Lew Rockwell Institute

I spent 16 years as a lawyer and a judge before going to Congress and have maintained my law license and have done a very small amount of legal work since leaving Washington.

Thus, I was shocked when over 6,000 law professors and law students signed a petition demanding that Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley be disbarred simply for questioning the results of the 2020 election.

Professor Alan Dershowitz said that Cruz was the best student he ever had at Harvard Law School, and Hawley graduated from both Stanford and Yale Law School.

I graduated from the George Washington University Law School and was taught back then that even the worst criminals had the right to be defended in our courts.

The petition mentioned above showed me that too many of our law schools had become very political, very partisan, and really little more than leftist think tanks.

Now, there are apparently thousands of left-wing lawyers chomping at the bit to sue President Trump, trying to stop everything he is trying to do.

As I write this column, there are three federal judges who are at least temporarily stopping Trump’s executive order to do away with birthright citizenship.

I have been interested in this issue for a long time, and was asked by The Tennessean newspaper to write a column which was published on August 15, 2010 under the title “U.S. Citizenship Is A Privilege.” That column follows here:

I spent 7½ years before coming to Congress as a Criminal Court Judge in Knoxville. Because of this and other experiences, I believe there is a right way to do things and a wrong way.

Thus, I am strongly opposed to illegal immigration and do not believe those who are here illegally should be given the same status and rights as those who are here legally.

This, in part, is why I believe children born to those who are here illegally should be treated as citizens of the countries from which their parents came and not as citizens of the United States.

When I was a judge, I was probably toughest on crimes against children, and I believe children of illegal immigrants should be treated with the greatest of kindness.

But, citizenship in the United States should be regarded as a very great privilege, and it should not be granted lightly to anyone.

I am supporting an effort that is just beginning in Congress to change the birthright citizenship provisions in the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment has been changed before. It refers only to voting by men, and this was changed by the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

One of the original purposes of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship and count as a whole (instead of just 3/5 as in the original Constitution) those persons who had been slaves. This was right and proper and should have been done long before it was.

Those who imply or say that being tough on illegal immigration is somehow racist are resorting to the sort of scurrilous personal attacks and childish sarcasms that people often use when their case is weak.

It is very difficult to change the Constitution, and it should be. And the odds are very much against changing the birthright citizenship provision.

But the 14th Amendment was not written to deal with anything related to illegal immigration. Our leaders in 1868 could never have envisioned the numbers we have coming here illegally today.

I have heard and read that half the people of the world have to get by on $2.00 or less a day [now it is $4.00]. Some three billion people are hoping for one good meal today and probably will not get it.

We are blessed beyond our comprehension to live in this country, and Americans are by far the most generous people in the world. No other country has even come close to the many millions we have allowed in legally over the course of just the last few years.

But our entire infrastructure – hospitals, schools, jails, roads, sewers, etc. – just could not support the rapid influx of the mega millions who would come here if we simply opened our borders.

While we all sympathize with those billions who are living in terrible poverty around the world, we have to have a legal, orderly system of immigration and it must be enforced.

I saw a television program several years ago which showed pregnant women who had come from Mexico to San Diego just before delivering so they could get free medical care, and so that their children would be U.S. citizens.

Some adults have later used the citizenship of their children as a basis to gain immigration for their families.

The birthright citizenship provision should be changed as a part of the overall reform of our immigration laws.”

This column written in 2010 is even more timely today.

This originally appeared on The Knoxville Focus.

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In President Trump’s second term, he has been moving fast. He is already passing the overall total numbers of executive orders of Bush, Obama, and himself in his first term, and he looks set to easily pass the overall total of the Biden presidency.

Trump’s executive orders, although limited in overall extent, have been substantive starts in such areas as government efficiency, energy, and immigration.

We need Trump to not respect judges’ attempts to grab the executive power we have delegated to him to use on our behalf.

And we need more of the same. Much more.

Bring On Good Executive Orders

Executive orders that enforce the Constitution and constitutional statutes are exactly what we need given the current congress’s and the next congress’s compositions.

