Wednesday, September 25, 2024

Part I

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Kamala Harris Says it Out Loud: Vice President Harris Reveals She Remove Filibuster in Order to Reinstate Abortion Legislation – And It Will Go Far Beyond Roe v. Wade

Well, the other shoe dropped. In other words, Vice President Kamala Harris came right out yesterday and said that she would be for the Senate eliminating the filibuster rule in order to pass what she calls abortion rights legislation, codifying Roe v. Wade with just a simple majority vote. So that means getting rid of the filibuster, and it means getting rid of the filibuster, not in its entirety, but with specific urgency directed at the question of abortion.

So, as I say, that’s the other shoe that dropped. The first shoe is the radically pro-abortion position that is taken by the Harris-Walz ticket. The second shoe is this rather honest and straightforward acknowledgement that if she is elected, she will press Democrats in the Senate to eliminate the filibuster on this issue. So what does that mean? It means that it would reduce the number of votes necessary to pass this kind of legislation in the Senate from 60 to 50 or 51. It also means that in the case of a tie, the Vice President of the United States serving as President of the Senate could cast a tie-breaking vote. In any event, the filibuster would be effectively dead if her proposal is met, and let’s just face the facts. This means that she’s willing to do, basically, whatever is necessary to get what she wants in terms of this legislation.

Now, you might say, “Is this news?” Well, when this news story broke, it’s news in one sense. I mentioned a shoe dropping. On the other hand, the current President of the United States, Joe Biden, who had fought against this kind of measure for decades, came out in 2022 saying that the filibuster should be eliminated on this question. Why did he do it? Well, he did it for the same reason. He changed his position on the height amendment in order to get the Democratic nomination in 2020. Otherwise, he would’ve been washed up and washed out as an old Democrat because the pro-abortion forces in the Democratic Party are in the driver’s seat, and they are putting the pedal down.

Now, I don’t think Kamala Harris is responding to that pressure so much as she is just speaking honestly because I don’t think any honest observer felt that she would have held to any other position. But in the case of what happened yesterday, she said it out loud, and she said it out loud not accidentally, but very clearly on purpose. You don’t speak about something like this as a major party nominee, unless it’s a premeditated act, but she made the statement, and she knew it would make headlines in an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio. Wisconsin is one of the most crucial of the swing states, up for grabs, in the 2024 election. Nothing is accidental. This wasn’t accidental.

The interviewer, Kate Archer Kent, there in Wisconsin asked Harris what she would do if she were faced with being elected and then working with Congress “to pass a federal bill to codify abortion rights.” “How do you plan to get enough support in Congress,” she asked, “to restore abortion rights when you’d likely need to pass a Senate filibuster? You’d have potential legal hurdles.” The Vice President, of course, the current Democratic presidential nominee came back and said, “I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where we… 51 votes would be what we would need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom and the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about her own body and not have the government tell them what to do.”

Okay. All right. I mentioned that the other shoe had fallen here. She goes ahead and says she will call upon the Senate if she’s elected, and she has a sufficient number of Democratic senators. She says she will move to eliminate the filibuster as a barrier to the legislation. But then, there’s something else. Notice how she describes the legislation. She speaks of here putting back in law “the protections for reproductive freedom and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”

All right. I’ve been saying for a long time that it is an absolute lie that first, President Biden and then Vice President Harris said that their goal was to put into effect legislation that would codify Roe V. Wade. As I said, when that statement was first made, it is a lie, it is an untruth, it is a pretense because there is no way, given the current shape of the Democratic Party, the same party that would put the pressure on the newly elected Democratic president to come out against the filibuster. There is no way that this Democratic Party is going to be satisfied even with putting Roe back into effect by legislation. There is no way, and you see that in the language that’s used here because all of sudden, Roe just completely disappears. Now, you have reproductive freedom and the ability of every person and every woman as if every person and every woman is, well, I’ll just let you do the math on that, “to make decisions about their own body and not have the government tell them what to do.”

