No Question Here

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Federal District Judge Loren AliKhan is the presiding judge in Soffer v George Washington University, a case centered on allegations that antisemitic activity is rampant on the GWU campus. While serving in that capacity, the GWU Law School hired the judge as an adjunct professor.

The overlap has prompted questions about a potential conflict of interest, given federal rules requiring judges to avoid cases in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. AliKhan did not immediately step aside but issued a 10-day stay in late March to consider whether recusal is warranted. Since the April 20 status conference, no final decision has been publicly announced.

??

How is this even a question? Those Federal rules don’t just bar judges’ conflicts of interest, nor is this merely a matter of questions of impartiality. Those rules bar judges from actions that create even the appearance of a conflict of interest, a requirement that, if honored by judges, preempts any questions of impartiality.

It’s more than that, though. While AliKhan was presiding, she should never have even considered the GWU offer of employment, or she should have resigned from the bench altogether: teaching in a law school hews too close to the ethical line and creates that barred appearance of conflict.

That she hasn’t even deigned recuse herself yet (as I write on Sunday) is instructive of her level of ethics. Given that lack, GWU’s Law School should reconsider its hiring of her, and if the Law School can’t figure it out, GWU should act in its subordinate Law School’s stead. Either of those entiities’ decision to do nothing would be instructive, also.

“No New Negotiations”

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That’s the position of Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian, at least until the US lifts its blockade of Iran’s ports and of shipping going to and from Iran.

I’m down with that. The blockade has finally achieved something that years of sanctions have failed to obtain: a serious stranglehold on the money flowing into Iran, which it uses in its nuclear weapons development programs [sic] and to fund its terrorist satraps.

Even this serious grip, though, will take time to produce results, particularly among a collection of despots who believe that they have lost nothing since they have not lost their lives. The US should push the pace. Let the bomb deliveries resume and dismantle the despots’ war-making infrastructure. Destroy Iran’s ports, cut the pipelines to Kharg Island and to Bandar Abbas. Cut the pipelines running from Iran’s oil wells and running to and from Iran’s refineries. Resume the attacks against the now dispersed IRGC leadership. Hunt and destroy Iran’s stored inventory of missiles, drones, and launchers. Destroy Iran’s missile, drone, and launcher production facilities. Hunt and destroy Iran’s (IRGC’s) mosquito boat fleet which it currently uses to attack commercial shipping in the Arabian Gulf.

Keep this up until the despots come to the table with decision-makers and agree the US’ terms. President Donald Trump (R) has acknowledged that the Iran government, having taken casualties already, is fractured and in a power struggle, but this is irrelevant. With the increased pressure and casualties among those in charge or competing to be in charge, the surviving government men will figure out how to stop being fractured and take seriously their fate.

As President Donald Trump (R) said when he called off his envoys’ trip to Pakistan last week, the Iranian despots know how to call him and can do so when they’re ready to be serious. They also can be given safe passage to any meeting point while kinetic operations continue.

Dangerously Naïve Assumption

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Matthew Continetti, in his Free Expression piece, had this early on:

Yet Democrats are looking at the wrong maps. They’re winning the gerrymander battle while losing the larger war for America’s future. Their state machines produce Democratic victories, but from a shrinking base. Their populations are fleeing high taxes and housing shortages for Republican strongholds. Nor are Democrats prepared for 2030, when the decennial census will realign national politics toward the GOP-friendly South.

As Continetti noted,

House Minority Leader Congressman Hakeem Jeffries (D, NY) threatened retaliation and summed up his party’s philosophy: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

But he missed the implications of that, and that miss falsifies his underlying assumption that the Census Bureau count and subsequent House Representatives reallocation will occur in the normal fashion. That’s a dangerous miss, but he’s not alone in making that naïve assumption. No one in the press is thinking about the effect on the Census Bureau of Progressive-Democratic Party victories in the next two elections.

