Even though it’s Holy Week, with both Passover and Easter, events are not slowing down or even taking a breather. This week we have a White House address by Donald President Trump on the war, Attorney General Pam Bondi being given the boot, the Supreme Court in the news once more, and we’re back in space!

Trump Addresses the War

On Wednesday, President Trump addressed the nation about the war against the Islamic Republic, making a case for his actions – something he should have done at the very start. In part, the address may have been aimed at the millions of Americans who aren’t paying much attention to global events, but who have noticed that the price of petrol has risen.

Trump laid out why we are at war with the Islamic Republic: we cannot live with a death-cultist regime that has atomic bombs combined with the ability and desire to fire them at us and our allies. The rising oil prices and disruptions to the global economy are a small price to pay for not having homicidal maniacs in Tehran able to rain down death and destruction on the entire West.

But Trump was his typical mercurial self when discussing the Straits of Hormuz, the trump card, if you will, that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRCG) holds. He indicated that it would be up to others to secure the Strait and ensure that the mullahs cannot hold the global economy to ransom whenever they choose.

We have been here before. During the Iran/Iraq war, the Iranians blocked the Straits, and it took almost a year of United States (US)-led military intervention to open them again. There should, by rights, be an international coalition that keeps the Straits open, but how we achieve that when Trump keeps insulting our North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies and threatening to withdraw from NATO entirely is an open question. Furthermore, our allies, like the United Kingdom (UK), barely have the capacity, let alone the will, to engage in any meaningful fight with Islamist terrorists.

For one thing, Sir Keir Starmer is terrified of upsetting the UK’s large and growing Muslim vote. The Houses of Parliament now has several Islamist MPs in it, and London’s streets are filled with protesters defending the IRGC. (Speaking of protesters, one wag asked someone at an anti-war protest about the homophobia of focusing on the Straits of Hormuz and not the Gays of Hormuz.)

President Trump committed the USto several more weeks of bombardment in Iran, which evidently now includes infrastructure such as the B1 bridge near Tehran. Notwithstanding the outrage about taking out the bridge, it is surely an important military target. This fight is certainly not over yet, and the IRGC keeps firing missiles at Israel, as does its proxy Hezbollah from southern Lebanon. News dropped just as I was about to file that the Iranians had shot down an F-15E Strike Eagle fighter jet.

So far, the political pressure within the US to end this war has been muted, but that pressure will surely grow as fuel prices continue to rise and as we experience shortages of other commodities like agricultural fertilisers and aluminium. But surely Trump must withstand any potential pressure and finish the job – meaning he has to ensure that the IRGC cannot control the Straits of Hormuz. Any failure to do that will send a message to our far bigger and more competent foe, China, that the US can start wars but cannot end them, and that we will flinch at the slightest economic pain. Buckle up, because more fighting lies ahead.

Adios Pam

On Thursday, Trump fired Pam Bondi, his attorney general (AG). The AG is the federal government’s chief law enforcement officer of the United States, overseeing the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Drug Enforcement Administration, and all federal prosecutors.

Bondi has not covered herself in glory since assuming office, bungling the whole Jeffrey Epstein affair and engaging in aggressive and intemperate fights with Congress. At one point she called a Democratic congressman from Maryland, Jamie Raskin, “a washed-up loser lawyer.” Bondi also engaged in aggressive lawfare against Trump’s political enemies.

The AG is supposed to be insulated from the President so that there cannot be any hint of political interference in what is supposed to be matters of law enforcement. Would that it were so. Bondi has gone after Jim Comey, the former FBI chief, as well as New York’s AG, Letitia James, both of whom had previously targeted Trump. Neither of these cases is going well for the Trump Administration, showing that Bondi failed in several important respects. She failed stand up to Trump and failed to give President Trump sound legal advice. Pressure to bring these weak cases doomed to failure should have been met with a firm “no!” She failed to execute her cases competently. If you’re going to shoot, you better hit!

Your correspondent firmly believes that the use of lawfare is wrong and should stop. But all those lefties up in arms about Trump’s lawfare were strangely silent … or perhaps more accurately they were quietly gleeful … when lawfare was being committed by various Democrats. The way the Biden Administration, and the Obama Administration before it, used the legal system to target enemies, including entire industries such as the firearms industry, was shocking. The less said about the whole “Russia collusion” scandal, the better.

The Trump Administration may be trying to do lawfare just as past Democratic administrations have. To their chagrin, they aren’t particularly good at it. Furthermore, unlike Democratic administrations, the Trump Administration doesn’t have an entire media class backing it up and pretending the obvious and outrageous abuse of the legal system is all well and good because it’s somehow in the service of higher goals. This lawfare and the use of our legal system to achieve partisan wins is how you turn a great constitutional republic into a banana republic.

Trump will have to replace Bondi, and that replacement will need to be approved by the US Senate. The list of candidates who will be willing to deal with Trump’s hotheaded and mercurial nature and who will be acceptable to the Senate is likely to be a short one. One candidate already being spoken about is the current Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator, Lee Zeldin. I, for one, hope Zeldin isn’t picked because he’s doing a stellar job at the EPA.

