Tag Archives: government

Misunderstanding the Court’s Role

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Here, the misunderstanding is of the role our court system, including our Supreme Court, plays in our elections.

Recall that President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyers have filed a number of lawsuits challenging various States’ vote counting procedures. In particular, the lawyers have filed, in Federal court, alleging that

some of the state’s [Pennsylvania’s] actions, and particularly the exclusion of Republican poll-watchers during the counting of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, violated federal constitutional requirements.

The complaint can be read here. (Aside: this is a separate complaint from one also filed that Pennsylvania’s Executive Branch officials altered the State’s vote handling procedures in violation of our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, and, from that, in violation of established Pennsylvania election law (including an explicit decision last summer by Pennsylvania’s legislature to make no changes to the State’s election law).)

American Thinker‘s James DeLong, at the link, provided a sound analysis of the legal strategy underlying the lawyers’ move. But DeLong went off the rails at the end of his piece.

Everyone in the legal world assumes that the justices, bruised by the excoriation the Court has received over Bush v Gore (even though the result was right), would never put itself in the position of reversing the apparent results of a presidential election.  This assumption is the reason for the Democrats’ efforts to create an irresistible bandwagon effect, but the president’s lawyers may have out-maneuvered them.  The justices may have no choice except to decide the election, one way or the other, and to be put to the choice of reversing the media-claimed results or ratifying massive fraud.

No, the Bush Court most assuredly did not revers[e] the apparent results of the Bush-Gore election contest. That Court merely upheld the choice of the citizens of Florida, which citizens decided for themselves and joined with the decision of the aggregated citizens of the nation, who our President would be.

Similarly, our courts, including most likely our Supreme Court, will not be deciding the current election with their rulings on the Pennsylvania case or any other cases that come before them.

On the contrary, our courts—including our Supreme Court—will only be upholding and enforcing the decision of us American citizens.

An Electoral College Thought

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Spitballing here.

The Left worries that the Electoral College abolished, because its use renders the popular vote for President/Vice President irrelevant. The Right argues that that preserves representation of the States qua States in the election of our President and Vice President. That was the intent of our Founders when they wrote our Constitution, and the intent of We the People when we ratified it.

Under our current Electoral College setup, each State gets a number of President/Vice President electors equal to the sum of the number of Representatives it’s allowed in the House and the two Senate seats it has in the Senate.

Here’s a thought that emphasizes both the popular vote and the States’ equal representation in the selection of President/Vice President.

Do away with the Electoral College as it stands, and replace it with a one State, one President/Vice President vote, and that vote is determined by that State’s popular vote. If a State’s popular vote favors one candidate, that State’s Electoral vote goes to that Presidential/Vice Presidential candidate.

That provides truly equal State representation in the election—just as each State has, by design, equal representation in the Federal Senate—while that representation is determined by that State’s popular vote.

Of course this would require a Constitutional amendment.

Labor Rights

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Whose rights are they, anyway?

Last Thursday, a California First Appellate District court upheld a State district court’s order that Uber and Lyft must reclassify their gig drivers as actual employees and so must add to their labor costs with benefits, paid leave of various sorts, payroll taxes, and so on. Never mind that this will reduce gig-oriented companies’ ability to recover from the State’s Wuhan Virus-related lockdowns and cost thousands of Californians access to additional income.

The time is fast approaching when it’ll be most useful for Uber, Lyft, and other gig-oriented businesses to leave California altogether.

It gets worse. As Uber noted in part,

…rideshare drivers will be prevented from continuing to work as independent contractors….

Indeed. The California court’s order (and AB5, the State statute that originally levied the classification requirement) go far beyond restricting gig-oriented businesses.

They’re attacks on gig workers themselves by denying them control over their own labor and the price and other parameters under which they’re willing to market their labor. The ruling and the statute convert those who wish to work in California into labor wards of the State’s government.

Almost like they’re State plantation laborers. But it’s all good, though; it’s for the workers’ own good.

The court’s opinion can be read here.

Science Agency and “Diversity”

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Heather Mac Donald wrote about “woke science” in a number of Federal agencies in her Thursday op-ed.

Her thesis centered on the…foolishness…of allegedly science-supporting agencies like NIH, NSF, and CDC diverting taxpayer monies toward efforts at agency diversity for diversity’s sake. For instance,

Earlier this year the NIH announced a new round of “Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research.” Academic science labs could get additional federal money if they hire “diverse” researchers; no mention was made of relevant scientific qualifications.

Mac Donald closed her piece with this:

Mr Trump should order that federal science initiatives return to a color- and sex-blind basis.

Indeed. If NIH, NSF, CDC (et al.) were serious about improving “diversity” (whatever that is), they would devote their diversity efforts and funding to improving the pre-K and K-12 education opportunities for our children, with particular emphasis on those stuck in “underserved communities.”

Absent that, those agencies, diverting themselves from their missions like they are, are wastes of taxpayer money, and they should be disbanded (not merely defunded) and replaced with other, newly constituted agencies whose personnel will be serious about their actual missions.

Testing Criteria

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The FDA wants to add new Wuhan Virus vaccine testing criteria to emergency use authorization applications—weeks after several pharma companies’ Phase III trials (the last phase requiring substantial data collection before EUA can be requested, the phase whose satisfactory completion is required before general use authorization can be requested) already have begun.

As part of the new guidelines, manufacturers seeking authorization would have to follow trial participants for at least two months after a second vaccine shot.
The new standards would also reportedly ask developers to identify a specific number of severe COVID-19 cases in patients who received a placebo in trials.

These data collection steps would be useful; however, it’s ridiculous to try to make them Critical Items for EUA. The FDA has known the structure of existing tests all along—it approved those tests’ advance into Phase III trials. If the FDA really thought these new “standards” and data collection criteria were important, it would have levied them on the original pharma companies at the time it approved their Phase III trials.

Waiting until this late date to try to add them is suspicious.