By Selwyn Duke

Are we truly a nation of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln put it, if our elected representatives aren’t the ones actually making the decisions affecting our lives? For a long time they haven’t been making many of those decisions, too, having essentially “outsourced” them to judges and bureaucrats. But two cases currently before the Supreme Court could help remedy this problem and force Congress to do its job — and could restore power to the people.

The two cases are Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Commerce. And what instigated them well illustrates the perils of letting unelected officials, whose unelected status places them beyond the people’s corrective reach, issue life-altering regulations.

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By Selwyn Duke

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive,” philosopher C.S. Lewis famously wrote. “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.”

Our busybodies are neither omnipotent nor moral, though they crave to be the former and fancy themselves the latter. But they sure do want to control us — for our own good, of course.

Though this phenomenon is confined to the West, it is West-wide because, as the Africans might say, at issue are “First World problems.” And the latest example is a story out of Britain titled “An alcohol ban is beginning to look inevitable.”

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By Selwyn Duke

The men who crafted the First Amendment, the giants who birthed the Establishment Clause, opened the very first U.S. Congress in 1789 with exclusively Christian prayers. This practice continues to this day, too — and the prayers are still mainly Christian. So clearly, the Constitution does not dictate that A, “religion must be kept out of government”; or B, if it is there, that “all ‘religions’ must be given equal time.”

This hasn’t stopped local governments, however, from supposing that public-sphere religious displays/expression must sometimes make room for “Festivus,” the “Church of The Flying Spaghetti Monster,” and other conceptions of “religion” — including satanism. An example of rolling out a red carpet for the Devil just occurred earlier this week, too, in Nevada. And the fact that some government official thought it necessary means that he, like so many today, perhaps misses a simple point. As I wrote last month:

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By Selwyn Duke

One generally unmentioned reason prices are so high is that government taxation and regulation increase businesses’ costs, which then are handed down to consumers. A prime example is a regulation dictating that not only must a herring fishing vessel have a federal monitor aboard, but that its owner also must pay the cost of the observer, which reportedly can be $710 a day (this requirement is currently before the Supreme Court). And now there’s another example:

The Emperor Has Your Clothes — in the crosshairs — and aims to regulate their makers and sellers, supposedly to combat “global warming.”

What’s more, this is apparently based on a lie that the fashion industry pollutes more than it does.

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By Selwyn Duke

“I think there is a lot of voter fraud,” said one Alan Schulkin, caught on hidden video in 2016. Schulkin should know, too: A Democrat, he was at the time New York City’s commissioner of the Board of Elections.

Unfortunately, little has changed for the better since 2016. A case in point is a recent investigation by two experts that has found massive voter-database irregularities in another Democrat-run state: Illinois.

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By Selwyn Duke

What has so often struck me, and irked me, about the embrace of “diversity” dogma is how profoundly unintellectual it is. A wiseguy might say it’s really a simple IQ test, though a wise guy understands it’s a soul and sagacity test. To wit:

To the extent that a person accepts as imperative diversity, DEI, CRT, wokeness in general — or whatever the latest shiny anti-Truth thing is — he is a vacuous know-nothing, not just unqualified, but dangerously ignorant.

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By Selwyn Duke

Another week, another case of a woke figure imposing PC lunacy, another rage storm.

Another fizzle, another memory-holing of the story — and another absence of consequences.

And the woke monster lives to fight another day.

This time the issue is a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) “hit list” circulated at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (JHM) in Baltimore. As GB News wrote on the story late last week:

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By Selwyn Duke

Maybe you’ll be able to call the physician who treats you in the future the DoubleplusGood Doctor. Oh, he perhaps won’t know much about human anatomical structure, but everything about structural racism. And if you’re sick and he renders the diagnosis “white and privileged,” you just may be able to know he’s a graduate of UCLA med school.

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By Selwyn Duke

The history of presidential campaigns is replete with dirty tricks, from 1856 claims that James Buchanan’s palsy-induced head tilt was the result of his trying to hang himself to the 2004 Killian documents fraud and beyond. But the advent of artificial intelligence and “deepfake” video and audio can take dirty tricks to a whole new level — and even, perhaps, sway an election.

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By Selwyn Duke

“It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children,” said a NYC liberal in 2015 about a diversity plan affecting his kids’ school. Now a Democratic legislator in the Big Apple perhaps could echo that sentiment after her daughter was kicked out of school — to make room for Joe Biden’s migrants.

In fact, states Assemblywoman Jaime Williams, who has complained that the migrant maneuver is “not fair to us,” she wants Biden to close the border.

(Now, there’s a novel idea. Anyone ever thought of that before?)

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