Also on today’s menu:
Children Rescued, Man Charged After Canoe Overturns
Loon Rescued From Lake Opechee In Laconia
Those who listened to the pleadings before the United States Supreme Court in the challenge to Colorado’s decision that Donald Trump cannot appear on that state’s ballot because of his role in the January 6, 2021, insurrection in Washington, D.C., could have predicted that the justices would overturn Colorado’s ruling. What they could not anticipate is that the court would go beyond the case at hand to further undermine the Fourteenth Amendment by saying that its ban on insurrectionists holding office only applies if Congress decides to disqualify them. The ban is not self-executing, they ruled.
The Supreme Court decision is ostensibly unanimous, but actually is a 5-4 decision, with four of the justices “concurring” but taking exception to some of the reasoning. Notably, one of the majority votes supporting the decision is that of Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife was an active participant in Trump’s attempts to invalidate the 2020 election results. Thomas should have recused himself, and the other justices should have insisted that he do so, because allowing him to participate in a vote with his obvious conflict of interest further undermines faith in the court’s impartiality. Without Thomas’ vote, it would have been a 4-4 tie and the decision might have been restricted to the narrow facts before the court.
The reason all the justices agreed to the decision was that Colorado’s decision did not pass constitutional muster. They did not address the fact that Trump has not been convicted of insurrection, which could have served as a reason to reverse the decision, but there was enough in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment to accomplish the same thing.
The court wrote, “Section 1 of the Amendment, for instance, bars the States from ‘depriv[ing] any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law’ or ‘deny[ing] to any person ... the equal protection of the laws.’ And Section 5 confers on Congress ‘power to enforce’ those prohibitions, along with the other provisions of the Amendment, ‘by appropriate legislation.’
“Section 3 of the Amendment likewise restricts state autonomy, but through different means. … Section 3 aimed to prevent such a resurgence by barring from office ‘those who, having once taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, afterward went into rebellion against the Government of the United States.’ The court wrote that it is therefore necessary, as Chief Justice Chase concluded and the Colorado Supreme Court itself recognized, to ‘“ascertain[] what particular individuals are embraced”’ by the provision. The Constitution empowers Congress to prescribe how those determinations should be made. The relevant provision is Section 5, which enables Congress, subject of course to judicial review, to pass ‘appropriate legislation’ to ‘enforce’ the Fourteenth Amendment. …
“Sen. Trumbull noted that ‘notwithstanding [Section 3] ... hundreds of men [were] holding office’ in violation of its terms. ... The Constitution, Trumbull noted, ‘provide[d] no means for enforcing’ the disqualification, necessitating a ‘bill to give effect to the fundamental law embraced in the Constitution.’ … The enforcement mechanism Trumbull championed was later enacted as part of the Enforcement Act of 1870, ‘pursuant to the power conferred by §5 of the [Fourteenth] Amendment.’
“We conclude that States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office. But States have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the Presidency.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett concurred with the majority opinion, but added, “This suit was brought by Colorado voters under state law in state court. It does not require us to address the complicated question whether federal legislation is the exclusive vehicle through which Section 3 can be enforced.
“The majority’s choice of a different path leaves the remaining Justices with a choice of how to respond. In my judgment, this is not the time to amplify disagreement with stridency. The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election. Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up. For present purposes, our differences are far less important than our unanimity: All nine Justices agree on the outcome of this case.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Karan, and Katanji Brown Jackson also concurred, but quoted the court’s statement in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that, “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case, then it is necessary not to decide more.”
“Today,” they wrote, “the Court departs from that vital principle, deciding not just this case, but challenges that might arise in the future. … Allowing Colorado to [prevent Trump from appearing on the ballot] would, we agree, create a chaotic state-by-state patchwork, at odds with our Nation’s federalism principles. That is enough to resolve this case. Yet the majority goes further. Even though ‘[a]ll nine Members of the Court’ agree that this independent and sufficient rationale resolves this case, five Justices go on. They decide novel constitutional questions to insulate this Court and petitioner from future controversy. … Although only an individual State’s action is at issue here, the majority opines on which federal actors can enforce Section 3, and how they must do so. The majority announces that a disqualification for insurrection can occur only when Congress enacts a particular kind of legislation pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. In doing so, the majority shuts the door on other potential means of federal enforcement. We cannot join an opinion that decides momentous and difficult issues unnecessarily, and we therefore concur only in the judgment. … Yet the Court continues on to resolve questions not before us. In a case involving no federal action whatsoever, the Court opines on how federal enforcement of Section 3 must proceed. Congress, the majority says, must enact legislation under Section 5 prescribing the procedures to ‘“‘ascertain[] what particular individuals’”’ should be disqualified. … Section 3 states simply that ‘[n]o person shall’ hold certain positions and offices if they are oathbreaking insurrectionists. … Nothing in that unequivocal bar suggests that implementing legislation enacted under Section 5 is ‘critical’ (or, for that matter, what that word means in this context). … In fact, the text cuts the opposite way. Section 3 provides that when an oathbreaking insurrectionist is disqualified, ‘Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. It is hard to understand why the Constitution would require a congressional supermajority to remove a disqualification if a simple majority could nullify Section 3’s operation by repealing or declining to pass implementing legislation.”
Discussion: In other words, the ruling reverses the stated intention, to automatically disqualify an insurrectionist from holding office, and instead puts the onus on Congress to decide whether to ban such a person from serving. Given Congress’ inability to get much of anything done, including holding Trump accountable in two impeachment proceedings, the ruling opens the door to any traitor aiming to dismantle the Republic. Furthermore, if the aim is to ‘turn the national temperature down, not up’, the ruling further discredits the Supreme Court, and keeping Trump on the ballot means that, if he loses in November, he will again claim the election was stolen and bring further chaos.
