Tag Archives: freedom

Queen Michelle Lujan Grisham

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New Mexico Reina Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has said the quiet part out loud: the solemn word of a Progressive-Democratic Party politician is worthless.

Reina Grisham has taken it upon herself to completely suspend our Constitution’s 2nd Amendment, and with that, she is actively barring the open or concealed carry of firearms in her realm, even by New Mexico citizen-subjects who are duly licensed to do so.

What’s also—and possibly more broadly—dangerous is that Grisham’s suspension demonstrates her belief that her oath of office is not absolute. She can walk away from any part of it whenever that oath, or anything her oath binds her to and to do, becomes inconvenient to her and/or to her politics. Here she is as plain as can be (listen to the whole four minutes, or scroll ahead to about 2:25):

No constitutional right, in my view, including my oath, is intended to be absolute.

This is what the New Mexico constitution requires in the way of an oath of office. Article XX, Section 1:

Every person elected or appointed to any office shall, before entering upon his duties, take and subscribe to an oath or affirmation that he will support the constitution of the United States and the constitution and laws of this state, and that he will faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of his office to the best of his ability.

She is required to support…the constitution and laws of this state. There is no caveat giving the governor of the State an out for whenever she doesn’t feel like keeping her oath. Further, that bit about faithfully and impartially discharge the duties of his office explicitly demands that the State’s constitution and laws be enforced fully; no part of either of them can be set aside whenever they become inconvenient to the governor.

With specific reference to our Federal Constitution’s 2nd Amendment, the New Mexico governor also is explicitly sworn to support the constitution of the United States, again without exception, caveat, or instance of inconvenience.

This is the degree of integrity of the members of the Progressive-Democratic Party. Grisham has made it explicit: Party member commitments, promises, even oaths of office are utterly worthless. They—each of them—will walk away from their promises the moment that promise becomes personally or politically inconvenient to them.

Oh, and one more thing. This is what Article IV, Section 36, of New Mexico’s constitution says about impeachable offenses:

All state officers and judges of the district court shall be liable to impeachment for crimes, misdemeanors and malfeasance in office….

Grisham’s conscious, deliberate violation of her oath of office is, very clearly, malfeasance in office, and so she is plainly impeachable and convictable for her violation. However, with strong Progressive-Democratic Party majorities in both houses of the New Mexico legislature, that will never happen.

This Will Be Instructive

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Of course, Israel’s newly enacted judicial reform bill, limited in reform as it is, will go before Israel’s Supreme Court; an initial hearing is set for September.

Israel’s Supreme Court said Wednesday that it would hear a petition challenging the constitutionality of a judicial overhaul law enacted earlier this week, setting up a possible showdown between the court and the government.
The court, however, didn’t issue an immediate injunction, as petitioners had requested.

It will be instructive to see the Court’s ruling and how anxious those Justices are to hang onto their power—political, especially, as well as judicial.

Israel’s Judicial Reform

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Israel has taken a step toward limiting the governing power and authority of its Supreme Court. Prior to last Monday’s vote, Israel’s highest court could blithely strike down Knesset-enacted statutes based on nothing more concrete or measurable than the personal opinions of what constituted the statute’s “reasonableness” in the minds of the judges constituting the Court’s majority in any particular case. If those judges didn’t like the statute, they could cry “unreasonable,” and strike it.

This reform law will restrict

the power of the country’s top court and hand more control to lawmakers. It aims to restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government or executive decisions on the basis of reasonability…. Supporters say the reasonableness standard is too nebulous and allows the courts to overrule the will of elected officials for political purposes.

In fine, the new law requires the Supreme Court to have a far more specific and publicly measurable rationale for striking a law. Otherwise, the matter is returned to the representatives of the Israeli people, the Knesset, and to the people themselves. In particular, if the people disagree with the law, they can fire their Knesset representative(s) at the next election and replace those persons with representatives who will make the adjustments or recissions the people demand. The people have no such possibility with the Supreme Court; those worthies, once selected, are in office until age 70. The people making the ultimate decisions, rather than unaccountable office holders doing so, is the stuff of democracy, whether popular or republican.

