Category Archives: rights

ERIC Surveillance

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is an increasingly farther-Left standing organization that shares voter registration data among the member States, ostensibly so the States collectively have cleaner voter rolls that contain fewer ineligible registrants. Apparently, ERIC also shares those data with others than the member States, too, and does so in deliberate secrecy, without required permissions, and outside the center’s charter—for instance, with the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which got $70 million from the Leftist Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, just in time for the 2020 elections. I’m actually more concerned about another aspect of ERIC’s activities [emphasis in the original].

The authors [of a Heritage Foundation report] note concerns about ERIC forcing member states to engage in active voter registration activities, despite states already making it easy for citizens to register to vote. …the membership agreement forces states to send out notices essentially yearly (every 425 days, to be precise) to at least 95 percent of the individuals in a state who are potentially eligible to vote but who have not registered “inform[ing] them how to register to vote.”

How does a State know who is eligible to register but has not? Certainly, the needed data are generally publicly available, but they need explicitly to be sought out, collected, and then fused into an eligible-but-not-registered list. Why are States being required by ERIC to conduct this surveillance, instead of leaving that up to the citizens of each State to do or to refuse to do? Why is it any American government’s business why this or that American citizen chooses to register, or not? Why is it any American government’s role to hector any American citizen to engage in this lawful behavior rather than that one? What other government surveillance is this supposed Organizational Compact trying to get governments to carry out at its behest? For what purposes? Maybe more States should be leaving ERIC and leave the government surveillance of private citizens to the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States whose governing personnel actually think this level of surveillance is a good idea.

Ban Assault Weapons

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President Joe Biden (D) wants to ban assault weapons completely.

His Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Director Steve Dettelbach, testifying under oath before a House Appropriations subcommittee, flat refused to say what an assault weapon was when asked by Congressman Jake Ellzey (R, TX).

…if Congress wishes to take that up, I think Congress would have to do the work, but we would be there to provide technical assistance. I, unlike you, am not a firearms expert to the same extent as you maybe, but we have people at ATF who can talk about velocity of firearms, what damage different kinds of firearms cause, so that whatever determination you chose to make would be an informed one.

Weasel words. You define the term, Dettelbach said, we’ll “help.” After all, he could have provided his own definition; those same experts could have advised him as he prepared for his testimony.

Biden wants to ban, and his ATF honcho—the man and the agency responsible for “regulating” the weapons us American citizens choose to keep and bear—refuses to say what it is that this administration would ban.

The obvious, and only logical, conclusion from this deliberate obfuscation is that Biden and his fellow Progressive-Democratic Party syndicate members intend to ban all of our firearms.

Rogue Judge

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A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.

A String’s Attached

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President Joe Biden (D) and his DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona are trying to rewrite the Title IX statute to bar States from categorically ban[ning] transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Never mind that the actual statute, enacted those decades ago, is explicitly designed to give women a fair and reasonably equal opportunity to play sports: if a State school or a local school district has a men’s program, that school or district must fund and provide for a substantially similar program for women.

Now the Biden/Cardona DoEd is proposing a rule that would ignore the sex-based Title IX statute and require biological men be allowed to compete in women’s sports in those schools that get Federal funding.

The proposed rule would establish that policies violate Title IX when they categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity just because of who they are[.]

Never mind that a transgender woman is a man by his biology, by his genes, by his XY chromosome pair.

Never mind that a transgender man is a woman by her biology, by her genes, by her XX chromosome pair.

This is the Biden administration’s open war on women.

My advice to the States: don’t take the Federal funds. The strings attached are more like chains.

False Entries

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DA Alvin Bragg’s indictment accuses the defendant [former President Donald Trump (R)] of the crime of FALSIFYING BUSINESS RECORDS IN THE FIRST DEGREE in thirty-four counts.

Thirty-four counts of made and caused a false entry in the business records of an enterprise…, all of them centered on voucher entries into a Detail General Ledger, and check stubs and invoices kept…somewhere.

Thirty-four counts of intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof…. leading into the sentences claiming those false entries. But nowhere does Bragg say who he thinks was the target of the “defraud,” nor does he say what that “another crime” is. Absent a defraud victim, there is no defrauding. By withholding what that other crime is, Bragg is denying the defendant his opportunity—his right—to answer the charge of that other crime.

False entries. Maybe—maybe—three real counts, but cut apart and expanded in 34 of them.

Withholding what that “another crime,” though, 34 times…. How about: false indictment.

 

Bragg’s charging document, the output of his grand jury, can be read here.