Both now and after the 2026 mid-terms, both houses will consist of large Democratic minorities that are highly Progressive, plus pluralities of Republicans who are moderately to highly Progressive. Together, they form Progressive supermajorities, which we see in action on every budget bill.

Progressive majorities won’t pass anything that’s substantial and good. It’s a strategic error to think that any more-constitutionalist president should be measured by how thoroughly such Progressives enact his recommendations on legislation, and to think that any good statutes would be permanent.

Instead, presidents have the duty to independently interpret constitutionality and only take actions that they interpret are constitutional. These will become lasting, but through a different process than most people envision.

If a president’s actions are right and extensive, they will severely limit governments. This will be popular from the start, and this will bring better results relatively quickly.

A president who severely limits governments will remain popular. Successors who do the same will remain popular. Regardless of whether the president or good successors are impeached and removed, the voters will get to keep returning others who will continue.

In time, new legislators will arrive as reinforcements. That will be when these presidents’ recommendations on legislation will finally get enacted as laws. And starting then, these laws will in fact endure—for a generation at least; and if they limit governments severely enough, then for much longer.

Go Big or Go Home

Fast, extensive change is always best for freedom. This was demonstrated well after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as summarized in the figure.

Figure. Economic freedom of different groups of nations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Figure: James Anthony. Data: Oleh Havrylyshyn et al.

If a change is initially for the best, then fast, extensive change delivers the greatest overall impact and benefits. In addition, it bypasses the current incumbents and creates the strongest-possible new incumbents. This creates political support for holding the good changes in place for the long run.

If a change is initially for the worse, then fast, extensive change creates the strongest-possible pushback. Soon enough, this brings fast, extensive change for the better, after all.

Prevent Losses

So absolutely, moving fast is best.

Of course some mistakes will get made. It’s excellent that Trump has shown that he will listen to pushback against mistakes. Even so, with very-many actions already in play and with plenty more to come, it’s harder than ever to push back and get heard. It becomes all-the-more important to push back clearly and resolutely.

An even more-excellent way is to steer clear of mistakes in the first place.

To push back here, and to also show here how best to prevent mistakes in the first place while still moving just as fast, here are examples.

• Support of Stargate AI, with uses that may include surveillance and mRNA cancer therapies, is a non-starter if you understand from first principles that the people have a right to be secure against unreasonable searches, and also that no person shall be unduly deprived of life and no competitors shall be unduly deprived of liberty or property.
• Tariffs are non-starters if you understand from first principles that setting tariffs is legislative power, so as an executive, you won’t executively accept and use this power in the first place. This is also best in practice. Tariffs make marginal producers unprofitable. So tariffs reduce supplies, and this increases prices. These increased prices must be paid here, by producers who must buy intermediate products, and by customers. Government people take a bigger cut, making us less free. Returns get unknowable, so producers forgo investment; America’s Great Depression was prolonged by regime uncertainty. Domestic producers grow increasingly uncompetitive and end up losing business and cutting jobs.
• A Bitcoin reserve and a sovereign wealth fund are non-starters if you understand from first principles that there’s no enumerated power to accumulate assets other than for military use, postal use, or national-government occupancy.
• Gaza intervention that ends up bringing new support to Israel’s enemy Hamas and rebuilding it next door is a non-starter if you understand from first principles that our people’s rights are the most secure from war when we maximize our people’s freedom, and then our people add value much faster than coercive potential enemies’ people do.
• No taxes on tips is a non-starter if you understand from first principles that the only revenue source that takes the same proportion of each person’s liberty is a fully-flat tax on labor income.

Good Boundaries, Good Government

Imagine a state-of-the-union message that consists only of (1) a forthright report of the executive branch’s performance on spending and debt in the last year, followed by (2) recommended measures to consider in the next year.

That’s hard to imagine. But it’s just good management, and it’s called for by the Constitution.

Always change fast and extensively. Also, prevent losses. In all things—even just in state-of-the-union messages—hold yourself to constitutional boundaries, and let the chips fall where they may.

