WSJ EDITORIAL BOARD

Ask not why Europe doesn’t regulate digital companies more. Ask why Europe doesn’t have more of its own digital companies to regulate.

Bad ideas never die. They go to California in the hope they’ll eventually become law.

Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. 

The Court’s jurisprudence is focused more than anything else on who under the Constitution gets to decide policy, not what that policy should be. This is the main reason Democrats and the press corps are furious about the Court’s decisions. For decades they have counted on a majority of Justices to deliver or bless the policy results they want: on abortion, voting rights, healthcare, racial preferences, climate and economic regulation. You name it, the Court found ways to deliver it with balancing tests, trimester analysis, and the discovery of unenumerated rights between the lines of the Constitution’s text. For decades conservative critics have argued that the role of the Court should be different—supporting rights that are actually in the Constitution, but otherwise enforcing the separation of powers so each branch of government stays in its lane as defined by the Founders. With the arrival of three new Justices nominated by Donald Trump and shepherded to confirmation by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, that Court has arrived.

[Kamala Harris] is a vessel for the triumph of hope over experience, whom Americans are expected to embrace mainly because she isn’t Donald Trump.

I want to tell you, [Justice Neil] Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price, You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

The controlling Justices in Casey went so far as to make an essentially political plea that Americans let their ruling settle the abortion issue. It was a futile attempt to end debate on a question that touches people at their deepest moral convictions. Abortion continues to roil American politics, and states continue to pass laws challenging the logic of both opinions. When a ruling is still controversial and unworkable after five decades, that is compelling evidence it was wrongly decided.

Progressives and the press corps claim that judges who speak to conservative groups or attend their seminars are guilty of conflicts of interest. They even made an effort through the Judicial Conference to bar Justices from attending meetings of the Federalist Society, a legal organization that espouses constitutional originalism. But they are mute about the easy access to judges by the Climate Judiciary Project. Progressives and their friends at ProPublica and the New York Times say Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are tainted by their social connections with conservative donors and interactions with constitutional lawyers. They demand that the Justices recuse themselves from cases, despite no evident conflict of interest. But under the left’s ethics standard, every judge who attends a Climate Judiciary Project event should have to step aside from climate-related cases. Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and his Senate sidecar Dick Durbin are trying to use ethics as a political weapon against conservative Justices, but watch out: It’s a double-edged sword.

Out go the bad memories of [Kamala Harris’] association with Joe Biden, and in come the gauzy slogans about “our future,” the “contagious power of hope,” and “fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion.” Ms. Harris is no longer the Vice President who failed to secure the border. She’ll now be tough on illegal migration. She’s no longer the Veep who said “Bidenomics is working” while inflation reached a 40-year high. She’s now the candidate who will reduce your family’s food bill by going after your grocer for “price gouging.” She’s no longer the candidate of 2020 who questioned the need for cash bail and blamed police for urban violence. She’s now the tough prosecutor who as California Attorney General dared to investigate . . . Exxon. She’s no longer the presidential candidate of 2019 who wanted to ban fracking, endorsed Medicare for All, and questioned whether the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should exist. Her campaign suggests she’s changed her views on all that, although she hasn’t said why—or even been asked. Americans are expected to take her expedient leap from the left to the center on faith.

Covid has been a painful lesson in the costs of media and elite conformity, though we wish we could say the conformists have learned much from it.

Ask not why Europe doesn’t regulate digital companies more. Ask why Europe doesn’t have more of its own digital companies to regulate.

Out go the bad memories of [Kamala Harris’] association with Joe Biden, and in come the gauzy slogans about “our future,” the “contagious power of hope,” and “fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion.” Ms. Harris is no longer the Vice President who failed to secure the border. She’ll now be tough on illegal migration. She’s no longer the Veep who said “Bidenomics is working” while inflation reached a 40-year high. She’s now the candidate who will reduce your family’s food bill by going after your grocer for “price gouging.” She’s no longer the candidate of 2020 who questioned the need for cash bail and blamed police for urban violence. She’s now the tough prosecutor who as California Attorney General dared to investigate . . . Exxon. She’s no longer the presidential candidate of 2019 who wanted to ban fracking, endorsed Medicare for All, and questioned whether the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should exist. Her campaign suggests she’s changed her views on all that, although she hasn’t said why—or even been asked. Americans are expected to take her expedient leap from the left to the center on faith.

[Kamala Harris] is a vessel for the triumph of hope over experience, whom Americans are expected to embrace mainly because she isn’t Donald Trump.

One hallmark of our era is the collapse of public trust in government and experts of all kinds. But it’s hard to fault the public when so many experts and their policies have failed in such spectacular fashion. The inflation that progressives helped to cause, failed to anticipate, and then ignored is one more example of earned public distrust.

Dishonesty plus economic ignorance equals California government.

I want to tell you, [Justice Neil] Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price, You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

Bad ideas never die. They go to California in the hope they’ll eventually become law.

Our Constitution protects the rights of people to make abject idiots of themselves. 

Be truthful, but not neutral.

Covid has been a painful lesson in the costs of media and elite conformity, though we wish we could say the conformists have learned much from it.

The controlling Justices in Casey went so far as to make an essentially political plea that Americans let their ruling settle the abortion issue. It was a futile attempt to end debate on a question that touches people at their deepest moral convictions. Abortion continues to roil American politics, and states continue to pass laws challenging the logic of both opinions. When a ruling is still controversial and unworkable after five decades, that is compelling evidence it was wrongly decided.

Progressives and the press corps claim that judges who speak to conservative groups or attend their seminars are guilty of conflicts of interest. They even made an effort through the Judicial Conference to bar Justices from attending meetings of the Federalist Society, a legal organization that espouses constitutional originalism. But they are mute about the easy access to judges by the Climate Judiciary Project. Progressives and their friends at ProPublica and the New York Times say Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito are tainted by their social connections with conservative donors and interactions with constitutional lawyers. They demand that the Justices recuse themselves from cases, despite no evident conflict of interest. But under the left’s ethics standard, every judge who attends a Climate Judiciary Project event should have to step aside from climate-related cases. Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and his Senate sidecar Dick Durbin are trying to use ethics as a political weapon against conservative Justices, but watch out: It’s a double-edged sword.

The Court’s jurisprudence is focused more than anything else on who under the Constitution gets to decide policy, not what that policy should be. This is the main reason Democrats and the press corps are furious about the Court’s decisions. For decades they have counted on a majority of Justices to deliver or bless the policy results they want: on abortion, voting rights, healthcare, racial preferences, climate and economic regulation. You name it, the Court found ways to deliver it with balancing tests, trimester analysis, and the discovery of unenumerated rights between the lines of the Constitution’s text. For decades conservative critics have argued that the role of the Court should be different—supporting rights that are actually in the Constitution, but otherwise enforcing the separation of powers so each branch of government stays in its lane as defined by the Founders. With the arrival of three new Justices nominated by Donald Trump and shepherded to confirmation by GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, that Court has arrived.

Not to beat a dead horse (a phrase that the index says “normalizes violence against animals”), but you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid.