Commentary by James Shott
The presidential
campaign has not adequately addressed the issues and problems facing the United
States, but the next president has a mountain of problems needing attention.
Looking at polls from major news organizations – CBS
News/New York Times; ABC News/Washington Post; NBC News/Wall Street Journal – from
May through October of this year, the economy/jobs is the leading issue in all polls,
followed by the combination of terrorism, national security and immigration. Tam Warner Minton, writing on The Huffington
Post blog, suggests that the Supreme Court is the most important of the issues.
All of these issues
are important, but two of them – The economy/jobs; and the U.S. Supreme Court –
are already affecting the country.
The thing to remember
when evaluating the way Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton approach these
problems is that one of them loves and lives for big and bigger government,
while the other plainly prefers the private sector.
Looking at the
economy and job creation, Trump has actually created jobs through his hotels,
golf courses and casinos; while Clinton’s decades in the public sector leaves
her with no real experience in this important sphere.
Her approach to jobs
and the economy will rely on increased regulation, reducing taxes on the middle
class and making the rich pay more. The National Center for Policy Analysis
(NCPA) analyzed the Clinton plan and said, “As currently
presented, the Clinton tax proposals would increase taxes on high-income
earners, reduce the exceptions to the corporate income tax, and increase estate
taxes, in an effort to raise more revenue and bring greater equity to the
current U.S. tax system. According to our NCPA-DCGE model, the plan would
generate $615 billion in revenue over 10 years, with most of that increase
coming from the federal personal income tax. The cost to the economy would be a
net loss of 211,000 jobs by 2026, and a reduction in real GDP of 0.9 percent.”
Clinton has criticized Trump’s tax cutting policy, deriding
it as “Trumped-up trickle-down,” a cute phrase, but a horribly ignorant economic
reality. The NCPA explains why this idea will out perform Clinton’s: “Rather,
insofar as tax cuts raise after-tax profits, they induce taxpayers to expand
investment and, in so doing, wages, and jobs. Insofar as they raise after-tax
wages, they induce taxpayers to enter the labor force and work longer hours.
This is not the result of money “trickling down” from one person to another but
of the reduction of disincentives to invest and work that are inherent to any
tax code,” and especially one that punishes people with money to invest in
job-creating economic activity.
Where the U.S.
Supreme Court is concerned, it can cause great harm to the nation if Justices
stray from their Constitutional limits, and they often do.
In response to a question in a
presidential debate, Clinton said: “If I have the opportunity to make any
Supreme Court appointments, I’m going to look broadly and widely for people who
represent the diversity of our country, who bring some common-sense, real-world
experience.”
This answer displays
a shocking lack of understanding of the job of the Supreme Court, and the
purpose and meaning of the U.S. Constitution. The Court’s duty and function have
nothing to do with ideas of diversity, or the supposed benefits of real-world
experience. Its job is essentially to resolve legal disputes, being sure always
to uphold the principles of the Constitution.
The Constitution is
alive, but it is not a “living document,” the meaning of which would change
with the winds of societal preferences. The Founders based the Constitution upon
important principles that were intended for the ages. They understood that at
some future point there may be a true need for modification, and they created a
mechanism for doing so. That mechanism is not simply a majority of Supreme
Court Justices wanting to make a change; it is a clear and difficult process,
difficult by design to prevent foolish modifications to satisfy some momentary
desire.
There are essentially
two approaches to how justices interpret the Constitution: conservatism/originalism,
which honors and adheres to the actual language and original intent of the
Constitution; and liberalism, which is a willingness to interpret the language for
some social or political end, which results in making law from the bench
instead of in the Congress, as the Constitution requires.
Packing the Court
with Justices who do not honor the original meaning of the Constitution in
order to achieve some narrow ideological objective is a form of subversion, and
Hillary Clinton is married to that goal.
Donald Trump, on the
other hand, understands the great wrong of that goal, and has vowed to nominate
judicial conservatives/originalists to fill Court vacancies.
The left likes for things
to be easy: easy border control and easy citizenship; easy changing of the
Constitution; easy to vote through early voting and without a picture ID; and easy to
live off of government support, rather than facing the rigors of a job, among
them.
Such laxness and
failure to uphold traditional standards makes it much easier to turn America to
liberalism/socialism through subversive measures than trying to persuade people
to accept it. We must resist these efforts.
Cross-posted from Observations
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