Tag Archives: freedom

Mao Lives

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The People’s Republic of China, the home of rule by law (not rule of law), has retroactively legalized its “internment” camps, which the government is using to jail reeducate recalcitrant Muslims in its western province of Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities in the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang on Wednesday revised legislation to permit the use of “education and training centers” to combat religious extremism.

So far—so far, mind you—a million Muslims are…housed…in those camps.

The camps are strongly reminiscent of those of President Xi Jinping’s early predecessor, Mao Tse-tung.  Mao sent 16-18 million children and millions more adults to his “reeducation” camps.

Xi is off to a good start.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

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The tentacles reach far—even into the origin of Western concepts of individual liberty.  A British court has ordered

the wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker to explain how she and her husband could afford their multimillion-pound London mansion or face having it seized.

Government does not have to prove the illegal origin of the money.  No, the holder of the money must prove her innocence.  Here is the outcome of the British government’s legislation ostensibly aimed at allegedly dirty money held by people with political connections or suspected of serious crime.

Think about that: someone with the wrong political connections in the eyes of someone in government, or someone whom somebody in government decides is behaving suspiciously, now must prove his lack of guilt.

Money laundering might seem a perfectly fine excuse for invading individual liberty in this way: truly laundered money does indeed have origins that are inimical to safety.

But so are individual liberties critical to the safety of each of us.  What is the government’s limiting principle here?  Where does the tradeoff between security and liberty naturally end?

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept that must protect even the unsavory, or apparently unsavory, among us because that protection is critical to our own safety.

A Newly Conservative Court?

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Jess Bravin, writing in The Wall Street Journal, thought so.

When Justice Brett Kavanaugh takes the bench Tuesday, it will mark the culmination of the Republican Party’s 50-year drive to cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

At the least, he argued,

[A] five-justice majority more sensitive to regulatory and litigation costs on business should tip more outcomes toward industry and employers, imposing higher bars for workers, consumers and environmentalists, according to legal experts who have studied the court and Justice Kavanaugh’s jurisprudence. At the same time, the new majority is likely to show more sympathy for social conservatives resisting the encroachment of gay rights and access to contraceptives, as well as greater tolerance for state initiatives to curb the availability of abortion.

Not so much.

Bravin is either naive or excessively optimistic.  Kavanaugh’s confirmation has produced no five-justice majority.  The only Conservatives on the Court are Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh.  Four others form a liberal bloc convinced that the Constitution needs updating in accordance with the climate of the era.

The ninth Justice, Chief Justice John Roberts, is too squishy, too enamored of “perceptions of Court legacy” to be reliably conservative. He’ll find middle ground for the sake of that perception instead of basing rulings on the text of the Constitution or the law in front of the Court.

The Supreme Court

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As I write this (Saturday morning), Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh has not been confirmed; although, that seems more likely than I had thought Friday morning before the cloture vote.  Nevertheless, here’s why we need another textualist Justice on the Court—from the words of another Supreme Court Justice.

Associate Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan said Friday she fears the high court may lack a justice going forward who would serve as a swing-vote on cases….

And

Kagan said at a conference for women at Princeton University that over the past three decades…there was a figure on the bench “who found the center or people couldn’t predict in that sort of way.”

She made her view explicit:

It’s not so clear, that I think going forward, that sort of middle position—it’s not so clear whether we’ll have it[.]
…
It’s an incredibly important thing for the court to guard is this reputation of being impartial, being neutral and not being simply extension of a terribly polarizing process.

In one respect, it’s shocking that a Supreme Court Justice would have so little understanding of the role of American judges in our nation—in their role at the foundation of our freedom.

What’s polarizing and destructive of the Court’s credibility is its penchant for ruling on the basis of their individual views of what society needs or wants, even to the point of rewriting a law, as Chief Justice Roberts did in order to “save” Obamacare.  Determinations of what society needs and modifications of law are political decisions, that only We the People, through our elected representatives, can make.  That’s clear from our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1.

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Short, sweet, to the point, and not at all susceptible to misunderstanding.

Nor can a judge rule for the sake of achieving what seems to be—to the judge—some sort of “middle ground.”

A judge can only rule on the basis of what a law, or our Constitution, says.

Full stop.

It’s a Start

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The Trump administration has agreed to sell $330 million worth of spare parts to the Republic of China.  The spares will support the RoC’s F-16s, C-130s, and other of the island nation’s military aircraft.

It’s a start.  However, we need to do more.  We should be selling uprated F1-16s, F-15s, and A-10s to them.  We should be selling missile defense systems to them and brokering deals between the RoC and Israel for the latter’s Iron Dome and Arrow missile and rocket defense systems.  We should be selling the RoC anti-ship and anti-aircraft weapons systems.  We should be selling them land-attack cruise missile systems.

We should be selling the RoC the training necessary to maintain and operate those systems.

We should be helping the RoC defend itself against an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.