A Supreme Court Justice Doesn’t Understand our Constitution

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The Supreme Court has a very good code of ethics—pronounced so by no less a light than Justice Elena Kagan—but it lacks teeth sufficient enough to suit that same light. So Kagan wants—and she’s serious—a panel of lower court judges to pass judgment on claimed ethics violations done by a Justice.

There’s a problem with that. Here’s what Art III, Section 1, of our Constitution says about our courts and our judges and Justices:

The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.

The editors of the WSJ understand this full well:

The Supreme Court was established by the Constitution, but the lower courts were created by Congress. A lower-court tribunal would therefore subject the High Court to supervision by a creature of Congress, which is constitutionally dubious.

It’s not just dubious; such a travesty would be a blatant violation of the separation of powers that our Constitution has created for our Federal government.

How is it that the Light of the Supreme Court does not understand this?

How Concerned?

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Just the News recently ran a poll of its readers—entirely unscientific, since the respondents are far from a random sample even of readers of JtN, and JtN makes no bones about this with any of its polls—that asked How concerned were you by FBI Director Wray’s testimony on attempt to assassinate Trump? regarding FBI Director Christopher Wray’s initial House testimony that he couldn’t be sure that Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, in the recent assassination attempt, was hit by a bullet—it might have been, speculated Wray, a piece of shrapnel.

You can guess how the poll went (I’ll give you three guesses, and the first two won’t count), but that’s not what’s important here.

What’s important is the speed with which “the FBI” reacted to pushback on that “uncertainty” and moved to correct/adjust Wray’s testimony to indicate that Wray was, after all, confident that Trump was hit by a bullet. The initial testimony and the clarification, especially as it was a response to the hooraw over that initial testimony, when taken together are concerning: the whipsaw change suggestd that the FBI and its Director were not thinking overmuch about what actually had happened.

What has become of the FBI’s claim to operate on facts, wherever those facts might lead? What has become of Wray’s respect for facts?

It’s Still the Case

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Sundar Pichai’s Google is busily censoring/shadow banning Google searches for information about the recent assassination attempt against former President and current Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Billionaire Elon Musk suggested that Google’s omission of search functions for the assassination attempt against former President Trump may be improper.
Musk took to social media to highlight that Google Search’s autocomplete feature omitted results relating to the July 13 shooting. Google has denied taking any action to limit the results.

A carefully anonymous Google spokesman clarified that there has been no manual action taken on these predictions. This is cynically disingenuous. Pichai’s Google programmers are responsible for that absence; they’re the ones who wrote the algorithms that omit exactly those search suggestions.

That same Unknown Spokesman further insisted that

Our systems have protections against Autocomplete predictions associated with political violence, which were working as intended prior to this horrific event occurring[.]

Indeed, as this screenshot, published on Fox Business on 28 July, demonstrates:

Yet, suddenly, similar searches regarding the Trump assassination attempt are seeing similar autocomplete suggestions censored out. That’s continuing even after Pichai’s censorship has been exposed. That Google still is censoring the search effort is demonstrated by this screen shot that I took shortly after noon CDT on 29 Jul.

Still no autocomplete output there. If a searcher doesn’t come up with the precisely correct—Pichai’s and his Google programmers’ definition of correct—the searcher will find nothing.

Race and Gender in our Presidential Election Campaign Season

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Sadly, this is being thrust into the faces of us average Americans, riding on Progressive-Democrat Vice President and nominal Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Joshua Jamerson, John McCormick, and Tarini Parti put it in their WSJ article,

Harris’s rapid ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, expected to become official early next month, has thrust race and gender into the center of the contentious 2024 presidential election, in a country where scars of racial segregation and sex-based discrimination still linger.

It’s true enough that those scars still linger; it’s true enough that there remain instances of actual race and sex bigotry. However, the only ones thrust[ing] race and gender into the center of the current election season are Progressive-Democratic Party politicians and their frontmen of the press. It was, after all, then-Progressive-Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden who announced that his choice for his Vice President candidate would be, first and foremost, a woman who was black—qualification was a distant tertiary consideration. Then it was Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden who announced that his first pick for the Supreme Court would be a black woman; her qualification for the bench again was a distant tertiary consideration.