When the Progressive-Democrats gain control of the House and possibly the Senate after the 2026 elections, retain House control and retain or gain the majority in the Senate while winning the White House in the 2028 elections, this is what Party will do. First, it will use its Senate majority, possibly as early as January 2027, to gain outright control of the Senate by eliminating the filibuster altogether. That’ll be bad enough, devolving us from the liberty-preserving republican democracy of our present government structure to the tyranny of popular democracy.

Next, they’ll rescind any requirement for voters to show ID in order to vote, and they’ll lift restrictions on who is allowed to cross our border and under what conditions. To prevent States like Texas from doing their own border enforcement, they’ll pack the Supreme Court in order to get the judicial rulings they want regarding immigration and voting rights.

Finally, they’ll use all of that to cement for generations Party control over the popular democracy they will have created: they’ll alter the rules of counting the Census Bureau is required to use to prevent just that Representative reallocation in order create and preserve their Electoral College advantage.

There’s one more step that will put a big, blue bow on it. Many of the Progressive-Democratic Party-run States are making agreements among themselves to have each State award its Electoral College votes to the Presidential candidate that wins the national-level popular vote. Interstate agreements or compacts are illegal without explicit Congressional approval of each agreement or compact attempted, per our Constitution’s Art I, Sect 10, Clause 3. The Party-run Congress will promptly approve those agreements.

Our nation faces nation-defining elections in 2026 and 2028. The futures of our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren depend on the outcomes of those elections.

Right Answer, Wrong Reason

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In 2023, Texas enacted its Senate Bill 4, which

makes illegal entry into Texas a state crime. It gives Texas law enforcement the authority to return illegal foreign nationals to a port of entry and/or arrest them for unlawful entry, among other provisions.

Governor Greg Abbott (R) justified the law on the basis of the Biden administration’s open borders policy which required Texas to act on its national Constitution Art I, Sect 10 obligation to resist the functional invasion that resulted. Progressive groups promptly sued.

Last Friday, the 5th Circuit upheld that law. That was the correct answer, but the court did it for the wrong reason, so the critical underlying question remains unaddressed.

On Friday, the court issued a 12-page ruling solely on procedural grounds, arguing the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue. It didn’t address the merits of the claims.

This ruling, avoiding as it does the constitutionally important question that was raised by the suit, is badly flawed. That question is this: does a State have the right (much less the obligation) to enforce its own border with another country when it believes the Federal government is not enforcing that same border, and material harm to the State and to its citizens result?

Chief Justice John Mashalll writing for the Court in 1803’s Marbury v Madison, made all judges’ obligations crystalline:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.

To say what the law is, to speak up, not to avoid that duty by deflecting on procedural grounds.

That’s not to say judges should never consider questions of standing or other procedure; that way lies tons of fee-seekers bringing cases without regard to necessary procedure. As the 5th Circuit wrote,

Federal courts have a solemn responsibility to apply neutral principles, such as standing, to the cases that come before them and must resist the temptation to confer Article III standing any time an advocacy group or political subdivision challenges a law it passionately dislikes.

But the province and duty of judges does require them to say what the law is and to act on that saying. Doing so need not automatically confer Article III standing for every case concerning a passionately disliked issue. The Supreme Court has begun applying the Major Questions Doctrine to cases involving the limits of Executive Branch power vs the Legislative Branch’s. The Court needs to apply a similar Major Controversies Doctrine to its decisions regarding whether a case’s core question is more or less important than the specifics of procedure in that case.

The 5th Circuit’s ruling can be read here.

It’s Either a Blockade or It Isn’t

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The US has seized or escorted back to Iranian waters three (so far) Iranian cargo and tanker ships on the high seas after having announced a blockade of all Iran-related shipping, both inbound to Iran and outbound from Iran. Much is being made of those high seas interdictions.

What those making mountains out of these minor swells (yes, I mixed a metaphor. The mix is its own metaphor) choose to ignore is that it’s not a blockade if the first layer, here at the boundary between the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman, can be breached and then the shipping is immune to further interference.

If the nation’s assets can escape, the nation isn’t being blockaded. Any blockade worth its…salt…must include the ships being blockaded, wherever they’re found, not just the nation itself that’s being blockaded.