Now, she mentioned Roe in a very strange phrase where she says, “I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe.” Well, again, we know what she means, and then she gets right on to what she calls for, and there’s no restriction on what she calls for. There’s no restriction allowable in what she calls for. It’s a categorical statement, and this is exactly what we see state by state and in some of the measures, including ballot measures in states like Missouri where you have, pretty much, something like what Minnesota adopted under Governor Tim Walz, and that’s, of course, Kamala Harris’s running mate, and that is the statement that abortion is a fundamental right.

A fundamental right means that it is difficult to come up with any situation in which the government may limit that right, and it passed constitutional muster. That is exactly where they are pressing. It eventually means abortion if it doesn’t immediately mean abortion without any restrictions whatsoever because after all, if you say to any woman, according to the logic of the Vice President, that abortion is not allowable under any circumstance, then you are following her own language and her own logic telling a woman what she can and can’t do with her body which the Vice President says is categorically wrong. So, again, it’s not my words that matter most here. It’s her words, and her words are frighteningly clear.

All right. Let’s just remind ourselves of the basic constitutional structure of the American system because this turns out to be important, and we can do this quickly. You had the judicial branch that’s not so much yet at stake here. You have the executive branch. Meaning, the president and the entire administration. But most importantly, when you talk about the filibuster, you’re talking about the legislative branch, but specifically, you’re talking about the Senate. You’re talking about the upper chamber in the United States Congress.

The House of Representatives has no such filibuster rule. The House of Representatives is intended to be with 435 members, the most directly democratic unit of our government. The Senate is not the House with fewer members. The Senate is determined in an entirely different way. The Senate was meant as a balance to the House, and at least in some early language, it was discussed as a cooling saucer for the House as in you pour out the coffee or the tea, and then you let it cool a little in the saucer. It’s where cooler heads are supposed to prevail. It’s where there is supposed to be a slower legislative movement.

You also have longer terms, two-year terms for the House, six-year terms for the Senate. Now, why would you have the difference between two-year terms and six-year terms? Well, it’s all about velocity. It’s all about speed. The house can move quickly and voters can move quickly to say yay or nay to a congressional candidate that can put an incumbent out of office within a matter of just, well, at the most, two years. In the Senate, the six-year term is intended to insulate members of the Senate from that kind of direct action. So voters also have to cool their heels a bit, even as the Senate itself is a cooling saucer, a cooling chamber on Democratic passions. So, also, the voters have to wait. You get mad at a Senator? It could be, well, just about six years before you get to vote on that candidate again, and that is intended by our constitutional framers to slow the process down and to insulate the United States Senate from this kind of direct action.

Now, the filibuster isn’t in the United States Constitution. It was a rule adopted in the Senate, and you say, “Why? Why would the Senate adopt a rule that would require what is called a supermajority?” That is a simple majority would be 50% plus one. A supermajority is a higher number. Why would the Senate adopt that higher number? The answer is this. If you have a majority party that has, say, 50 votes or 51 votes, it can pretty get its way. It really doesn’t have to deal with the other party.

Now, wait just a minute. That’s exactly how the House of Representatives works. The House of Representatives, two-year terms, fast action, 435 members. It can move very quickly because the majority gets exactly what the majority wants. In that sense, it’s very much like the British House of Commons in Parliament. The House of Commons. Again, when you have a majority party, it becomes the government. The majority party can’t lose a vote, at least hypothetically, because after all, the majority party is the majority, and when it votes, it votes its own purpose, its own ideas, its own ideology. Thus, when you have a parliamentary majority in the House of Commons, it can just push through anything and everything. Watch the British House of Commons. Sometimes that’s exactly what happens, anything and everything.