Now pressmen are (see above) making a big deal about Harris’ race and gender as somehow qualifying, in addition to making her merely popular; qualification for office, even her experience as VP, are distant tertiary and quaternary considerations. This is manufacturing racist and sexist bigotry where it does not exist—here, in candidates for office. It’s hard to get any more invidiously bigoted than that. Yet here is where Party is, along with their press communications arm.

This is despite the article’s authors contradicting themselves later in their piece:

A Wall Street Journal poll conducted July 23 to 25, after President Biden bowed out of the race and endorsed Harris, found 81% of respondents said Harris (who is also of South Asian descent) being a Black woman made no difference in whether they would support her for president.

Us average Americans—which is to say, us honest Americans—don’t give a rat’s patootie about Harris’, or any other candidate for office’s, race or gender. We only care that, beyond being old enough and a born-American citizen, the candidate actually is capable of handling the demands of being President. Even those constitutionally mandated minimal eligibility criteria (note: these are not qualification criteria) are background considerations; our primary concern is whether the candidate is qualified for the Presidency, what that candidate’s claimed policies and goals are, and what that candidate’s empirically demonstrated history of achieving those goals is.

For pressmen and Party politicians to give primary emphasis to race and gender in the present season is at once their confession that their candidate has no record worthy of campaigning on, and nakedly insulting to us Americans.

AP Grade Inflation

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College Board, the nonprofit folks who bring us the SAT exams many institutions use for college/university entrance assessment and the Advanced Placement exams used by many high schools to assess how well students have done in their advanced placement courses, has dumbed down made it easier to pass its AP tests. A passing score on the AP exam is a 3 on a scale of 1 to 5; as a result of the changes, it’s easier now for a student to score at least that 3.

AP US History teacher Mark Reindl said that, after the change, 76% of his students passed the AP History exam, against his prior years’ average 40%.

That was an eye opener. One thing I’ve read a lot in military history is to train like you fight[.]

For College Board, though, there’s this:

The College Board has spent years lobbying state legislators to require public universities to offer credit for students who do well on its 40 AP exams, which include the core subjects of math, English, science, and social studies, as well as foreign languages and electives like psychology and art history.
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Each exam requires a fee of just under $100, paid for by students’ families or, in some cases, school districts or states seeking to expand access to the programs.

But the nonprofit’s move is not a business move, it insists. The organization argues its courses are still more difficult than some entry-level college classes. Isn’t that a sad commentary on the rigors of colleges and universities.

Jon Boeckenstedt, Oregon State University Vice Provost of Enrollment Management:

 It is hard to argue with the premise of AP, that students who are talented and academically accomplished can get a head start on college[.]

Indeed. But maybe if this sort of exam is useful for assessing a student’s readiness for college, College Board could structure its exams along the lines of this 1895 8th Grade Final Exam that Salina, KS used. It’s a straightforward 4-hour exam across several subject areas (which College Board could break out into several exams for assessing high school student performance and readiness), and it’s one that requires examinees to think about each answer, not just regurgitate some parcel of rote learning.

Grammar (Time, one hour)

  1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
  2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
  3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
  4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
  5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
  6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
  7. 7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)

  1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
  2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
  3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
  4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
  5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
  6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
  7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
  8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
  9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
  10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)

  1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
  2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
  3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
  4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
  5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
  6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
  7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
  8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?

Orthography (Time, one hour)

  1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
  2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
  3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
  4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
  5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e’. Name two exceptions under each rule.
  6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
  7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
  8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
  9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
  10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)

  1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
  2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
  3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
  4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
  5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
  6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
  7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
  8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
  9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
  10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.

It is, indeed, highly useful to the extent of being critical that students train—learn—like they’ll fight—perform in the real world of adulthood. To the extent students can’t pass this older jr high exam, or a collection of them based on this exam, that’s the extent of the failure of the teachers and school districts to insist on actual knowledge and thinking skills; it’s not a failure of the students, although they’re the ones who suffer the consequences.