15 January 2019
Is Bolton Steering Trump into War with Iran?
Tuesday - January 15, 2019 at 8:35 am

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By Patrick J. Buchanan
“Stop the ENDLESS WARS!” implored President Donald Trump in a Sunday night tweet.
Well, if he is serious, Trump had best keep an eye on his national security adviser, for a U.S. war on Iran would be a dream come true for John Bolton.
Last September, when Shiite militants launched three mortar shells into the Green Zone in Baghdad, which exploded harmlessly in a vacant lot, Bolton called a series of emergency meetings and directed the Pentagon to prepare a menu of targets, inside Iran, for U.S. air and missile strikes in retaliation.
The Wall Street Journal quoted one U.S. official as saying Bolton’s behavior “rattled people. … People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”
Bolton’s former deputy, Mira Ricardel, reportedly told a gathering the shelling into the Green Zone was “an act of war” to which the U.S. must respond decisively.
Bolton has long believed a U.S. confrontation with Iran is both inevitable and desirable. In 2015, he authored a New York Times op-ed whose title, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” said it all. He has urged that “regime change” in Iran be made a declared goal of U.S. foreign policy.

When Trump announced his decision to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops now in Syria, Bolton swiftly imposed conditions: ISIS must first be eliminated, Iranian forces and allied militias must leave, and the Kurds must be protected.
Yet enforcing such red lines would require a permanent presence of American troops. For how, without war, would we effect the removal of Bashar Assad’s Iranian allies, if he declines to expel them and the Iranians refuse to go?
Bolton has an ally in Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. In Cairo last week, Pompeo declared it U.S. policy “to expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria.
And though Hezbollah has been a “major presence” in Lebanon for several decades, “we won’t accept this as the status quo,” said Pompeo, for Hezbollah is a “wholly owned subsidiary of the Iranian regime.”
But how does the secretary of state propose to push Hezbollah out of Lebanon peacefully when the Israelis could not do it in a month-long war in 2006?
Pompeo’s purpose during his tour of the Middle East? Build a new Middle East Strategic Alliance, a MESA, an Arab NATO, whose members are to be Egypt, Jordan and the nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council.
There are other signs a confrontation is coming soon. The U.S. has objected to Iran’s pending launch of two space satellites, saying these look like tests of missiles designed to deliver nuclear warheads. Yet Iran has never produced weapons-grade uranium or plutonium and never tested an ICBM.
Pompeo has also called for a conclave in Poland in February to bring together an anti-Iran alliance to discuss what is to be done about what he calls “our common enemy.”
Over the weekend, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu boasted of Israel’s latest strike in Syria: “Just in the last 36 hours, the air force attacked Iranian warehouses with Iranian weapons at the international airport in Damascus. The accuмulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”
Israel brags that it has hit 200 targets inside Syria in recent years. The boasting may be connected to Bibi’s desire to strengthen his credentials as a security hawk for the coming Israeli election. But it is also a provocation to the Iranians and Syrians to retaliate, which could ignite a wider war between Israel and Syrian and Iranian forces.
What does the U.S. think of the Israeli strikes? Said Pompeo: “We strongly support Israel’s efforts to stop Iran from turning Syria into the next Lebanon.”
In short, forces are moving in this country and in Israel to bring about a U.S. confrontation with Iran — before our troops leave Syria.
But the real questions here are not about Bolton or Pompeo.
They are about Trump. Was he aware of Bolton’s request for a menu of targets in Iran for potential U.S. strikes? Did he authorize it? Has he authorized his national security adviser and secretary of state to engage in these hostile actions and bellicose rhetoric aimed at Iran? And if so, why?
While Trump has urged that the U.S. pull out of these Mideast wars, Pompeo has corrected him, “When America retreats, chaos often follows.”
Is Trump looking for a showdown with Iran, which could result in a war that might vault his approval rating, but be a disaster for the Middle East and world economy and do for him what Operation Iraqi Freedom did for George W. Bush?
One thing may confidently be said of the rhetoric and actions of Bolton and Pompeo: This is not what brought out the new populists who made Donald Trump president, the people who still share his desire to “stop the endless wars.”

