounce capitalism in favor of socialism, even under pressure.

But he did bend on the Green New Deal and he cravenly and without a shred of credibility folded completely on the Hyde Amendment, gaining nothing but a respite in hostile criticism FROM DEMOCRATS.

Faux Democrats and outright non- and anti-Democrats of the further left have joined arms with the most radical of baby-killing feminists and anointed themselves the ideology police of the Democratic Party, and have largely gotten away with it.

Waning clericalism in Ireland

Ireland Votes Overwhelmingly to Ease Divorce Restrictions

Ireland has voted overwhelmingly to ease restrictions on divorce, taking another step toward liberalizing a Constitution that was once dominated by the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

Official figures released this weekend showed that 82 percent of voters in referendum on Friday approved the change, with all areas of the country voting strongly in favor.

The results come on the heels of other major social shifts in the country: a 2015 vote to legalize same-sex marriage — the word’s first popular vote on marriage equality — and a referendum last year that repealed Ireland’s ban on abortion in almost all circumstances, including rape and incest. 

In October, the nation voted overwhelmingly to remove a ban on blasphemy from the Constitution.

Divorce was banned in Ireland by a 1937 Constitution strongly influenced by the Catholic hierarchy, and an attempt to overturn the ban in a 1986 referendum was soundly defeated by a 3-to-2 margin. 

The country made divorce legal in 1995, after a referendum deciding the issue with just over 9,000 votes of 1.63 million cast.

But the new law imposed strict conditions, including a provision that a couple must have lived apart for four of the previous five years before getting divorced.

The results of Friday’s referendum remove divorce regulations from the Constitution and place them in the hands of lawmakers. 

The government of Prime Minister Leo Varadkar, having consulted with other parties, said it would move to reduce the waiting period to two years.

A liberal court created the affirmative right to an attorney

6th Amendment

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Gideon v. Wainwright

Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335 (1963), is a landmark case in United States Supreme Court history. 

In it, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that states are required under the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to provide an attorney to defendants in criminal cases who are unable to afford their own attorneys. 

The case extended the right to counsel, which had been found under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to impose requirements on the federal government, by imposing those requirements upon the states as well.

Only a liberal court will force states to hire enough of them (maybe about ten or twenty times as many as we have), and pay them decently, and not charge indigent defendants for their services.

Yes, I watched John Oliver discuss the way the system actually works in various states, the worst of them being Florida.

Apparently more conservative courts since 1963 have had the effrontery to claim such practises are consistent with Gideon.

And his show on bail was equally horrifying.

Conservatives regularly declare they aim to undo every progressive achievement going back to the beginning of the 20th Century.

Conservative lawyers, judges, and scholars, for their part, have made no secret of their hostility toward the liberal jurisprudence that has also achieved so much, and their conviction that that jurisprudence rests on incorrect - often egregiously incorrect - readings of the constitution.

Nor is their increasing willingness to overturn what they claim are wrong decisions any secret.