Hail to the Supremes

As we discussed on the latest Makin Sense, this week the Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar, which reaffirmed that the First Amendment, which protects free speech, among other things, applies to counsellors. Kailey Chiles is a counsellor in Colorado who practices talk therapy – she only talks to her patients about the issues they are facing. Chiles ran up against a Colorado law that prohibits counsellors from any practice or treatment that attempts to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity … or any effort to change behaviours or gender expressions. However, Chiles, who is a Christian, believes that her patients can be counselled to accept the bodies they are born with and to find peace and happiness.

In an 8-1 ruling, which included two of the Court’s progressive left-wing justices, Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the Court affirmed Chiles’s First Amendment rights. Only one justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented, claiming that the ruling would lead to professionals, like psychiatrists, giving substandard medical care. “It is baffling that we could now be standing on the edge of a precipitous drop in the quality of healthcare services in America. But the Court sees fit to bring us one step closer to that fate today,” wrote Brown Jackson.

If we are looking for a drop in the quality of healthcare, perhaps we should examine the way the medical establishment has been treating children with gender dysphoria. For far too long, quack doctors have been putting children on puberty blockers and then butchering them by, for instance, removing their breasts. There are now several lawsuits brought by people treated this way who now realise they are not in the “wrong body” but were just perhaps confused and … you know … teenagers going through puberty. Brown Jackson seemingly cannot imagine a world in which these unfortunate people, who now cannot have children or normal sexual relations, would have benefited from a Kailey Chiles instead of the ghoulish doctors performing underage gender transitions.

Thank God for Justice Gorsuch, who penned the Court’s opinion and wrote:

“The Constitution does not protect the right of some to speak freely; it protects the right of all. It safeguards not only popular ideas; it secures, even and especially, the right to voice dissenting views.”

Meanwhile, free speech is not faring particularly well over in Europe. In Finland, a sitting member of parliament and former leader of the Christian Democrats, Päivi Räsänen, has been found guilty and fined by the country’s Supreme Court for “making available to the public text that offends a group.” Twenty-two years ago, Räsänen wrote an essay saying that she thought homosexuality was a mental disorder. She made the mistake of then publishing that piece many years later on Facebook.

Your correspondent might disagree with Räsänen, as I’m guessing many people will. But do we really need the courts to fine and punish people who hold views we might disagree with? Views that were, I hasten to add, mainstream just a few years ago. The answer to speech or ideas with which you disagree is not to shut them down, but to use your own speech rights to argue and persuade. Maybe Räsänen will meet and engage with some gays or lesbians and will change her mind. Or maybe she won’t. Who cares?

I’m sure there are many who have cheered this prosecution and guilty verdict. Those who want Räsänen punished would probably also explain how good and tolerant they are. I know many of these good and tolerant progressives in Washington, DC. And indeed, they are tolerant: tolerant of all the people and ideas they already agree with … but woe betide anyone who thinks even slightly differently.

This increasingly illiberal and censorious trend that punishes free expression should be opposed in the strongest possible way. Free speech is the foundation of any civilised society. Brown Jackson and her ilk are inviting in a tyranny that seeks to police what we can say, and once you do that, you police what and how we think. Without wanting to sound too dramatic, removing our ability to think and speak clearly and openly without fear or favour will lead our societies to wither and die – and faster than you might believe.

Birthright Citizenship

Meanwhile, on Wednesday the Supreme Court heard a new case, Trump v. Barbara, on whether the Trump Administration’s executive order to end birthright citizenship was legal. For the first time ever, a sitting president attended the live arguments, with President Trump sitting in the court, quietly listening to proceedings.

Birthright citizenship is a long-standing rule that nearly everyone born in the US automatically becomes an American citizen. Part of the 14th Amendment reads: “All persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States …”

With the sharp increase in illegal immigration, the Trump Administration argues that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” should be limited to children of parents who are in the country lawfully, and not here illegally or engaging in “birth tourism.” The Trump Administration is asking the Supreme Court to overturn a case from 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

This is a complex issue, more complex than one might at first think, so I won’t go into it here. Serious legal scholars, like Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman, support the Trump position, while equally serious scholars at the Cato Institute disagree.

The consensus of views following the oral arguments seems to be that the Justices will be unlikely to overturn precedent and will rule against the Trump Administration. But the fact that this case made it this far, and that highly credible lawyers and legal scholars are taking these arguments seriously, means the issue won’t go away soon – even if the Supreme Court rules against Trump.

Up, up and away …

We’re back in space, baby! The American space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched its Artemis II mission, taking astronauts on the first lunar flyby in 50 years and also taking them further into space than ever before. This is part of NASA’s project to build a space station on the Moon.

There are legitimate arguments about whether this is a good use of taxpayer money, and also whether the private sector could be doing all this better, cheaper, and faster. But I think we can pause for a moment and just enjoy the awesome sight of a rocket going into space and marvel at the engineering genius behind it all. Something childlike comes out in all but the most curmudgeonly of us at the sight of astronauts exploring space and pushing the limits of human endeavours. I love it … and I also love that we’ll hopefully be getting our space station before the Chinese Communist Party does. USA! USA! USA!

With that, Happy Easter, y’all.