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https://buchanan.org/blog/is-bolton-steering-trump-into-war-with-iran-135696

When Democracy Fails to Deliver
January 22, 2019 by Pat Buchanan   



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By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible … make violent revolution inevitable,” said John F. Kennedy.

In 2016, the U.S. and Britain were both witness to peaceful revolutions.

The British voted 52-48 to sever ties to the European Union, restore their full sovereignty, declare independence and go their own way in the world. Trade and immigration policy would henceforth be decided by a parliament elected by the people, not by bureaucrats in Brussels.

“Brexit” it was called. And British defiance stunned global elites.

Two and a half years later, Britain is still inside the EU, and no one seems to know when or whether the divorce will take place — a victory of London and European elites over the expressed will of the British people.

Appalled by the Brexit vote, these elites played a waiting game, broadcasting warnings of what could happen, to panic the British public into reconsidering and reversing its democratic decision.

Losing candidates and losing parties accept defeat and yield power.

Establishments have agendas they do not regard as subject to electoral repudiation or repeal. Defeated, they use their non-electoral powers to prevent unwanted policies from ever being implemented.



Call it limited democracy.

In 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected president when a spirit of rebellion against America’s failed elites roiled both parties. Both the Trump campaign and the Ted Cruz campaign, which ran second in the Republican race, offered anti-establishment ideas. So, too, did the Bernie Sanders campaign in the Democratic primaries.

Trump’s defining agenda was basically this:

He would build a wall across the Mexican border to halt the flood of illegal migrants. He would extricate us from the half dozen Middle East wars into which Bush II and Obama had plunged us.

He would abrogate the trade deals that had seen imports from NAFTA nations, China, the EU and Japan replace goods made in the USA. He would halt the shuttering of tens of thousands of U.S. factories and the hemorrhaging of millions of manufacturing jobs.

He would call off the new cold war with Russia.

Halfway through this presidential term, where are we?

Part of the U.S. government has been shut down for a month. The wall has not been built and may never be. President Trump’s decision to pull 2,000 U.S. troops out of Syria has met massive resistance from our foreign policy establishment. Trump is being pushed to confront Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea and to trash the intermediate-range nuclear missile treaty that Ronald Reagan negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev.

And we are being pushed toward a new Mideast war with Iran.

This was the establishment’s agenda, not Trump’s.

We have lately learned that after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, a cabal inside the FBI initiated a counterintelligence investigation to discover if Trump was a conscious agent of a Kremlin conspiracy.

Who made this call? Who approved it? Did the FBI discover that Trump is a patriot, or another Alger Hiss? We have not been told by the FBI after two years of investigation. Why not?

We do know that the dirt-diving arm of the Clinton campaign, Fusion GPS, hired a British former spy with KGB connections to cook up a “dirty dossier” that was used to persuade the secret FISA court to approve the surveillance of the Trump campaign.

Foremost among these was “the New Journalism.”

Yet there seems a massive media disinterest in a conspiracy that might portray Trump as the victim of dirty campaign tricks.

Which brings us back to the larger question: While populists have won elections and carried out peaceful revolutions, often the policies for which they have successfully worked are never implemented.

In the 1975 book “Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed,” this writer sought to explore and explain the forces that so often deny the right the policy fruits of its political victories.

“The essence of press power lies in the authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others,” this writer wrote. “The press determines what ‘people will talk and think about’ because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington.”

Among the reasons for Trump’s political success, such as it is, is that today’s conservative media did not exist back then, nor did the new social media that he has mastered so well.

Yet still, the left’s power over America’s character- and culture-forming institutions remains overwhelming. It dominates public schools and teachers unions, mainstream churches, college and university faculties, media and entertainment, TV and film.

What is taking place in the West today might be described as a struggle between the capital and the country it rules. England voted to leave the EU; London voted to remain.

In the last analysis, Kennedy was surely right. People who see the policies they have voted for rejected again and again, by the very elites they defeated, will inevitably turn to other means to preserve what they have.

The “yellow vest” protests in Paris show us that.



