Category Archives: ethics

In Which a Supreme Court Justice is Wrong

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Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor didn’t just get it wrong in her dissent, she is wrong.

In Wolf v Cook County, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s expansion of its public charge rule regarding immigrant visas to include a bar on

non-cash benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), forms of Medicaid, and certain housing assistance….

Sotomayor opened her dissent from the Court’s decision with this:

Today’s decision follows a now-familiar pattern. The Government seeks emergency relief from this Court, asking it to grant a stay where two lower courts have not. The Government insists—even though review in a court of appeals is imminent—that it will suffer irreparable harm if this Court does not grant a stay. And the Court yields.

Lower courts said it two times—it must be true. Lower courts have already said it. The superior court is obliged, somehow, to accede to its subordinates.

Besides: a court of appeals (the 7th Circuit) is going to hear oral argument this week as I write. Oral argument. Not review the written submissions, much less rule; that usually comes some indeterminate amount of time, usually measured in weeks, later. Especially if lower courts, like Sotomayor here, don’t see the matter as the emergency that the government avers.

She went on:

But this application is perhaps even more concerning than past ones. Just weeks ago, this Court granted a stay of a different decision involving the same administrative rule at issue here, after the Government professed urgency because of the form of relief granted in the prior case—a nationwide injunction.

This is fractured logic, and Sotomayor knows better. The Court objected to the nationwide aspect of that district court ruling because that lower court badly overstepped its bounds. And having lifted the nationwide injunction, the Court had no reason to reach the emergency aspect of the situation.

And this:

The Government’s professed harm, therefore, boils down to an inability to enforce its immigration goals, possibly in only the immediate term, in one of 50 States. It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.

Because the government should not—of course!—be allowed to enforce its immigration goals. And because unless the harm isn’t nationwide, can the harm only be limited to a single State in our Union, the harm doesn’t matter. Never mind that much of the cost on not enforcing in the one State, Illinois, will be borne by that one State—and Illinois is, by many definitions, bankrupt already.

And now Sotomayor’s arrogant self-importance begins to be revealed:

…even putting aside the dissent of four Justices in the New York cases and the plaintiffs’ weighty arguments on the merits….

The Liberal minority disagreed. And her prejudgment of the matter: the plaintiffs’ weighty arguments on the merits.

And Sotomayor closed with this [citations omitted]:

…most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This Court often permits executions—where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures “to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.” … Yet the Court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the Government in far less compelling circumstances—where the Government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one State. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decision-making process that this Court must strive to protect.

Never mind the non sequitur nature of her analogy. The execution cases that the Court has declined to (further) stay are cases that have been appealed repeatedly and on successively flimsier grounds (for the most part). They’ve already been extensively adjudicated, and further delay would at best be unnecessary—that ground having already been plowed lots of times—and would border on violation of the 8th Amendment.

On the other hand, the harm done by 20 years of too narrow (as now realized) enforcement of the public charge rule would be extended by not lifting injunctions against its enforcement pending final adjudication.

But her position is of a piece with her claim to personal superiority.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

It’s hard for her bias to get any more blatant.

Finally,

I respectfully dissent.

There’s nothing respectful about her dissent; she attacked her fellow jurists’ integrity and morality, and she insulted the intelligence of all of us.

The Supreme Court’s stay of the Cook County case and Sotomayor’s dissent can be seen here.

Deliberately Ignorant

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In a Wall Street Journal article about the espionage and intellectual property theft threat posed by the People’s Republic of China, Boston University William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor artificial intelligence researcher H Eugene Stanley said this when his PRC research collaborator—whom he enthusiastically took on—said this when she was arrested for lying on her visa and for potential espionage:

I’m not interested at all in politics. I’m a scientist.

And

If a person anywhere in the world wants to come to my group, and they have the money to come, I say why not?

Wow. He might want to review the musings of Plato and Aristotle on politics and individuals’ relationship with politics.

And this, as paraphrased by the WSJ:

Mr Stanley said that he receives droves of research requests and that he vets candidates’ scientific credentials. A Boston University spokesman said the school doesn’t engage in classified research and relies on the State Department to screen foreign applicants for national-security risks.

Of course. It’s someone else’s responsibility. Only Government should do, not each of us.

That “research” collaborator?

[F]ederal prosecutors accused Yanqing Ye of acting as an agent of a foreign government. On her application for a J-1 visa used for scholarly exchanges, she said she was a student at [the People’s Republic of] China’s National University of Defense Technology, but omitted that she was a lieutenant in the PLA….

On being asked whether it was useful to work with scholars of the PRC’s National University of Defense Technology, which was the school claimed by Ye and by her handler Kewei Yang on a paper co-written by the two along with Stanley, he responded

Is it a bad place? I don’t know[.]

