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A shooting in PA
“There is no place in America for this kind of violence — for any violence. Ever. Period. No exception. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”
Those words were spoken by President Biden in response to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
Nice, but powerless words.
Violence is normalized in America; there have been 341 mass shootings in the nation through July 14, resulting in 340 people killed and more than 1,400 people wounded. The shooting at Trump’s rally was a mass shooting, resulting in the death of one rally-goer.
People on both sides of the political divide were stunned and shocked as the news spread throughout the country on July 13. Trump supporters were energized by the former president’s demeanor after being wounded by the alleged assassin’s bullet. He punched the air with his fist mere seconds after getting wounded in his ear.
Trump escaped a much more serious result: the difference of a quarter inch was the difference of being murdered and his show of defiance.
While Biden’s words were meant to be calming, it is hard to compare a presidential candidate who survives a bullet (Ronald Reagan was never so popular as when he survived his own assassination attempt, demonstrating his natural sense of humor.
Some think the election is over and they feel Trump will be the recipient of sympathy votes.
The secondary story is how the shooter was able to do what he did. The shooter was spotted by some rally attendees; they told members of the security team.
An investigation following the shooting should take a deep dive look into how a person can get on a roof of a building with a clear line to the podium where Trump spoke.
The United States Secret Service is admired for its personnel and tactics, now, the incident in Pennsylvania leaves it with a black eye. The public wants and deserves answers.
Shortly after news of the assassination attempt was out, fingers started to be pointed. Some Trump supporters blamed the Democrats rhetoric about what the danger Trump ‘s election will imperil American democracy.
Actor Tom Hanks when asked earlier this summer if he worries about a second Trump adminstration, said, “I think there’s always reason to be worried about the short term,” if Trump wins in November.
“But I look at the longer term. Our Constitution says, ‘We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,’—that journey to a more perfect union has missteps in it,”
We couldn’t have said it better.
— LAZ
Keizer shows up
By CELESTE GUPTILL For the Keizertimes
The city motto of Keizer is Pride, Spirit and Volunteerism.
One area Keizer citizens prides themselves in is volunteerism.
There are many ways to volunteer in Keizer and all of them help make our city a stronger and better community.
Big projects have been accomplished because Keizer shows up. Big projects have a way of mesmerizing us and gaining momentum in a crowd.
The little things are harder to muster help for, but it is the little things that keep our community thriving and strong.
Inside the cultural center, the Keizer Homegrown Theatre is just one of many areas to volunteer locally.
The Keizer Cultural Center also has the Keizer Heritage Museum, the Keizer Art Association Enid Joy Mount Gallery and the Keizer Community Library.
Keizer Homegrown Theatre has two plays remaining this season, one of them coming up in August and another in November.
Volunteering with the theater is more than acting.
Cheerful faces ready to greet patrons before the shows are needed. Training for Box Office and other support positions are offered at least once per year.
The best part is that when you volunteer you get to see shows for free.
The Keizer Homegrown Theatre is a theater of and for the community.
We believe engaging in the arts is an essential part of a strong community.
We aspire to break down barriers for others to participate by attending and creating this important element of entertainment.
KeizerFEST is also just around the corner and provides another opportunity to volunteer.
These are just a few small ways you can engage but it’s the small things that lay the foundation.
It’s the bread and butter of keeping a strong and thriving community.
So if the people of Keizer keep doing what they do best and show up, we will gladly put you to work
(Celeste Guptill lives in Keizer.)
Did incivility beget shooting?
By GENE H. McINTYRE
Daily, almost hourly at times of late, the American public is bombarded with messages that are hateful and encourage violence. in fact, over the past several years, messages from persons who have been placed in a leadership role —with dedicated companion surrogates assisting them- have come across to make living here a dangerous place.
What’s getting interesting now is that those same persons who have encouraged the delivery of a threatening diatribe have now experienced the return of it to them or ‘what goes around often comes around.’
Actually, when life meets reality, that’s what usually comes to the perpetrators of hate wherever they are in the world today and yesteryear.
What happened to one leader last weekend resulted in a great hue and cry over an assassination attempt.
Thereby, many Americans are screaming angry revenge over that incident, as they should, because it’s not in keeping with a democracy with freedom of speech.
However, when we as a people say nothing to discourage those who express visions founding acts of hate and violence, then such acts realize commonplace status and soon a way of life by everyone and everyone is a potential victim.