Children Rescued, Man Charged After Canoe Overturns
Franklin police have charged Michael Stewart of West Bow Street with drunkenness while canoeing with two children on the Winnipesaukee River on March 1. The charge arose after the canoe overturned near the Franklin Public Library, spilling the occupants into the frigid water.
Stewart managed to get ashore and shout for help, and Sergeant Forrest Walker entered the river to save the two children, handing them off to Officer Christopher Hart, who had obtained a water rescue device.
Franklin Fire and EMS initially treated the children, one of whom was unconscious. They called for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Advanced Response Team to take the child to the hospital in Lebanon while the other child was taken to Concord Hospital-Franklin. Walker was treated for hypothermia.
Discussion: The child taken to the Franklin hospital was doing fine at last report, while the other child’s fate has not been reported. Canoeing with young children is always risky and doing so while allegedly intoxicated is even more so. The information from the police department does not say whether the children were wearing personal flotation devices, but even if they were, the water temperature would be dangerous. Police say other charges are likely, and there surely will be more charges if the child dies.
Loon Rescued From Lake Opechee In Laconia
Laconia resident Carol Varney reported seeing two loons swimming in an open area of Lake Opechee on February 21 and notified the Loon Preservation Committee. Much of the lake was iced in, and she was concerned about their safety. Loons typically fly south during cold weather, but this year’s warmer temperatures have affected their normal migration patterns.
Biologists Caroline Hughes and John Cooley arrived to find one loon in a patch of open water off Opechee Point, with other loons further out in the lake. Cooley, wearing a cold water suit and pushing a small boat, caught the loon in a net and brought it back to shore, transferring it into a cardboard box. After ensuring that it was in good health, they banded it and released it at the Seacoast.
The Loon Preservation Committee, based in Moultonborough, reports observing or rescuing many loons that did not make the usual seasonal migration to the ocean this year.
Discussion: The warming climate is causing a lot of confusion in the animal kingdom. The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department is engaged in multi-year study to learn more about threats facing the moose population, including winter ticks. The New Hampshire Game Management Plan has the department working with partners to monitor the moose population and seek to conserve, protect, and enhance moose habitat.
Café Chatter
I was going to write a rebuttal on the anti-Trump articles I have seen, but I found an article from Lex Greene that says it far better than I could. So here’s the link https://newswithviews.com/the-truth-about-trump-voters/ to read his article and then you decide if Biden was really looking out for you and your family or if Trump will try to make us proud and bring us back together as a UNITED STATES of AMERICA, a people, a country, a nation, Americans. Did you know Newfound school district’s vision statement is teaching the kids they are Global Citizens? This is a slap in the face of all veterans and there is no such thing as a global citizen, only a national or state citizen.
Under Biden our nation is out of control by people that believe gun control is the right way to stop criminals and people from shooting each other (bulletin…. It’s not the gun, it’s the people that are doing the shooting and killing with no or little concern for life), giving hundreds of billions of dollars to Ukraine while we have no border wall allowing drugs in killing our young people, human trafficking, allowing millions of illegals aliens into our country with little to no vetting and that hate our way of life, giving them all sorts of care and paying them billions while our poor, homeless and veterans go without and go 34 trillion further into debt. Look at Massachusetts, housing illegal aliens and now are telling their citizens to house them and even asking NH to help out.
Cross dressers and transgenders are normal, manipulating and mutilating kids thinking they can change their sex, drag shows to kindergartens/young kids, explicit hard core graphic porn in our schools and libraries for pre-teens and teens to read/view with your tax dollars (what academic value does that bring, all it does is promote more sex, rapes, crimes, abortions, and grooms kids to think that doing or allowing anything to be done to them is normal), teaching sex-ed starting at pre-k, and teaching diversity that us white people (that is all of you reading this) are viewed as evil or that you are privileged all the while preaching inclusion (except your way of life) and equity must be accepted (what’s yours is mine, share and share alike, you are privileged and owe it to them). They’re now started collecting mental health data on all students under the guise of teaching social emotional learning (SEL), which is changing the child’s mind/psyche and that data will follow them all their lives like grades do now (SEL is a topic for another time, too deep to explain it all in this letter). Under Biden, schools believe that 50% failing English, Math and Science is acceptable and that our schools are doing wonderful. They Don’t hold anything as truth, truth is what you believe. Morals are subjective and being a humanist is normal and they keep changing the meaning s of word.
Many people believe they are god, I am the creator of who and what I am and no one can tell me otherwise, that is the humanism and a religion. They believe (takes faith to believe) in themselves and not that someone created them or our universe. I know, what about the big bang theory, right… Well, I ask, what created all the matter that went BANG? Who created the BANG? You see, no one knows (I believe it came from God or who I call God or who I know as God), but humanists believe it came out of nothing. You only have to look at a human life itself to see we are a created being. From conception, cells form and automatically the sex is determined, hair, eye, skin color is known, in 9 months we go from a couple cells to fully developed human made in the image of our creator, not parents, but God. We were created from something we didn’t just go poof and now exist. Did you ever create something from nothing? No. A tree, cut up to make a table, thread from cotton to make clothing, a rock, carved to make a sculpture, materials, mined from the earth to create an electric vehicle, EV.
Let’s change while there is still time and bring God back into our lives, our classrooms, and country and watch what God can do. Open your eyes and stop being fooled, tricked, deceived and open a Bible and see the truths and examples all throughout it. We have thousands of years of history and facts to look at in the Bible so we don’t make the same mistakes.
— John Sellers