Category Archives: Courts

An Appeal

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Bayer is appealing a District court judgment against it and its Roundup product which has glyphosate as an important ingredient. The judgment is for $25 million, and Bayer thinks it’s a wrong judgment.

The German company’s main argument is that US federal agencies have determined its product is safe and not a carcinogen.

Bayer noted that the

verdict defies both expert regulatory judgment and sound science.

And

Because the EPA has consistently approved the sale of glyphosate without a cancer warning and has stated that including such a warning on the label would render the product misbranded, any state-imposed cancer warning is expressly preempted

Wow. Truth as defense.  What a concept.

Checks and Balances

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Editors at The Wall Street Journal correctly decry a Federal district judge’s ruling that ex-White House counsel Don McGahn must testify before the House of Representatives in response to a House subpoena.  As the editors put it,

the sweeping ruling essentially eliminates a right to confidentiality between a President and his most senior advisers.

Thus:

A federal judge says White House aides must answer to Capitol Hill.

Not just any Federal judge: an Obama judge, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The Jackson’s ruling, though, goes far beyond that.  The judge has asserted absolute supremacy of the Legislative over the Executive.

Because checks and balances only run one way. The Legislative is above reproach, and the Executive may not—has no capability to—check or balance the Legislative.

That’s the new mantra of the Progressive-Democratic Party and its supporters, even though they lack the transparency to say so out loud.

Until a judge said so out loud. Thereby also deprecating another coequal branch’s ability to check and balance the Legislative.

The Left and Judging

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President Donald Trump has nominated Sarah Pitlyk for the US District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, and the Senate is about to take up her nomination for the confirmation process.

The American Bar Association thinks highly of Pitlyk’s great intelligence, high character, and experience researching and writing briefs, but it says she’s not qualified to be a judge.  After all, this textualist judge nominee

worked for the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit organization, on cases involving contract, employment and tax disputes, as well as on religious liberty and pro-life matters.

The evil, conservative Thomas More Society. And Pitlyk worked those religious liberty and pro-life cases that the Left hates so much.

It’s telling when the ABA says it does not want great intelligence, high character, and experience on the bench.

Look for a strictly party line vote to pass her nomination out of committee with a favorable recommendation and an equally party line confirmation vote.  Because the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate also do not want great intelligence, high character, and experience on the bench. Smart judges, morally strong judges, experienced judges are in the way of their agenda.

A Judge Got One Wrong

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Recall Florida’s citizens, by a 2:1 margin, voting up a State constitutional amendment restoring to convicted felons (except murderers and sex offenders) their right to vote on completion of their criminal sentences.

Recall, further, Florida’s government passing a law that required these felons to pay off their outstanding fines, fees or restitution—in other words, actually to complete their sentences, including court-imposed financial requirements.  This law went further: it provided mechanisms for relief from those financial penalties so the felon could complete their sentences more quickly after release from jail:

  • payment of the financial obligation in full
  • a court’s dismissal of the debt
  • conversion of the debt to community service

That last is instructive: community service is one of several sanctions, whether in addition to or in lieu of jail, applied on felony conviction. Community service in this guise thus stands as the State’s explicit recognition that a felon has not completed his sentence until he has completed all of it, including financial penalties.  That community service also is used to sanction misdemeanors and civil wrongs in no way alters that simple truth.

Now Federal District Judge Robert Hinkle has chosen to overrule the will of the citizens of the State: he’s issued an injunction that bars Florida’s Secretary of State and County Supervisors of Elections

from preventing plaintiffs from registering to vote solely because they can’t pay a financial obligation. He cited an appellate court ruling that held that “access to the franchise cannot be made to depend on an individual’s financial resources.”

Never mind that the law does not bar a right to vote based on a voter’s financial resources but on a felon’s having completed his sentence.

Never mind, either, that the law provides two means of relief from the financial portion of the felon’s sentence.  With his injunction, Hinkle has both removed the possibility of relief from financial distress, thereby making even more difficult an already arduous journey back to society, he’s removed much of the incentive for the felon to try.

This is another example of activist judges making political decisions in direct contravention of the political arms of a government, for all that this injunction is temporary, pending next year’s trial on the merits.

Threats

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Progressive-Democrats are nakedly trying to intimidate the Supreme Court to get their own way—and they’ve made their threat overt, in an Amici Curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court concerning New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc v City of New York, which is a case involving New York City’s ban on transporting “licensed, locked and unloaded handgun[s] to a home or shooting range outside city limits.”

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI), Richard Blumenthal (D, CT), Mazie Hirono (D, HI), Richard Durbin (D, IL), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) made their threat thusly:

The Supreme Court is not well. And the people know it. Perhaps the Court can heal itself before the public demands it be “restructured in order to reduce the influence of politics.” Particularly on the urgent issue of gun control, a nation desperately needs it to heal.

The threat to the Court’s safety, its independence, couldn’t be more clear.  Never mind that the influence of politics is made manifest by this threat.

We can’t afford this in our government. At any level.

The despicable brief can be read here.