Author Archives: eehines

Judicial Insubordination

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Elizabeth Price Foley and Mark Pinkert are on the right track. They’ve laid out the problem concisely in their Thursday Wall Street Journal op-ed:

Now some lower-court judges have become brazenly defiant, not only of the administration’s agenda but also of high court opinions. In response, the justices have had to remind lower courts of their constitutional role and chastise them for resisting court precedent. But the resistance continues, threatening to erode the judiciary’s ability to function.

And

An anonymous group of 12 lower-court judges took their grievances to NBC News, telling a reporter that the high court’s rulings are “validating the Trump administration’s criticisms” of lower courts. One said “it’s inexcusable” that the justices don’t “have our backs.” Four judges opined that the justices, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, “should do more to defend the courts,” in the reporter’s words. Another judge complained that he and his colleagues have been “thrown under the bus.” But even an Obama appointee admitted that “the whole ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ is a real issue” and that lower-court judges “are sometimes forgetting to stay in their lane.”

They then propose a solution:

They should avoid writing opinions that contain obvious ambiguities like the one in Fair Admissions. They should also clear away the underbrush of nonoriginalist constitutional law, overruling such precedents rather than narrowing, distinguishing or calling them into doubt. … And all the hullabaloo over the president’s authority to fire executive-branch officers would be quieted if the court flatly overruled Humphrey’s Executor v US rather than merely chip away at it.
The court has a duty to provide doctrinal clarity, especially on constitutional law.

Those certainly are good ideas, at least from this textualist’s perspective. Clarity in bold, declarative sentences written in exclusively plain terms, would good, whether textualist or activist. More is needed though.

The Supreme Court needs lay aside its hesitancy and swat down, firmly, recalcitrant judges, especially (but not only) those of the district courts. The Supreme Court, over the course of its admonishment-containing overrulings, need to remove the recalcitrant judge from the case altogether, an action the Court has done, but up to now all too rarely. The Court also needs, rarely but at a non-zero rate, to rule that a particularly insubordinate judge will have all of his rulings automatically stayed until reviewed by appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, if necessary.

These are drastic steps, to be sure, but they’re necessary to emphasize that Supreme Court rulings are binding on the lower courts, especially at the district level; to increase the efficiency and speed of the courts and especially of the appellate process; and to begin to restore the public’s confidence in our court system.

Inadequate

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Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, and International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General, Rafael Grossi, say they’ve reached an agreement wherein IAEA inspectors would be allowed to visit Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities sites.

The “agreement” is a chimera and a further example of the Iran government men’s penchant for talking superficials while agreeing nothing substantive and doing nefariousness.

The agreement doesn’t say when inspectors would be able to visit the sites, including the enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow and a nuclear complex at Isfahan, diplomats said. Iran must compile reports on the status of the sites and its enriched uranium stockpile before inspectors can go to verify the information.

No. The only serious agreement in this environment would be for IAEA inspectors to go where they wish, when they wish, for as long as they wish, and without any prior notice. The inspectors need to compile their own reports, without having their inspections colored by Iranian prior commentary and without having their inspections and inspection targets “guided” by Iranian inputs. That’s the only way the inspectors would have any sort of chance to conduct a serious, in-depth inspection of any facility in Iran, much less all of them.

“socialize the agricultural system”

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That’s what the Democratic Socialists of America Party, Progressive-Democratic Party Mayoral candidate for New York City Zohran Mamdani’s first and still most important party membership, wants to do, among other classical socialist things.

The destructiveness of government ownership of production everywhere else is widely demonstrated around the world, a destructiveness of national prosperity and of the weal of the ordinary population, all the while concentrating the remaining wealth in the hands of the Know Betters who run the socialist government.

The rest of us, though, should study the collectivization of the kulaks—the dekulakization—which was Joseph Stalin’s seizure in the name of small-c communism of all of the agriculture production facilities right down to the land itself. That socialist paradisical seizure led directly the deaths by starvation of five to seven million (estimates vary) Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussian children, women, and men.

It’s obvious that members of DSA, most especially Mamdani, either have not studied the outcomes, or they have, but care not a whit about the toll.

Silly Question

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Progressive-Democratic Party Zohran Mamdani now claims he will “discourage” calls to globalize the intifada. The editors at the WSJ wonder

if he really understood [the term and the phrase], wouldn’t he go further and outright condemn such language?

It’s a silly question. Mamdani’s claim is empty rhetoric, intended solely to garner votes, with nothing whatsoever to do with any sincere conversion of understanding.

Mamdani fully understands the phrase and the term; that’s why encouraged it in the first place, and that’s why he continues, consciously and deliberately, to refuse to condemn it and to consciously and deliberately to weasel-word his way around questions of why he will not condemn.

This is who Party chose for their mayoral candidate, and this is who New York City residents are on the cusp of electing as their mayor.

The city is about to get an up close and personal demonstration of what it means to have a socialist who also is an anti-Semitic bigot running their show. The rest of our nation is about to get an object lesson in the outcomes of broad socialism and rank bigotry at the top of a city government.

Hopefully, it awaken the rest of our nation and take us back toward the virtuous people that one of our Founders readily acknowledged is a necessary prerequisite for a republic and for a population to govern itself.

I support and endorse Mamdani’s election for precisely that lesson.

Conflagration of Norms

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As President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Branch nominations languish in the Senate (300 of them), Republicans there are considering changing the rules to speed the nomination confirmation/rejection process. As The Wall Street Journal puts it in its lede,

…Democrats will call it President Trump’s latest conflagration of norms.

This would be, of course, typical of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ hypocrisy. Senate norms have already been burned to ashes in the conflagration of Party’s unprecedented obstruction of nearly all things President (read Trump) and nearly all things Republican. But especially all things (not just nearly all) regarding the President’s nominations and Party’s knee-jerk, universal attempts to block and its successes in slowest-walking the confirmation process. Progressive-Democrats are actively stalling even minor nominees who won bipartisan support in committee, just in petty protest of Trump policy (Party politicians claim it’s over his firing of Party-favored Executive Branch appointees, but their obstruction is much broader than that).

Changing the rules in the way Republicans are proposing—limited time to debate each nomination, allowing nominations to be considered in batches, with each batch subject to that same limited debate time—are sorely needed, and the change would benefit all Presidents, not just Trump.

The folks a President nominates and wants confirmed are intended to be members of the President’s team. Party politicians, though, are with their actions demanding confirmees be members of Party’s team, regardless of which party is in power from administration to administration.