Tag Archives: courts

Dehumanizing Babies

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Florida has a law (HB5, Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality Act) banning abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Florida’s Governor DeSantis (R) has characterized the law as

protect[ing] babies in the womb who have beating hearts, who can move, who can taste, who can see, and who can feel pain.

Planned Parenthood and the ACLU have sued, claiming that the ban violates the Florida Constitution. The Florida Constitution, Art I, Sect 23, grants a right of privacy to every natural person. The only part of the Florida Constitution that directly addresses abortion is Art X, Sect 22, which authorizes the State’s legislature to enact laws requiring notification of a minor’s parent or guardian prior to termination of the minor’s pregnancy.

Whitney White, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project:

…we are dismayed that it has allowed this dangerous ban to remain in effect and to harm real people each and every day until this case is finally decided[.]

The State’s district-level judge, Leon County Circuit Court Judge John Cooper, siding with PP and the ACLU in issuing an injunction barring enforcement, wrote in part that (as cited by Fox News)

the Florida Constitution contains an explicit “right to privacy” that is “much broader in scope” than any privacy right under the United States Constitution. He further ruled that a 15-week cutoff for abortions is not supported by sufficient state interest.

Florida appealed the judge’s ruling and got the injunction lifted; the matter now is before the State’s Supreme Court.

It’s important to note that, both the ACLU’s and Cooper’s arguments can have legitimacy only by denying that unborn babies—especially after those 15 weeks—are not “real people,” are not natural persons. The only way in which the law’s abortion cutoff time is unsupported by sufficient State interest is by denying that unborn babies are not natural persons. After all, a core responsibility—a core duty—of the State government is to see to the safety and welfare of every “real” natural person in the State.

This is Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and a Florida judge shamefully denying babies’ personhood, shamefully dehumanizing babies, just because they’re unborn.

A State Supreme Court Justice Didn’t Mince Words

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In TWISM Enterprises v State Board of Registration, TWISM, an engineering company, sued Ohio’s Board of Registration over being denied a contract to provide engineering services to the State of Ohio. The Regulators had denied the contract on the grounds that Ohio’s engineers must be employees of the State. Never mind that the applicable Ohio law requires no such thing. Per The Wall Street Journal‘s editors,

The court ruled 7-0 that the regulatory board had essentially rewritten Ohio law by insisting that anyone providing engineering services must be an employee, and not an independent contractor. The statute says no such thing, and the court ruled for the company.

Justice Patrick DeWine expanded on that in the ruling, as he wrote and was joined by three more of the seven:

[He] swept away competing lines of previous Ohio deference cases to make clear that “the judicial branch is never required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law.” The agency’s view “is simply one consideration a court may sometimes take into account in rendering the court’s own independent judgment as to what the law is,” he writes.

Never required. Court’s own independent judgment. What he, and they, said.

The Supreme Court and Title 42

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Much is being made of the Supreme Court’s decision requiring Title 42 restrictions on illegal aliens to remain in effect until the Court hears the underlying case (sometime in February). That underlying case, as put by the Court in granting certiorari, is this:

Applicants suggested this Court treat the application as a petition for a writ of certiorari; doing so, the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the State applicants may intervene to challenge the District Court’s summary judgment order.

That’s an outcome, however temporary, that is very welcome.

There’s an additional aspect to this ruling that’s also interesting to me, though. A dissent to the grant of certiorari was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, and it was joined by the activist Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Gorsuch wrote,

The States contend that they face an immigration crisis at the border and policymakers have failed to agree on adequate measures to address it. … And courts should not be in the business of perpetuating administrative edicts designed for one emergency only because elected officials have failed to address a different emergency. We are a court of law, not policymakers of last resort.

This is the activist Justice Jackson agreeing that it’s not a role of an American court to make policy, only to apply law. Whether she honors that position in future cases remains to be seen, but it is, perhaps, a start.

The other two activist Justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, ducked the question altogether, choosing only to vote without comment against certiorari.

A State Judge Gets It Wrong

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Concerned with what her child might be taught were that child to take a particular course in Michigan’s Rochester Community School District, a mother asked the District for information related to that course—lesson plans, course curriculum, readings to be assigned, and the like. Things led to things, and the mother formalized her request as a FOIA request under Michigan’s FOIA law. More things led to more things, and the matter wound up in Michigan Circuit Judge James Cunningham’s court, with the mother asking the course instructor, in addition to the District, be required to deliver the requested information, and the District denying having the requested information and further denying requiring its instructors to develop anything like that information.

Cunningham proceeded to rule against the mother.

He quoted Michigan’s FOIA law [emphasis in the opinion]:

“Public body” is defined in MCL 15.232(h)
…
(iii) A city, county, township, township, village, intercounty, intercity, or regional governing body, council, school district, special district, or municipal corporation, ….

Cunningham then proceeded to write that since Michigan’s law listed school districts as bound by State FOIA requirements, but it didn’t list school district employees, those employees—teachers in the present case—are not bound by State FOIA requirements.

This is a cynical interpretation. A “school district” does not exist without the personnel that populate it: its employees, from superintendent on down through school principals and teachers, to janitors and bus drivers.

Of course the Rochester school district’s teachers are subject to a FOIA request under Michigan law.

This is a…silly…ruling that ought to be overturned on appeal, which the mother intends to bring.

Not Just DoJ

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It has come to light that DoJ prosecutors convened a grand jury and got subpoenas with which to investigate then-House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R) and a number of Republican Committee staffers during Nunes’ Committee investigations into what are now known to be Progressive-Democratic Party collusion with DoJ to create a false narrative of Republican collusion with Russia.

“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it,” Nunes said. “It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”
The subpoenas demanded a broad swath of records from Google, including “all customer and subscriber account information” for [then-Committee Senior Counsel Kash] Patel and the other staffer, “addresses (including mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, and e-mail addresses,” user names, “screen names,” “local and long distance telephone connection records,” and even the “means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records.”

That’s bad enough, but I’m especially concerned about another, closely related matter. Retired FBI Assistant Director for Intelligence, Kevin Brock:

A federal grand jury subpoena for records can only be issued after some type of criminal investigation has been opened.  So whoever sought the subpoena will have to be prepared to articulate why they thought these staffers broke the law. And it better be a substantial violation, something more than just a media leak investigation for example, otherwise it will risk being perceived as a gross misuse of the grand jury process to intimidate or chill a congressional committee demanding pointed answers from DOJ.

The larger question in my view—especially if the subpoenas were issued on an allegation of a chump change crime—is who were the judges, if any, who played along and approved the grand jury subpoenas, what were their rationales for their approvals? Also, who were the prosecutors convening the grand jury? It’s possible they came from the DC US Attorney’s Office, but who in particular?