I can't deal with what may become this country of ours... it's already happening and it is frightening.
Katherine Stewart: “This is an anti-democratic movement that doesn’t believe in representative democracy. They are the law unto themselves.” Well, you don't really believe in representative democracy if you desperately cling to the favourable and rather arbitrary decisions of a few Supreme Court judges instead of organising political majorities for your cause to let the voters and their representatives decide. Introduction: Democracy, Courts and the Dilemmas of Representation (2013) Richard Bellamy and Cristina E. Parau The first important work of comparative law and politics to define, analyse and evaluate the global phenomenon of the ‘judicialisation of politics’ was Tate and Vallinder's The Global Expansion of Judicial Power (1995). They found that judges had steadily encroached upon policy-making prerogatives hitherto reserved to elected representatives. Over the past decade and a half a vast empirical literature on this topic has sprung up, spanning law and politics (Caldeira et al. 2008; Guarnieri and Pederzoli 2002; Hirschl 2004; Stone Sweet 2000). These studies remain for the most part rooted in older debates concerning the legitimate powers of the judiciary in a democracy (e.g., Bickel 1962; Ely 1980). Similar preoccupations have also loomed large in recent work by normative legal and political theorists on judicial review and the nature of constitutionalism (Bellamy 2007; Dworkin 1998; Waldron 2006). This special issue reflects and seeks to advance these debates on the impact and legitimacy of the judicialisation of democratic politics in two main ways. First, it brings together scholars holding different perspectives—some more critical of and others more favourable to judicialisation—and who employ different methods, be they normative, qualitative or quantitative, that reflect the different disciplinary approaches to the topic found in law, political science and sociology. Second, it focuses specifically on the contrasts and complementarities of law and politics as modes of democratic representation. On one hand, the transfer of policy-making power from popularly elected representatives to a judicial elite would seem to subvert democracy in a fairly straightforward, zero-sum way. On the other hand, political representation has defects that might justify remedial judicial intervention. Indeed, a representative democracy, of the kind typical of all contemporary democratic polities, would have been classified as a form of ‘oligarchy’ by Aristotle, and has been viewed since the eighteenth century as a mode of elite rather than popular rule (Bellamy 2003). Some scholars have suggested that judicialisation can compensate for the representative failures of democracy by providing a venue for a more active participation by citizens (Kavanagh 2009), while others see in judges a form of representativeness akin to that of legislators (Kyristsis 2006). The articles in this special issue probe these accounts of judicialisation and explore their implications for the role of courts within a representative democracy. Democracy involves an ‘input’ and an ‘output’ aspect, as that form of government of the people that is both ‘by’ the people and ‘for’ the people. Indeed, democratic theorists have typically linked democratic means, whereby rule is ‘by’ the people rather than a privileged ruling class, with democratic ends, or government that is ‘for’ the people rather than a sub-section of them, regarding the one as the guarantee of the other. A standard argument, associated with J. S. Mill among others, runs as follows: if a group of people are all roughly equally effected by the totality of collective decisions, and may be regarded as the best judges of their own interest most of the time—especially when moral and epistemological disagreements prevail—then they all should have an equal say in those decisions. This does not mean that all decisions must be made by consensus—an impossible goal. Majority rule, which treats all views neutrally and impartially and is positively responsive to those views most favoured by voters, proves sufficient; offering a public mechanism that gives equal concern and respect to each citizen's interests and views (May 1952). Not only are there grounds, associated with the Condorcet jury theorem (Condorcet 1976), for believing that, when conditions justifying democracy prevail, majority rule is more likely to produce decisions in the public interest than rule by any minority, however well informed, but also democracy offers an alternative to guardianship by an elite with the consequent risks of arbitrary rule (Dahl 1989). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00344893.2013.830479 The influence of the Evangelicals on U.S. foreign policy should not be underestimated either, and their views on Israel and Russia, and relatedly on Ukraine, are particularly striking. This film, presented here in two parts, could have benefited a great deal from the omission of the well-known non-original material and saved the viewer half an hour: Representative Lauren Boebert: “There have been two nations created to glorify God, Israel and the United States of America. I will bless both, I will honor both, I will do all I can to stand and defend them.” Francis Schaeffer, founder of the pro-life movement: “Abortion on demand is another humanistic euphemism for man playing God.” “The bedrock of support for the state of Israel is there because American Evangelicals think it will bring Jesus back quicker, and without the bedrock Evangelical voter no Republican anywhere in America for any office gets elected.” “The big numbers who were there at January 6th were Evangelicals protesting him not getting elected were Evangelicals. For them, when Trump lost the election somehow this couldn’t be right because they had interpreted him being president for another four years as God’s will.” “When Jesus comes back, he’s not going to send an army, he’s going to lead an army. I want to be in that, and I want to be right up in the front.” In this battle of Armageddon, who in on God’s side? Or in other words, who is God’s enemy? “The ultimate enemy is going to be all those who have rejected Christ as savior.” Donald J. Trump: “The bible means a lot to me, but I don’t want to get into specifics.” Even to cite a verse? “No, I don’t want to do that.” Of course, the Evangelicals are not the only ones to blame; others are also able to use the cloak of religion for their own ends. We know why the Democrats, who like to pretend to be progressive, will never campaign for a ban on circumcision, even though they claim to be doing everything they can to protect children from parental abuse. Circumcision and law - Wikipedia Trump tell-all cites Adelson's bankrolled Israel embassy move Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party’s biggest funder over the past decade, used a $20 million donation to a super PAC to pressure then-president Donald Trump to adopt the highly controversial decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That quid-pro-quo is described in New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman’s new book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” “Adelson’s singular focus was Israel,” wrote Haberman, effectively acknowledging that the former president’s biggest funder was most interested in promoting the interests of a foreign country. “[In] Trump he saw a chance at enacting change in American policy toward [Israel], and gave $20 million to a super PAC working to elect him,” wrote Haberman. “As a candidate, Trump promised that he would open an embassy in Jerusalem ‘fairly quickly,’ and after his victory, Adelson pushed him to act on it. Over meetings during the transition and first year of the administration, Adelson assured Trump that the nightmare scenarios that he would be warned about in briefings as a possibility following such a move were overblown.” Haberman goes on to detail how Trump appointed his bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman as ambassador to Israel and worked with his son-in-law Jared Kushner to “shift the U.S. approach to the region.” … Sheldon Adelson died early last year but not before he and his wife Miriam Adelson flaunted their influence by ferrying Jonathan Pollard — a former U.S. Navy analyst who spent 30 years in prison after pleading guilty to spying for Israel — out of the country and to a hero’s welcome in Israel on one of the Adelsons’ private 737s after Pollard’s travel ban was lifted. Miriam, who holds both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, and is worth $27 billion, continues to loom large as a potential GOP megafunder in the midterms and beyond, but she’s largely held back, thus far, from the level of political giving she engaged in alongside her husband. https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2...-campaign-money-influences-us-foreign-policy/ Sheldon Adelson: The Megadonor Who Underwrote the GOP’s Pro-Israel Shift https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/12/27/2021-obituary-sheldon-adelson-520597 The Intercept: U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel U.S. Quietly Expands Secret Military Base in Israel The unexpected relationship between U.S. Evangelicals and Russian Orthodox U.S. evangelicals, Russian Orthodox, and the ecumenism of political opportunity