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 If the Army Stands With Maduro, What Is Plan B?
January 29, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 5.00 Stars!

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“Pay the soldiers. The rest do not matter.”
This was the deathbed counsel given to his sons by Roman Emperor Septimius Severus in A.D. 211.
Nicolas Maduro must today appreciate the emperor’s insight.
For the political survival of this former bus driver and union boss hangs now upon whether Venezuela’s armed forces choose to stand by him or to desert him and support National Assembly leader Juan Guaido.
Wednesday, Guaido declared Maduro’s election last May to a second six-year term to be a sham, and had himself inaugurated as acting president.
Thursday, the defense minister and army chief General Vladimir Padrino Lopez, with his top brass, dismissed the 35-year-old Guaido as a U.S. puppet, and pledged allegiance to Maduro.
Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the U.N. Security Council: “Now it is time for every other nation to pick a side. … Either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you’re in league with Maduro and his mayhem.”
By Friday, however, the world had already taken sides.

Russia and China stood by Maduro, as did NATO ally Turkey, with President Erdogan phoning his support. Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia were also with Maduro.
Backing Guaido are Venezuela’s neighbors Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia, the U.S. and Canada, and the Organization of American States.
Britain, France, Germany and Spain have sent Maduro a diplomatic ultimatum: Agree in eight days to new elections or we back the 35-year-old Guaido, who, until this year, was an unknown.
All options are on the table, says President Donald Trump. But Russia called Guaido’s action a “quasi-coup” and warned that intervention could result in “catastrophic consequences.” Vladimir Putin also phoned Maduro with his support.
The stakes for all sides here are huge. Russia has contractors in Venezuela and has lent the regime billions. In a show of solidarity, Putin recently flew two strategic bombers to Venezuela.
China has loaned Venezuela tens of billions, with Caracas paying Beijing back in oil.
Cuba has sent military and intelligence officers to maintain internal security. Hugo Chavez had seen in Fidel Castro a father figure and modeled his new Venezuela on Castro’s Cuba — with similar results.
Where hundreds of thousands fled Castro’s revolution in the 1960s, three million Venezuelans have fled to Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia and other South American countries and the USA.
The economy is in a shambles. Though Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth, production is a fraction of what it once was. Cronyism and corruption are endemic. Inflation has destroyed the currency. There is poverty, malnutrition and shortages of every necessity of modern life.
Yet, still, the crucial question: What will the soldiers do? And if the military stands with Maduro, and Maduro refuses to go, what do the Americans do to force him out?
Invade? That would invite disaster. Venezuela is not Panama, Haiti or Grenada. Larger than Texas, its population is more than 30 million. And U.S. forces are already committed around the world.
A blockade and sanctions would magnify and deepen the suffering of the people of Venezuela long before they would bring down the regime. Would our allies support a blockade? And if years of suffering by the Venezuelan people have not shaken Maduro’s hold on power, what makes us believe more of the same would persuade him?
Maduro and his army are being offered amnesty if they peacefully depart. But what would Maduro’s fate be if he flees?
If he gives up power under U.S. threat, he is finished and disgraced as a coward. Would he not prefer to go down fighting?
And if the leadership of the army should abandon Maduro, there are younger ambitious officers who would surely see a rewarding future in fighting to save the regime.
Are we inviting a cινιℓ ωαr in Venezuela? Should the shooting start in Caracas, what do we do then?
Did anyone think this through?
Maduro is an incompetent brutal dictator whose ideology has helped to destroy a nation. But if he can change the narrative from a confrontation between a tyrant and his persecuted people to that of an embattled defender of Venezuela being attacked by Yankee imperialists and their domestic lackeys, that could resonate among the masses in Latin America.
And from all indications, Maduro intends to defy the U.S. and rally the radicals and anti-Americans in the hemisphere and the Third World.
Guiado’s constitutional claim to the presidency of Venezuela was a scheme cooked up in collusion with Washington, made in the USA, with Secretary of State Pompeo, John Bolton and Sen. Marco Rubio signing on, and President Trump signing off. This was Plan A.
But if Plan A does not succeed, and Maduro, with America’s prestige on the line, defies our demand that he yield, what do we do then? What is Plan B?
“Assad must go!” said Barack Obama. Well, Assad is still there — and Obama is gone.
Will the same be said of Maduro?