America became great because its governments long were severely limited. Bring us back that old-time freedom, and more.

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Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we can see if the strangers we meet in street and store are Catholic—at least we can see who went to Mass to get their Lent started. While the black ashes clearly mark the brows of the baptized, it isn’t clear to most of those baptized and ashed who it was that began this grim yet gritty liturgical tradition recalling “the way to dusty death,” as Macbeth put it.

The first man to smear Lenten ashes on the foreheads of the faithful did so not only as a reminder that we are dust and to dust we must return, but also to proclaim that it is from the ashes that we will rise again. It was one who was no stranger to suffering, service, and the struggle over crumbling culture and lost souls—and with the steely determination to do something about it with prayer and penance. The ashes of Ash Wednesday come to us from no less a personage than Pope St. Gregory the Great.

In 601, three years before he died at 64, Pope Gregory set the day for the beginning of Lent as 46 days before Easter. His reasoning was to establish 40 days of fasting while including six feast days on the Sundays—for in Gregory’s words, “Who bends the knee on Sunday denies God to have risen.” This was when a Wednesday became the beginning of Lent, and Pope Gregory marked that Wednesday by marking his flock with ashes in the form of a cross, according to the ancient pagan and biblical tradition denoting mourning.

Ash Wednesday is a perfect icon of Pope Gregory’s totally down-to-business and somewhat down-in-the-mouth Catholicism. In his own day, fourteen hundred years ago, Gregory was convinced he was living in the end times—and he would certainly have that opinion were he living today. We may not have to deal with marauding Lombards, but we are under attack by wilder breeds of barbarian. And though Gregory showed us what it means to be great, it was in his sacrificial determination to see God’s will through that he did so, making his whole life a Lent.

Born to a Roman Senator, Gregory’s Italy was languishing under the botched conquests of the late Emperor Justinian, famine, disease, bureaucratic corruption, and educational collapse. Gregory received a rigorous training in the liberal arts and a thorough course in religious studies to prepare him for a promising political career as a Prefect of Rome. But his secular formation drove him to a Benedictine monastery, where Gregory found peace in the simplicity and structure of monastic life.

Distinguished for his intelligence and learning, Gregory the monk was commanded by Pope Benedict I to become a deacon of Rome. Soon after, Pope Pelagius II sent Gregory the deacon to Constantinople to be a papal emissary. When Gregory the emissary tried to sneak back to his abbey to be a monk again, he was made a papal secretary. When Pelagius died, Gregory the secretary was pressed to become pope. Though Gregory refused the holy office, appealing to the Byzantine Emperor and even fleeing Rome, Gregory could not escape. The people would not allow it—and neither would God. Gregory became pope.

Though unwilling, Gregory proved one of history’s most active, most influential, and most beloved popes and political leaders. Though disinclined to do great works, Pope Gregory’s devotion to do good works won him greatness. From dining with beggars every day to embodying his self-given title “servant to the servants of God,” Gregory was a pope who knew what it meant to love when the going got tough. Though he was hesitant to rise to the occasion of worldly opportunity, he never hesitated to rise to the occasion of heavenly charity.

And all this is why it is so fitting that Gregory stands as a founder of the Lenten tradition. The humility to lower oneself, to accuse oneself, to acknowledge personal fault and spiritual filth, is to be great as Gregory was great—and it is a mystery at the heart of Gregory the Great’s reluctant rise to papal power. It is a mystery embraced in following the Lenten standard of St. Gregory in the ashy cross he gave to the Church. The reluctance to be great is a measure of both sanctity and sanity, and it is therefore a cause for greatness through meekness.

As anyone who has taken Lent seriously knows, meekness is not weakness. It is the noble desire to sit at the lowest place, to deny oneself for the sake of Christ and neighbor. It is strength. Though the meek refrain from resisting evil with force, they overcome it with patient and enduring goodness. The meek are those whose reason guides impulse, restraining anger. They are not freed from anger but possess the will to control it. In this lies strength, virtue, and greatness.

