BLOGGING AGAIN

HELLO TO ALL!

I am happy to report that this blog is now officially back to normal.

I haven’t given up on the book. Not at all. The manuscript is finished, all 68,939 words of it.

For those who have started reading it on the mini chapters I posted here, and for those who never quite got around to it, I am pleased to announce that the entire book can be seen at:

WWW.CONVDIST.BLOGSPOT.COM

Don’t expect a professional printing job. Google’s Blogspot has a mind of its own. Sometimes what was typed in 14 point gets printed in 18 point, and vice-versa. It may be a gravel road, but the scenery and the destination are what’s important.

No cost, no obligation, except the moral imperative that you listen to the distress signals coming from Washington and consider becoming a First Responder.

That said, I’ll be checking with Google every few days to see how many people visit the site.

With Michigan claiming to be the 34th State to petition Congress for a an Article V convention, perhaps the possibility of a constitutional convention will start to dawn on the media and people will want to know what its all about.

Tell them to read the Judge’s book. 

In the meantime...

Yesterday, April 2, 2014 was the sixty-sixth anniversary of my first date with Pauline Mary Weinberger. And my first taste of those sweet lips that passed so many words of wisdom, correction, counsel, amusement and devotion in the last two-thirds of a century.

I planned a kind of a date. Polly had a doctor's appointment in Sun City Center, and I found a cutsey Tea Room in Sarasota, for a light supper before the 6:40 showing of God's Not Dead at the AMC 12 in Sarasota. She managed to finale the surprise out of me, and didn't seem all that enthused about a tea room.

Then she got on her Ipad and read about the movie. Of course, she found some anti-Christian egghead reviewer who couldn't wait to give away the surprise ending.

As it turned out, the tea room was closing, and we ended up at an Irish Pub, much to my liking.

The movie was quite good -- and sold out. 

DEAR BLOG READER

Several people have written to say that they would like to see my book. Although completed in a rough draft, the book is sill a work in progress.

It has occurred to me that, taken collectively, my friends, relatives and blog readers are far wiser and better informed than I am, and so I am inviting everyone to lend me hand.

I have broken the book down to a number of short (700 to 1,200 words) chapters, and I propose to publish a few chapters every day for the next couple of months on my blog. They will be seen at www.judgebrennan.com.

I invite all of you to leave comments on these blogs with any corrections – typographical, factual, grammatical, etc. that may occur to you. Comments may be left anonymously. All will be published except any that belong in a locker room.

Don’t hesitate to take issue with the text. If what I have written isn’t defensible, maybe it should be excised.

And I invite you to relay this to anyone you think might be interested in joining in. I need all the editors I can get.

© Thomas E. Brennan 2014

GOD'S SOCIAL SECURITY

Interesting conversation the other night with a Dade City lawyer named Chip. He’s opposed to the income tax. Says you can’t believe how many people in the United States have never filed a tax return. Millions.

I can believe it. The talking heads are always telling us that small businesses are the backbone of our economy. I’m sure they are, but not the way Washington thinks. The household service industry, kitchen, basement and garage based factories, and family businesses, for example, employ millions of people who get paid in cash and never give a dime to Uncle Sam.

For anything. No income tax. No social security tax. No Medicare tax. They don’t pay, and neither do their employers. It’s called the underground economy. It is raw free enterprise. Capitalism at its basic, most natural, most instinctive level.

And no government, least of all a national government thousands of miles away, is ever going to be able to stop it, slow it down or tap into it to pay politicians, bureaucrats, teachers, policemen or soldiers.

Which is why local governments collect real estate and sales taxes. Everybody’s got to sleep someplace and everybody’s got to eat.

We read that the social security system is going to go broke sometime in this century. When FDR invented it, there were dozens of people paying social security taxes for every one recipient of benefits. Not so today, and in a few years there will be only two or three workers for every old timer living on monthly checks from Uncle Sam.

We live in an artificial economy in which children are seen as a luxury and a financial burden. For most of the planet’s seven billion people, children and grandchildren are still assets: God’s social security. The family is the basic economic unit. Kids help on the farm. Child labor? You betcha. Mom and Dad are the bosses. There is no retirement age. People work until they die or until their kids and grandkids can take care of them.

UnAmerican, you say? Uncivilized? Third world living? How wrong you are. It’s natural, instinctive and it is exactly the way the underground economy which supports millions of Americans works. And works better than the intelligentsia are willing to admit.

Which brings me to another exchange I recently had with a correspondent on the Internet. It had to do with the national government requiring employers to compromise their religious beliefs by providing employee health insurance that covers birth control and abortifacients.

My friend’s argument was that religious beliefs give way to sound public policy. It’s a strong argument. The state of Utah was denied admission to the union until they adopted a constitution that prohibited polygamy. If God hadn’t stopped Abraham from setting Isaac on fire, someone would have called the cops.

In our day, we talk about cultural warfare; the conflict between traditional Judea-Christian standards of behavior and the libertarian hedonism that is justified as personal freedom and privacy.

Unhappily, too few Americans realize that culture, like the economy is a layered phenomenon. The smaller the universe of the layer, the more minute are the regulations. The household has rules about when to eat and sleep; the village tells you when you can water your lawn, the county tells you where to vote, and the state makes you get a drivers license.

