"We're in a Constitutional crisis" ...

Talking heads, pundits and politicians who say this are usually displaying their ignorance of the Constitution. Either that, or they are outright lying. 

Neither is a good thing. 

I’m just surprised they get away with ping-ponging on the value and applicability of our Constitution whenever it suits their specific narrative. 

When the Constitution supports what they like, they support the Constitution. Yet when the same Constitution goes against what they like, it’s suddenly an outdated document.

When someone wins the Presidency via the Electoral College, his or her supporters are big fans of the Electoral College. When their candidate loses through the Electoral College, but wins the popular vote, it’s a stupid system that needs to be replaced with the popular vote alone. When the Supreme Court agrees with them, it’s the final authority. When it doesn’t, it needs to be changed. 

Honestly, you can't have it both ways. The Constitution is what it is, period. If anyone wants to change it, there's a process. Until it's changed, you can't just ignore it.    

I tend to think the framers of the Constitution were brilliant in devising the structure of our government.  They separated powers to create checks and balances, so that no one branch of the government – or person – had unlimited power.  That’s lost on too many people. 

Too many are ignorant of how and why the framers structured our system the way they did.  And especially why they opted for a constitutional republic over a democracy. Too many don’t understand why a balance of power is essential for our republic to function properly, or why the framers protected less populated states from being bulldozed by states with bigger populations.

It was all about preventing consolidation of power. And mob rule.  

Congress was originally divided into a popularly elected House, apportioned by population, and a Senate made up of two Senators from each state elected to six-year terms by their respective state legislatures. This way the House reflected the will of the people every two years, while the Senators represented the interests of their states with every state having equal weight. 

I’ve said this many times: many of the current problems we have in Congress – including the flood of money from special interests – result from 17^th Amendment. Before, Senators were only accountable to their state’s legislature which reflected the will of its own state’s constituents.

Changing this was a disaster.

Now Senators are less accountable to their own state’s constituents, and more to out-of-state special interests and deep-pocketed donors.  Senators no longer actually represent their states; they don’t need to because big money for their campaigns is coming from somewhere else. 

Laws and spending had to originate in the House – because that more closely represented the will of the people – and were subject to approval by the Senate. The Senate could take a longer-term view and, as such, could act as a check on legislation that might be popular at the moment, but also shortsighted. This further prevented states with large populations, and more House members as a result, from riding roughshod over less populated states.

This was the same thought process that created the Electoral College. The Electoral College meant that every individual state in the union mattered, not just the overall popular vote.  A candidate couldn’t simply run up the vote in a few big states to become President – he or she needed to win a variety of states to get enough Electoral College votes. This was brilliant.

Finally, the President was tasked with “faithfully” executing the laws of the United States, not creating laws – which was solely in the wheelhouse of Congress.

The Supreme Court was only to be involved when there were disputes among states, conflicts between rulings by lower Federal courts, or when a law by Congress or a state was challenged on Constitutional grounds.  The Supreme Court was the final arbiter.  The Supreme Court had, and still has, absolutely no authority to create law. 

Because that authority belongs solely to Congress. Not the Court. Not the President.   

Why am I bothering with this basic high-school civics lesson?   

Because it’s not being taught in high school anymore.  Hasn’t been for years. 

As a result, we now have generations of people who have absolutely no idea how our government is supposed to work.  Or why power is dispersed among three co-equal branches, and the limits under the Constitution on each of those branches.  They don’t understand what’s in the Constitution. What led the founders to create it in the first place.  Why the Bill of Rights was so important. And why it’s intentionally so difficult to amend the Constitution.

Some of them are now in Congress.  Even more are in the media. Their collective ignorance of our Constitution is sadly on display every day. What they don’t know is appalling.  And dangerous.  Especially since so many in our voting population blindly look to them for guidance. 

If you don’t understand the Constitution and its history, you can’t appreciate why it’s as important today as it was centuries ago.  It’s the one thing that’s been a relative constant from the early days of our nation. It’s the bedrock upon which everything else has been built.  Certainly, it’s been amended and expanded from time to time, but always in a deliberate way.

Yet the basic structure and concept behind it has remained essentially unchanged. 

