Authoritarianism, attacking free speech, and covering up is exactly what we're getting...

...from the Democrats. Fortunately, SCOTUS has different ideas.

Amidst the everyday torrent of hate directed at Donald Trump — including the “beach messaging” from James Comey — an important emblem of the values of the Democratic Party, and its refutation by the Supreme Court, got largely missed. Still, it’s a revealing story, carried by NBC News:

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that the Democratic-controlled Maine House of Representatives cannot bar a Republican lawmaker from speaking in the chamber or voting as a result of comments she made about a transgender student-athlete.

For reasons best known only in the asylum, transgenderism-on-steroids (as it were) has become the Sacred Cow of the Democratic Party, possibly even more so than race huckstering.

This is what the Maine dispute was about:

[Republican State Rep. Laurel] Libby, a critic of the state's policy to allow transgender athletes to compete in high school sports, posted a photo of [a minor] athlete alongside a photo of the same student competing in the boys' event in a previous year.

The House subsequently censured her.

The issue before the [US] Supreme Court was not the censure but a separate punishment that barred Libby from speaking or voting in the House until she apologized.

In other words, Rep. Libby’s constituents were canceled in the Maine House until Libby got on bended knee.

As a result, Libby was unable to properly represent her [district], leaving [it] without a voice in the Legislature, her lawyers argued. A group of voters joined Libby in filing suit.

They asked the Supreme Court to immediately allow her to participate in the current legislative session, which ends in June, arguing that the punishment violates her constituents' voting rights under the Constitution's 14th Amendment.

Lower courts refused to intervene, saying legislative immunity barred her claims.

Executive immunity, by contrast, appears to be not nearly as popular with Democrats. A suspicious person might think this has less to do with legal analysis than with which party controls the Maine House vs. which party controls the White House.

Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said in court papers that the House's actions constituted a "modest punishment" that merely required an apology, not that Libby recant her views.

Could Goebbels have put it any better? When I say that the Left doesn’t hear itself, this is what I mean. And this is apart from the skimpy (at best) merits of Maine’s transgender policy, which essentially puts an end to anything like fair competition in girls’ high school sports. The literal disenfranchisement of Ms. Lippy as punishment, and the Thought Control demand for an apology, bespeaks an authoritarian turn of mind that would make Joe McCarthy blush, and that in years past would have shocked mainstream Democrats (think Hubert Humphrey). Now, it’s who they are.

The loss of a remotely acceptable alternative — acceptable to baseline notions of freedom of thought, anyway, not to mention even vaguely normal views of sexuality — is one thing that helped elect Trump. One can reasonably argue about how much it helped him (notwithstanding Trump’s exaggerated claims that he won in a “landslide” (he won by 1.5% of the popular vote and just missed getting a majority)). In my view, the cultural divide wasn’t the main thing — that was the electorate’s understanding that it was better off during Trump’s first term than it was likely to be under Kamala — but influenced probably millions of voters who found the 2024 choice, let’s say, less than fully appetizing, and were looking for a tie-breaker.

Then, of course, there’s the more prominent news this week that the Democrats — including and especially Kamala, who saw her boss often and up-close — knew that Biden was very ill and had started losing mental capacity earlier and to a much greater extent than they were ever willing to be honest about.

For those who’ve forgotten, the mental functioning of the Commander-in-Chief — the guy who carries around the Nuclear Football — is a critical matter of national security, not just campaign politics. But this was of no moment to the Democrats — the same people who now sanctimoniously, and continuously and loudly, lecture the country about Trump’s dangerous deceitfulness.

As Michael Goodwin writes in the NY Post:

Those of us who were long convinced that aides were hiding the president’s cognitive decline weren’t cynical enough….

His re-election campaign is why the White House and Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to release the recording [of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur], even as they released an edited transcript. They knew his meandering mumbles would sink him beyond salvation — so they hid it.

You know, to protect democracy.

[T]he interview and the cancer report are so alarming that the GOP Congress is right to hold hearings about the suspicious autopen signature of Biden’s name on thousands of pardons and commutations.

The validity of Biden’s clemencies, the huge majority of which came near the end of his term in office, and thus when his mental decline was most pronounced, is an important subject about which I plan a later post. For now, I’ll close with this question:

From about the middle of last year until this past January, who was actually running the country? It wasn’t Biden. Who was it?