Category Archives: rights

An Expansionist Germany

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Not military expansion, but a more insidious one: legal expansion.

The German government must come up with a new law regulating its secret services, after the country’s highest court [Federal Constitutional Court] ruled that the current practice of monitoring telecommunications of foreign citizens at will violates constitutionally-enshrined press freedoms and the privacy of communications.

And:

The key legal question was whether foreign nationals in other countries were covered by Germany’s constitution….

Why, yes, yes they are. Because German sovereignty reaches deep inside other nations’ borders, other nations’ legal and political jurisdictions, overrides those nations’ own sovereignty. Germany’s laws not only apply outside German borders, they apply inside other nations’ borders.

The Court’s judges’ hearts may have been in the right place, but this sets an ugly precedent regarding the allegedly inherent superiority of German sovereignty.

Time for a New Plan

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That’s what Dr Marty Makary, Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, says.  Broad lockdowns might have been justified at the outset of the present Wuhan Virus situation, but new information has arisen.

Since that time, we have data that has taught us that this infection is associated with public transit, with density, with mass gatherings, with city-to-city travel and it is associated with climate[.]

And

What we do know, [is that] there are safe ways to conduct activities in society if we use certain precautions and we probably need a targeted approach where we find areas where there is either an outbreak or an ongoing increase in cases, and use some of the more aggressive strategies in that particular location.

A man once said, When the facts change, I change my mind—what do you do, sir?

Some State governors, when the facts change, reemphasize their original positions, denying that change has occurred.

Finally, Some Recognition

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…of the role of Federal laws in State activities. Recall that two New Jersey officials of then-Governor Chris Christie’s (R) administration were convicted in Federal court for

hav[ing] participated in a 2013 scheme to create traffic backups in Fort Lee, NJ, by limiting motorists’ access to the George Washington Bridge that crosses into New York—in retaliation against Fort Lee’s Democratic mayor, Mark Sokolich, for not supporting the re-election bid of Mr Christie, a Republican.

The Supreme Court, unanimously, tossed those convictions. The unanimity of the throwing out is made the more noteworthy by this money quote, by none other than Justice Elena Kagan, who wroteg for the Court:

not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime.

Think about that for a bit.

It’s a Start

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But it can’t possibly be the final answer; it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has issued the final rule regarding college/university sexual harassment complaints and how colleges/universities must handle them. Along the way, DeVos revoked with finality the Obama DoEd rule that eliminated the rights of the accused.

It allows both the accused and accuser to submit evidence and participate in cross-examination in live proceedings, and both parties can also appeal a school’s ruling. Victims-rights advocates say the provision for cross-examinations could traumatize those alleging misconduct and potentially keep them from filing complaints at all.
It also allows institutions to choose one of two standards of evidence—”clear and convincing,” or the lower “preponderance of the evidence,” which just requires a greater than 50% likelihood of wrongdoing—as long as they apply the standard evenly for all cases

The victim’s rights advocates objections can be dismissed out of hand—they’ve never been interested in due process or the rights of the accused.

However.

There should be no ability for the accuser to keep appealing until she gets the ruling she wants. A ruling that the boy didn’t do what he was accused of doing should be final.

Too, there should be no choice in the standards of evidence. The accused too often is being charged with a crime or a near crime. The only legitimate standard of evidence should be clear and convincing, and any…guilty verdict…should be required to be arrived at “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Furthermore, there needs to be a better limit on the cases a college/university is permitted to investigate. An outside, unaffiliated party should determine whether the misbehavior being alleged would be a crime. If the determination is that a crime is being alleged, then the matter should be turned over to the police—not the campus police, but the local police or sheriff’s department—for investigation. If appropriate, the case then should be turned over to the local prosecutor. Colleges/universities are not qualified to investigate allegations of crimes.

This rule is far better than the travesty that Obama and his Education Department inflicted on our students. That was a very low bar, though.

A First Amendment Case

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Oral argument on a 1st Amendment case was heard by the Supreme Court last Wednesday. The case centers on

whether or not a 1991 law that protects people from receiving unwarranted telemarketer calls is a violation of the First Amendment when applied to political organizations.

This strikes me as a no-brainer that never should have gotten out of any District court. The 1st Amendment bars the abridgment of political speech in the public square. It does not take away the right of private citizens to decide for themselves what speech they will hear from within their own, private property.

That private property is entered by telephone as surely as it is by the speaker’s physical presence, and those resident on the property have no more obligation to allow the speaker’s telephonic entry than they do the speaker’s physical entry.

Nor does the 1st Amendment create a right of a political speaker—or any other speaker, or any person in any guise—to use another person’s private property to speak, nor does it create an obligation of the property owner to allow that use.  This applies to land lines terminating in a home or private business, and it applies to a wireless telephone, or a cell phone, or any other communications device wherever its owner might happen to be at the time of the political speech effort.

The Supreme Court should so rule, and it shouldn’t take long or very many pages at all to convey the ruling.