Category Archives: law

Mamdani’s Nod in the General Direction of Stability

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The newly elected Mayor of New York City, the Socialist Zohran Mamdani, has indicated he’s taking the City’s crime problem seriously with his claim that he would like to retain Jessica Tisch, the city’s Police Commissioner.

I have questions, though.

With what authority would Tisch have actually to deal with crime and to pursue the criminals that commit them? Would she have free rein, or would he try to keep her hemmed in? He is, after all, on record calling to defund the nation’s largest police force and accusing it of racism. He was speaking from his heart then; is he now speaking merely politically, or has he evolved his views?

Assume he’s serious, even if merely arguendo. A couple follow-on questions arise. What will he do regarding both city prosecutors who decline to prosecute the criminals and that subset of them who also attempt to prosecute the victims for their heinous efforts to defend themselves?

In those few cases where the suspect actually faces trial, what will he do about city judges who insist on turning those suspects loose on no bail, and what will he do about the ordnances and State laws (over the latter which he has little influence) that mandate many of those no-bail releases?

Monetary Misconception

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Judy Shelton, a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, has this one. She wants the Federal government to issue a gold-backed bond would strike a blow for sound money.

Mr Trump has criticized currency manipulation in global trade relations. Challenging other nations to emulate the US [gold-backed bond] by guaranteeing some portion of their sovereign debt in gold would demonstrate America’s vision for stable money as the proper foundation for fair trade.

This is naïve. “Other countries” will continue to manipulate their currencies, just as they do now; this move only would add a new tool for manipulation—varying the value of the metal backing their own debt instrument(s).

Governments have been debasing their metal backed currencies ever since money was invented, doing so by shaving coins minted in the metal; by replacing some of the money-backing metal with other, cheaper metals; outright announcing a differing, lower values for a unit of the metal.

The most infamous recent example of the latter was during our own Great Depression when then-President Franklin Roosevelt (D) seized all privately held gold and then promptly devalued the gold in US dollar terms.

All currency is fiat currency, whether it’s minted in the metal or it’s printed on paper formally backed by the metal (at a rate the issuing government has announced for the time being), or it’s printed on paper and allowed to float in the markets for goods and services—and currencies. That currency has the value, in legal terms, that government says it has from time to time.

Backing a bond with a precious metal has no material meaning. What makes a money sound is the stability of the issuing government; the economy it oversees with a light hand; and that government’s ability to protect its people from invasion, whether physical, economic, or political. Nothing else does.

Personal Responsibility

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This is a core tenet of our federal republican democracy—the concept that us American citizens are the ones primarily—and most often solely—responsible for the outcomes of our decisions and our actions. This is a tenet that applies just as firmly in our fundamentally capitalist economy to our businesses. In particular, for this post, it applies to our banks, large, small, and in between.

Or, it should apply. Dangerously, our banks, particularly our small and mid-sized banks, would be relieved of that responsibility under legislation that Tennessee Republican Senator Bill Hagerty, who should know better, and Maryland’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Angela Alsobrooks, who is merely acting on her party’s big and bigger government bent, are proposing. That legislation would raise the FDIC’s deposit guarantee from $250,000 per depositor’s account to $10 million.

The editors of The Wall Street Journal have the right of it on this one.

The truth is that a higher insurance limit will increase moral hazard and make the banking system less sound, which will hurt all Americans.

Because

It would also encourage more risk-taking since banks will have to worry less about runs.

Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren as recently as 2023:

We have to do this because these banks are under-regulated, and if we lift the cap, we are requiring—or relying even more heavily on the regulators to do their jobs.

Here is the monarchist Party’s purpose revealed and now pushed by Alsobrooks: an ever more intrusive and controlling central government.

The proposed legislation is an idea whose time never will be, and the proposed legislation needs to be scotched in committee, if not before.

There’s More To It Than Just Race

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined recently on race-based gerrymandering. Their second paragraph was this:

In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

The editors are absolutely right on this.

They missed a Critical Item point, though, as they closed with this:

The Justices would do the country and themselves a favor by correcting the Gingles error and declaring that the Constitution forbids race-based map-making. As the Chief wrote in a 2006 redistricting opinion, “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

Here’s the Constitution on citizen representation in our Federal government.

Article I, Section 2:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

14th Amendment, Article 1:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

14th Amendment, Article 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

Our Constitution also forbids political party-based (faction-based in the Founders’ terms) map-making. Our Constitution also takes clear precedence over statutes, including 1965’s Voting Rights Act requiring racial gerrymanders or putative statutes allowing gerrymandering by political party.

What our Constitution does require, and all that it requires, is that Representatives’ districts have substantially equal populations of American citizens.

Full stop.

Lower Court Obstructionism

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In a legal environment in which Federal district court judges routinely block President Donald Trump’s (R) initiatives and the Supreme Court, via Trump emergency appeals, overrule those judges (and the occasional appellate court ruling) more often than those lower court judges deem appropriate, we’re seeing increasing whining from those lower court judges: they’re getting quite cross over not being listened to, all the while pretending not to understand the Supreme Court’s stays of these lower court blocks while the underlying case works its way through the legal system. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer put it,

The court, has given Trump much of what he has asked for so far, but the brevity of its orders has flummoxed judges who say there is no way to interpret them.

This is the measure of the lower courts’ defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court lifts the stays explicitly to let the underlying cases concerning the Trump initiatives proceed pending a final judgment. Often, appellate courts and district court judges, in lifting a stay or HIAing one, will say they’re doing so because they think the relevant party to the litigation is likely to prevail in the underlying case. The Supreme Court cannot say such things without prejudicing its eventual ruling in the case while it’s before those lower courts. The Court does say, often but not always, that it’s staying a case while the case wends its way. Even in those cases where the Court does not say, though, that much is clear to anyone reading with objective eyes.

These district (and appellate) judges know that.

Here’s an example of lower court defiance in the judge’s attempts at obstruction:

“Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system,” Gorsuch wrote.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts fired back at Gorsuch a couple of weeks later when she ruled the administration’s cuts to Harvard’s research funding were unconstitutional. In a footnote, Burroughs said it was “unhelpful and unnecessary” to criticize judges for defying the Supreme Court “when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”

What part of set that precedent aside is unclear to this judge? If it appears to her to be set aside, then from her perspective it is set aside. Is Burroughs really insisting she’s unable to follow a simple ruling without having in hand a long, detailed dissertation on why the ruling exists and why she must follow it? Would that ruling need to be written in words of one syllable or less? If so, she needs to find another line of work where her bosses have the time and inclination to hold her hand every step of the way.

On the other hand, it sounds like this judge is letting her disdain for Trump lead her to disrespect for and defiance of the Supreme Court. In that case, too, she needs to find another line of work, maybe with Bill Kristol.