Opus 2018-258: Toast Rules

All games have rules.  If they didn’t they would be impossible to play.  Certain things are understood and not allowed and people are always trying to get away with things.  It is the nature of games.  One of the card games that I played in my youth was called Rook.  It is a recognized, registered, trademarked game even if you have never heard of it.  I played it for years before I ever read the rules and found that what I had been playing was not Rook.  It was our version of Rook.  We even had subversions.  We called ours Pasadena College Rules.  If we had been playing with someone who had read the rules they would have claimed we were cheating.  No.  We understood the rules.  It didn’t do any good to complain that the rules didn’t allow something.  We all agreed to play that way.  If you refused to acknowledge the rules you played under, you were toast.

Politically a lot of us low level conservatives have been toast.  This came to me as I was reading a post by Don Surber about recent activity in the Senate.  Evidently the Senate Judiciary Committee met while the Senate was not in session and approved some judges to go to the floor for a floor vote.  Democrats are crying, “Foul!”  It seems that they were all out of town and even the Republicans only had two senators present.  I am guessing that they were playing by Pasadena College Rules.  It must be legal because they are getting away with it but it doesn’t seem logical.

This is where those of us in fly-over country probably need to read the real rule book.  Traditionally conservatives have believed that the rule of law means you follow the law even if you don’t agree with it.  That means a Supreme Court with a conservative majority will abide by such nonsense as Roe v Wade because it is the law and precedent.  A liberal, activist court will throw out 200 years of American rulings and 2,000 years of Western civilization because they can and it advances their leftist agenda.  That means the conservatives can never move forward.  All they can do is hold the line while the liberals are free to go crazy.

We need to take another look at the rule book.  This time it needs to be the actual play-book that is being used, not the one that sits in the box and gets ignored.  What are the rules, encased in the Constitution, and what are traditions made up by the dominate party and the ingrown incumbents?  Take the idea of a 60 vote necessity to end debate and get on with the business of confirming judges.  This is not in the Constitution and if used as it was originally intended, to make sure everyone had a chance to speak, it was a tool to keep the majority from running over the minority.  It became a way for people who lost elections to keep the Senate from voting and doing its job.  It was tradition and it was changed.  If it had not been changed we would be getting no judges confirmed.

Jury nullification is another principle that citizens need to consider.  When you are on a jury the judge tells you the choices you have under the law.  That is the judges opinion and what he tells you may be technically correct.  But what if the law is wrong and it is being used to railroad someone for political purposes?  Jury nullification says that the jury can declare someone “not guilty” no matter what the law says.  It is the jury applying the same principles to their role that the liberal Supreme Court justices apply to theirs.  Just because the jury only serves on one trial and doesn’t get black robes does not mean they are second class citizens.

I am sure there are other ways we can begin to play by the real rules.  I am tired of being toast.

homo unius libri