Law Enforcement Progressive-Democrat Style

Here’s yet another example of the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s contempt for law in the US and for us average Americans:

The City of Sacramento, California’s, legal department threatened to fine a popular retail store for public nuisance over numerous calls to police after thieves stole from its Land Park location multiple times, according to a [Sacramento Bee] report.

Stop troubling our police department with all these nuisance calls regarding repeated thefts by folks who know they’ll go unpunished. The poor, unfortunate thieves are more important to the Left than are the people and businesses being stolen from.

This lawless attitude of Party is on the ballot this November. Us voters need to vote accordingly.

Bad Analogy

Kat Rosenfeld, writing for The Free Press and attempting to defend Alec Baldwin and his negligence on the set of his movie Rust, looked to lay off the hue and cry over his shooting two people, killing one, with an “unloaded” gun, and Baldwin’s trial for that, on the man’s status as an old, white, rich and famous man.

Then she used a wholly inapt analogy in her attempt to excuse his negligence. She likened Baldwin’s mishandling (my term here, not Rosenfeld’s) of the revolver that was handed to him to a party-goer being handed a lit stick of supposedly fake dynamite, the party-goer then passing the stick back to the one who’d handed it to him, and then the stick—real dynamite, it turns out—detonates.

It’s a bad analogy: there was no way for the two individuals to ascertain whether the supposedly fake dynamite was, in fact, fake.

There was, however, opportunity—and obligation—for Baldwin to ascertain whether the revolver he’d just been handed was, in fact, loaded only with blanks and that no live rounds were in the cylinder.

It doesn’t matter that the man who’d handed the revolver to Baldwin had himself just checked the firearm for live rounds when he’d picked it up to hand to Baldwin. It doesn’t matter whether the man had then told Baldwin it had no live rounds or whether Baldwin had witnessed the other man’s check. It is every firearm handler’s obligation to personally check the firearm for live rounds. It’s no insult to the one who just did the check before handing the firearm over; the receiving man must check for himself that the firearm has no live rounds.

Full stop.

It’s easy enough, too, to flip the cylinder out and check. It’s easy enough, further, to dump the loaded rounds into the palm of a hand, or onto a nearby shelf, or even onto the ground, and inspect the rounds so ejected to see whether they’re all blanks or if one or more live rounds have gotten into the mix.

Baldwin chose—negligently—not to do so. And from his negligence, a woman was killed and a man severely injured because Baldwin pointed the revolver he’d just been handed at them—also negligently, since the scene being filmed wasn’t ready for him to do that; he was just playing around—and he squeezed the trigger. That the trigger squeeze at that point may have been unintended by Baldwin is just another act of his negligence.

It was a tragic but accidental death, Rosenfeld insisted. Nobody is arguing otherwise. The accidental nature of the killing and wounding, though, in no way alters the fact of Baldwin’s atrocious negligence in mishandling the revolver in his hand. It’s Baldwin’s negligence that led to the tragic but accidental death and the nearly as tragic and just as accidental wounding, and Baldwin’s negligence is what has led to his felony trial, not any “get the celebrity” nonsense nor any gross authoritarianism.

Joe Biden vs Lyndon Johnson

There are some comparisons being made between Biden’s desired-by-many decision to quit his campaign for reelection and Lyndon Johnson’s actual decision to not run for reelection.

It’s a silly comparison. Here are a couple of reasons for that:

Johnson made his decision public in February of that year’s Presidential campaign, while even were Biden to so decide tomorrow, it’s July and only a few weeks before his Party’s convention.

Johnson, aside from his role in the by then generally unpopular Vietnam War, had a record on which the replacement Democratic candidate could run. Biden does not. His record is one of border erasure; international kowtowing and retreat; and domestic economic inflation, overregulation, and destruction.

The 1968 convention was pretty chaotic inside the building, but that was because there were a number of actually viable candidates in the contest.

The 2024 convention also would be chaotic, were the delegates on their own consciences to vote down Biden. That, though, would be because Party, as Leo Terrell has said on more than one occasion, practices identity politics and so would be stuck with Progressive-Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris, who is not viable as a Presidential candidate. Were Party to try to nominate someone other than her, the racist and sexist hue and cry would be deafening. The contest between those factions—viable candidate(s) vs Harris—would be bloody, and the damage done to Party would last for years.