The creators of our Constitution wanted to avoid mob rule.  They wanted to create a country based on the rule of law rather than the rule of man.  They wanted to prevent would-be tyrants and demagogues from ever seizing absolute power. They didn’t want too much power concentrated in the Federal government, any single branch of government, or any single person.

Or only in the more populous states.

They gave us a constitutional republic instead of a pure democracy, as a result.  A constitutional republic is a representative form of government guided by a central charter that protects the rights of individuals and individual states against the tyranny of a simple majority. 

Our founders never intended the United States to be a pure democracy, run entirely by the will of the majority. That’s because they knew pure democracies often lead to mob rule.   

And chaos.  That’s what some today – particularly those who want to substitute popular opinion for the rule of law under the Constitution – are proposing, whether they know it or not.        

Detaining minors at our border ...

We are being flooded with minors – some as young as 10 years old – trying to cross our southern border illegally. Or, to be more accurate, trying to get caught crossing illegally.   

Some are dying before they even get here. Some are so sick when they arrive, they soon die.  Several children have died while in the custody of border authorities recently. The media and liberal politicians blame our “broken immigration system” for these deaths. They specifically blame our policies for detaining minors caught illegally crossing our border.  

I’d put the blame elsewhere.  More at the source. 

I keep asking who the hell thought it was a good idea to send their child – alone in some cases – on a journey of hundreds of miles, across dangerous terrain, exposed to dangerous human predators as well, with only the shoes on their feet, the clothes on their back, and a backpack.

I understand that some older minors, like 15-18-year-old boys, might leave on their own hoping to find jobs. But no 10-year-old or 12-year-old boy or girl gets up one morning in Guatemala or Honduras and decides on their own to take this journey without their parent’s encouragement.    

What kind of parent would do this?  And why? 

Do they care so little for the well-being of their child that they are willing to put their child’s life at risk – and for what?  The slim possibility their child will succeed against all odds and get here relatively unscathed? And once here will be taken care of?

What the hell are they thinking? Somebody must be telling them it’s an acceptable risk. That the potential rewards outweigh everything else – just get here and life will be better. 

I want to know who that is.  Who is persuading those parents it’s okay to send your own flesh and blood – especially your younger girls and boys – on a trip where their probability of getting raped, abused and possibly killed is so high? And for what? 

Border Patrol agents report that human smugglers are apparently running radio ads in Central America. The ads claim it's easy to get into the US right now.  Agents say they’ve heard this from many of the illegals they’ve encountered recently as what persuaded them to try.    

Then there are our liberal politicians, courts, and media. 

They’ve made illegally entering our country a human right, made those who want to stop or curtail it monsters, and those who protect illegals from capture and deportation folk heroes.  They’ve also sent a clear message that there’s nothing we can do to stop illegal immigration. Nor should we:  they will oppose any effort to curtail illegal immigration or deport illegals here. Even when those illegals repeatedly commit violent crimes and have been deported before many times.   

If anyone thinks the people in Latin and Central America – and criminal gangs and human smugglers from there – aren’t hearing that message loud and clear, they’re delusional.

Organized criminal operations to smuggle people across our southern border are a big and profitable business. Estimates range from $200 million to over a billion dollars a year.  Smugglers and gangs know what works and how to game the system.

So do the people they’re smuggling. Using children is part of the plan. 

Lately it’s been learned that smugglers are recycling some children as props to get various “families” across our border.  Border Patrol has reported that they’ve detained some of the same children multiple times, sometimes traveling with different “families.”  Over a few months, they’ve detained more than 3,000 bogus “families” with unrelated children in tow.  

It's obviously a scam. And it’s been going on for some time.  

Still, the question remains: what do we do with unaccompanied minors detained at our border? What do we do with children we detain who are no relation to the adult or adults they’re traveling with?  Right now we’re giving both sets of minors a pass.

If they already have relatives here, which is usually the case – is anyone surprised? – we generally send them on to those relatives to await their immigration hearing. If they don’t, we try to find them an American adult “sponsor” to stay with until their hearing.   

In the end, most asylum requests by illegals are denied.  So most of the minors as well as any families they might have traveled with should get deported back to their own countries. That is, if they and their sponsor show up for their hearing – which most won’t. 

Instead, like the hundreds of thousands of other illegals awaiting a hearing they never plan to attend, they disappear into our already burgeoning illegal community. 

They win, in other words.  That’s why their parents are sending them.  Despite the risks.    

