Tag Archives: rights

ByteDance and TikTok

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Recall that TikTok, a social medium heavily favored by our children, is wholly owned by ByteDance. Recall further, that ByteDance is domiciled inside the Peoples Republic of China. Finally, recall that the PRC’s 2017 national security law requires every PRC-domiciled company to collect and deliver to that nation’s intelligence community any information that community requests. A bonus memory: TikTok’s executive team has been at pains to insist that, in the United States, they operate independently of all of that.

Against that backdrop, there’s this:

Since the start of the year, a string of high-level executives have transferred from ByteDance to TikTok, taking on some of the top jobs in the popular video-sharing app’s moneymaking operations. Some moved to the US from ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters.

That’s not independence. Nor does it matter what top jobs, in particular, ByteDance’s transferred executives assume in TikTok. They work for ByteDance, which operates at the behest of the PRC government. Their presence at the top of TikTok only tightens that control.

Bottom line: it doesn’t matter how much gussying up ByteDance or TikTok executives do in their attempts to deny Peoples Republic of China control of TikTok; the PRC’s intelligence community can command TikTok to obtain and deliver any information regarding TikTok’s users that the intel community wants.

It’s past time the Federal government bans TikTok from any and all operations inside the US. Standing in the way of that are too many Congressmen and Senators, of both parties, who have taken “donations” from folks like Jeff Yass, who through his Susquehanna International Group owns a big stake in ByteDance, [and he] has also worked to fend off a US ban through organizations like Club for Growth. Among those…donees…are

  • Senator Rand Paul (R, KY), who received through a Paul-supporting PAC, $3 million
  • Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY), who has received $32,200 directly from Yass, his wife, and via a Massie-supporting PAC
  • Other [carefully unnamed] Republicans in Congress, including at least five others besides Paul and Massie, who received financial support from Club for Growth and have objected to legislation targeting TikTok.

Yass has rationalized his antipathy to banning TikTok with this:

TikTok is about free speech and innovation, the epitome of libertarian and free market ideals. The idea of banning TikTok is an anathema to everything I believe.

Aside from moving to protect his investment in the PRC-controlled ByteDance, it appears that part of everything I believe includes the right of the Peoples Republic of China to spy on our children. Banning TikTok has nothing to do with interfering with free speech (or innovation, come to that). Banning TikTok would ban a tool used by the PRC against our children and our national security, to the extent it’s used by government officials at any level of our hierarchy or by business executives anywhere. Content, speech, all of that, could and would continue apace, completely unhindered, on any of the plethora of other social medium platforms.

Ban TikTok. No further delays.

Just Like a Progressive-Democrat

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Republican Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says—and he’s actually serious—that, as President, he would deport the US-born children of illegal migrants.

I favor ending birthright citizenship for those whose parents entered the country *illegally* because we shouldn’t reward those who violate the law with the intent of exploiting the citizenship rules. The Framers of the 14th Amendment never intended this & it’s arguably not even what it says (don’t forget the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause which is often ignored). That’s common sense.

For good or ill, the 14th Amendment of our Constitution is quite clear on this. Here’s the first sentence of the first Article of that Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

There’s no caveat, there’s no exception, for when a baby born in the United States can be ruled not a citizen of the United States—not even for when that baby is born to illegal aliens. Whether that’s a good or a bad blanket deeming of citizenship is for We the People, and only us, to decide, through our decision to amend our Constitution, or our decision not to amend it on this matter.

Arguably…. What Ramaswamy has chosen to “forget” is that the Supreme Court has ruled that that is precisely what it says. The Court also has ruled that subject to the jurisdiction thereof means being on American soil. (That’s one of the reasons al Qaeda terrorists were (and some still are) held in Guantanamo and not in a stateside prison.)

Aside from that, what’s common sense is adhering to our Constitution and statutes, not disregarding inconvenient parts.

Just like Progressive-Democratic Party politicians, though, Ramaswamy would blithely ignore any part of our Constitution that he finds inconvenient to him, instead of doing the actual work of getting an Amendment ratified—or even proposing one.

Vivek Ramaswamy: too much like a Progressive-Democrat to be an actual Republican.

A Court Gets It Wrong

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Alabama’s legislature redrew its Federal House of Representative district lines, leaving the State with one black-majority district. The State’s courts objected and ordered the lines drawn, strongly encouraging a second black-majority district be created, since 27% of the State’s citizens are black. The State’s legislature sort of obliged, creating a second district with 40% of its voters being black.

A three-judge Federal panel (which The Wall Street Journal identified as a special three-judge district court) rejected the new districts. It’s on this point that I think the court got things badly wrong, and if the AP article is accurate, exposed the intrinsic racism in the way district lines are drawn.

The panel said that if Alabama’s legislature didn’t draw lines that suited the judges on the panel, that panel would draw the lines for them. It

ordered a special master and cartographer to draw new maps that comply with the Voting Rights Act in time for the 2024 elections, saying it would be futile to give the state Legislature a third chance to draw districts that didn’t disenfranchise Black voters.
“We do not take lightly federal intrusion into a process ordinarily reserved for the State Legislature. But we have now said twice that this Voting Rights Act case is not close,” the court said.

This is what our Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, says about that sort of thing:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof….