For all its undesirable disciplines, Lent is all about desire: the desire for eternal life. The ashes are our sooty reminder of all that is desirable beyond the dust. Gregory was keenly aware of that; and, if he was great in any way, he was great in the desire for God. Benedictine monk and theologian Jean Leclercq called St. Gregory the “Doctor of Desire,” referring to Gregory’s philosophy that asceticism was a preparation for the desire for God—a training, or cultivation, of desire.

What more should we prepare for on Ash Wednesday? Speaking of sackcloth and ashes, there is a passage in the Book of Job that echoes Elijah’s famous experience where he searches for the Lord in a hurricane, in an earthquake, and in a fire, but he only finds Him in a gentle breeze. Job reads, “There stood one whose countenance I knew not, an image before my eyes, and I heard the voice, as it were, of a gentle wind.” In this murmur, this hidden word, Gregory heard the opening of a lovers’ dialogue. “This inspiration touches the human mind,” he writes, “and by touching lifts it up and represses temporal thoughts, inflaming it with eternal desires.”

Read the Whole Article

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It’s hard to imagine where we would be today in terms of economic progress, industrial production capacity and labour dynamics if Henry Ford never existed. The revolutionary system he pioneered in the early 20th century, largely known for implementing the concept of the “assembly line” (which, notably, was actually invented by Ransom Eli Olds, and merely popularized by Ford), forever changed the way companies thought about production processes.

It massively increased efficiency and it introduced the idea of standardized output. It delivered affordable and reliable cars and later, various consumer goods of dependable and consistent quality to the masses, while at the same time it significantly increased profitability and productivity for the companies that adopted it. All these benefits and progress, however, came at a steep cost, which would soon accumulate and compound. It undermined and denigrated human creativity, it stifled and demonized individuality, free, independent thought and autonomy.

The sharp and perceptive observer will no doubt detect some of the most fundamental, core ideas and principles of Fordism in today’s society and in our current political and economic system. We can see a clear example in public education: Much like Fordism, the education “factory” is also all about uniformity. And much like Ford’s assembly line, which didn’t just produce identical cars, but also demanded identical workers and reduced people to mere cogs in a machine, with no allowance for creativity or deviation, public education also focused on churning out conforming minds filled with pre-approved, sterile and harmless ideas, modest and sheepish ambitions and a sense of duty to follow a narrow, designated path.

It is a system that leaves no room for questions, doubts or challenges and it vehemently suppresses dissenting voices and “dangerous” opinions: if anyone dares to go against the grain or refuses to wholeheartedly embrace the “received wisdom” that is expected to be instantly accepted as the absolute truth, they are immediately dismissed as “problematic”, “fringe” or “antisocial”. They are singled out as pariahs and they soon become a cautionary tale to ensure that other potential dissenters will keep their unsanctioned thoughts and disruptive ideas to themselves. “Go along to get along” is the main lesson that public education imparts and drills into each young citizen, future voter and taxpayer.

This is why at the higher levels of this system, e.g. in academia, we see the Orwellian environment that has so brutally discredited it today. There are intellectual “no-go” zones and there are areas of permitted research, but even in the latter, the researcher must refrain from coloring outside the lines. In order to get the approval of one’s peers and one’s superiors, to climb the academic career ladder and to get the grants to sustain such a career, one’s “scientific findings” must align with and confirm certain views and expectations and that is true in a terrifyingly large number of academic fields, including biology, medicine, economics, sociology and history.

This is not just humiliating and dishonorable for those within those fields. It is extremely dangerous and toxic to society as a whole. After all, it was this blind intellectual subservience and lemming-like behavior that gave us the covid response laws and mandates that ruined the lives of millions of people, as well as the economically catastrophic policies against climate change.

We find similar parallels in the media. Fordist ideals and principles are virtually ubiquitous if one knows what to look for, not just in the legacy news outlets, but in online media platforms too. Adherence to clearly defined narratives is vitally important, as is the nearly robotic repetition of said narratives. It matters not if there are plain-as-day facts that directly contradict it, if there are legitimate questions and sound, logical reasons to challenge and dispute it, or even if the majority of target audience clearly does not believe it.

