Category Archives: Courts

Unitary Executive

Posted on by
Reply

Senator Ben Sasse (R, NE), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that held hearings last week on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, had an op-ed in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal that opened with this.

Brett Kavanaugh has been accused of hating women, hating children, hating clean air, wanting dirty water. He’s been declared an existential threat to the nation.

He’s also accused of favoring a unitary Executive and thereby ceding dangerously broad power to the President.

What the accusers carefully ignore is that it’s Congress that has so broadly expanded the power of a unitary Executive, while eliding the fact that our Constitution’s Article II created the unitary Executive in the first place.  It is, after all, Congress that has created all of the Agencies and Cabinet Departments that are in the Executive Branch.  It is Congress that has delegated all the power to those facilities by ceding to them rule-making authority.  All the Executive can do is hire and fire the facilities’ management teams–the only check he has on an overreaching Congress and its abuse of power.

Connections

Posted on by
Reply

One in particular stands out for me: that between Senator Amy Klobuchar (D, MN) and the truth.  Charles Hurt, in the Washington Times, has the sordid story.

[Klobuchar] claims to have read 148,000 documents that reveal Judge Kavanaugh to be so heinous as to be unfit for the high court.

OK, let’s say Ms. Klobuchar spent two minutes reading each document. That would be 296,000 minutes—or 205 days—reading these documents. Which is pretty remarkable considering Judge Kavanaugh was nominated 55 days ago.

There is another word for this. It is called a “lie.” And the person who utters it is known as a “liar,” even if the person she tells this “lie” to is so sleepy-eyed as to appear to be fully asleep.

And this:

But this isn’t even the most astonishing part of Ms Klobuchar’s sewer dive on national television.

She goes on to say that as horrific as all these documents reveal Judge Kavanaugh to be, she is not allowed to share the documents with the American people. She is not even allowed to tell us what they say.

“I can’t even tell you about them right now on the show[.]”

In her opening remarks during Tuesday’s Senate Judicial Committee confirmation hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination, she repeated lie about the documents, too.  The woman is shameless.

Remember this in the fall when she’s up for reelection.  Remember it in general as all the Progressive-Democrat candidates running this fall show their approval of her dishonesty with their silence.

Kavanaugh and Precedents

Posted on by
Reply

Brent Kendall, in a piece in Monday’s The Wall Street Journal, wrote about the importance of judicial precedence and how willing Supreme Court Justice nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh would be to overturn them.

Liberals warn that key rulings on abortion, affirmative action, and gay rights could be weakened or reversed by a court that leans further to the right. Many conservatives, on the other hand, hope those precedents will be limited by future rulings and eventually crumble, even if Judge Kavanaugh moves carefully rather than tearing through established doctrine.

Sure enough, in Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing’s opening remarks, it was the End of Days according to the Progressive-Democrats on the Committee.  Kavanaugh represents, you see, everything wrong with President Donald Trump (even though his nomination to office was confirmed a couple of years ago), with Republicans, and with the non-Progressive world.  Women will die (although unborn babies dying doesn’t matter).  People will get horribly sick.  Segregation will return (although it was the Progressive-Democrat Woodrow Wilson who resegregated the Federal government work force that post-Civil War Republicans had integrated, and it’s Progressive-Democrats’ identity politics that actively seeks to segregate Americans politically.)  Violence will rule the streets.

As Kendall pointed out, though,

The judicial doctrine of stare decisis—respect for precedent—is a pillar of the US legal system, and justices generally are reluctant to toss out a ruling without a compelling reason that goes beyond believing it was wrongly decided.

There are two reasons why a precedent should be reversed or overturned by a court, in particular by the Supreme Court.  One, contra reluctant judges (and Kendall?), is if the precedent was wrongly decided: in that case, the precedent should be overturned.  Allowing an error to stand only allows injustice from the error to stand, and the longer the delay in correcting the error, the greater the injustice.  It’s never too late to correct an error.