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https://buchanan.org/blog/if-the-army-stands-with-maduro-what-is-plan-b-135899

Sacrificing Northam Will Not Be Enough
February 5, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 5.00 Stars!

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“Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia.”
So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor Gov. Ralph Northam.
Et tu, Brute?
Yet Northam had all but sworn Saturday he had no knowledge of the 1984 yearbook photo and that he was not either man in the photo.
McAuliffe, who is considering a run for president, joined Kamala hαɾɾιs, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Julian Castro and Joe Biden in the pile-on. All had washed their hands of Northam.
That a moderate Democratic governor is near friendless in a fight for his life reveals much about the Democratic Party.
Earlier last week, Northam was at the center of another blazing controversy. He had backed legislation to permit abortions up to birth.
And then he volunteered that, if a child were born after a botched abortion, the “infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Northam seemed to be not only endorsing third-trimester abortion, but infanticide, “mercy killing,” the murder of a living but wounded baby after birth. A public outcry forced the legislature to back off the bill.
Then the photo from the yearbook of Eastern Virginia Medical School surfaced. Yet, in term of moral gravity, which is worse?
Public advocacy of late-term abortions with an option to execute babies who survive, or a stupid and insensitive 35-year-old photo of two beer-drinking guys, one dressed up in Klan costume, the other in blackface.
Other Democrats are saying that even if Northam is not in the “racist” photo, he admitted to putting shoe polish on his face, to imitate Michael Jackson and his moonwalk, for a 1984 dance contest.
To some Democrats, third-trimester abortions are a step forward for women’s rights. Gov. Andrew Cuomo was cheered in Albany for enacting a law to guarantee late-term abortions should Roe v. Wade be overturned.
By week’s end, Virginia Democrats were bewailing the “horrible” history of their state, where, in 1619, the first slave ship arrived at Point Comfort with men and women from Africa who would work the plantations until the cινιℓ ωαr ended, 250 years later.
One cannot rewrite history.
Four of America’s first six presidents — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe — were Virginians. All were slave owners. Richmond, the capital of Virginia, was the capital of the Confederacy. The commander in chief of the Confederate armies was a Virginian, Robert E. Lee.
Northam attended Virginia Military Institute, where Thomas Jonathan (“Stonewall”) Jackson had been Instructor of Artillery. The VMI cadet corps fought proudly in the Battle of New Market.
The most memorialized of Virginia’s heroes, in its monuments and statues, are colonists, Revolutionary War and Confederate soldiers and statesmen, and 19th- and 20th-century senators and governors. Almost all supported slavery or segregation.
When the Warren Court outlawed segregation in 1954, Virginia and the South replied with the Dixie Manifesto, declaring open defiance and “massive resistance” to the court order to integrate.
Not until Nixon’s presidency was the order carried out.
In recent years, there has been a running debate about what kind of country America is.
Is she a blood and soil nation, a separate people, with their own unique history, heroes, holidays, language, literature, myths and music? Or is America a propositional nation, united solely by its values, whose mission it is to transmit these values to mankind?
The question raised this weekend, however, is even more divisive.
Is America a good country, or has she, like Virginia, such a past of sins and crimes as to make her eternally ashamed and for which she should make eternal amends? Does America owe the world?
Should Western civilization be held responsible for what it has done through the centuries to persons of color the world over? Should we conduct a purging of monuments to all of America’s “white racists,” as antifa and its allies are determined to do in Virginia?
The Democratic Party may believe that by throwing Northam to the wolves it will satisfy these forces. It won’t.
We are at the beginning of a Kulturkampf to purge America of all monuments and tributes to the white males who created, built and ruled the country, and once believed that they, their nation, their faith, and their civilization were superior to all others. And, without apology, they so acted in the world.
Those two guys drinking beer in blackface and Klan robes and a hood thought they were being funny, but to the unamused members of a radicalized Democratic Party, there is nothing funny about them.
And, after Northam, these intolerant people will demand that the Democratic Party nominate a candidate who will echo their convictions about America’s past.




