Tag Archives: freedom

Independence Day

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I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.

On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.

These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities.  At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes.  Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.

And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government.  They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.

They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office.  This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.

We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial.  And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.

As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.

“Pre-Crime”

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Another word for Government’s prior restraint of private citizens, a word used by Holman Jenkins in his Friday op-ed to disguise this assault on our freedoms.

Let’s face it, with big data, with impersonal algorithms that could track every earthly resident’s web activity, travels, purchases and electronic interactions with the world, it might be quite possible to know whose life and personality are disintegrating, who might seek to resolve the impasse by going on murder binge.

Jenkins saw this favorably as the basis of a “pre-crime” era of law enforcement, however pessimistically he also saw it as coming to pass anytime soon.  I see that unlikelihood less sanguinely, but to the extent it’s slow to come or doesn’t come at all, that’s a good thing.

Then Jenkins closed his piece with this:

The more the average citizen can understand and recognize the pattern, the more such incidents likely will be avoided without us even knowing it.

Indeed, and yet Jenkins completely ignored the implication of this. We don’t need Big Brother looking over our shoulder everywhere we are, in the real world or the virtual world of social interactions, nor do we need a Hoover-esque FBI peering in through our windows, real or virtual, nor can we support any other excuse for Government extend its regulation of our lives through this new version of prior restraint.

What we need is a return to a sense of community, where private citizens look out for each other at the local level. Local problems dealt with locally are much less likely to become national problems. And even those don’t require the assault on liberty that is prior restraint, which can only be done from politicians’ definitions of alleged need for the prior.

The Supreme Court is Considering the Limits of Partisan Gerrymandering

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The case stems from a Wisconsin state districting case

where a three-judge lower court last year invalidated a redistricting plan enacted by the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature in 2011.

That court insisted that, following the 2010 census, the Republican State legislature redrew its legislative districts to favor Republicans and disfavor Democrats.

Election results since then have shown the redistricting had its intended effect, with the GOP winning a larger majority in the state assembly, even as the statewide tally of votes was nearly even between Republicans and Democrats, the lower court said.

This smacks entirely too much of disparate impact sewage.  The ruling would be legitimately reversed on that ground alone.  That one party won a collection of close-run elections proves nothing.  Close-run means no more than that the two parties were evenly matched.  Apparently, an even election is too partisan, not favoring Democrats sufficiently, to suit the court.

The Supremes and lower courts have long held, though, that

gerrymandering that discriminates against minority voters [is] unconstitutional….

There aren’t any minority voters, only American citizen voters, though. Not any more.  As a Chief Justice John Roberts said only a few years ago in Parents Involved in Community Schools v Seattle School District No.1, the way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.  Mandating districts explicitly to benefit minorities is exactly that cynical discrimination.

Woodrow Wilson once said about segregation that blacks should be grateful for the protection it affords them.  Is that really what today’s Progressive-Liberals, including the Liberal Justices on the Supreme Court, want?  We should return to that despicable era of racial racist discrimination?

Regardless of any of the foregoing, the question is easily enough settled, if there’s enough collective courage to do so.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: draw equal-sized district squares, regardless of demographics, deviating from the square shape only at State borders and only along the side that is the border.

Foolish

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The Justice Department is clashing with career site Glassdoor Inc over the company’s refusal to identify users who posted anonymous employee reviews of a veterans health-care company under federal investigation.

That’s been fought over in civil courts, but this is a first for a potentially criminal matter.  The Federal government is the one making the demand this time because the Feds want witnesses for a grand jury investigation into Glassdoor.

Whatever the parameters of any possible criminal case involved here, there are some questions that need careful consideration.  Leave aside 1st Amendment questions regarding a right, especially but not necessarily limited to political discourse, to discourse anonymously.

Forcing a potential witness to come forward and testify in open court seems counterproductive.  How credible, indeed, how objectively accurate, would a witness be who’s forced to testify?  Might such a witness say what his government forcer wants him to say?  Might such a witness’ memory become faulty?  Might such a witness’ testimony, however well he tries for accuracy, be slanted by…fear of consequences, frustration at being forced, other factors, factors that wouldn’t be present with voluntary testimony?

How would a court tell whether impacts from these factors are large or small in a particular case?  How would a court even recognize the presence of these factors?  Given presence, how would a court control for that presence?

Leaks, Again

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Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on leaks about ongoing investigations:

Americans should exercise caution before accepting as true any stories any stories attributed to anonymous “officials,” particularly when they do not identify the country—let alone the branch or agency of government—with which the alleged sources supposedly are affiliated.

Indeed.  And here’s Peter Carr, a Robert Mueller spokesman, assuring us that Mueller’s special counsel operation

has undertaken stringent controls to prohibit unauthorized disclosures that deal severely with any member who engages in this conduct.

Then, I have to ask, why is Mueller still allowing these leaks to occur?  Why hasn’t he hailed his leakers into court, civil or criminal?