Short and sweet. And wrong. At Tuesday’s morning session of the hearing to confirm/reject Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson:
Senator Chuck Grassley (R, IA): Do you believe the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right?
Brown Jackson: Senator, the supreme court has established that the individual right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right.
Notice that. A court says so. Not our Constitution—the second of our Bill of Rights—says so.
This should be disqualifying.
Michael Sussmann, the Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer (among other roles) moved in court to strike portions of Special Council John Durham’s indictment of him, including in particular, the indictment’s “Factual Background” section. Sussman claimed that the section had “prejudicial” information and “false allegations” and so would taint the jury pool from which his jurors would be drawn. DC District Judge Christopher Cooper waved the BS flag at Sussman’s move.
I’m not going to strike anything from the record. Whatever effect the filing has had has already passed.
That’s correct. More important, though, are these factors. One is that, of course the indictment contains “prejudicial” information: grand juries are, by design, one-sided affairs intended solely to determine whether there’s enough material to warrant a formal charge and a trial. That’s why the evidence presented to a grand jury is sealed until trial; only the fact of the indictment and the nature of the government’s case can be made public before that trial—and never made public at all if, with or without indictment, the government decides not to proceed to trial.
The other factor, regarding the “false allegations” claim, is a so what one. The accuracy of the allegations, along with the accuracy and believability of any facts or other evidence underlying the allegations, are for juries to determine at trial, not for judges to deny jury access to via prosecutorial presentation.
Recall that the Fairfax County School Board, last year, changed the admissions policy for its elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology from one of straight merit to one of discrimination to favor some racially preferred children and to disfavor some racially…not preferred…children. This racist policy was objected to in court by a broad coalition of average American residents of the county. In US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Judge Claude Hilton waved the racism flag and struck the racial preferences scheme.
Hilton ruled in part [citations omitted, emphasis added],
The Board’s main problem is its focus on the goal to have TJ [Thomas Jefferson] reflect the demographics of the surrounding area, described primarily in racial terms. Far from a compelling interest, racial balancing for its own sake is “patently unconstitutional.” The Board cannot transform racial balancing into a compelling interest “simply by relabeling it ‘racial diversity.'” The school districts in Parents Involved tried various verbal formulations to deflect from their intent to racially balance schools through race-based transfers. The Board here did not even bother with such “verbal formulations.” Board members and high-level FCPS [Fairfax County Public Schools] actors did not disguise their desire for TJ to represent the racial demographics…. Whether accomplished overtly or via proxies, racial balancing is not a compelling interest.
And
…steps…could have been implemented before the Board defaulted to a system that treats applicants unequally in hopes of engineering a particular racial outcome.
And
The proper remedy for a legal provision enacted with discriminatory intent is invalidation.
We may be making progress toward correcting the blatantly racist policies of the Left.
The ruling can be read here.
President Joe Biden (D) said in his speech Friday announcing his selection of DC Circuit Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee for the Supreme Court that “it’s time our courts looked like America.”
Nothing could be less accurate or more Extreme Left.
Our Article III courts—and our State and local courts, as well—are not, and were not, designed to reflect the demographics of our nation. That’s the role of the political arms of our governments, Federal, State, and local. Those political arms are populated by men and women elected by their fellow citizens to be Representatives, Senators, President of our nation, and analogously at the State and local levels. Those are the folks who should look like the demographics of our nation and their State and district constituents. And they do—that’s what our elections achieve, however clumsily.
Our courts were set up, instead, to be independent of those political arms, independent of demographics. The judges and Justices appointed to those courts were given lifetime appointments explicitly to keep them independent of politics. Our courts were created and the judges/Justices are appointed to them for the sole purpose of applying our Constitution and any statutes before them in any particular case as they were written.
Doing that requires no particular demographic on the bench nor any pattern of demographics. It requires only that they honor our Constitution, which holds that legislation is the sole province of the Congress, and that they honor their oaths of office, which hold them to upholding and defending our Constitution and to treat all men and women before them equally under law, without favor or preference of any sort—including demographic.
Being a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences is irrelevant to the role of a judge or Justice. Being a black is irrelevant to the role of a judge or Justice. Being a woman is irrelevant to the role of a judge or Justice. Being an American citizen applying the text of the Constitution and the statute(s) as they are written is the role, the only role, of a judge or Justice.
Applying gender or race, or religion, is simply bigotry. Selecting a person for judge or Justice because of gender or race, or religion, is simply bigotry.
Full stop.
The Tenth Circuit has issued a temporary injunction against President Joe Biden’s (D) rule requiring outdoor recreational groups under contract to the Federal government or doing their business on Federal property to pay their employees $15/hr, whether the value of those employees’ work output is that valuable or not.
The “plaintiffs have demonstrated an entitlement to relief from the minimum wage order in their particular circumstances,” the court ruled, and enjoined the government from enforcing the $15-an-hour minimum wage mandate, which recreational companies said would force some of them out of business.
The court also granted the request because it found the plaintiffs were “likely to succeed on the merits” and “suffer irreparable harm in the absence of preliminary relief.”
The Pacific Legal Foundation had brought the case last fall, arguing that
the requirement amounts to “an executive power grab to force a social agenda through federal contractors.”
That power grab, as the PLF argued, is barred by our Constitution:
Only Congress can make law setting minimum wages. The president can’t establish a minimum wage through administrative fiat. The Constitution says that only Congress can make laws that bind the public.
Indeed. This is what Art I, Sect 1, makes that explicitly clear:
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
Biden-Harris knows this full well, as do his Cabinet Secretaries in on or otherwise supporting the grab.
This is the Progressive-Democratic Party pushing its social engineering agenda with no regard for statute or Constitution—those are just speed bumps on their road to control.