Category Archives: rights

Criminalizing Speech

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That’s what a Progressive-Democrat President Elizabeth Warren would try to do.

She would also lead a charge to criminalize the mere spreading of false information about the process of voting in US elections.
“I will push for new laws that impose tough civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating this kind of information, which has the explicit purpose of undermining the basic right to vote[.]

She masquerades her initial move as a criminalization of false claims concerning when and how to vote, but she ignores the fact that it’s already illegal to interfere with an election; there’s no need for additional laws.  She also declined, as Progressive-Democrats do regarding all efforts to regulate, to identify her limiting principle.

This is just an opening move to a broader speech censorship effort by the Left.

The…foolishness…of such an effort is illustrated by commentary concerning her plan. Senator Rand Paul (R, KY):

Would this apply to the tall tales you tell and those networks allow @ewarren?

Jeff Blehar of the National Review:

Elizabeth Warren is an American Indian. Go ahead Liz, charge me.

No, this is yet another example of the utter contempt in which Progressive-Democrats hold us deplorable average Americans. We’re just too stupid to do our own sorting of accurate speech from inaccurate speech from deliberately inaccurate speech. Our Betters must do this for us.

It’s also a very short step from there to criminalizing all speech of which this or that party disapproves, and from there it’s an even shorter step to criminalizing all speech of which this or that person in power disapproves.

Green Card Residency

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The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote (I’m tempted to say “party line vote,” but CJ Roberts might demur were he not otherwise occupied at the moment), lifted a district court’s stay blocking implementation of the Trump administration’s public charge immigration rule. The rule blocks permanent residency and allows for denial of entry visas in the first place for those in our nation or entering it if they are considered likely to rely on our welfare programs. The stay removal allows the rule to be enforced while the underlying case wends its way through the courts.

Europe, exemplified by Deutsche Welle, is dismayed (even as many of the EU’s members demur from accepting immigrants making their passage from northern Africa).  It’s a harsher immigration law.  It significantly expands the criteria for denying legal residency. It disproportionately put[s] permanent residency out of reach for low-income applicants from developing countries.

The stay-issuing district judge, George Daniels, is in a high dudgeon, too. He wrote in his ruling that the rule was repugnant to the American Dream, and was a policy of exclusion in search of justification.

Last things first. The district judge was—and is—completely out of line in his ruling. His task, his duty as an American judge, is to find the law underlying the rule, or the rule itself, unconstitutional or, failing that, to apply the underlying law and the rule as they are written. Full stop.

Our Constitution and the judge’s oath of office, which enjoins him to uphold our Constitution, bar him from implementing his personal opinion or his personal view of what’s good or bad for our society.

Regarding the alleged disproportional impact on the poor or on third-world applicants, that may or may not be true. However, as is the case with all nations, those entering ours are expected to be beneficial to our nation, not drains on it.

On the beef that the rule makes it harder for an entrant to gain legal residency, that’s the point of borders. No one has an inherent right to come into another nation without that nation’s prior permission. No nation has an inherent obligation to grant that permission. Entry requirements and entrants are solely at the discretion of that nation.

Nor have we any obligation to extend the benefits of our already overstretched (and too inefficiently run) welfare programs to noncitizens. Such an extended overstretch can only work to the detriment of our citizens.

“The ‘Corrupt Purposes’ Impeachment”

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The Wall Street Journal offered some thoughts along these lines re the current impeachment trial.

Especially pernicious is the new House “corrupt purposes” standard for removing a President from office.

“Corrupt Purposes,” though, isn’t the only failure of this so-called impeachment that’s being tried in the Senate.  Just as pernicious, certainly far more dangerous, is Progressive-Democrats’ repeated (including Wednesday afternoon by Jerry Nadler in his presentation before the Senate) demand that Trump produce documents, witnesses to prove his innocence.

This attacks the very core of American jurisprudence; it sets every American, not just a Party-hated President, at direct, personal risk.

It’s dismaying that the NLMSM, not the WSJ alone, wholly ignores this unAmerican attack on one of our foundational principles.

