Bridging the gap?

I'm all for calling their bluff.

Try us. Don’t start something you can’t finish.

This came from a lefty former compatriot of mine, an acquaintance from back in the day when we were both in the Maryland Blogger Alliance - an association of blogs from a number of perspectives that lasted about a half-decade beginning in the mid-aughts. And it is an interesting way to disarm the counterprotesting opposition momentarily.

The tell is in the second sentence, as they imagine that there is such a thing as excess when studying the Founding Fathers. It’s a little like the old Barry Goldwater quote, “Extremism is the defense of liberty is no vice.”

One thing about the Left: they only cite the Constitution when it’s convenient for them to do so. Most of the time they see our founding documents as just old pieces of parchment that are a product of a bygone era - one where we still held slaves and women were chained to their homes. Their judges make things up as they go along, using the flimsiest of defenses to favor their preferred anti-American viewpoints.

But if you go to my friend’s site (which I did) and dig up the post (which I did) you will notice I asked the question in the comments:

So then I would ask "how?"

You may also notice no one answered the question. Now it could be that my friend’s commenters exist in an echo chamber where they don’t have to answer opposing viewpoints, and that’s fine. I don’t get a whole lot of leftists coming here to rebut my presumptions, either. We seem to stay with our own kind.

On the other hand, if you go to the social media of our elected representatives, you’ll see that few on the opposition are afraid to comment. (I regularly ask questions and point out things about my representatives in Congress and the Senate, as I voted for none of our Three Stooges.) Here’s an example from Friday, from our Senator LBR*:

A new poll shows that more than 70% of Americans worried about their finances.

This President doesn't care about the hard choices families have to make when money gets tight – he's never had to make them.

He may not care, but I'll never stop fighting to bring down costs.

I can just hear her social media minion staffer saying, “Oooooooohh, I really got tRump, didn’t I?”

Allow me to check in with the factoid mic drop:

You know, you're likely correct with that polling news, but what you're lacking is context. For example, this is nothing new - a survey from 2019 came out similarly. And just last year, "About 70% of Americans report feeling stressed about their personal finances, with 75% of adults aged 18-34 expressing significant financial anxiety. Among Generation Z, 79% of hourly workers admit they frequently lack sufficient funds to cover their bills on time."

This was a survey done under Joe Biden, but I don't recall you making a big deal of this, and if your underfunded opponent did no one covered it because the news operations in this state are rather biased.

Speaking of which, why is it I hear from you so much now when you were hardly ever on my feed for the last eight years? Is it just dumb luck?

Mark Zuckerberg seems to bring all three of my Stooges onto my feed regularly, which I suppose is correct because I follow them but then again I follow a lot of other things I hardly ever see.

So let me get back to the Constitution. It’s worth pointing out that I see bills all the time which wish to mandate that all legislation cites its constitutionality, but those measures never seem to get anywhere. (Or they simply say it’s to “promote the general welfare.”)

The idea of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was that of minimizing government and maximizing freedom. What wasn’t assigned to the federal government was granted to the states, or the people.

Yet, over decades that turned into going on two and a half centuries, we’ve developed a negative symbiotic relationship: those who wished to amass power gravitated to the federal level and those who wanted sinecures where they have the trappings of elected office at the state and local levels allowed power to be ceded to the federal government so they have someone to blame when the shit hits the fan. “It’s not our fault!” they cry.

Look at the situation with the federal Department of Education, which wasn’t spelled out in the Constitution anyway. For perhaps 10% of the school’s funding, they call close to 100% of the tune. (The hammer of withholding federal funding is a 40-pound sledge.) They don’t teach a single student but have presided over a long-standing decline in educational achievement.

In another area, federal regulations written by lobbyists and bureaucrats in some conference room inside the Beltway affect people who have never set foot in Washington, D.C. and create issues with their way of life. Have they ever come out to the 1/3 of land out West controlled by the federal government? (And why is this land controlled by the federal government anyway?)

When the Left really wants to “protect the Constitution” we’ll talk, but right now it’s just empty rhetoric.

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* My regular reminder that I don’t like to type out Lisa Blunt Rochester all the time.

In the meantime, though, you can Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now.