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Are the Democrats Bent on ѕυιcιdє?
February 12, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan   


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After reading an especially radical platform agreed upon by the British Labor Party, one Tory wag described it as “the longest ѕυιcιdє note in history.”

The phrase comes to mind on reading of the resolution calling for a Green New Deal, advanced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and endorsed by at least five of the major Democratic candidates for president.

The Green New Deal is designed to recall the halcyon days of the 1930s, when, so the story goes, FDR came to Washington to enact the historic reforms that rescued America from the Great Depression.

Only that story is more than a small myth.

The unemployment rate when FDR took the oath in 1933 was 25 percent. It never fell below 14 percent through the 1930s. In June 1938, despite huge Democratic majorities in Congress, FDR was presiding over a nation where unemployment was back up to 19 percent.

World War II and the conscription of 16 million young men gave us “full employment.” And the war’s end and demobilization saw the return of real prosperity in 1946, after FDR was dead.

Yet this Green New Deal is nothing if not ambitious.

To cope with climate change, the GND calls for a 10-year plan to meet “100 percent of the power demand of the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

This appears to require a phase-out by 2030 of all carbon-emitting power plants fueled by coal and oil and their replacement by power plants fueled by wind and solar.

Will natural gas be permitted? Will nuclear power? There are 60 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 98 nuclear reactors in 30 states. Will they be shut down? Will the Greens agree to dam up more U.S. rivers to produce renewable hydroelectric power?

Air travel consumes huge quantities of carbon-producing jet fuel. What will replace it? Perhaps progressive Democratic candidates will set an example by not flying, and then by voting to end production of private aircraft and to ground all corporate jets. Let the elites sail to Davos.

The GND calls for an overhaul of the “transportation systems in the United States to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector … through … clean, affordable and accessible public transportation; and high-speed rail.”

Gas-powered cars are out. How long will that train trip from DC to LA take? And if China continues its relentless rise in carbon emissions until 2030, as permitted by the Paris climate accord, while the U.S. spends itself into bankruptcy going green, where would that leave America and China at midcentury?



“By the end of the Green New Deal resolution (and accompanying fact sheet) I was laughing so hard I nearly cried,” tweeted the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel: “If a bunch of GOPers plotted to forge a fake Democratic bill showing how bonkers the party is, they could not have done a better job. It is beautiful.”

The Green New Deal, say its authors, has as a goal “stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, the elderly, the unhoused, peoples with disabilities, and youth.”

Fifty years after the Great Society, apparently half the country consists of victims of oppression.

Who are their oppressors? Guess.

Among the endorsers of this Green New Deal is Sen. Cory Booker, who compares the battle to stop climate change to fighting the nαzιs in World War II. Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala hαɾɾιs and Elizabeth Warren have all endorsed it. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who calls climate change “an existential threat,” was an original co-sponsor.

Nancy Peℓσѕι has more sense. Interviewed last week, the speaker batted the Green New Deal aside: “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

With her own agenda and priorities, Peℓσѕι does not want to be dragged into having to defend a docuмent that reads like it was written by the college socialists club.

The question, though, is why Democrats, who, if nominated, are likely to face Donald Trump in 2020, are signing on to so radical a scheme.

In a presidential election, the “out” party candidate usually has an advantage. No record to defend. He or she can choose the terrain on which to attack the incuмbent, who has a four-year record.

Rarely does an out party present a fixed and stationary target as exposed as this, as out-of the-mainstream as this, as vulnerable as this.

The only explanation for the endorsement of the Green New Deal by candidates with a prospect of winning the Democratic nomination is that they are so fearful of Ocasio-Cortez and the left for whom she speaks that they must endorse her plan.

That British Tory got it right. This thing reads like a Democratic Party ѕυιcιdє pact.

https://buchanan.org/blog/are-the-democrats-bent-on-ѕυιcιdє-136395

Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats
February 19, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 5.00 Stars!