More Censorship in the Offing

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Amazon and YouTube are two companies peddling streamed videos, and they’re looking at “filtering” certain content.

An (unidentified) Amazon spokeswoman says

We continuously review and monitor titles to ensure that they are in accordance with our policies and guidelines. If content is identified as not meeting those standards, it is immediately removed.

YouTube, also:

[A] self-avowed creature of user-generated video, also has faced the challenge of policing objectionable content on its site.

Policing objectionable content.

Indeed.

It’s the same “challenge” faced by all sites, not only Amazon or YouTube, though, and it’s rank censorship.  Whose definition of “objectionable,” what “policing” techniques are used—with whose consent? Not the user, not a citizen.  This is a challenge best ignored altogether.

The Wall Street Journal, at the link above, also asked a question:

What steps, if any, should Amazon take to help viewers differentiate between professional and amateur content in its video library?

I’ll extend the question to include “objectionable” content, and the answer is plain: the same steps any site should take, and they’re similar to those taken since movies were invented: ID the producer(s), director(s), and leading actors, and if those names are unavailable, note that, too.

Viewers are fully capable of taking this information and determining for themselves what programming is legitimate or unobjectionable. It is, after all, their criteria of “legitimate” and of “objectionable” that matters, and these criteria are unique to each person.

In the end, it is, or should be, the viewer’s choice of what to watch, not the censors’.

Some Thoughts on Impeachment and Trial

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Some thoughts. Alan Dershowitz has some, and so do I. His last is irrelevant to the present context; I’ve included it solely for completeness’ sake. The core of the present context is in his (3 of 3) tweet.

(1 of 3) To the extent there are inconsistencies between my current position and what I said 22 years ago, I am correct today. During the Clinton impeachment, the issue was not whether a technical crime was required, because he was charged with perjury.
(2 of 3) Therefore, I didn’t research the issue; I relied on the academic consensus that a crime was not required. In Trump impeachment, on the other hand, that is the critical issue, because abuse of power and obstruction of congress are neither crimes nor criminal-like behavior.
(3 of 3) So I have now thoroughly researched the issue and concluded that although a technical crime with all the elements may not be required, criminal-like behavior akin to treason and bribery is required.
(3 of 3 cont) To the extent therefore that my 1998 off-the-cuff interview statement suggested the opposite, I retract it. Scholars learn to adapt and even change old views as they do more research.

I disagree concerning whether criminal-like behavior is sufficient; behavior must actually be criminal to justify, legally as opposed to politically, impeachment and removal from office.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

That’s a clear statement of the requirement for overt criminal behavior in order to justify the Article I, Sections 2 and 3 impeachment and trial procedure.

And yet, the President (or Vice President or any civil Officers) cannot be criminally convicted of anything. The impeachment/trial procedure under our Constitution is, explicitly, not a criminal proceeding:

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification….

Guilt and acquittal simply are meaningless concepts here.

This goes further to a central point of the matter that keeps getting missed by the Republicans: Progressive-Democrats and their NLMSM keep bleating about adding witnesses, evidence, etc throughout the course of the Senate’s trial “like any other trial,” and “what kind of a trial is it without witnesses?” They keep conflating the Senate’s portion of the impeachment/trial procedure with an Article III court (or State court) trial.

In fact, the two have nothing to do with each other. The impeachment/trial procedure requires a crime in order to remove a President from office, but to convict him of that crime, he has to be haled into an Article III court for a separate, actually criminal, trial.

“Criminal-like” isn’t enough: looking, quacking, walking like a duck is insufficient here.

On the other hand, from a purely political, raw power perspective, Gerald Ford was right, and criminality becomes irrelevant: impeachable (and subsequent removal from office) is whatever Congress says it is. Which goes to the center of us being governed by less than angels. Those who have the power to make our laws also have the power to ignore their own lawlessness.

(Another central point that keeps getting missed is the Progressive-Democrats’ constant demand that the President provide his own evidence to prove his innocence. The Republican legal team and Republicans generally, keep not disputing that unAmerican contention. Kellyanne Conway finally started approaching this, tangentially, in a Monday night interview.)