Category Archives: law

The Editors’ Misapprehension

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In writing Wednesday about the (later that day) Wednesday Supreme Court oral arguments for Trump v Barbara, the Wall Street Journal‘s editors have badly misunderstood the situation. Leave aside that the editors completely ignored the matter of birth tourism in the US, wherein pregnant women enter the US, legally or illegally, to give birth and then to return to their home country, with their purpose for being present for birth being wholly and cynically confined to gaining US citizenship for their newborn. The editors’ argument only concerned the children of illegal aliens and the current automatic conferring of US citizenship to those newborn.

The editors correctly argued that the nub of the matter concerns the 14th Amendment’s reference to children born to parents in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, and they agreed with the plaintiff argument that

Under the longstanding definition, undocumented immigrants are domiciled in this country: they reside here, with “an intention to remain[.]”

This, though, is an incomplete definition of “jurisdiction.” The illegal aliens certainly do intend to remain, but by having entered our nation illegally and refusing to correct that illegal status, they continue to hold themselves apart from our laws, outside our legal strictures, and so outside our government’s jurisdiction—making themselves only subject to our government’s power. These people, in the words of the government’s argument, are incapable of and do not owe “direct and immediate allegiance” to the Nation, and so they both may not and cannot claim its protection.

The editors did acknowledge that

the place to fight [illegal immigration] is at the border, and Mr Trump has virtually halted migrant flows.

A place to fight illegal alien influx is at the border, but that’s not the place. Other necessary battlefields exist, too, battlefields that contain incentives for continued efforts at illegal entry, and these include the birth wards of hospitals and our courts. The present courtroom battlefield is an arena in which birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens (and of birth tourists) must be ended. That, in turn, will facilitate the successful outcome of the birth ward battlefield.

Voting is a Two Step Process

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Elections by ballot, whether by secret ballot, as in the US, or by candidate-coded ballots, often by color, as early on in the US and in sham-election nations, are a two step process: voters mark their ballots, indicating the candidates for whom they’re voting, and they then cast their ballots—put them into a ballot receptacle at a polling station approved by each State’s elections process agency—to be collected and counted.

Mail-in ballots complicate voting, and their arrival after Election Day while still being considered legitimately cast unnecessarily threaten our elections’ integrity. The question of whether mass-mailed late ballots should be counted has arrived on the Supreme Court docket.

Election Day is a nationally statutory date—a single day. Ballots arriving after that day are not cast on Election Day because they’ve not arrived to be cast. It’s bad enough that too many precincts on up to States, whether by dishonesty or incompetence, don’t (not can’t) finish counting the ballots cast by the end of the day, without allowing those not yet cast by Election Day to be counted.

Mississippi law says absentee ballots that are postmarked on time are valid even if officials don’t receive them from the mailman until a week later. Other states have similar rules. The question for the Justices: does accepting tardy mail votes violate the federal law that sets a uniform Election Day?

Mississippi’s argument:

Mississippi suggests that once the US Postal Service takes custody of any outstanding ballots, then the election’s winner is already determined, however long it takes the mail to arrive and the result to become clear. “An election occurs when the voters have cast their ballots,” the state says. “The voters have then chosen and their choice is conclusive: the election is over. An election thus does not depend on when ballots are received.”

That’s the fallacy of the State’s argument. The USPS has never taken custody of a voter’s ballot; it only accepts custody. The responsibility to actually cast that ballot remains the voter’s, and his ballot is not cast until it makes it into the ballot box. His election, therefore, has not occurred until after Election Day if the USPS fails its custody acceptance by delivering the ballot after Election Day has ended and the polls have closed.

It seems straightforward: if the ballots aren’t received until after Election Day, then they weren’t cast by Election Day, and so they cannot be valid. Even if a voter chooses not to cast his ballot himself, instead trusting to a third party, even one as nominally trustworthy as the US Postal Service, the failure to get those ballots into the ballot box remains that voter’s, not the delivering party—even the USPS.

As Joseph Stalin said, it is extremely important who will count the votes and how. It’s imperative for our elections’ integrity that the counting be strictly controlled, especially including limiting the counting to the period beginning after voting precincts close in the State and ending as soon as possible after that, ideally by midnight of Election Day.

Social Services Fraud

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Minnesota’s social services fraud has been going on for years. Faye Bernstein used to work in Minnesota’s Department of Human Services as a compliance officer, but when she started identifying the level of fraud and the lack of controls with which to prevent the fraud and to address it when it did occur in 2019, she started being cut out, slandered, and ultimately forced out.