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“If you look at Trump in America or Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people now want politicians who are tough enough to do what they promise,” said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreno.
The Spaniard was explaining to The New York Times what lay behind the rise of Vox, which the Times calls “Spain’s first far-right party since the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975.”
Indeed, the growing impatience of peoples with elected leaders and legislators who cannot or will not act decisively explains two realities of our time: the eclipse of Congress and the rise of autocracy worldwide.
In condemning President Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency and use Pentagon funds to build his wall, Beltway elites have charged the president with a multitude of sins against the Constitution.
He has usurped the “power of the purse” that the Founding Fathers invested in Congress. He has disregarded the “checks and balances” of Madisonian democracy. He is acting like an imperial president.
Yet the decline of Congress is not a recent phenomenon. And the principal collaborator in its fall from grace, from being “the first branch of government” to the least esteemed, has been Congress itself, its own timidity and cowardice.
Contrast, if you will, the now-inveterate torpor and inaction of Congress with how presidents, declared by historians to be great or near great, have acted.

Thomas Jefferson seized upon Napoleon’s sudden offer to sell the vast Louisiana territory for $15 million in an act of dubious constitutionality by Jefferson’s own judgment. History has validated his decision.
Andrew Jackson — “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” — shoved aside a Supreme Court ruling denying him the right to transfer the Indians of Florida to the middle of the country.
Abraham Lincoln arrested Maryland legislators to prevent a secessionist-minded legislature from meeting, violated the habeas corpus rights of thousands, ordered Chief Justice Roger Taney arrested, shut down newspapers, and, in January 1863, declared free all the slaves of every state still in rebellion against the Union.
“I took Panama!” said Theodore Roosevelt, whose agents helped rebels shear off the province from Colombia to build his canal.
FDR ordered some 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps in 1942 for the duration of the war.
Without authorization from Congress, Harry Truman ordered U.S. troops into South Korea in 1950 to resist the invasion by North Korea, calling it a police action.
Though a Republican House voted against attacking Serbia in 1998, Bill Clinton continued his 78-day bombing campaign until Belgrade yielded up its cradle province of Kosovo.
Yet while presidents have acted decisively, without congressional authorization and sometimes unconstitutionally, Congress has failed to defend, and even surrendered, its legitimate constitutional powers.
Congress’s authority “to regulate commerce with foreign nations” has been largely ceded to the executive branch, with Congress agreeing to confine itself to a “yeah” or “nay” vote on whatever trade treaty the White House negotiates and sends to the Hill.
Congress’s authority to “coin money” and “regulate the value thereof” was long ago transferred to the Federal Reserve.
Congress’s power to declare war has been ignored by presidents since Truman. Authorizations for the use of military force have replaced declarations of war, with presidents deciding how broadly they may be interpreted.
In declaring the national emergency Friday, Trump rested his case on authority given the president by Congress in the National Emergencies Act of 1976.
The Supreme Court has usurped Congress’ powers with impunity.
While the civil rights acts of the 1960s were enacted by Congress, the desegregation of America’s public schools was simply ordered by the Warren Court in 1954.
In the ’60s and ’70s, Congress sat indolent as busing for racial balance was imposed on countless school districts by federal judges.
As the Supreme Court, for decades, exploited the establishment clause of the First Amendment to de-Christianize all public schools and public places, Congress did nothing. A triumphant court then moved on to declare abortion and same-sex marriage constitutional rights.
Yet Congress had the latent power, in Article III, Section 2, to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and every other federal court. But the big stick the founders left for Congress to corral a runaway Supreme Court was never picked up, never used.
High among the reasons Trump was elected was that, for all his flaws and failings, he was seen as a doer, a man who “gets things done.”
And high among the reasons that autocrats are on the rise is that the centrist parties being shoved aside are perceived as having failed the people in their most basic demands — fewer migrants, more secure borders, preservation of national identity, putting their own people and their country own first.
Whatever may be said of the autocrats, be it Trump, Putin or Xi Jinping, they are not talkers but doers. They act.
And they may very well own the future.

https://buchanan.org/blog/why-autocrats-are-replacing-democrats-136467

Left’s Latest Demand: Race-Based Reparations
February 26, 2019 by Patrick J. Buchanan
Votes: 4.98 Stars!