What the US Supreme Court ruled when Alabama’s original newly drawn districts got to it was that courts could, indeed, reject a legislature’s districting, but it did not rule that courts could draw the districts themselves—all courts may do is return the matter to the State’s legislature. This three-judge panel has no authority to draw its own districts or to designate party separate from Alabama’s legislature to draw them. All this panel can do is serially reject the legislature’s districts. Our Constitution has a solution for this, as well. The 14th Amendment, Article 2, is quite clear:

[W]hen the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

If Alabama lacks a court-approved set of districts, then all of its citizens (the 19th Amendment eliminated the restriction to “male inhabitants”) are denied their right to vote, and Alabama would lose all of its representation in Congress.

The intrinsic racism in districting “requirements”—including in the US Voting Rights Act which governs—is this AP summary of the panel’s ruling:

[T]he State should have two districts where Black voters have an opportunity to elect their preferred candidates. Because of racially polarized voting in the state, that map would need to include a second district where Black voters are the majority or “something quite close,” the judges wrote.

The only racial polarization in voting is the creation of the Voting Rights Act and the several courts’ rulings that insist certain races of US citizens should get special treatment in voting. Either all American citizens are equal under our Constitution and our laws, or we are not. To insist that some races must be treated differently in our voting laws can only be racist.

As the Supreme Court has ruled, more than once, Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.

Full stop.

Wrong Way to Punish the FBI?

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are concerned that doing away with FISA’s Section 702 would be the wrong way to punish the FBI.

I agree. But the editors are missing the point. They too narrowly justify 702 with this:

Congress created Section 702 after 9/11 to address intelligence-gathering gaps. It lets the government collect information without a warrant on non-US citizens living abroad.

That’s a worthy purpose; although the realization has demonstrated the difficulty of using the capability to good effect, and without abusing it. Or the impossibility of that with the current regime. The FBI has demonstrated that, as an institution, it cannot be trusted with 702 output, and the FISA Court has empirically demonstrated that cannot be trusted, either—not after squawking about FBI lies in the latter’s filings and then proceeding to accept unquestioningly further FBI blandishments and warrant applications.

Answering those deficiencies, though, is a separate matter from applying the appropriate responses to the FBI’s misbehaviors and the FISA Court’s yapping about those misbehaviors.

The FBI is irretrievably broken—its lies to a court are only part of the institution’s failures; its stonewalling of Congress under the risible rationalization that its internal procedure policies are superior to Congress’ constitutionally mandated oversight obligations are another—and it needs to be erased from our government altogether. That, not dealing with 702, is the correct response to the FBI’s institutional dishonesty.

The correct FISA-related action is to make the FISA Court a public proceeding court or itself eliminated as well. That’s not punishing anybody; that’s simply getting rid of the stain of a secretive Star Chamber and forcing “court” activities out into the sunlight, or bringing the warrant application/granting process back into a proper Article III court. Those courts, after all, are fully checked out on the process of keeping warrants sealed until execution.

Occupying Floodwaters

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It seems a Wisconsin man owns some property near Ixonia, and that property has been flooded, gets flooded fairly frequently, by the Rock River against which the man’s property lies. He’s gotten fed up with the airboats that go running across his land, taking advantage of its temporarily flooded condition, and he’s filed suit in Wisconsin’s Jefferson County Circuit Court to put an end to the practice.

At the heart of the issue is the so-called public trust doctrine, which are provisions in the Wisconsin Constitution that guarantee public access to navigable waters generally defined as any waterway with a bank upon which someone can float a canoe or other small watercraft on a regular basis.
State Department of Natural Resources policies state that the doctrine grants access rights to any part of a navigable waterway as long as the person remains in the water.

At the heart of the man’s suit is this:

public access [the suit holds] ends at the ordinary high water mark, a point on the bank or shoreline where the water regularly stops, and that the DNR’s position has left law enforcement confused.
“DNR’s authority to implement and enforce the public trust doctrine is limited to navigable lakes, streams, sloughs, bayous and marsh outlets,” the lawsuit says. “Flooded yards do not fit into these categories and are not subject to DNR’s public trust jurisdiction.”

The man has the right of it, and a key phrase is that “regular basis” bit. There’s nothing regular at all about floods—that’s why they’re called floods and not rivers, or bayous, or swamps, or ponds or lakes. Another key phrase is that waterway with a bank bit. Floods don’t have banks; they’re floods because the water has overflowed the waterway’s banks.

Beyond that, there are basic private property rights. A man owns his private property, whether it’s in its normal state or flooded by a temporary overflow. There are no “navigable waters” in a flood sitting on private property, however easily someone else’s boat might float on the flood.

Wisconsin’s constitution is fairly explicit on the matter of private property. Art I, Sect 13:

Private property for public use. SECTION 13. The property of no person shall be taken for public use without just compensation therefor.

There is no clause or collection of clauses that authorizes the DNR’s navigable water policy. The DNR’s…policy…looks an awful lot like a taking without just compensation. Just a “shut up and deal with it” misinterpretation of the State’s constitution.

The cynicism of the DNR’s position regarding floods and navigability is demonstrated by this definition of navigable waterway in the DNR’s own policy regarding waterway jurisdiction:

A navigable waterway is defined through case law as any waterway that has a defined bed and bank, and upon which it is possible to float a canoe or small watercraft on a recurring basis.

This directly contradicts the DNR’s Public Trust Doctrine definition of navigable waterway on which it’s hanging its hat in defense in the law suit:

The Public Trust Doctrine applies to all navigable waters, which are defined as any waterway on which it is possible to float a canoe or small watercraft at some time during the year.

That internal-to-DNR contradiction by itself ought to be enough for summary judgment in the man’s favor and the striking of DNR’s navigable water policies. With that internal contradiction, DNR has demonstrated that it has no concept of navigable waters.