My latest for The Rebel: On May 19 the French Legion d’Honneur was established. In 1802. By Napoleon. The famous dictator and failed aggressor. Many recipients have been outstanding human beings., But the Legion d’Honneur underlines the tragic difficulty in places without the Anglosphere’s tradition of liberty under law successfully maintained in finding aspects of their heritage worth celebrating and rallying round in the name of good government and civic virtue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDeu1XQax6M

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Robson Rebel, May 19"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/May/160519RobsonRebel.mp3[/podcast]

In my latest piece for The Rebel, I note that May 12 is the date in 1933 that FDR signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act into law, a brilliant government plan to increase prosperity by destroying wealth, specifically to feed a hungry nation by plowing food right back into the dirt. This approach has of course caught on in the public sector. But it’s also the date the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous first met, in 1935, and by creating a group reliant on voluntary organization, fellowship and humility has done far more to help mankind than any government War on Drugs, the welfare state or virtually any government program to make us better off by making us worse off. https://youtu.be/_mbeGVTM8B8

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="May 12, 2016 Rebel"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/May/160512Rebel.mp3[/podcast]

In my latest Rebel Media piece I say it’s never the wrong time to do the right thing. But if you’ve left it far too late, as when King Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General, France’s pseudo-parliament, in 1789 for the first time in 175 years and the last time ever, it may well fail regardless. The right thing to do was develop a functioning parliamentary system… in the Middle Ages. Like England. https://youtu.be/DnuNNc4vNaU

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Never the wrong time, but..."]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/May/160506_Robson_Rebel_EstatesGeneral_audio.mp3[/podcast]

We just posted an update, here, for those of us who are following this project along with our Constitution project.

It seems that Donald Trump will indeed win the Republican nomination for president. For months I have been predicting, at first blithely and more recently grimly, that it would not happen. And now I am eating crow. I got it badly wrong and I apologize. I have no excuse. I don't even have an explanation. I have great faith in Americans and a great deal more faith in Republicans than most commentators around the world and even, I often feel, in the United States. And perhaps I allowed wishful thinking to distort my sense of what was likely to happen.

The GOP has nominated candidates I did not approve of in the past. So have the Democrats. But normally I could find some sort of explanation, even for Hillary Clinton, who I think would make a pretty bad president. For Trump I just can't. It makes no sense to want this man as your leader or your representative. You can't admire his grasp of the issues, his consistent adherence to a philosophy, his suavity, his gravitas.

Sure, he annoys the right people. But so did Ted Cruz and any number of other potential nominees. Ronald Reagan drove them berserk, as did George W. Bush. You didn't need Trump for that, and I have no idea what anyone does think they need him for. And annoying people may bring a certain sour private satisfaction. But it cannot drive political conduct anywhere you want to go.

I'm not abandoning my faith in the United States or in American conservatives. But I am saying this outcome, and with Ted Cruz suspending his campaign after his crushing defeat in Indiana it seems inevitable that Trump will be their nominee, reflects badly on both the nation and the movement.

It's too early to risk a prediction about what will happen in the general election especially given how wrong I was about this nomination race. But I am certain that those who backed Trump will eventually be very sorry they did.

As for me, I'm already sorry. In both senses.

On Friday a Provincial Court judge in New Brunswick struck down a duly enacted law and I couldn't be happier. It was a section of the provincial liquor act limiting the right to buy beer next door in Quebec and it was clearly unconstitutional. Now it might seem that I like judicial activism when it goes my way. But it's not that at all. It's that properly designed constitutions are set up to keep government limited even when the ambitions of politicians or a temporary lapse in the good sense of the public push them to expand, and to guarantee that rights are respected even when expedience seems to argue for violating them. When courts strike down laws that infringe basic constitutional guarantees of liberty, it's not activism. It's proper checks and balances against legislative or executive activism.

There is in the end no paper defence against people genuinely heedless or contemptuous of their own liberties and those of others. But the American Constitution is famously an appeal "from the people drunk to the people sober" and so is ours even when the issue is the right to buy beer. As a Macdonald-Laurier Institute press release praising the judgement rightly notes, our Constitution deliberately forbade the provinces from engaging in petty internal protectionism.

The release links to a paper I had the privilege of coauthoring with Institute Executive Director Brian Lee Crowley and the late Robert Knox back in 2010 explaining what our Founders did and why and how, and how the federal government could and should act to make their vision a reality. It's excellent that a court has taken the right view of this matter and I hope the ruling is not appealed or, if it is, that it is upheld.

I also hope the federal parliament will be emboldened to legislate and end to all such protectionism. It clearly has the power and not just the right but the duty.

Meanwhile our own draft constitution, part of our "True, Strong and Free" project, will not only reiterate but strengthen the constitutional provision against internal protectionism just to be safe. But here's one case where a court has acted in the genuine spirit of the constitution and of upholding legitimate rights not inventing unworkable ones. And it deserves our applause.

My latest for The Rebel: April 28, over 500 years ago, in 1503, saw the first decisive victory due to small-calibre gunpowder weapons in the otherwise totally obscure battle of Cerignola. It was a long journey from that generally forgotten clash to the transformed tactics and “empty battlefields” of the Boer War and both World Wars, in which accurate rifles and lethal machine guns meant to be visible was to be dead. But that’s how technology always starts… very small. https://youtu.be/Gt8MEDCiEEE

The audio-only version is available here: [podcast title="Rebel, April 28, 2016"]http://www.thejohnrobson.com/podcast/John2016/April/160428Rebel-audio.mp3[/podcast]

An odd piece in today's National Post by former federal justice minister and attorney-general Peter Mackay laments that "Over the last decade, the Supreme Court has often seemed at odds with elected governments over legislation designed to emphasize enforcement of the rule of law and reflect the public demand for greater accountability." The complaint is not odd given how often the Court was at odds with the ministry in which he served or given how often Courts do now make law. What is odd is that he offers no remedy.

In the piece, which I'm not linking to because I can't find an online version, he complains that judge-made law seems not to meet the needs of the situation: "Lost in the activist celebration in some circles are the basic facts. Recidivism rates in some areas of our justice system are on the rise and public confidence in our system is waning and turning victims in particular away from reporting." And he notes that judges increasingly go beyond their mandate to strike down blatantly unconstitutional law to override decisions made by legislators elected in campaigns in which those issues were thoroughly debated. But his argument seems to be mostly against the substance of what judges are doing, not the process.

To be sure, his concluding paragraph says "Today one branch encroaches on another over mandatory minimums or truth in sentencing. Let the next activist victory not be at the expense of society’s most vulnerable." And the first part seems to point to rebalancing our constitution. But the second seems to me to be a plea to judges not to misuse their mighty new powers.

I say "activist" victories should not be at the expense of society's elected representatives, and of the right of the rest of us to control government and set the terms under which it operates. All three branches of government, that is. Which is why, again, we launched our "True Strong and Free" project to fix the constitution, including restoring balance with respect to the judiciary rather than just begging judges to be nice to us.