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“Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party.    It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did…”

Having embraced “Medicare-for-all,” free college tuition and a Green New Deal that would mandate an early end of all oil, gas and coal-fired power plants, the Democratic Party’s lurch to the left rolls on.
Presidential candidates Kamala hαɾɾιs and Elizabeth Warren both called last week for race-based reparations for slavery.
“Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, legal discrimination and segregation, and discrimination that exist today have led to a systemic wealth gap between black and white Americans,” hαɾɾιs told The New York Times. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”
Echoed Sen. Warren: “We must confront the dark history of slavery and government-sanctioned discrimination in this country.” This history has crippled “the ability of black families to build wealth in America for generations.”
That black Americans are handicapped by their history in this country, and cannot accuмulate wealth as easily, and require compensatory reparations for slavery and segregation, is more than a controversial assertion.
Are the Democrats going to say this in their national platform in 2020? And how much will be the rest of America be forced to pay, and for how long?
Warren says Native Americans, too, must be “part of the conversation.” Apparently, they suffer from a similar handicap and need the same reparations.
How far and fast has the Democratic Party lunged leftward? In 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders all rejected reparations.
Have Warren and hαɾɾιs thought this through?
The questions that instantly arise are: Who would qualify as a beneficiary of reparations, and who would pay the immense transfer sums involved?
In 1860, there were 4 million slaves in 15 states and D.C. There are 45 to 50 million African-Americans in the USA today.
Would all black Americans, even the middle class and affluent, be entitled to reparations? How would the government go about proving that folks living here today had ancestors in slavery before 1865?
Do we, as Warren did to prove her Native American ancestry, conduct a DNA test? Do we consult Ancestry.com for every applicant for reparations?
The last 50 years have seen many marriages between blacks and whites. Would the children of such marriages qualify for reparations?
Barack Obama, whose mother was a white teenager and father was a Kenyan, would not qualify. But would wife Michelle and daughters Sasha and Malia?
hαɾɾιs’s mother was from India, her father from Jamaica, where the British abolished slavery in the mid-1830s. But if the father had ancestors who were enslaved in Jamaica, would the senator qualify, or do reparations go only to the descendants of slaves within the USA?
While a higher percentage of African-Americans than whites are poor, there are more white poor than black poor in the USA. Does not endemic poverty produce the same negative consequence regardless of race?
What is the justice in excluding poor whites, or poor Asians and Hispanics, whose ancestors were not here in the USA when slavery existed before 1865?
From 1845 to 1849, the Irish fled a potato famine that persisted under the indifferent rule of the same British who introduced slavery into what became the United States.
As for the great migration of Eastern and Southern Europeans — Poles, Italians, Jєωs, Slavs, Slovaks — slavery was gone before they arrived. They had nothing to do with instituting Jim Crow. Why should they pay reparations?
Asians and Hispanics were a tiny fraction of the U.S. population as late as 1960, when segregation was being outlawed everywhere, but they are more than 75 million Americans today.
Should they be made to pay for sins their ancestors did not commit?
Warren took a DNA test to prove she was partly American Indian, as she put down on various legal forms. Would her less than 1 percent of Indian DNA be sufficient to provide her with reparations for America’s Indian wars?
If slavery and segregation explain the disparity in wealth between black and white in the U.S., what explains the equally wide disparity in wealth between Hispanics and Asians?
Politically, the party of slavery, secession and segregation was the party of Jefferson, Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Wilson and FDR, who put a Klansman on the Supreme Court — the Democratic Party. It was the Republican Party that was formed to contain and end slavery, and did.
One need not be a cynic to suspect Warren’s motivation. Her claim to be an American Indian angered Native Americans, and she would like to mollify them, and ingratiate herself with African-Americans, who constitute more than 60 percent of all Democratic voters in the crucial South Carolina Primary.
By pushing for compensatory reparations, Warren and hαɾɾιs may be helping themselves, but they are further splitting their party along the lines of ethnicity and race and elevating an issue certain to divide their country more than it already is.