Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

Here.

Here.

We live a disturbingly divided country. One side identifies as being liberal or progressive. The other conservative. But the terms vague [sic].

Lose your job, and there is unemployment available. Find yourself broke without any resources, and there are food stamps. Reach your older years, and there is a bit of help through Social Security. Those and other programs that make our lives easier than they would be because of the efforts of one side of the two political philosophies.

The other side claims to be the advocates of freedom. Yet, ironically, is also embraces a faction that seeks to claim freedom in the form of exclusionary behavior as part of practicing their religion.

The social division might be mitigated a bit if we had a National Role Reversal Week. A week where those who strongly believe in one of the two philosophies makes an honest intellectual effort to investigate and role play the other position. Attempting to mentally walk in another’s shoes might help take the edge off our toxic environment.

SID KASKEY,

SOUTH MIAMI

Note from KBJ: Who divided us, Sid? Could Barack Obama have had anything to do with it? And I assume that the people you're talking about who engage in "exclusionary behavior as part of practicing their religion" are the Muslims. I don't know of any Christians who want to exclude themselves from anything.

Of all the things that interest me (and there are many), nothing interests me more than the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which occurred on 25 June 1876 (141 years ago today). It is endlessly fascinating. This image (click to enlarge) shows the Ute Indian Yellow Nose counting coup at the battle. It shows the intensity of the battle and the horror (and glory) of the participants. See here.

Hillary Clinton colluded with the Democratic Party in order to beat Crazy Bernie Sanders. Is she allowed to so collude? Unfair to Bernie!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2017

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Mr. Perry’s is an invitation I would run from fast. If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation. To be sure, the demands of bicameralism and presentment are real and the process can be protracted. But the difficulty of making new laws isn’t some bug in the constitutional design: it’s the point of the design, the better to preserve liberty. Besides, the law of unintended consequences being what it is, judicial tinkering with legislation is sure only to invite trouble.

(Dissenting Opinion [joined by Justice Clarence Thomas], Perry v. Merit Systems Protection Board, 582 U.S. ____ [2017])

Note from KBJ: This opinion by Justice Gorsuch should be comforting to conservatives, or at least to those conservatives who believe in judicial modesty. The quotation shows that Justice Gorsuch is committed to judicial deference to the legislature. Elsewhere in the opinion, he writes:

• "[T]he business of enacting statutory fixes [is] one that belongs to Congress and not this Court."
• "I would decline Mr. Perry's invitation and would instead just follow the words of the statute as written."
• "Beyond its claim about the statute's purpose, the Court offers little in the way of a traditional statutory interpretation. It does not explain how the result it reaches squares with the statute's text and structure, or grapple with the arguments presented here on those counts."
• "At the end of a long day, I just cannot find anything preventing us from applying the statute as written—or heard any good reason for deviating from its terms."
• "Respectfully, Congress already wrote a perfectly good law. I would follow it."

Please, God, let us have one more Neil Gorsuch.

Montrose (1973). One of the greatest first albums of all time. You had to have been alive at the time to appreciate it. I was 16.

The Tour de France doesn't always start in France. See here.

Here is Roger Kimball's latest column.

Here.