Even though doing so will be painful.. there are reasons why I will have to vote for Donald Trump.

1. The Supreme Court. The left is getting positively giddy at the
prospect of a Supreme Court with a solid block of five liberal justices
who will reliably oppose conservatives on issues they consider vital,
from gun rights to religious liberty to abortion. Mark Tushnet, an
influential figure on the legal left, is already essentially advocating a
total judicial war on conservative policies, particularly those involving social conservatives.

The regulatory disputes surrounding everything from birth control to
transgender teens make a lot of religious groups feel -- not entirely
unreasonably -- that they are facing an existential threat, as their
rights of free association and conscience are trimmed back to “You can
say it in the privacy of your own home, or at church, but don’t you dare
act upon what you believe.”



2. Immigration. Trump supporters
are not wrong to say that elites of both parties have basically
conspired to keep both immigration and trade off the agenda. Nor are
they wrong to be annoyed when any opposition to increased immigration,
or to legalizing people who are here illegally, is immediately dismissed
as racist. No one who wrings their hands about gentrification can
reasonably dismiss “I like my community the way it is” as an inherently
racist and illegitimate sentiment.

Moreover, in a country
with birthright voters, immigration means importing your future
electorate; this, of course, sounds splendid to people on the left who
think that this electorate will be more friendly to social democratic
programs, but it is perfectly reasonable for people who prefer a more
conservative government to oppose greater immigration for the same
reason. Opposition to immigration can be racist, but it isn’t
necessarily so.



3. Elites need a rebuke. For all my criticisms
of Trump and his supporters -- and they have been many -- I find myself
quite sympathetic with the folks who are angry at the establishment.
Elites are smug. They are obnoxiously condescending. They have colluded
to keep legitimate issues off the table.

This sort of elite
collusion can certainly work, but if it becomes too disconnected from
the electorate, a political reaction is inevitable. We are in the middle
of that reaction. And I have to say that if I were out there in flyover
country, I’d probably be pretty mad too.



4. Economics. We are
on a long slide and even though I am skeptical of his actual prowess in
business and his ethical issues, we need someone who has actually HAD
business experience. The level of ignorance among the current
administration about economics and the level of corruption of Hillary
Clinton forces me to vote for Trump.



Sometimes by not voting for the lesser of two evils means the greater of two evils becomes the President.

Five Reasons Decent People May Want to Back Trump - Bloomberg View

Things to think about from John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, KCVO DL (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902)—known as Sir John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Baronet from 1837 to 1869 and usually referred to simply as Lord Acton—was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer.

