TRUE OR FALSE? “The Flintstones” is a documentary. “Row versus Wade” involves a fisherman’s choices for crossing a raging stream. A homotextual is someone who drinks homogenized milk while using Twitter.
If you didn’t answer false to all three, you may return to Fox News.
Regular Barbwire readers know that when I make a mistake, I eat crow with lots of mustard. However, when proven right, I crow. Loudly. Today, I soar while some become sore. Evermore.
In this column five years ago, I shamelessly projected that a newly-minted U.S. Supreme Court justice would become his mother’s revenge on the federal agency she once headed and tried to destroy.
I drew serious fire from Democrats and Republicans alike. Here is the Barbwire of February 7, 2017:
“If you want to attack Anne Gorsuch Burford, the first woman appointed as the head of the EPA, now deceased, and impute her alleged sins to her son, a distinguished jurist of impeccable reputation, then you are free to do so. But if you do, there are those who might be tempted to ask you ‘Sir, at long last, have you no sense of decency?’ “
One of my correspondents employed the classic gimlet which attorney Joseph Welch used as a scalpel to torpedo the credibility of Sen. Pat McCarran’s (D-Nev.) best bud, Sen. Joe “Commies Under Every Bed” McCarthy, R-Wisconsin.
Such kneejerk response misses my point: With the nomination of Poison Annie’s progeny Judge Neil Gorsuch, Tsar Donaldov Vladimirovitch and Rasputin Breitbartsky (Steve Bannon) have deftly engineered an inside triple play, a three-layered insult to environmentalism, a joke which all moonhowlers will immediately understand.
In 1981, King Ronnie the Vague appointed Anne Gorsuch Burford to head the Environmental Protection Agency, an institution she reviled.
The Tsar’s 2017 EPA nominee, oil patch politician Scott Pruitt, is cut from the same ideological cloth and likewise assigned to destroy.
Poison Annie did her best to dismantle the EPA and gloried in the destruction and carnage even as she walked out the door in disgrace. She was the first cabinet minister ever cited for contempt of Congress and resigned after Reagan threw her under the bus.
Her defense was the ancient war crime cop-out: I was just following orders.
The Reaganauts ordered her not to comply with congressional subpoenas about more than $1 billion of Toxic Waste Superfund mismanagement.
When the White House abandoned its executive privilege claims, she walked after just 22 months on the job. Her chief aide, Rita Lavelle, went to jail for perjury.
The nomination of Poison Annie’s kid is a multi-layered insult to tree huggers without explicitly stating it, thus eliminating the risk of righteous (but nonetheless off the mark) reactions such as stated by my learned legal correspondent, above.
Rasputin is truly an evil genius.
When the Trumpista Court finally gutted the EPA last week, my warning of Poison Annie’s revenge came terribly true by a vote of six to three.
Gorsuch2 wrote a 19-page concurrence with Chief Justice Roberts’ execution order. The CJ hung his hat on the Clean Air Act’s lack of “particular clarity.” Hmmm…where have I heard that one before. Oh yeah — President Nixon’s lawyers, fighting congressional Watergate subpoenas, alleged “lack of specificity.” (Try to say that fast 10 times as Daffy Duck. Despicable.)
Roberts was joined by fisherman/Justice Samuel Alito, who two weeks ago neither rowed nor waded. He just destroyed the river.
In her kickass dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote “that the statute at issue in the case had given the agency ample authority…The Clean Air Act was major legislation designed to deal with a major public policy issue,” she stated.
“Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues — even significant ones — as and when they arise…
“This is not the attorney general regulating medical care or even the CDC regulating landlordtenant relations. It is E.P.A. (that’s the Environmental Protection Agency, in case the majority forgot) acting to address the greatest environmental challenge of our time.”
Mommy thus lectured the errant children who nonetheless declared gang warfare against the 21st Century.
As I have noted many times, today’s retro Supremes practice homotextuality. (“Rise of the Homotextuals,” Barbwire 2-9-2022) It’s a shuck fabricated to overturn Roe v. Wade and popularized by the late Antonino Scalia and his corrupt sidekick, Clarence the Morally Obtuse.
Homotextual judicial activism is lazy person’s justice, dictionary dictation. Focus on the words of the Constitution as written in the 18th Century and look for definitions from that time. If not there, it won’t fly. (Somebody find me the word “airplane” from 1789. No? Thus crash the FAA, air traffic control and the US Air Force.)
“The current court is textualist when being so suits it,” Kagan wrote. “When that method would frustrate broader goals, special canons like the ‘major questions doctrine’ magically appear as get-out-of-text-free cards.”
In other words, the toxic sextet makes it up as they go.
The destruction of the EPA thus comes down to the same crosscutting cause of the court’s cancer as stated by longtime Supreme Court journalist Linda Greenhouse. Of Alito’s tortured, tortuous and twisted tracheal tweaking of Roe, she simply said “they did it because they could. It was as simple as that.”
Welcome back to the Gilded Age of 1896 when robber barons ran wild, workers and women had no rights and black people were “separate but equal.” Racial segregation was obviously constitutional according to 19th Century Supremes who might well admire the jurisprudence of today’s Saudi princes.
The sickening six are flush with power. Beware: Indoor plumbing’s not in the Constitution. Fight back any way you can every day.
Take care of each other and be careful out there.
Pray for Ukraine and 53 other currently war-torn lands.
Be well. Raise hell. / Esté bien. Haga infierno.
Andrew Quarantino Barbano, a 53-year Nevadan, is editor of MississippiWestNV.org, ConsumerCoalitionv.org, Rentvolution.org and NevadaLabor.com. Barbwire by Barbano has originated in the Tribune since 1988.
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