But the United States Senate was never meant to be that way. Senators don’t represent districts. They represent states, and there are two of them. That means an equalization for all the states. You have the state of Wyoming. Fairly small population compared, for example, to, say, the state of California. But California and Wyoming both get two senators. You say, “Well, that’s not fair. There are a lot more people in California.” Well, that’s exactly how the Senate was designed, and it was designed that way because, after all, California has many more legislative seats in the United States House of Representatives than is true of the state of Wyoming. But when it comes to the Senate, it’s a way to have the states represented on an equal basis. If you don’t like that, what you don’t like is the US Constitution.

Now, I want to note something else about what the Vice President said here because it’s revealing in more than one way. I guess the first thing it reveals is the fact that she represents a truly radical position on abortion, but guess what? We knew that already. This is just affirmation or confirmation of that. But the second thing it tells us is that when you look at the Democratic Party, it’s fairly ready to ditch the filibuster. You could put a period at the end of that sentence, and you say, “How do you know that?” Well, it’s because the logic that is used in this argument that Kamala Harris offered yesterday could be offered to anything that is a legislative priority. “This is such an important issue. We can’t afford to have it slowed down by the filibuster.” If you say that about abortion, then you’ll say it next time about something else, and that’s exactly what many want to do.

You have now prominent legal theorists. You have prominent democratic politicians. You have prominent people on the left who come right out and say, “We need to make the Senate like the House. We need to get rid of the two seats per state system.” That’s, by the way, unwieldy and unlikely given the fact that would require an amendment to the US Constitution. So, as a first step, they say, “Well, let’s get rid of the filibuster. Let’s make the Senate operate more like the House of Representatives.”

Well, that is exactly what the framers of the Constitution intended to prevent. That’s why they established the Senate as a very different body. You want to make it just like the house? Let’s face it. What you want do is to short-circuit the American Constitutional System. The fact that this politician, the current Democratic nominee for president says she would do it on abortion, that’s extremely troubling, especially given the fact we’re talking here about unborn human life. But we need to understand that there are a host of issues that the Democratic Party will push after this saying, “You know, this too means we need to get rid of the filibuster so we can deal with this thing directly just like the House.”

I guess, finally, it shows one other thing, and that means that whatever party is pushing this kind of measure has given up on ever gaining a supermajority in that House of Congress. I think there, you’re looking at the reality of red and blue America, and red and blue states. Now, you have at least many looking to the blue states and saying, “Hey, go Team Blue. Let’s just eliminate the influence of Team Red.”

Part II

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Childless Cat Ladies and National Politics: Motherhood Has Become a Central Issue in the 2024 Presidential Election

Well, all right. Speaking about the 2024 Election, there are some huge worldview issues, and it’s interesting right now to see that even the secular media and the, say, guardians of the contemporary cultural moment, they’re trying to deal with this, they’re trying to understand it, but they don’t know what to do with it. But the ideological Left is, in particular, the mainstream media, and academics, and others I’d put in that category, they’re quite confused about some of the argumentation that has emerged in the 2024 campaign.

Guess what? One word which, by the way, is supposedly about as American as apple pie, that word has become a matter of political controversy. Well, you figured out the word. It’s “mother” or in this case, “motherhood.” When you’re talking about God, motherhood, and apple pie, we are told that those are three symbols of American identity. I’m not going to get into the theology at this case nor even the apple pie, but motherhood, well, that’s where we’re directing our concern.

Katie Rogers of The New York Times had recently a front page article, the headline, “How Motherhood Has Become a Dividing Line in the Election.” The subhead, by the way, is “GOP.” That means the Republican Party. That’s the Grand Old Party. “GOP risks alienating childless voters.” Okay, this sounds interesting. Here’s how the article begins. “She is not humble. She has no stake in the future of the country. She and other childless women are looking down on Americans who have chosen to reproduce. These are a few,” says Katie Rogers, “of the broadsides Republicans have lobbed against Vice President Kamala Harris, who has come under attack not for something she has done or said, but for something she doesn’t have biological children.”