Here is an example of the failure of the ideology that insists that Government is the solution, of the passivity that lets Government handle personal responsibilities exclusively rather than acting as support for each of us handling our own duties.

The proximate solution? In the particular case, bar Stanley from any government research funding, which the school claims he has none of presently, and bar Boston University from government funding until it cleans up the understanding of ethics and of personal responsibility on the part of its staff and students.

Some Thoughts on the Nevada Caucus

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…based on 60% of the precincts reporting.  The Nevada map provided at the link indicates that Sanders won the urban counties, Buttigieg won the rural counties, and Biden’s precinct wins are too scattered to show up.

Biden’s showing here indicates he’s wasting his money and Progressive-Democrat primary votes by staying in. He finished second—likely, only 60% of the results are in as I write—and he’s bragging about what a strong showing that is, but the first place finisher got more than twice as many votes as he did. Given the way this campaign began all those months ago, as much as Sanders won so big in Nevada, so big did Biden lose in Nevada.

Mouse over the map, the map, though.  It’s apparent that where Sanders won, he won big, especially in Las Vegas (which is where Biden had his best showing, too—a not quite so distant second). Buttigieg, on the other hand won his rural counties only narrowly.

Sanders’ urban showing, especially in contrast with his rural showing, has interesting implications for President Donald Trump if Sanders becomes the Progressive-Democratic Party nominee.

An aside a propos competence in general, and nothing to do with the candidates themselves. Recall the confusion the Nevada caucus managers had and how they dumped two separate software “aids” for counting results.  After 20 hours for results reporting, Iowa was 62% complete.  Nevada got to 60.4%–the results on which I comment above.

Update: Now, two days after the caucus, Nevada’s reporting is roughly 96% complete. The thrust of my claims remains accurate. The only material change in outcome is that Buttigieg, who was “viable” at the 60% mark, no longer is.

And, at those two days, Nevada’s caucus managers are showing their better performance compared with Iowa’s.

Contradictions

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Howard Kurtz, self-appointed “news media” critic and supporter of the NLMSM as gateway to what we’re permitted to know of the doings in the world, is at it again. This time it’s his piece on Attorney General William Barr’s alleged musings about resigning as AG.

Kurtz opened his piece by doing what today’s journalists do: repeating others’ rumors.

As the Washington Post reported, and others have confirmed, William Barr “has told people close to President Trump—both inside and outside the White House—that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations”—that’s according to three administration officials.

Both WaPo and Kurtz only have deliberately unnamed sources for these claims, so we can’t even know whether they exist, much less assess the accuracy of their claims or their motives in making them if they do exist.

There’s more along another axis.

…just as the president is declaring himself the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer….”

Kurtz presented this as though the declaration surprised him. Does he really not understand the position?  Here’s what Article II, Section 3, of our Constitution says:

…he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed….

“He” meaning the President of the United States, that office and officer being the subject of Art II. Does Kurtz really not understand the meaning of that clause? Surely his intern explained it to him when he did Kurtz’ research for this piece. Surely, that intern also explained to Kurtz that the AG is the chief prosecutor, not the chief law enforcement officer.

Indeed, neither the office of Attorney General or the officer exist in our Constitution; these are statutory creations of Congress. The Department of Justice didn’t exist at all for 100 years after our nation’s birth. Surely, that intern explained….

It gets…better:

The press gives him [Trump] plenty of voice, of course, but it’s not unfiltered.

There’s that arrogant, self-important gateway bit again. Which is a major part of why Trump is on social media as much as he is—the media “filters” what he says and does before reporting to us and before opining to us.

Kurtz closed his piece with this:

But those [prior Presidents’ pardons and commutations] were largely treated as isolated incidents, while the press is linking the Trump pardons to a wholesale assault on the criminal justice system.

There’s that filter in action, again.

Telecommunications and Backdoors

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It turns out that Huawei has been able to use legislatively mandated backdoors into telecommunications software—backdoors ostensibly for the sole benefit of law enforcement, and then only usable within judicially allowed limits, search warrants duly sworn, in the US, for instance—for years.

But we would never do that, says Huawei in its wide-eyed innocence.

“The use of the lawful interception interface is strictly regulated and can only be accessed by certified personnel of the network operators. No Huawei employee is allowed to access the network without an explicit approval from the network operator,” the [senior Huawei] official said.

The existence of the interface is the access pathway. The bar to its use is wholly a matter of the integrity of the humans involved. This is not a hard concept to understand; Huawei’s management is being disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Further, PRC law requires PRC companies to cooperate with the government on the government’s demand.

Huawei “has never and will never do anything that would compromise or endanger the security of networks and data of its clients,” the company said.

Huawei’s CEO Ren has also made that preposterous claim. He and his management team insult our intelligence, assuming as they do that we would believe that Huawei would actually defy the PRC government.