Tag Archives: government

Courts and (Public) Opinion

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In a letter in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal, Walter Smith claims to have argu[ed] several cases personally before the Supreme Court (“claims,” because unlike many Letter writers, his signature block makes no mention of his status as a lawyer, past or present), and he expressed considerable dismay over the basis of Court decisions and subsequent Court “legitimacy.”

The court’s majority has made clear that it doesn’t care about public opinion or many of the harmful consequences of its decisions.

I have to wonder how many cases Smith won before the Supreme Court, with such a breathtaking lack of understanding of the Supreme Court’s—of any American court’s—role, an understanding any first year law student gains.

The Court’s role is not to wave to and fro with the winds of public opinion, but to rule on what the Constitution and the statute(s) before the Court say.

Full stop.

That’s why judges and Justices have lifetime appointments—deliberately to insulate them from public opinion, and from politics altogether.

But Smith wasn’t done.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Indeed. But that was Politician Lincoln, not Judge Lincoln. If Smith doesn’t like the Court’s rulings, his beef is with the political branches of our republican government, the men and women of which wrote the laws the Court must apply.

I suggest he begin his remedial training on the American legal system by writing our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, 100 times on his blackboard.

Unions for Socialism

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It doesn’t get any clearer than this.

Workers at an Apple Inc store in Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall have voted to organize, styling themselves the Penn Square Labor Alliance.

Here’s the deal, though, as laid out by Charity Lassiter, a member of the new organization’s organizing committee:

Now that we’ve won the election, it is our hope that management will come to the table so that we may collectively work towards building a company that prioritizes workers over profit and encourages employees to thrive[.]

To hell with profit, to hell with business success—which is how jobs get created, how wages increase—companies exist as non-governmental social welfare organs.

That’s the stuff of socialism.

Another DoJ Failure

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DoJ has fined a business in Maryland $300,000 because it asked its employees for particular items of documentation as proof of citizenship or legal resident alien status instead of accepting the generic sets of documents that “Federal law” allows. Per DoJ,

Federal law allows workers to choose which valid, legally acceptable documentation to present to demonstrate their identity and permission to work, regardless of citizenship, immigration status, or national origin.

Regardless of…immigration status. So a company wants to be careful that it’s hiring legal workers by applying tighter standards to its own workforce, and DoJ objects. ‘Course if the company is caught with illegal aliens in its employ—that regardless of immigration status part—it could lose its license to operate.

But never mind.

Cashless Bail and Flight Risk

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Illinois has passed its cashless bail law, euphemistically styled the SAFE-T Act (Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act—how cute, how misleading). This is a law that will allow lots of suspects accused of violent crimes to walk without even needing a hearing—an Illinois magistrate can simply release the suspect, functionally, on his own word that he’ll appear in court when called to do so.

Supporters of the law, set to take effect at the beginning of next year, point out it does not prohibit detention and that anyone deemed a flight risk can be detained.

This is as cynical as it is disingenuous.

The degree of flight risk isn’t the only factor that should be used in assessing bail amounts; it isn’t even the most important. What’s central to bail consideration, or should be central, is the nature of the crime alleged and the degree of risk to the people in the local community from having the accused walking free among them.

A man accused of a violent crime needn’t flee in order to commit (further) violent crimes; indeed, most crimes (like politics) are local. And now he has a collection of targets in the local area against whom to commit further violence: witnesses against him, and their families.

“Misunderstanding” of the Left

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A number of credit card companies, on the demand of the Federal government as washed through the International Standards Organization, are going to start explicitly listing gun sales by lawful gun stores to individual average Americans. Among those credit card companies are Visa, Mastercard, and AmEx.

The Federal government now is going to track us average Americans and build a database of who among us has a firearm.

For what purpose?

…gun control advocates who argue that a separate category for gun store sales will help track suspicious quantities of firearm sales that could potentially lead to a mass shooting.

Because buying a firearm is ipso facto suspicious under the ideology of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party. But wait—suspicious quantities—what’s wrong with that? This is the camel’s nose. It won’t be long before the Feds decide that one is a suspicious number of firearms to buy. And then one is a suspicious number of firearms to own.

The concern of us average Americans is justified by this misleading claim by New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) as he demonstrates his “misunderstanding” of the tracking.

When you buy an airline ticket or pay for your groceries, your credit card company has a special code for those retailers. It’s just common sense that we have the same policies in place for gun and ammunition stores[.]

Buying “guns and ammunition” is an explicitly protected activity under our Constitution. Buying firearms—keeping and bearing Arms—is an entirely unique activity for us average Americans, quite apart from the ordinary, day to day, activity of grocery buying, or the process of buying a travel ticket. There is no reason to track Americans going about our Constitutionally protected behaviors.

Other than identifying who has firearms for further Progressive-Democrat “control.” This is another effort of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s desired surveillance state.