Now, you may remember that Republican vice presidential nominee, JD Vance, got into hot water for talking about childless cat ladies. That has become a meme in popular culture. More recently, Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, made a comment about Vice President Harris and her lack of biological children. But remember, the subhead in this article says that Republicans “risk alienating childless voters.” Very interesting. Katie Rogers summarizes it this way, “Call it the motherhood divide. The presidential race has expressed a fault line in American culture or at least among today’s most prominent politicians over the deeply personal and usually, private decision,” she writes, “to have children.” She continues, “With an election likely to be decided by razor-thin margins, perhaps by women whose votes could tip the scale either way, motherhood itself has become a campaign trail cudgel.”

Well, it seems we’re going to have to talk about this. It’s hard to come up with anything more important, especially when we prioritize issues that get to creation order most directly. When you talk about mother, father, male, female, well, you’re talking about creation order, and this puts us right back in the Book of Genesis. Indeed, Genesis chapter 1 can’t start any earlier than that. Well, the Katie Rogers piece, along with another piece by Jenny Jarvie published in the LA Times, they’re basically warning that this is a political hot potato. It’s a politically difficult, contested terrain, and the article that appeared in the LA Times comes back and says, look, “non-traditional families now outnumber traditional nuclear families in the United States.” She cites the fact that four out of 10 adults have at least one step-relative. About 16% of children live in a household with a step-parent, step-sibling, or half-sibling according to Pew research.

Speaking of the Vice President, the LA Times piece mentions that she is “also one of a growing number of women who have never given birth,” and the LA Times cites, “The fall in the US fertility rate to an historic low. The share of adult younger than 50 without children who say they’re unlikely to have kids was 47%.” That’s a 10% increase just from 2018 to 2023. You do the math, that’s five years. This is a massive issue of worldview significance. Christians have to understand that at the get-go.

Now, in the context of a political campaign, things can often be taken out of context. They can be inelegant, and frankly, you can have things debated in terms that don’t get to the bottom line and don’t reach a very basic level of consideration. I don’t want to make this argument so much in the context of politics, but I want to use the politics to illustrate the worldview reality here.

Now, I want to say something just as clearly as I possibly can. We want every child to receive the care and the parenting that will maximize that child’s opportunity. We want that child to be healthy. We want that child to be fed. We want that child to be disciplined, and cared for, and taught, nurtured, and loved. We want all of those things for every child, and that’s why we want to honor anyone who is taking on that responsibility for any child, and we want to encourage them to do just that, to maximize the health, the well-being, and in every comprehensive way, the positive future of that child. But even as we are told by the LA Times that a majority of American households are now “non-traditional,” and that means not marked by a married mother and father with their biological children in the home, that’s not as radical statement as you might think.

For one thing, a lot of this stuff is thrown around without any footnote, without any explanation, so let me just give you a basic explanation. If you take a snapshot of the population at any given time, guess what? A lot of people have not yet aged into childbearing years, and a lot of people have aged out of childbearing years.

Part III

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Parenthood is Not Just an Identity: True Parenting Can’t Be Reduced to Identity Politics

So, in other words, we need to look at this a little bit more comprehensively. Yes, we’re quite concerned about the following birth rate. Yes, we’re very concerned about falling motherhood rate. Yes, we’re concerned about all of these factors. But when you look at some of these numbers, you have to step back for a moment and say, “Well, wait just a minute. There’s a couple living in a home. They’re married to each other, a man and a woman, and you know what? They raised some children, two, three, four children.” It’s not that they represent a non-traditional family just because they don’t have children in the home right now. They can be extremely traditional. Trust me on this as grandparents.

You also add to the fact, and this is worldview-significant in a very big way, you add to the fact that younger Americans are aging into both marriage and parenthood at a much slower rate. That means at advanced years, and so you’re also looking at a further distortion of these numbers. But at the same time, we as Christians recognize if only 47% of US households are made up of the nuclear family where you have a mother and a father married to each other with their biological children, this is a change in the culture. I also want to say it’s a change in the politics.