It’s another glaring hole in our system. Once someone gets on American soil they are entitled to all sorts of support and assistance while they await a hearing on a claim for asylum – a process that can take years, during which they are released because we don’t have enough resources to detain them all. Or even keep track of them.

And during which time, as a result, the overwhelming majority will conveniently disappear and never report for their hearing. 

The easiest solution is don’t let them set foot on American soil in the first place; that way they don’t have any rights.  Build the wall and add more border patrol personnel to stop them. And don't make exceptions for minors or small children; they are participants in the ruse, not victims.  

Next, stop catch and release. If detention centers are overcrowded, don’t build more; make illegals wait somewhere else outside our country until we can process them. If they don’t like that, maybe they should have thought about the possibility of “no vacancy” before they left home.    

Finally, reform the asylum process:  require all requests for asylum be filed first in the applicant’s home country, not here. Show up here without that prior filing and your claim is dismissed.    

Hmm.  Sounds a lot like what Trump has proposed.  Maybe he’s on to something.   

Democrats can't hear the laughter ...

That’s too bad.  It might wake them up to reality. 

It’s not going to take long before a large part of the country – perhaps a majority – moves on from being pissed by Democrats’ bad behavior, to bafflement, to downright ridicule and mocking.

Democrats don’t get it; they don’t see their party’s pushing closer to that line, every day. 

They’re still claiming Trump is a Russian asset – a stooge of Vladimir Putin. That Russians changed the outcome of the last election.  That Barr lied about the Mueller investigation to protect Trump. That Trump’s a white supremacist directly responsible for a rise in reported hate crimes. 

And my personal favorite: that unless we stop using fossil fuels the world will end in 12 years – or 10 according to one Presidential wannabe. That's right: the entire world.  

You can’t make this up. But they clearly have. And they’re okay with that.   

You’d think at some point Democrats in Congress would realize their unrelenting hyperbole about everything makes them look like buffoons. Especially when there’s absolutely no evidence for their claims; in fact, when there’s ample evidence to the contrary. 

Maybe I’m giving them too much credit. Maybe there aren’t any more rational adults left among Democrats in Congress.  It sure appears that way. 

Hearings become tantrums. They see a monster lurking in every closet, even when the lights are on revealing nothing there. They make outrageous claims they know aren’t true.  They cry wolf and impending apocalypse over every little thing. Every innocuous bump in the night, every creak in the floorboards, every word out of context, is a clear sign to them of the end of days. 

Or, at the very least, the end of our democracy.    

And these are not just the Democrats running for President. These are the Democrats elected to the Congress to help govern the country. What were their constituents thinking? Were there no adults available as an alternative?     

At first blush, these Democrats can alarm you – could some of what they’re saying actually be true?  The media seems to think so … or wants them to be true for whatever reason.   

Yet when the facts come in and there’s no “there” there, you’re annoyed and maybe even angry. But as their nonsense continues you finally realize they’re no more than children or at best arrested-development adolescents playing imaginary games, against imaginary foes.

They’ve gotten lost in the game.  They think it’s real – all the monsters, goblins, magic swords, and secret spells – but it’s still just a stupid game, played badly. With our money. 

They take it all so seriously. And themselves so seriously.  Which makes it even funnier.   

Now a lot of us just laugh at their antics. The more off the wall they get, the more hilarious they become. They’re like the crazy neighbor on a sitcom who wears tinfoil under their hat to keep the government from reading their mind. That neighbor always has a conspiracy theory for everything – from the moon landing to why there’s fluoride in the water.    

You know they’re nuts. The audience knows they’re nuts. But they truly think what they believe – no matter how ridiculous – is real.  They’re the only one who knows “the truth.”       

That’s the joke.  That’s why you laugh at them.    

That’s where I am.    

Democrats embarrassed themselves in the Kavanaugh hearings. They’ve embarrassed themselves in the Senate’s hearings with AG Barr about the Mueller report.  The Democrat contenders for the 2020 nomination continue to embarrass themselves daily. The foolishness keeps coming. 

For me, it’s a comedy marathon that never seems to end.  I can’t take them seriously anymore.  It’s just too damn funny to see them make fools of themselves, time and time again. 

Thanks for the laughs, Democrats.  Too bad you can’t hear it.