Critics of the new law claim that it’s an attack on democracy. One citizen:

We refuse to accept this. It is clear to us all that there is no alternative. We either escalate or we leave the country.

And Yair Lapid, an opposition leader:

This is the destruction of Israeli democracy[.]

That’s democratic opposition? No, that’s opposition to democracy. It’s disappointing that the “opposition” in Israel is so opposed to the idea of the people’s representatives—and the people themselves through their democratically selected representatives—having the primary say in Israel’s laws. It’s also illustrative of the opposition’s ideology that they’re so opposed to that degree of democracy.

The kerfuffle also is illustrative of the problems stemming from not having an actual, written-down constitution to which anyone—government official (judge, member of the Knesset, Prime Minister) or private citizen—can point and say, “This is what our constitution requires,” and engage in open and transparent (to coin a phrase) debate concerning what a law or a proposed law says, rather than depending on cloistered judges’ obscure and too often limited explanations that are stripped of the reasonings and closed-chambered debates conducted as the Court arrives at its rulings.

An Opportunity to Reverse Kelo

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Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case involving our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause: a homeowner who didn’t want to sell her home in New London, CT, to a property developer who said he needed the property to finish out the development of shopping mall. New London agreed on the developer’s representation that his mall would produce more tax revenue for the city than the homeowner’s property tax remittances. In the resulting suit, the Supreme Court decided that government has the authority to commit such a Taking and redistribution for the public purpose of increasing government’s tax revenue.  The Court said that one man’s private purpose is superior to another’s so that other must surrender his property to the one.

What the Takings Clause actually says is

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

For public use, not for public purpose, and certainly not for a private enterprise’s claimed public purpose.

Now a case is developing that should end in the Supreme Court and present the Court with an opportunity to reverse that shameful ruling.

A public school district in Texas is pursuing an eminent domain process to remove a 78-year-old man from the home that his family has owned for more than a century in order to build a high school football stadium parking lot.

The 78-yr-old homeowner’s daughter, Tara Upchurch:

I want you to understand what the significance of this place is for my father. It is where he played as a child with his grandparents, where he woke up 4 a.m. to milk cows, it’s where he spent 39 years happily married to my mom, and it’s where he raised a family, and it’s a place we never thought he would leave[.]

On the other hand,

Aldine ISD is planning to build a $50 million football field and parking lot on his property and is using eminent domain options after the Upchurch family rejected an initial offer to purchase the property last year, KPRC reported. Eminent domain allows the government to acquire private property for public use.

Aldine ISD wants it, and its desire is more important than a property owner’s…ownership. Well, then. That settles it. That’s what Kelo has wrought.

Private property ownership isn’t actually ownership: if another private entity wants it, all that one needs to do is to persuade a government or quasi-government that its desire is greater than the original owner’s ownership, and the owner must give it up.

This is the mess that Kelo caused, and this is the mess that the Supreme Court should get an opportunity to clean up, and it should clean it up.

Government Surveillance

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The French government is on the verge [a Tuesday vote as I write on Tuesday morning] of authorizing its police forces to

remotely tap into the cameras, microphones, and location services of phones and other internet-connected devices used by some criminal suspects.
The proposed law plainly stipulates that the procedure can be executed “without the knowledge or consent of its owner or possessor” but is limited to suspects involved in terrorism, organized crime, and other illegal activities punishable by five or more years in prison.

Whether the French vote is up or down, imagine such a capability in the hands of a government that considers enthusiastically protesting mothers to be potential terrorists, or a government that openly worries about traditional Catholics (or traditionals of any other religion), or a government that spies into the emails of journalists and their families, or a government that already (illegally) spies on its general citizens with the tools of an intelligence organization and a secret court system.