If we want to remain the civilized place we have been and can be all the time, a place where an American can walk and talk freely, without fear of physical harm, then we must all, collectively and individually demand and maintain behaviors by which we all can live and even flourish as a united society. Otherwise, we face lives without safety or security where leaving one’s bunker can mean sudden harm or death by every and all means.
Think about what you are doing, saying and being. If you get hopping angry when something happens to a like-minded friend, but don’t stand to protect all Americans, then you are part of the problem not helpful to a solution.
(Gene H. McIntyre shares his opinion regularly in the Keizertimes.)
Whoops…the progressive road to Nirvana ran into a Court detour
By GEORGE F. WILL
Should progressives be more alarmed by Donald Trump’s threat to the Constitution or by the Constitution’s threat to progressivism? For the answer, read on.
Woodrow Wilson, a progressive and the first president to criticize the Founding, considered the Constitution’s essence —the separation of powers—an impediment to a modern necessity: encompassing government wielded by an unimpeded executive. Progressives’ dismay about two of the Supreme Court’s end-of-term rulings illustrates how far their criticism of the Constitution goes beyond Wilson’s.
When a federal agency ordered four small fishing companies to pay the estimated $700-a-day cost (reducing their profits 20%) of on-board government inspectors, the companies sued, arguing that no statutory language explicitly authorizes the agency to impose this burden. The agency invoked Chevron deference, a court-created (in 1984) doctrine that says when Congress uses ambiguous legislative language, or is silent on a subject, a court reviewing an agency’s disputed action should defer to the agency, if its action is “reasonable.”
The doctrine, in addition to encouraging Congress’s slipshod legislating, impinges on the judiciary’s duty to (in Chief Justice John Marshall’s words) “say what the law is.” So, the Supreme Court held, 6-3, that Chevron deference violates the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, which stipulates that courts shall “interpret” statutes and decide all questions of law.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority: “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.” There it is, progressives’ bête noire (definition: something that is an object of aversion or the bane of one’s existence): the separation of powers. Somewhere, Woodrow Wilson weeps. Here, Justice Elena Kagan dissented.
She defended, as progressives who created it must, the administrative state’s status quo. Extinguishing Chevron deference —narrowing agencies’ discretion—will, she said, cause “a massive shock to the legal system,” because Chevron deference “has become part of the warp and woof of modern government.”
Kagan calls overturning the court’s creation, Chevron, “judicial hubris.” Yet progressives advocate courts wielding judicial power to legitimize progressive practices —agencies’ semi-legislative activities, regardless of their incompatibility with the separation of powers.
It is, however, not hubris when courts reject Panglossian progressivism: All is for the best in this best of possible worlds; “modern government” is what it is, so it should be what it is.
The other case also has progressives fretting about the court’s curtailment of executive agencies’ discretion. An investor was accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC has been empowered by Congress to be the arbiter of its own judgments. So, the investor was convicted by an SEC in-house administrative law judge, who fined the investor $300,000 and banned him from the securities industry. The SEC has a lopsided winning record in cases it assigns to be judged by itself.
Now, however, the court has held, 6-3, that Congress cannot “conjure away” (language from a previous ruling) the Seventh Amendment Guarantee of a right to trial by jury. Writing for the majority,Roberts cited Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 78): “There is no liberty,if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.” Yet again, progressives regret the separation of powers, meaning: the Constitution.(One of the Atlantic magazine endless supply of hysterics anticipated this outcome as “terrifying”and “destroying” the government’s “administrative capacity.”)
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, concurring in the judgment, and joined by Clarence Thomas, wrote that the Seventh Amendment “does not work alone”: It works in tandem with the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process. Dissenting, the three progressive justices (Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson) say that limiting the SEC’s discretion to choose its own judges ignores what “modern-day adaptable governance must look like.” Well.
Consider the lengthening list of progressives’ complaints about the Constitution’s incompatibility with their “modern-day adaptable” government. They consider the First Amendment too protective of speech that harms an individual’s serenity, or society’s comity. Don’t get them started on the Second Amendment. Now they resent the Fifth and Seventh Amendments working together to inhibit progressives’ handiwork: the administrative state agencies whose discretion has been curtailed because the separation of powers dictates the demise of Chevron deference.
For more than a century, progressivism’s unvarying agenda has been to concentrate power in Washington and concentrate most of this power in the executive branch. Progressives have constantly prioritized expanding government’s power and scope over individual freedom. With two excellent end-of-term decisions, the court affirmed the Constitution’s different priorities.
So, the answer to the question posed in the first paragraph is: the latter.
(Washington Post)
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