Category Archives: Courts

The Judge is Mistaken

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Federal Judge Lee Rudofsky, of the Eastern District of Arkansas says he’ll toss an ACLU suit against that State’s new voter redistricting law unless Biden-Harris’ DoJ joins the suit.

His rationale is this:

After a thorough analysis of the text and structure of the Voting Rights Act, and a painstaking journey through relevant caselaw, the Court has concluded that this case may be brought only by the Attorney General of the United States[.]

Rudofsky is sort of correct to make his threat—the suit should be dismissed. There is no advantage or disadvantage to any race in the new voter map, only to this or that political party. All voters, after all, look alike under law, including voter law.

However, the judge has made a number of errors in this. First, there’s no need to delay a dismissal of the case. DoJ has already communicated its decision to not be a party through its current non-participation.

Second, State districting for Federal elections is an internal State matter per Art I, Sect 4:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Place of Chusing Senators.

DoJ is not Congress, and Congress has not asked—nor is it likely to—DoJ to make a case. It’s more basic than that, though. Congress can intervene in a State’s voting law only to make changes to existing law; it cannot rewrite State law, or originate State law for that State.

Lies of our President

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President Joe Biden (D) has made his announcement that he’ll only appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court, meaning that no one else—no white man or woman, or Hispanic man or woman, or Asian man or woman will even be considered. Biden has set a purely racist and sexist pair of requirements as his primary criteria for a Supreme Court Justice.

Now Biden is objecting to the hue and cry over his racism and sexism.

The White House is…saying that Republicans who are criticizing President Biden for his promise to appoint a Black female to the bench did not object when former President Trump made a similar promise to nominate a female to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020.

And through his White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates,

When Donald Trump promised to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court just over a year ago none of these members objected[.]

Biden, again through Bates, also claimed that then-Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan also promised to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

But Biden’s claims are patently false, as Jonathan Turley points out.

Trump, when he said that he would be putting a woman on the Supreme Court, had already spent months and months with a public short list that they’d been vetting. … And when he [Trump] said he was going to put a woman on the court, it was days before he was going to announce her name.

And

Reagan said that he would give one of his first positions, one of the vacancies, to a woman, but the White House stressed that was not a guarantee, and when O’Connor was selected, he had a short list with a majority of men on it.

And

What these presidents didn’t do is they didn’t say that they would not consider anyone else beyond people with this race, this gender[.]

Biden knows this as fully and as clearly as does Turley.

Lies are the blanket over the head of cowards.

Ted Cruz is Correct

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Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has decried the criteria by which President Joe Biden (D) says he’ll select his Supreme Court nominee. Biden has said that his primary criteria for his nominee are that she be black and that she be a woman. Any criterion resembling actual qualification for the office is far down his list, if one is on his list at all. Cruz began with this:

The far Left doesn’t care about the individual, they will pigeonhole you, & they will discriminate based on race.

He continued:

He’s [Biden is] saying to 94% of Americans, “I don’t give a damn about you. You are ineligible.” And he’s also saying, it’s actually an insult to black women[.] If you came and said, “I’m going to put the best jurist on the court” and he looked at a number of people and ended up nominating a black woman he could credibly say, “OK, I’m nominating the person who is most qualified.” He’s not even pretending to say that. He’s saying, “If you’re a white guy, tough luck. If you’re a white woman, tough luck. You don’t qualify.”

The Biden insult to which Cruz referred is Biden saying to women, to blacks, and especially in the present context, to black women and to black women jurists that he thinks they’re not independently capable. They need special handling from Government in order to advance. They need their Liberal White Savior to ride to their rescue.

Tokenism has no place anywhere in America. That includes having no place in our courts and particularly having no place on our Supreme Court.

Lindsey Graham is Mistaken

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Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) is a supporter of President Joe Biden’s (D) Supreme Court nominee—so long as the selection is South Carolina US District Judge Michelle Childs. It’s typical for a Senator to support nominations for high office when those nominations come from the Senator’s State.

It’s also useful, all other things being equal, for Senators of either Party to support the nominations of a President of either party on the theory that a President should be able to have his own team in place (my argument here, not Graham’s).

Graham’s rationale, though, is badly mistaken, and the mistake of his rationale impacts that “team” concept, as well.

Graham supports Biden’s impending nomination of a black woman for Supreme Court Justice (which, in Biden’s own and often repeated terms, puts actual qualification for the Court deeply secondary, if that’s a consideration at all) centers on this:

Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America.

And, as paraphrased by Just the News:

Graham added that Republicans have made a “real effort” to “recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America.”

Looking like America, though, is a political matter. Political questions are entirely appropriate for political parties, political questions are entirely appropriate to the political branches of our government, where we American citizens can, and do, choose who will represent us—achieving tautologically a representation reflective of America.

However, it is not the role or purpose of our courts, epitomized by our Supreme Court, to “look like America.” Our courts—most especially our Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort for most cases—must reflect, must act within, must apply as they are written, the clauses of our Constitution, our Constitution as a whole, and the statutes before them in specific cases. Looking like America is irrelevant to that duty.

Nor are our courts—most especially the Supreme Court—part of the President’s team. Our courts consist of judges and Justices possessed of lifetime appointments. That’s by design, explicitly to inure those folks from politics, per se, to separate them from, among other things, this or that political team.

What looks like America, from the independent courts’ perspective, already is embodied in our Constitution and its clauses and in those statutes. It would be wrong for our courts to attempt to adjust that perspective, and it would be wrong for politicians to attempt to alter the courts so as to adjust that perspective.

The Supreme Court and Diversity

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Law Professor (University of Tennessee) Benjamin Barton thinks the Supreme Court needs diversity along many more dimensions than just race and sex, ostensibly to avoid groupthink.

Given that every justice is already a lawyer, it makes sense to try to diversify across other educational, geographic, and experiential axes.

Barton’s entire argument is a non sequitur.

The Supreme Court needs “diversity” far less than it needs Justices who will adhere to their oaths of office to defend and uphold our Constitution and to apply the laws equally to all Americans, without regard to any elements of “diversity.”

The Supreme Court needs Justices, in particular, who will accept the requirement of our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, and who will rule based on what the Constitution and the statute before them in a particular case actually say, and not based on a Justice’s personal views of society’s needs.

Society’s needs are political matters that are solely within the provinces of the political branches of government and of We the People who elect the members of those branches. It is, after all, We the People who are society and so are the arbiters of our needs, and it is We the People who implement satisfaction of our needs through our individual actions and with the votes we cast to elect our representatives.