Monthly Archives: July 2016

Another Judicial Misbehavior

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The Fifth Circuit, in a 9-6 ruling, has said that Texas’ Voter ID law violates the Federal Voting Rights Act and returned it to the trial court to…fix…it.

[The appellate court] instructed a lower court to come up with an “interim remedy” before the November election.

Therein lies a major part of the problem.  Regardless of what one might think of the particular law, any alteration to it is a political matter, to be done by the people and their elected representatives.  The courts have no authority whatsoever to write law or to rewrite an extant one; indeed, our Constitution explicitly bars the courts from such things.

There’s more.  Writing for the majority, Judge Catharina Haynes wrote this, having already acknowledged that there is no direct evidence of discriminatory intent.

In this day and age we rarely have legislators announcing an intent to discriminate based upon race, whether in public speeches or private correspondence. To require direct evidence of intent would essentially give legislatures free reign to racially discriminate so long as they do not overtly state discrimination as their purpose and so long as they proffer a seemingly neutral reason for their actions.  This approach would ignore the reality that neutral reasons can and do mask racial intent….

In other words, whenever legislators disagree with judges, judges must proceed from a presumption of dishonesty on the part of the legislators.  Direct evidence be damned.

[C]ourts may consider both circumstantial and direct evidence of intent as may be available.

Because circumstantial evidence, especially in the absence of direct evidence, can be interpreted in any way convenient to the judge’s predisposition—or to a litigant’s narrative.  That’s why circumstantial evidence is so sketchy in the first place.

The dissent, written by Judge Edith Jones, makes the majority’s shameful behavior plain.

No one doubts our unwavering duty to enforce antidiscrimination law. But in this media-driven and hyperbolic era, the discharge of that duty requires the courage to distinguish between invidious motivation and shadows. The ill-conceived, misguided, and unsupported majority opinion shuns discernment. Because of definitive Supreme Court authority, no comparable federal court precedent in over forty years has found a state legislative act motivated by purposeful racial discrimination.

All of that represents a very serious bit of judicial misbehavior, and it puts a premium on getting this 2016 election right.  A Progressive-Democrat in the White House, together with a Democrat-owned [sic] Senate, will have damaging effects far beyond the Supreme Court damage I’ve been on about in other articles: they’ll have their impact on lower courts, too, and throughout our judicial system.

The ruling can be seen here.

At Least He’s Consistent

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Recall that President Barack Obama (D) touts his Stimulus Bill, with its explosion in national debt (which is still growing these 7+ years later), as good for our economy.  That it’s an economy still mired, these 7+ years later, in a pseudo-recovery that’s the slowest since WWII and that has a smaller per centage of Americans in the labor force than at any time since the Jimmie Carter (D) years is lost on, or ignored by, him.

Now he’s making the same claim about our nation’s exploding student debt, a pile of markers reaching $1.3 trillion, a pile that has doubled in total size, and a pile that has seen a doubling of per-graduated student debt, all over these same 7+ years of Obama and his administration.  This growing pile is good for our economy, he says.

Maybe not.  That growing debt represents a number of drags on our economy beyond the broader national debt.

It drives up the cost of borrowing for the rest of us by competing for the supply of loanable funds, whether from government or from banks.

That’s fairly minor.  More importantly, money spent on debt repayment is money not spent on

  • consumption or on saving for the borrower’s emergency money needs (at least one such emergency is virtually inevitable over the course of a lifetime)
  • future retirement (which results in an increased reliance on a bankrupt, or nearly so, Social Security and Medicare public retirement system)
  • big ticket items like housing and cars (certainly these are routinely borrowed for, but added debt?)

And there’s this: money not spent on student debt repayment because the student (now adult) borrower has defaulted on his debt represents two more drags on our economy: increased general borrowing costs in order to cover the lenders’ costs of absorbing those bad loans, and increased taxes (which, among other drags, is money withdrawn from the private economy) to cover government-guaranteed privately extended student loans.

All of those drags represent reduced overall private demand and so lower business prosperity and so fewer jobs.  All those drags also represent higher taxes tomorrow or increased (yet again) borrowing tomorrow—and so higher taxes the day after tomorrow.

This is the level of understanding of basic economics held by Obama and the Democratic Party.

Welcome to the Bigs

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…and to the way the People’s Republic of China treats its foes, Mr President,

Recall that the PRC was resoundingly crushed in a case brought by the Philippines concerning the PRC’s violations of Philippine waters in the South China Sea, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague having ruled, sharply, in favor of the Philippines on all but the most trivial of the charges.

Recall, also, that newly elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte had said—repeatedly—that he wanted bilateral talks with the PRC regarding the South China Sea and the items in dispute.

At a cabinet meeting in progress when word of the ruling arrived, one of Duterte’s Ministers said he’d had dinner the night before with the PRC’s ambassador, and that ambassador—before the ruling had been announced—had provided a list of things the PRC required Duterte to say and not say in any press release he might release about the then-forthcoming ruling.  Earlier that same day of the dinner, too, Duterte had met with that same ambassador to assure him that no embarrassing remarks would be forthcoming.  Duterte’s response to that list?

 Didn’t he trust what I told him?

Welcome, indeed, to the contempt with which the Center of Heaven views its foes.

Democratic Party Lawfare

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The Missouri state legislature has a supermajority of Republicans in the House.  And legislator, of any party, can require a bill to be read aloud on the House floor prior to the House’s final vote on it.  Last spring, Democratic Party legislators initiated a filibuster by requiring each bill being brought up for its final vote to be read aloud.  So far, so good.  The Republican Speaker one-upped the Democrats by having the bills read by computer with the speed control dialed up.  Again, so far, so good.

But, since the Democrats lost their dispute from within the House, they’ve sued in open court.  They know they have no case, but they didn’t get their way, so they’re trying to go around the House rules—rules to which both parties agreed when the rules were developed and then adopted—to impose their way.

They have no case?  They have no case because legislatures set their own rules for how they’ll conduct their legislative business; courts have no jurisdiction here.  Even the Missouri Supreme Court seems to be recognizing that.

The court said weeks ago that justices…will quiz attorneys about how the Legislature conducts its own business, and they will consider whether the judicial branch has any say in settling a dispute among lawmakers.

This is what we can look forward to in the Federal government, too, as demonstrated by the recent Democratic Party’s calculated cancelation of democracy in the Federal House of Representatives by preventing the people’s business from being done in the People’s House because they couldn’t get their way.  This was demonstrated earlier, too, as Democrats left Wisconsin and Indiana explicitly to prevent those legislatures from conducting the people’s business because the Democrats couldn’t impose their will.  It’ll only get worse under a third Democratic Party-controlled White House and Democratic Party-controlled Congress.

If we Democrats can’t get our way, there’ll be no democracy for you.

Iran Nuclear Weapons Deal

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In a document Iran submitted to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran noted its ability to expand its nuclear enrichment program in just ten years—now nine, since the weapons deal is a year old—and get its nuclear weapons program back on schedule.

What’s interesting here is not the existence of that capability, everyone but President Barack Obama (D) and his Secretary of State John Kerry knew the agreement allowed it.  What’s interesting is that Iran is so open about their intent to do exactly that, and that Iran is so open with their contempt for the Obama administration.