Courts and (Public) Opinion

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In a letter in Thursday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal, Walter Smith claims to have argu[ed] several cases personally before the Supreme Court (“claims,” because unlike many Letter writers, his signature block makes no mention of his status as a lawyer, past or present), and he expressed considerable dismay over the basis of Court decisions and subsequent Court “legitimacy.”

The court’s majority has made clear that it doesn’t care about public opinion or many of the harmful consequences of its decisions.

I have to wonder how many cases Smith won before the Supreme Court, with such a breathtaking lack of understanding of the Supreme Court’s—of any American court’s—role, an understanding any first year law student gains.

The Court’s role is not to wave to and fro with the winds of public opinion, but to rule on what the Constitution and the statute(s) before the Court say.

Full stop.

That’s why judges and Justices have lifetime appointments—deliberately to insulate them from public opinion, and from politics altogether.

But Smith wasn’t done.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Indeed. But that was Politician Lincoln, not Judge Lincoln. If Smith doesn’t like the Court’s rulings, his beef is with the political branches of our republican government, the men and women of which wrote the laws the Court must apply.

I suggest he begin his remedial training on the American legal system by writing our Constitution’s Article I, Section 1, 100 times on his blackboard.

Revisionist History

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Karl Rove, in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, identified a number of Progressive-Democratic Party candidates running for office in the current mid-terms who deny their own words in the nearby past.

Those politicians are Robert Francis O’Rourke, who denies his words favoring defunding—even dismantling—police and police departments; John Fetterman, who calls reminders that he said we could reduce our prison population by a third and not make anyone less safe just lies; Mandela Barnes, who called critiques of his wanting to defund the police just lies; and Raphael Warnock, who called criticisms of his Ebenezer Baptist Church’s attempts to evict tenants who were late on their rent payments due to the straits the Wuhan Virus situation put them into—you guessed it—just lies.

Fetterman’s “memory failure” could well be an outcome of his stroke, which makes his medical fitness for office highly questionable.

O’Rourke, Barnes, and Warnock do not have that excuse. They’re just lying, and with their lies, they’re insulting the intelligence of us average Americans. And by that are unfit for office.

Apologies

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Elliot Kaufman had an op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that talked about the utility of apologies from Stanford University and the various failures of that school in its serial mistreatment of Jews along with the several machinations the school used to push that mistreatment.

I’m less interested in apologies from schools like Stanford than I am in changes in the schools’ behavior.

Such changes, though, won’t be possible without a complete turnover in school management, from the President/Chancellor/what-have-you on down through middle management, along with removal/replacement of Department Chairs and their seconds, and elimination of frivolous departments like the plethora of DEI and related claptrap.

Absent that—all of that—words of apology will only be, can only be, empty chit-chat and cynical distraction from the problem.

Why We Can’t Trust the CDC

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s primary advisory panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has voted unanimously to recommend routine Wuhan Virus (my term) vaccinations for children via the Vaccines for Children program, which pays for ACIP-recommended vaccines for children in low-income families. This likely will lead to green-lighting schools—especially teachers union-controlled schools—to require the vaccinations as a condition of enrolling.

It doesn’t matter that the vaccines aren’t FDA-approved for children under 12.

It doesn’t matter that children well into junior high age aren’t at risk from the virus beyond—perhaps—getting mildly ill and recovering in a day or two.

It doesn’t matter that the risk from the virus is extremely tiny for any healthy person up through adulthood and into old age.

Here are some hard numbers illustrating the degree of “risk” from the virus, based on work by John Ioannidis, who has routinely studied Wuhan Virus infection fatality rates (IFR) since early in the pandemic:

…median IFRs of 0.0003% for 0-19 years, 0.003% for 20-29 and 0.011% for 30-39, according to the preprint, which has not been peer-reviewed.
The IFR jumps substantially between ages 50-59 (0.129%) and 60-69 (0.501%).

Even that “substantial jump” is from a risk of nearly zero to a level still right next door to zero.

But the CDC takes seriously an advisory panel that insists on vaccination because…”we say so.”

The CDC could walk well down the path back toward trustworthiness if it rejects the ACIP’s recommendation and then gets rid of the ACIP altogether.

Voter Suppression

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Early voting is under way, and Georgia’s Jim Crow 2.0 Law® is in full swing.

Georgia has seen 539,297 people cast ballots as of Tuesday, far outpacing the 182,684 by this point in the 2018 midterm primary elections, according to data compiled by Georgia Votes.
The numbers have even outpaced those posted during the 2020 presidential election by 156%….

Tuesday was Day Two for those Leftists and Progressive-Democratic Party members keeping score at home.

These numbers are for a mid-term election, which typically has a much lower voter turnout than during a Presidential election year.

But wait….

The first day of early voting in Georgia set a new midterm turnout record, with nearly 123,000 in-person voters casting their ballots.

That’s how much voters are being suppressed; that’s how hard it is for them even to get to a voting booth—they’re voting in person in record numbers.

This is voter suppression in the minds of those Wonders who style themselves so much smarter and…better…than us average Americans.

Go figure.