Category Archives: Courts

Time to Start Swatting Down Recalcitrant Judges

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The house editorial opened with this:

This is getting old. Three times in the past decade the Supreme Court has vindicated religious schools excluded from state programs. Colorado still needs a remedial lesson.

The latest misbehavior is the State’s—through those State judges who think they’re above Federal law—position that Supreme Court rulings don’t apply to it, or them.  The state’s “universal” pre-K plan lets religious schools participate only if they agree to enroll families who oppose them on sex and gender.

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to deliver that lesson via St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy. Colorado’s pre-school program

pays for 15 hours of preschool a week, about $6,300 a year. Providers are subject to what the state calls “equal-opportunity requirements,” including enrollment without regard to religious affiliation, gender identity or sexual orientation. Two Catholic parishes, two parents, and the Denver archdiocese argue they’re being denied funds “solely on account of their religious exercise.”

Colorado’s argument that

it doesn’t target religion explicitly. Its program has included “more than forty faith-based providers,” and schools “may continue to teach and shape their curricula according to their faith.”

Nonsense. It doesn’t matter that the State is applying its demand for religious State-defined neutrality to all belief systems: it’s applying that demand and denying each of those systems, Catholicism in the present case, their right to select their students based on adherence to their religious strictures.

It’s time the Court reinforced the lesson with several sharp raps on the State judges’ knuckles with a ruler.

Progressive-Democrats, Education, and Assimilation

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California’s Progressive-Democrat governor, Gavin Newsom, is illustrating how thoroughly the Progressive-Democratic Party and the education of American children are an oxymoron, and this doesn’t even involve teachers unions.

Nearly 1 million California students designated as English learners will no longer have to pass a set of tests and benchmarks to exit the program, under a new law signed Sunday by [Progressive-]Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom.

Newsom’s—Party’s—move also illustrates the disdain that they have for American culture. Language is at the heart of any nation’s culture. It informs and strongly influences how a nation’s citizens think about themselves and how they understand their nation’s culture. By dumbing down English learning in California’s schools, Newsom and Party are deprecating the very thing that makes our nation American—our culture. Party doesn’t care that it’s very hard for immigrants to assimilate into our culture when they’re not required to become even reasonably conversant, much less proficient, in our language. But Party doesn’t care about American culture, either, so there’s that.

Fatuous

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The Supreme Court has ruled that the White House’s East Wing conversion into a ballroom and an uprated secure facility can proceed. The majority (a 5-4 decision) said, in part, that the single individual the plaintiffs had trotted out, a woman whose aesthetic sense was being offended because she heavily favored the original architecture of the White House over the new architecture created by the East Wing conversion, was insufficient to stop the conversion.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in dissent, disagreed with that. He wrote, regarding this aspect of the matter, that

one of the group’s [National Trust for Historic Preservation, the main plaintiff] members is “deeply committed” to the preservation of historic American buildings.
“The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” he wrote.
Preservationists can be “aesthetically injured” in a way that gives them standing to sue, just as environmentalists can have standing to sue over the destruction of wildlife, Roberts wrote….

Aesthetics—personal taste—can be a source of material injury? Really?

I have questions, then.

Personal taste can be used to stop projects? What about the personal tastes of those who favor the project? What about the personal tastes of those whose aesthetic sense leads them to not care about the progress? On what basis does Roberts determine the minority should reign over the majority?

Roberts’ position is so fatuous it’s hard to believe he gave any thought at all to the matter.

“Serious Legal Error”

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That’s what Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson claims the Supreme Court made when it lifted an injunction against President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order requiring, among other things, HHS to collect States’ voter registration rolls and the Post Office to work out procedures for not delivering mailed ballots to recipients who are not on those rolls. Her beef is that

the ruling could create election chaos and leave states trapped between filing legal challenges too early or too late.

And

“The Court does a disservice to all concerned by distorting Article III standing and ripeness principles to issue a ruling that contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” she wrote.

This is fatuous. If there is any uncertainty associated with drawing too close to Election Day, it’s not from Supreme Court, or any lesser court, ruling, it’s from the steady drumbeat of quibbling lawsuits from Leftists who want the ineligible to vote and from others pushing unserious boundary and corner cases just to see what trouble they can cause.

The majority dealt with that, whether they realized it or not by ruling the suit in the present case out of bounds because they’d suffered no injury because no procedure had yet been set up that caused or would cause injury.

Jackson wasn’t done.

Jackson said the decision “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

We’re supposed to believe that a lawyer so highly trained and so talented that she became a Supreme Court Justice is unable to work her way through a couple of clearcut rulings. This from a Supreme Court Justice who’s already confessed she’s not capable of saying what a woman is.

But she still wasn’t done.

“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize,” Jackson wrote….

Here she is, claiming to be able to read minds.

Good grief.

Go to Trial

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In the “legal” battle between Larry Ellison’s Paramount on the one hand and California, et al,, on the other over whether Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Brothers amounts to an anticompetitive monopoly, as California AG Rob Bonta claims, Ellison is pushing for a 4 November trial start date while Bonta and his fellow attorneys general in this case are holding out for a 5 April of next year start date.

Consider, though: Paramount, as part of the acquisition deal, agreed to pay Warner Brothers $650 million per quarter for every quarter the deal stays unclosed after 7 September this year, and a final payment of $7 billion, if the deal collapses or remains unclosed by June of next year. That’s what put the quote marks around the legal part just above.

If the defendant is ready to go to trial in early November, then that’s when the trial should start. That the defendant shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury is explicit in our Constitution for criminal cases, but the principle holds just as firmly in civil cases. California, et al., don’t get to delay the trial at government’s convenience.

Aside from that, they were ready to go to trial, tautologically, when they filed their suit. Delaying five months is nothing but an unethical effort to delay, delay, delay for the sole purpose of running up the costs to the defendant—hoping, perhaps to spend the defendant into giving up—for its impertinence in insisting on defending itself.