In a republic, we put up with localized cultural dictates because free men and women can get up and go. The easier it is to relocate, the more regulation by the majority can be tolerated.

Modern communication tends to blur the boundary lines of communities. Facebookers and Facebookettes chat from afar like neighbors, but they aren’t.  Appleton, Wisconsin and San Francisco, California are not interchangeable communities, despite the symbiosis of dozens of teenagers on the Internet.

The great tragedy of our times is the assumption that the United States of America, through its courts, its congress and its executive has proper authority to decide the minutia of human life in the fifty states. What kind of light bulbs you can use, how much water you can flush down the toilet, who can get a driver’s license, a barber’s license or a marriage license are decisions which our constitution never intended or authorized to be made in the national capital.

Not when there were only three million Americans, much less when there are three hundred million Americans.

ROE, ROE, ROE YOUR BOAT

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

Or so it seems to be considered by too many folks in America.

In September, 2009 I wrote a blog about Roe v Wade, and asked the folks to stay tuned. So I am overdue.

Let me begin with this startling statement from a conservative. Every woman has a natural right to abort her unborn child. I do not suggest that women have no moral obligation to protect the unborn. They do. But there is a difference between natural rights and moral obligations.

We all have the natural right to commit sin. The Creator has empowered us to do what we ought not do, what we know we should not do. It is called free will. A woman or man has the right to cut off his or her finger or toe. For any reason or for no reason at all.

To my knowledge, there never was a criminal law in the United States making it a crime for a woman to abort her unborn child. All of the criminal abortion statutes were directed toward another person causing or performing an abortion.

Thus this language:

"If any person shall designedly administer to a pregnant woman or knowingly procure to be administered with her consent any drug or medicine, or shall use towards her any violence or means whatever externally or internally applied, and thereby procure an abortion, he shall be confined in the penitentiary not less than two nor more than five years; if it be done without her consent, the punishment shall be doubled. By `abortion' is meant that the life of the fetus or embryo shall be destroyed in the woman's womb or that a premature birth thereof be caused.

Roe v Wade makes a special point that the decision to abort a fetus is to be made by a woman and her doctor. The Court was not saying that a woman has a right to an abortion; it was saying that a doctor has the right to perform an abortion. Setting aside for the moment the question of whether the fetus is a human life, considering it merely as healthy tissue in the woman’s body, the question must be answered whether a licensed surgeon has the right to remove it based entirely on the choice and consent of the patient?

He couldn’t cut off a healthy toe or finger without some medical necessity. He couldn’t remove a liver or a gall bladder just because the patient wanted it done.

I ask this question of NARAL: does a woman have a constitutional right to have an abortion performed by her teen age boy friend? Or by a mid wife? Or, indeed, by anyone save a duly licensed medical doctor?

If a coat hanger wielding boy friend punctures an artery and kills a pregnant woman does the criminal abortion law still apply?

Or does NARAL concede that the constitutional right of choice only extends to choosing a licensed medical professional?

In the old movies a spiteful spouse would cause herself to have an abortion by strenuous horseback riding. She endangered herself in the process. The law of nature decrees that the life of a fetus is inextricably entwined with that of the mother.

The truth is that a pregnant woman isn’t sick. Pregnancy is not an illness to be cured. The fetus consists of healthy human tissue and its surgical removal is subject to the same standards of medical excision as any other part of a person’s body.

Separation of a fetus from its mother was always an appropriate medical procedure to save the life of the mother. Roe v Wade was a judicial amendment of the statutes regulating the medical profession to permit abortion as an elective surgery that required no therapeutic justification.

It may well be that at some time and in some places the popular culture will approve of amending the medical licensure statutes to permit elective abortions. In a republic that can happen. But there is no call for nine unelected jurists in a distant national capital to dictate morals or mores to a free people.

THE IVY CORRIDOR

George Mason was an American patriot who participated in the 1787 convention in Philadelphia that drafted the Constitution of the United States.

But he didn’t sign it.

Mason had a premonition. He feared that the new nation would vibrate between a monarchy and a “corrupt oppressive aristocracy.”

He was not alone. Between 1787 and 1791 the entire nation was absorbed in the debate over ratification of the new charter. Fear of the abuse of centralized power was at the root of most opposition. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay wrote detailed arguments– lawyers would call them briefs – in favor of ratification. They became known as the Federalist Papers and they made a strong case.

But it was only an argument about what the future might hold. The true believers were confident that they had designed the best plan for the future of the American people. Perhaps George Mason and Patrick Henry of Virginia, James Winthrop of Massachusetts and Melancton Smith of New York were wrong. Perhaps they were just pessimists who would not let themselves see the silver lining.

On the other hand…

It is just possible that those naysayers were sounding an alarm about what could happen, what might happen, indeed what would happen, if the people of the states became too complacent, too content, too willing to let others take the lead, make the decisions, run the country.

So here we are, 230 years later. More than 90% of the American people have lost confidence in the Congress. Our President openly talks about ruling the nation by executive fiat. Our Supreme Court blandly goes about the theological business of dictating the cultural mores of three hundred million people who are spread over 16 percent of the inhabitable land mass of planet Earth.