The other reason is if the circumstances of the precedent no longer apply.  An example of this is the Supreme Court’s ruling of a lack of presumption of privacy in its upholding warrantless wiretapping of a wireless telephone connected to its homeowner’s base station by a then-unencrypted radio signal.  The public has gotten quite a bit more sophisticated about privacy and quite a bit more concerned with preserving it in all venues today, and so the circumstance of that precedent no longer applies—it should be reversed.

In either case, though, it’s not a straightforward affair to come to the recognition of error or of inapplicability.  That depends on the particular facts of a case and on what the applicable law actually says.  It’s unreasonable to expect Judge Kavanaugh to be able to comment substantively on whether he’d use a case to overturn Roe v Wade, for instance, or any of the other cases the Progressive-Democrats have their panties twisted around: he hasn’t seen those cases, since they haven’t come before him.

It’s also unreasonable to say what he might do, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at her confirmation hearing.  To speculate in advance would be to prejudge those cases, and no honest judge can do that.

The Progressive-Democrats know that, also.

Facts-s-s-s

Posted on by
Reply

It burns-s-s-s….

Brown University has come under fire after censoring its own study on transgender youth, which found that social media and friends can influence teenagers to change their gender identity.

After all, the study’s findings might invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.  Can’t have the narrative contradicted.

Here are examples of what its study found, according to the study’s author, Lisa Littman, Assistant Professor of the Practice of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown, physician, and author of the study:

The transition often happens after teens use social media and watch online videos about transitioning to another gender.
“In on-line forums, parents have been reporting that their children are experiencing what is described here as ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria,’ appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion[.]
“The onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe[.]”

And

The parents [surveyed in the study] described “a process of immersion in social media,” such as binge-watching “transition videos” and excessive use of social media, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric[.]

And a part of the study’s conclusion:

The research goes on to suggest that teens could be influencing each other to promote certain behaviors through “peer contagion.”

Bess Marcus, School of Public Health Dean at Brown, rationalized the university’s censorship this way:

[The university] has heard from Brown community members expressing concerns that the conclusions of the study could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.
The University and School have always affirmed the importance of academic freedom and the value of rigorous debate informed by research…[all studies] should be debated vigorously.
… At the same time, we believe firmly that it is also incumbent on public health researchers to listen to multiple perspectives and to recognize and articulate the limitations of their work.

But only so long as those multiple perspectives suit the predetermined conclusion.  That’s the critical limitation of any work.

There’s no doubt that gender dysphoria exists.  Understanding it, though, and preventing it or treating it where appropriate are impossible so long as today’s Galileos are to be kept locked away.

A “secretive, corrupt and troubling process”

Posted on by
Reply

In a Letter to the Editor in Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Kristine Lucius, of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, decried the allegedly secretive, corrupt, and troubling process (Lucius’ phrase) with which the document release related to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is being handled by the Senate Judiciary Committee.  She even went so far as to compare the document release of then-nominee Elena Kagan with that of Kavanaugh:

When President Obama nominated Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, then-Chairman Patrick Leahy joined with then-Ranking Member Jeff Sessions to request and receive access to her records from the Clinton White House—a full 99% of them. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, Chairman Chuck Grassley refuses to even request the same set of records for Mr Kavanaugh from the National Archives.

Couple things about that.

That Ms Lucius succeeded in getting potsful of irrelevant documentation released for committee consideration in no way legitimizes wasting committee time on similarly irrelevant documents regarding Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Besides, the secretive, corrupt, and troubling process with the Kavanaugh nomination is solely that of the Progressive-Democrat Senators. They’re the ones who said they’d vote “No” on the Trump nomination for Kennedy’s replacement even before a nominee was named. They’re the ones who said, even louder, they’d vote “NO” on Kavanaugh’s nomination the day it was announced—before any document requests were even made.

It’s the Progressive-Democrat Senators who are being secretive and troubling by keeping million pages of documentation and 300 judicial opinions away from their own eyes, having already announced their votes, and thereby making their own process corrupt.

Of course, Lucious knows all of that.