Sure, total uniformity and conformity of human thought, together effective orchestration and synchronization of human action, can and do yield impressive and predictable results, just like an ant colony would. But it also violently contradicts and oppresses human nature itself, which is why, thankfully, this misanthropic system has no hope of ever being entirely and sustainably enforced. There will always be defiant individuals, free thinkers and brave objectors to challenge and disrupt it and to ensure it will never have a decisive grip over the human race.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Therefore please feel free to share and you can subscribe for my articles by clicking here

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In his first address to Congress, Trump presented his Make America Great Again program and extolled the perennial American values of freedom and prosperity. He delivered his speech with marked oratorical skill, never once stumbling over a word or phrase. Although most of his pronouncements were about America and its people flourishing and achieving great things, most of the Democrats remained seated and steadfastly silent the entire time. The only time they cheered was when Trump stated that the U.S. had sent hundreds of billions to Ukraine.

I guess their behavior was an expression of protesting—not the president’s positive vision for the country, but the man himself. American politics has always been riven by partisanship. In the run-up to the Civil War, Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans had violent disagreements about slavery and states rights. What is peculiar about today’s Democrats is how rarely any of them express encouragement or approval for the prospect of American taxpaying citizens doing well.

When asked what his study of nature had taught him about the Creator, the English naturalist, J.B.S. Haldane, reportedly said that the Creator “must be inordinately fond of beetles” (referring to the 30 million different beetle species that inhabit the earth).

We can surmise that the Democrats are inordinately fond of sending money to Ukraine, vaccines, DEI, open borders, censorship, abortion rights, green energy, and transgender procedures.

However, when it comes to celebrating the proposition of We the People flourishing and being free, they sit on their hands and remain glumly silent.

This originally appeared on Courageous Discourse.

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Thanks., Saleh Abdullah. 

NewsTarget

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Unlimited Hangout

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Click Here:

Ben Bartee

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Ginny Garner wrote:

Lew,

RFK Jr., using his official HHS Secretary account, made a statement declaring anti-Semitism is comparable to history’s deadliest plagues. Very creative way to please the Zionists tying their cause to the issue of health which he was hired to address.

See here.

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Thanks, John Frahm.

Gateway Pundit

The post Hong Kong Firm Sells Panama Canal Stake to BlackRock, Making It Majority Owner Amid Trump’s Pressure To Curb Chinese Influence. appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Daniel Larison

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Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com

The post rump Administration Announces Steps To Crack Down on Protests Critical of Israel appeared first on LewRockwell.

Click here:

The Truth Barrier

The post The Implosion Of Project Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, David Martin. 

https://x.com/AndyHopson/status/1897288827968086155/photo/1

https://x.com/MikeRGlenn/status/1897137765160255563/photo/1

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Thanks, Vasko Kohlmayer.

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Click Here:

John Leake

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During his long-winded rhetorical romance with protectionist tariffs President Trump excitedly boasted that “We’re gonna take in a lot of money” in tariff taxes.  Oh great, “we” are going to take more money out of the pockets of the American working class with tariff taxes so that it can be spent by federal bureaucrats and politicians instead of the people who earned the money.

Republican party propaganda organs like Breitbart are struggling every day to dream up rationales in defense of protectionist plunder.  Their latest defense is to cite a study that said American retailers will pay more of increased tariff taxes than their customers will.  Well now.  So they admit that it is an anti-American, anti-populist policy that plunders both American retailers (and their American employees, their communities, and their stockholders) as well as American customers of the retailers.  And all that money goes into the black hole of the federal budget.  This will make America “great”?

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Writes Ginny Garner.:

Lew,

I’ve been curious about the reaction of Whitney Webb, whose reporting on Jeffrey Epstein has been phenomenal, to Bindergate – last week’s botched Epstein files release. She hasn’t posted on X since February 14 but today she posted this article written by Iain Davis on her UnlimitedHangout site. 

See here.

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