And where do these learned men and women, these modern day Pharisees come from? They march down the Ivy corridor that runs from Cambridge Massachusetts to Washington D.C. with short stops in New Haven, Connecticut and New York City to join the self anointed cadre of the intellectual elite, the heirs of a self perpetuating, self aggrandizing, self adulating, self promoting ruling class who see themselves as the brightest and the best, and who simply assume that everyone else in the world thinks so, too.

Let’s see. All nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court were educated at Harvard, Yale or Columbia. The President of the United States attended Columbia University and graduated from the Harvard Law School. That’s two of the three branches of our national government.

Some years ago, when I was Dean of the Thomas Cooley Law School in Lansing, Michigan, I noticed that all of the law clerks in the United States Supreme Court had graduated from one of four or five law schools. I wrote a letter to then Chief Justice Warren Berger and asked if there was any way for graduates of the other 165 law schools to be considered for those important and prestigious positions.

Berger replied that his former law clerks acted as a search committee and always provided him with able candidates for clerkships.

I wrote and suggested that there must be a better way. Then I asked the deans of all American law schools to nominate one graduating senior they felt was outstanding, and for several years we published the “National Law School Dean's List” with pictures and biographies of law graduates all across America.

The Supreme Court paid no attention. They have no need for outsiders. It’s an attitude that pervades our nation’s capital. But it is being challenged.

There is a spirit of revolt across the land. One of its provocateurs is Jimmy Wales, the Founder and Proprietor of Wikipedia. Educated by his mother and grandmother in a one room school house in Alabama, Jimmy has set about providing free access to the entire knowledge base of the human race.

More and more, people are learning that in the twenty-first Century, it's not who you know but what you know that counts. Can the Internet save the Republic?

I think so. And I certainly hope so.

MORE ABOUT THE PROFESSOR

I can’t resist commenting further about the TV chit chat between Michael Moore and Professor Robert Reich. A couple of things they said stuck in my craw.

One was that the wealthiest 400 people in the United States make more money than the poorest 150 million. Another was that the marginal tax rate peaked at 91% during the Eisenhower administration, which, they agreed was a time of great prosperity for the middle class. A third point was that household income in the United States has been on a downward trend for forty years.

I don’t know if they intended to infer that the prosperity was caused by the high taxes or whether they meant to say that the prosperity occurred in spite of the high taxes. In either case, it was pretty obvious that both gentlemen disapproved of the growing gap between the income of the wealthiest and the median income of the American people.

The professor was quite adamant that the goal of a good economic system ought to be traffic in money. A lot of money being made, and a lot of money being spent. The more is made and spent, the better off everybody is. That is the theory of stimulus. That is the economists’ argument in favor of entitlements, and government spending in general.

If that were true, it would follow that a government program giving every man, woman and child in the nation a fat paycheck of let’s say $10,000 per month would skyrocket the economy to an unheard of level of prosperity.

I don’t think so. In fact, I think that supermarkets would shortly be out of strawberries and lettuce and just about everything else.

Working is not just to get things for yourself. We all have the social obligation to contribute to the common welfare. In a free country, that social obligation is discharged freely and voluntarily by every person as they go about the business of seeking their own happiness.

The gap between the incomes at the top of the scale and the national median is interesting. Here’s a good example my son likes to tell:  in 1969, when, as Chief Justice of Michigan, I was able to persuade the State Officers Compensation Commission to give the Justices a raise from $35,000 to $42,000 a year, a star baseball player on the Detroit Tigers by the name of Al Kaline was paid $88,000 annually. And he didn’t even have to work in the wintertime!

Today, the Michigan Supreme Court Justices are paid $165,000 a year. Miguel Cabrera makes $21,000,000. He doesn’t have to suit up in the winter either.

My $42,000 in 1969 would calculate to $271,949 in 2012. Kaline’s $88,000 would equal $569,798 in 2012.

In a free economy, what does this tell us?

Two things, I suppose. Franchise level third basemen are hard to come by and intelligent, public spirited lawyers are a dime a dozen.

I’m sure there are many explanations. I doubt that Mr. Moore and Professor Reich would agree, but there is the fact that the institution of marriage has been on a downturn. Household income goes down when there are fewer people in the household. And the DINKs (double income, no kids) don’t have to work as hard or fight for raises as hard as I did in 1969 with a wife and six children at home.

I never envied Kaline his $88K and I don’t envy Cabrera’s 21 mil. 

The fat paychecks of ball players and stockbrokers are a function of people spending and investing their money the way they want to spend it and invest it.

Folks who make a lot of money and spend a lot of money are just priming the economic pump. Those who save money and invest it in enterprises that hire people and buy things are also priming the pump.

The amount of money a person or a corporation has is not the measure of social responsibility. Harvard University has a multi-billion dollar endowment. I don’t hear liberals complaining. The real stinkers are the folks who bury their coins in the yard. Jesus told a story about that, and he didn’t approve. The only thing worse than burying money in the yard is buying government bonds. 

I’d be in favor of taxing those rascals big time.