Since the situation has started getting ovetly addressed, nearly 100 people have been charged…. Two-thirds have been convicted so far in multiple interconnected schemes.

Most of those, though are soldiers, with maybe a made man or two thrown in as scapegoat distractions. It’s really necessary to go after the social services syndicate’s capos along with the capo di tutti i capi, which likely include Minnesota’s Progressive-Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and his syndicate concierge, Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison. If those last two are, in fact, involved, and if they are brought down, two things would result: the Feds would know better how to identify and stop this sort of fraud and jail the perpetrators, and other States might start taking their social services responsibilities more seriously.

Bogus

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A Wall Street Journal article on the requirements to vote under the SAVE Act had this bit of nonsense:

What happens if someone doesn’t have a passport or birth certificate?
The University of Maryland estimated in 2023 that more than 21 million American citizens don’t have ready access to a passport or other documentary evidence of citizenship. ….

Birth certificates are, most definitely, readily available, even if they’re not already in the prospective voter’s immediate possession. It’s straightforward to write to the hospital in which he was born, or the county, if the hospital is no longer operational. Even adoptees, in almost all cases, can determine their birthplace; it’s in their adoption records. It’s a bit more cumbersome when the adoption records have been sealed, but many of those can be opened by a court and the birthplace revealed. The few cases where that’s still not possible are very few, indeed, and present no excuse at all for blocking securing our elections against voter fraud. The fee for birth certificate copies is nominal.

Passports also are readily available; although the timeline for getting one is longer, and the fee is larger.

And this:

What about people who change their name when they get married or due to other circumstances?
The legislation doesn’t explicitly mention married voters or name changes, but does account for situations where a voter’s documents might not perfectly align by addressing “discrepancies in documentation.” Under the bill, an applicant would need to provide additional documentation to election officials to prove their citizenship.

In the particular case of married voters—the vast majority of whom are women—the changed name is an easily solved non-issue. It’s straightforward here, as with birth certificates, to write to the county where the marriage license/certificate was issued. Again, the fee is nominal. Most women in common law marriages haven’t changed their names. Those few occasions where they did and cannot provide documentation can follow the alternative procedures; in any event, these cases also present no excuse for holding up securing our elections.

Those who’ve changed their names “due to other circumstances” can write to the court in which they changed their name and get a copy of the documents recording the change. Here, too, the fee is nominal. The timeline for getting the copies might vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The plaint that evidence of voter fraud being scant is a red herring. It exists; this is an easy way to reduce it further. The thousands of “voters” illegally present in States’ voter rolls presents far too exploitable an opening for fraud. The fact that someone never locks his house door and hasn’t been robbed presents no rationale for continuing the foolishness.

This sort of misinformation, more likely borne of lazily repeating other news writers’ claims rather than doing actual original reporting, is yet another reason why it’s increasingly difficult to take a new writer’s natter seriously.

The FJC Has Become Unreliable

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Federal Judicial Center writes a manual that it alleges—and too many judges and Justices accept at face value—to be an unbiased source of information to help judges make unbiased assessments about scientific testimony.

It has ceased to be that. The Wall Street Journal has written before that the FJC‘s manual had a thoroughly biased chapter on so-called climate science, and that when that chapter was exposed for the disinformation section that it was, the FJC removed the chapter.

But wait—there’s more.

In the climate science chapter, footnote 77 says “discussion of attribution research has been adapted, and, in some cases, excerpted from the authors’ prior publications on this topic.” A review by American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Roger Pielke Jr noticed that one of those earlier publications was co-authored with a third person who wasn’t named as an author in the climate chapter.
Mr Pielke says the mystery author is Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center [of which the late chapter’s lead author is a Senior Fellow]. But here’s the shocker. He is also of counsel at Sher Edling, a plaintiff firm pushing climate-related lawsuits. The firm has promoted dubious legal theories, suing fossil-fuel companies for failure to warn about climate effects and public nuisance over the “cost of weather induced events.”

As nakedly biased as this chapter was, and which the FJC removed only when exposed, and whose authors defended the bias of their chapter with no correction of that disinformation, the obvious question becomes: what other nakedly biased “educational information” is included elsewhere in its manual that hasn’t been discovered yet?

The FJC, by rendering itself unreliable, has made itself irrelevant. Judges and Justices need to rely on their native intelligence and on better—or at least more and more varied—advisors.

Most of all, judges and Justices need to limit themselves to the evidence, scientific or otherwise, actually presented at trial. Outside sources of information are irrelevant and should be disregarded, even when disguised as “information” by sources like the FJC manual.