The only serious comparison between the two is a potentially dangerous environment for a convention being held in Chicago. The Democratic Party’s 1968 convention was marred by widespread violent riots. And in response to the rioters, who among us recalls Chicago’s Democratic Mayor Richard J Daley’s “shoot to kill” order?

Pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas, anti-Israel terrorist supporters have already promised violent “demonstrations” for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Chicago-hosted convention, now in a city with a reduced police capability and a reduced zeal for prosecution.

The two decisions would have a couple of contrasts but not many similarities. In the main, there isn’t any comparison.

One More Thought

Or maybe two….

My first concerns Corner Post, Inc v Board Of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that newly created businesses really are allowed to argue against decades-old regulations, here the Fed’s long-standing cap on credit card fees that card issuers are allowed to charge.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent,

The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the Court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright [which removed Chevron defense] have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.

In an era of burgeoning regulatory, vice Congressional, governance of our economy, and in an era where Federal government officials routinely ignore Federal law (immigration) and Court rulings (student debt “forgiveness”) to go about doing whatever an official feels like doing whenever one of them feels like doing it, it’s hard to see the downside of limiting the functioning of the Federal Government, much less to see any “devastation.” The tsunami of lower court lawsuits is simply the dam holding back private citizens’ and our businesses’ objections to such overreach finally bursting. The flood has every chance of flushing away a large part of that overreach detritus before it abates. And abate it will, just as even tsunamis do.

My second thought concerns the worry of Kevin King, a partner with Covington & Burling, regarding the Federal government’s reduced legal ability to blow off the objections of us private citizens and our businesses to government behaviors and the resulting potential for significant differences in interpretation of statutes by courts to develop:

The risk is that you’re going to get variation over geography, a patchwork of decisions[.]

Again, I say, “Yeah, and?” King’s worry seems centered on the possibility that the federated republican democracy nature of our constitutional governance, where the several States are, in their aggregate and individually, the equal of the central government regarding domestic matters might be starting to reassert itself. Furthermore, those geographic disparities are simply the noisy nature of democracy and a reflection of the plain fact that the citizens of one State might not have the same imperatives as the citizens of other States.

There’s also that Commerce Clause in our Constitution, a clause too long dormant, that can be put to the use for which it was devised and included—to smooth over (not paper over) the larger differences among the States where those differences too much impact the separate doings of other States.

Both of these are outcomes to be welcomed, not feared. Especially are they not to be obstructed.

A MAGA Supreme Court?

Who says the current Supreme Court is a MAGA court? Relatedly, who objects to Making America Great Again?  The Wall Street Journal‘s editors provided some insight to the Court’s rulings for last year and this.

First, an aggregate statistic: of all the cases decided in 2023, nearly 46% were decided unanimously, the second highest percentage of unanimity of the prior four years—second only to 2022’s unanimity rate. And both of those years had those evil Trump appointees Justices Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. That court also had the Progressive-Democratic Party’s darlings, Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Some 2024 cases decided unanimously:

  • Colorado can’t remove Donald Trump’s name from its ballot as an “insurrectionist” under the 14th Amendment
  • pro-life doctors lack standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over the abortion pill mifepristone
  • the National Rifle Association can sue a New York regulator for coercing insurers to stop doing business with gun-rights groups

Among the 8-1 and 7-2 cases:

  • Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the Court to uphold Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren’s (MA) CFPB funding scheme
  • a refusal to close the constitutional door to a wealth tax
  • government can, indeed, disarm an alleged—not convicted at trial—domestic abuser via a civil restraining order

Of 22 cases decided by 6-3 votes, 11 had “mixed” majorities. Among these:

  • three conservative and three liberal Justices ruled that the federal government had unconstitutionally pressured social-media websites to delete user posts
  • six Justices, including Ketanji Brown Jackson, ruled that prosecutors had stretched the law too far in charging a number of January 6 rioters with obstructing Congress

Who says, and who objects? The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians dishonestly proclaim this Supreme Court, which adheres to the text of our Constitution and the statute(s) before it, an extremist and MAGA court, using the latter adjective as though it were a pejorative. The Progressive-Democratic Party’s politicians object to Making America Great Again—here demonstrated by their sneering at the concept of MAGA.