Category Archives: politics

Future Nominations for Judgeships

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A denizen of flyover country—Jan Graham of Nebraska, in fact—had a thought in her Letter to the Editor of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal:

Every one of those Harvard and Yale law students protesting Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment should have their names written down and kept in case they want to be a judge someday. At that point their college-age record can be used to show that they don’t believe in due process and shouldn’t ever be considered for the bench.

Nor can they be considered, legitimately, for any prosecutorial office, Federal, State, or count/parish.

Full stop.

The ABA and Judicial Ratings

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Judge, now Justice, Brett Kavanaugh is on the Supreme Court and hearing cases.  The American Bar association is still looking for relevance here.  The ABA, after first giving Kavanaugh glowing marks as a judge wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee that it was “reopening” its evaluation—timing its letter for 5 Oct, just before the Senate’s floor vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

The ABA was ignored when Kavanaugh, et al., were being evaluated for a Supreme Court nomination and again when Kavanaugh was nominated. That prior ABA endorsement was simply the association’s jumping on the band wagon.

Now its irrelevance is manifest, and the ABA is squalling and trying to get back in the game.  That’s all this is.  That’s all that lately letter was all about.

Now the chairman of the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, Paul Moxley, is claiming he’s being bullied by Association President Robert Carlson, and that lately letter was an example.

[I]f he’s [Paul Moxley] being bullied by Mr Carlson or Democrats on his committee, he ought to resign and say so publicly.

That’s what the worthies on the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal claim.

No. Bullies only have the power their putative victims choose to give them. If Moxley thinks “Carlson or Democrats” are trying to bully him, he should have the integrity to stay put and call them out publicly.

In the meantime, the ABA needs to figure out what it means when it says something, and stick to it.  That’s the road back to relevance.

Mao Lives

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The People’s Republic of China, the home of rule by law (not rule of law), has retroactively legalized its “internment” camps, which the government is using to jail reeducate recalcitrant Muslims in its western province of Xinjiang.

Chinese authorities in the far-northwestern region of Xinjiang on Wednesday revised legislation to permit the use of “education and training centers” to combat religious extremism.

So far—so far, mind you—a million Muslims are…housed…in those camps.

The camps are strongly reminiscent of those of President Xi Jinping’s early predecessor, Mao Tse-tung.  Mao sent 16-18 million children and millions more adults to his “reeducation” camps.

Xi is off to a good start.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

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The tentacles reach far—even into the origin of Western concepts of individual liberty.  A British court has ordered

the wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker to explain how she and her husband could afford their multimillion-pound London mansion or face having it seized.

Government does not have to prove the illegal origin of the money.  No, the holder of the money must prove her innocence.  Here is the outcome of the British government’s legislation ostensibly aimed at allegedly dirty money held by people with political connections or suspected of serious crime.

Think about that: someone with the wrong political connections in the eyes of someone in government, or someone whom somebody in government decides is behaving suspiciously, now must prove his lack of guilt.

Money laundering might seem a perfectly fine excuse for invading individual liberty in this way: truly laundered money does indeed have origins that are inimical to safety.

But so are individual liberties critical to the safety of each of us.  What is the government’s limiting principle here?  Where does the tradeoff between security and liberty naturally end?

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept that must protect even the unsavory, or apparently unsavory, among us because that protection is critical to our own safety.

Exxon’s Carbon Tax

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Exxon Mobil Corp is throwing $1 million at the move to produce a national carbon tax.

Exxon’s move is an attempt to manage what it sees as the risk of a similar movement in the US, in ways that it hopes will simplify requirements on its industry….
Exxon sees a carbon tax as an alternative to patchwork regulations, putting one cost on all carbon emitters nationwide, eliminating regulatory uncertainty….

On the contrary, Exxon is looking for short-term competitive political advantage at the expense of long-term economic—real—advantage.  That’s unfortunate.

It’s also unfortunate because, leaving aside the question of whether a carbon tax even would work as claimed, the scheme is based on the false premise that increasing atmospheric CO2 somehow is bad.  Atmospheric CO2 is, in fact, critical—as in can’t live without it—plant food.  In addition to that small fact, ice core samples from both ends of the earth—Greenland and Antarctica—reaching back 400,000 years indicate that rising atmospheric CO2, far from being a harbinger of bad warming to come, lags planetary warming by several hundred years.  The rise confirms that a cold planet is warming out of its Ice Age, and life is recovering and exhaling increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.