Home Defense and Property Rights Get a New Tool

In Florida, at least.

The Florida Legislature unanimously passed a bill that would allow police to immediately remove squatters—a departure from the lengthy court cases required in most states.

The legislation, which passed both chambers earlier this month, would allow police to remove squatters without a lease authorized by the property owner and adds criminal penalties. Landlords, under the current law, typically have to wade through a long and expensive legal process to remove squatters.

The bill now goes to Governor Ron DiSantis (R) for signature and final enactment.

Further Reasons to Ban TikTok

And not just force its sale by ByteDance. ByteDance is domiciled in the People’s Republic of China, and as such it’s subject to PRC laws, including the PRC’s national security law requiring PRC companies to answer queries from that nation’s intelligence community, queries which can range from “what do you know about this subject in that country” to “go find out, conduct the espionage.” That’s reason enough to ban the company (that subordination of PRC-domiciled companies to that nation’s intelligence apparatus is reason enough to ban all PRC-domiciled companies from the US, but that’s a different story).

Another Reason to Rescind Chevron Defense

As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it in their editorial last Tuesday, nothing is stopping the

Securities and Exchange Commission and prosecutors from finding [regulatory] meaning in statutory penumbras.

Now the SEC is manufacturing a rule based on nothing but the æther in SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s mind. Gensler has hailed into court a pharmaceutical company employee for the “insider trading” crime of trading in options on the stock shares of another pharmaceutical company, a company about which the man had no insider information at all. Not a whit.

Wrong Reasons

Canada’s reigning government, led by the Liberal Party’s [there’s a misnomer] Justin Trudeau, has “delayed” its plan to kill euthanize its mentally ill population.

[H]ealth officials are slow-walking plans to expand the program, stating there are not enough doctors, specifically psychiatrists, in Canada to evaluate mentally ill people who wish to die, according to the announcement made by Health Minister Mark Holland and Justice Minister Arif Virani.

This is the wrong reason for slowing down the march to killing off the inconveniently mentally ill. The goal remains in place.

Holland went on:

A Department of Veterans Affairs Fail

Yet another in an appallingly long list of Veterans Affairs fails.

This time it’s the VA’s conscious decision to deprecate, if not outright ignore, our nation’s veterans and to give priority access to limited resources to illegal aliens instead. Yes, yes, they signed a contract with ICE to do this, but they were not forced to do so. Here’s Senator Marsha Blackburn (R, TN):

Valid Arguments

Several States’ Attorneys General have filed an amicus brief in a Supreme Court case centered on whether Texas and Florida statutes that limit Big Tech’s ability to censor speech done on their platforms are legitimate. The analogy they draw is one valid argument.

[Summarized by Fox News]: [G]iving Big Tech the ability to moderate or censor users’ content would be like giving cable or telephone companies permission to cut phone lines on speech at their discretion. The AGs note that under federal “must-carry requirements,” those companies are banned from subjugating any speech on their lines.

And:

A Death Penalty Revival

Former President Donald Trump (R) revived the use of the death penalty after a hiatus of some duration, and President Joe Biden (D) has moved to deprecate the death penalty anew, even if inconsistently so.

I confess to being conflicted regarding the death penalty. There are some crimes so heinous that they cry out for execution of the criminal. Rape, especially of children, and premeditated murder come to mind for me, along with mass and serial murder.

Probably Won’t Be Invited Back

Newly elected Argentina President Javier Milei was invited to the World Economic Forum. He had some things to say while he was there.

Today I’m here to tell you that the Western world is in danger. And it is in danger because those who are supposed to have defended the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inevitably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty[.]

And

Racism, Arrogance Against Election Integrity

In the aftermath of the 2020 election confusions in Georgia (both general and runoff), that State passed its Election Integrity Act that, among other things, shortened Georgia’s early voting period from nine weeks to four, reduced the window for mail-in ballots, and moved the deadline for registering to vote to 29 days before an election.

The Sixth Dist. of the Afr. Methodist Episcopal Church, the Ga. State Conf. of the NAACP, and The Concerned Black Clergy of Metro. Atlanta Inc., joined by the Federal government’s DoJ, sued to strike the law as voter suppressing—the stricter voting period unfairly discriminates against Black voters, among other complaints.

Maybe the Judge Isn’t Entirely Correct

A Florida man was charged by the Feds for possessing a firearm in a US Post Office facility. A Federal district judge ruled the law governing his arrest to be unconstitutional.

US District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, an appointee of former President Trump, cited a 2022 landmark US Supreme Court decision that expanded gun rights when she handed down her ruling Friday that dismissed part of an indictment charging a postal worker with illegally possessing a gun in a federal facility.

So far, so good. But:

[T]he judge declined to dismiss a separate charge for forcibly resisting arrest.