“Liberty becomes a question of morals more than of politics.”
“Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.”
“Free trade, to improve the condition of the people and fit them for freedom.”
“Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.”
“Political atheism: End justifies the means. This is still the most widespread of all the opinions inimical to liberty.”
“The object of civil society is justice, not truth, virtue, wealth, knowledge, glory or power. Justice is followed by equality and liberty.”
“All liberty is conditional, limited and therefore unequal. The state can never do what it likes in its own sphere. It is bound by all kinds of law.”
“Inequality: the Basis of society. We combined and put things in common to protect the weak against the strong.”
“Divided, or rather multiplied, authorities are the foundation of good government.”
“Duty [is] not taught by the state.”
“Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.”
“Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.”
“Bureaucracy is undoubtedly the weapon and sign of a despotic government, inasmuch as it gives whatever government it serves, despotic power.”
“Bureaucracy tries to establish so many administrative maxims that the minister is as narrowly controlled and guided as the judge.”
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.”
“Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.”
“Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.”
“Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.”
“Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.”
“Socrates taught a law independent of the state and superior to it.”
“If we dealt with institutions, antiquity would be low. It realized no liberty. But in the domain of ideas it ranks high.”
“Towns were the nursery of freedom.”
“The central idea of Machiavelli is that the state power is not bound by the moral law. The law is not above the state, but below it.”
“Burke's Speeches from 1790 to 1795: They are the law and the prophets.”
“For it is a most striking thing that the views of pure democracy...were almost entirely unrepresented in [the American] convention.”
“A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.”
“The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.”
“It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.”
“Absolute power demoralizes.”
“There should be a law to the People besides its own will.”
“Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power.”
“The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.”
“Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.”
“Federalism: The only barrier to Democracy.”
“Federalism: It is coordination instead of subordination; association instead of hierarchical order; independent forces curbing each other; balance, therefore, liberty.”
“Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.”
“All partisanship depends on concealment. Mere strong language and special pleading take in nobody.”
“Conscription is not tolerated by a people that understands and loves freedom.”
“Property, not conscience, is the basis of liberty. For the defence of conscience need not arise. Property is always exposed to interference. It is the constant object of policy.”
“Official truth is not actual truth.”
“Political economy cannot be supreme arbiter in politics. Else you might defend slavery where it is economically sound and reject it where the economic argument applies against it.”
“Every doctrine to become popular, must be made superficial, exaggerated, untrue. We must always distinguish the real essence from the conveyance, especially in political economy.”
“Self-preservation and self-denial, the basis of all political economy.”
“There could never be a revolution less provoked by oppression than America. Thenceforth the right of a nation to judge for itself could not be denied.”
“The Americans, having broken the thread in 1776, spliced it together again. They became eminently conservative in 1787.”
“Americans dreaded democracy and contrived their constitution against it.”
“In England Parliament is above the law. In America the law is above Congress.”
“The great novelty of the American Constitution was that it imposed checks on the representatives of the people.”
“Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.”
“What the French took from the Americans was their theory of revolution, not their theory of government — their cutting, not their sewing.”
“The value of history is certainty - against which opinion is broken up.”
“History is a great innovator and breaker of idols.”
“Progress, the religion of those who have none.”
“Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.”
“Politics = the ethics of public life.”
“It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.”
“Moral precepts are constant through the ages and not obedient to circumstances.”
“The notion of sin and repentance waned with the belief in authority. Men thought they could make good the evil they did.”
“A public man has no right to let his actions be determined by particular interests. He does the same thing as a judge who accepts a bribe. Like a judge he must consider what is right, not what is advantageous to a party or class.”
“A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar.”
“There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.”
“The Laws of [Plato], the Politics of [Aristotle], are, if I may trust my own experience the books from which we may learn the most about the principles of politics.”
“The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.”
“Example is of the first importance in politics, because political calculations are so complex that we cannot trust theory, if we cannot support it by experience.”
“By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.”
“The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.”

Gloomy Article By Erick Erickson | June 6, 2016, 02:00am

Over the weekend, Donald Trump doubled down on claiming an Indiana native of Mexican descent is unfit to preside over the Trump University fraud trial. He also added to the claim, telling the news media that a muslim judge would also be unfit to hear a case involving Trump. Never mind the legal precedent Trump is gunning for — that one can insult a judge, a race, or ethnicity, and then preclude a judge from overseeing a case — the real issue here is racism. Donald Trump contends that based solely on someone’s ethnicity, race, or religion that person is unfit to do their job. This is the man the Party of Lincoln is running for President.
Yesterday, on Meet the Press, Mitch McConnell ducked and swerved around the issue of racism. He said repeatedly that he disagreed with Donald Trump’s statement, but he would not say why. All he knew is that he did not want to call it racism. When confronted with my previous post on the matter explicitly noting that what Donald Trump said was racist, the best Mitch McConnell could offer up is that the center-right coalition needs to come together to win the White House.
So the Party of Lincoln will entertain a racist as its leader in the name of winning?
What good does it profit a party to win the White House and lose its soul? Because the odds are the party will not win the White House and will forfeit future victories as it sees Hispanic voters, black voters, and a solid number of evangelicals flee the party of racists.
We should take stock of where the Republican Party is at right now.
It is a party willing to be led by a racist.
It is a party willing to be led by a man who praises Planned Parenthood.
It is a party willing to be led by a man who says he would demand our soldiers, sailors, and marines commit war crimes.
It is a party willing to be led by a man who has no core principles, no core values, and no core convictions who is on trial for defrauding single mothers.
This is not my party. This is not the Party of Lincoln. This is a descent into madness and the American public will not reward it and its politicians will be forced to trot around Trump’s words like dog poop on their shoes.
A Republican Party that abandons its principles and refuses to call out racism in the name of winning the White House will not win the White House and will lose everything along the way.