Now, here’s where Christians understand that it’s hard to say which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Well, I know it starts in creation, but you know what I mean. It’s hard to tell which comes first, the chicken or the egg. It’s also true. Which comes first? Is it the culture or the politics? Because the culture determines the politics, and the politics influences the culture. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, late United States Senator, famously said that politics is downstream from culture, and you can make that argument, but you can also make the opposite argument, that the culture is downstream from politics because political decisions do establish priorities. They establish laws. Those laws have an influence on the culture. Let’s just say it’s like the chicken and the egg. It’s ridiculous to try to spend much time trying to figure out which came first. You can’t have more chickens without eggs. You can’t get more eggs without chickens.

Okay. Enough about poultry. If you look at American politics, here’s what you see, single women vote differently than married women, but this is affirmed over and over again, study after study, election after election. Women who have children in the home with them at the moment, that is children at home with them at this particular point of life, they vote far more conservative than women in the same neighborhood without children in the home.

Now, Christians look at that and say, “This can’t be an accident. This has to do with something related to the function of motherhood.” Motherhood has to create a context that’s so powerful that it actually affects how women vote. When they have children sleeping in the bedroom down the hall, guess what? They vote very differently. In one recent Virginia Governor’s race, the difference between women who had children in the home and women who did not have children in the home in their electoral decision was about two to one which is to say that if a woman voter had children in the home, she was even more than two times more likely to vote for the Republican candidate than the Democratic candidate. Then, you take the children out of the home, and guess what? The numbers are almost precisely flipped.

But then, you look at something like this, and you recognize this has made the front page of the New York Times, and it made major placement in the LA Times this week. This is a really important story. Even the secular world recognizes this is a really important story. Christians look at this and say, “You bet it’s an important story. This is about creation order.” And you know what? If you change creation order or if your life is not in alignment with creation order, guess what? If you’re more liberal on some of these most basic issues, you’re likely to be more liberal in other issues as well, or to state it in terms of just the basic sociological understanding. If you have little people, your own little people, the little people for whom you would do just about anything, they’re sleeping in the bedroom, they’re sleeping in the bed, they’re sleeping in the crib right down the hall, guess what? You are going to vote with a far longer range political horizon than if it’s just about you and the people your age.

One last issue is advice given to Republicans by a Republican pollster. In this case, Whit Ayres cited in The New York Times. He said, “When you attack someone for their identity, you offend everyone who shares that identity.” A word of warning he’s offering here to Republican candidates in his views. “So if you attack people for being childless, you offend everyone who has never had children for whatever reason.” Now, he may be giving some interesting political advice there, but I want to say that he misses the point, and he misses the point in a big way, and I want us to note why. It’s because he talks about identity. “When you attack someone, you attack anyone for their identity,” he says, “You offend everyone who shares that identity.”

But this is where Christians operating out of a Christian biblical worldview have to say. Parenthood is not just an identity. This is another manifestation of the very deadly identity politics that affects our entire culture. These are moral decisions in a moral context that have effect for generations. This is not just an identity. But for many people in our society right now, they’re so distant from an understanding of just biological reality and the function, creation order. Let’s just put it bluntly. They’re so distant from creation order. When it comes to many of these things, the only category they have for them is identity.

Very sadly, if all of this just becomes another matter of identity politics, then having children and not having children, having biological children, having a family that’s “traditional” or “non-traditional,” it all becomes just a matter of personal choice, personal autonomy, sociological analysis, and identity politics. If it’s just identity politics, you can’t make any moral judgments. You can’t make any real honest observations. You can’t even talk about what this means for the future of civilization. All you can say is, “This is an identity, and this is how it might function in the election. I don’t want to offend anyone represented by that identity.” That’s where the entire civilization begins to fall apart.

But this is where Christians also have a basic confidence, and that is that creation order has a way of showing itself even where people might want to deny it, and at least there is some encouragement by the fact that motherhood and these issues showed up in the LA Times and on the front page this week of The New York Times. Motherhood on the front page. Yeah, that too tells you something.