No Law

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…but merely convenience. Australia’s immigration ministry makes Australia a nation ruled by men and not by law.

Immigration Minister Alex Hawke made clear in court documents concerning his second revocation of Novak Djokovic’s entry visa that the law counts for nothing.

Hawke didn’t dispute Djokovic’s claim of a medical exemption from rules that travelers to Australia must be vaccinated against Covid-19…. Hawke, who canceled Djokovic’s visa on Friday, said allowing the player to stay could sway some Australians against getting vaccinated.

Additionally,

Hawke didn’t refute Djokovic’s contention that he posed a negligible health risk, documents showed.

In his separate visa cancelation notice, though, Hawke said,

His [Djokovic’s] presence in Australia, given his well-known stance on vaccination, creates a risk of strengthening the antivaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community[.]

Because government convenience is all that matters.

Australia isn’t the US, and Aussies can accept the style of governance they choose—or that gets imposed on them by the men and women in their government. That, though, does not make their decision to be ruled by men—a very hard choice to reverse—rather than by law any less foolish.

UPDATE: Australia’s federal court upheld Hawke’s order to revoke Djokovic’s visa and ordered the tennis star deported. The court’s reasoning was this:

Chief Justice James Allsop said the decision came down to whether Immigration Minister Ethan Hawke’s decision was “irrational or legally unreasonable.”
“It is no part of the function of the court to decide upon the merits or wisdom of the [government’s] decision,” Allsop explained.

That’s appropriate, as far as it goes. Court judges should rule on the legality of the matter, not interpose their own views of societal needs or their own feelz.

It doesn’t, though, detract from Hawke’s decision to act on his feelz and his views of government convenience being more important than law.

What Does Putin Want?

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It’s not as complicated as some…pundits…want us to believe. One such, James Marson in his Wednesday Wall Street Journal piece, offered the following claim from a Vladimir Putin spokesman. Marson didn’t question it; he simply commented on other politicians’ responses to the claim as though it were accurate.

A Kremlin spokesman said President Vladimir Putin wasn’t presenting ultimatums, but was worried about threats to Russia’s security.

This is a truckload of bravo sierra. Putin knows full well that no one in the West is interested in threatening Russian security, no one in the West is interested in invading Russia. Putin knows full well that Russia has absolutely nothing at all of value to the West that isn’t gotten far more cheaply—and mutually beneficially—through free and honest trade.

Putin wants Ukraine. He wants Georgia and the Baltics and, later, Poland. He’s even cynically trotted out his effort to redress his mythical 20th century tragedy as his rationale for his empire-building.

It’s also entirely possible that Xi is egging Putin on, since a Putin seizure of Ukraine would give the Republic of China to Xi.

More Chit-Chat

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Cynically done chit-chat, too.

Biden-Harris says he’s going to distribute bunches more Wuhan Virus test kits to schools to keep them open.

The Biden administration plans to distribute millions of free Covid-19 tests to schools around the country, part of the federal government’s effort to keep schools open amid a surge in coronavirus cases caused by the Omicron variant.
Later this month, the administration will begin shipping five million rapid Covid-19 tests to K-12 schools each month, White House officials said.

That’s in contrast to this:

The rapid tests for schools are in addition to the 500 million rapid tests the administration plans to begin distributing to the public for free in the coming weeks, a White House official said. The administration has faced criticism for testing shortages around the country that led to long lines and empty shelves at the start of the Omicron surge.

Which raises the question: where’s he going to get the tests, since he’s already unable to supply his previously promised tests? And that failure comes months after his decision to reject an industry offer to produce 700,000+ tests per month ‘way last October.

Or: are supposed to let the teachers unions keep our kids’ public schools closed for those months before Biden-Harris’ administration gets around to getting the tests and moseying them out to the schools?

Another question: how about the folks who might actually benefit from access to regular—and frequent, since each test is just a snapshot of the individual getting it, an individual who might get infected the next day, the next hour after the test—testing: folks in retirement and nursing facilities, health care workers, folks with comorbidities?

Promises, promises.

Gerard Baker Misunderstands

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Gerard Baker asked a serious question early on in his Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed. Unfortunately, despite the cogency of the rest of his piece, his opening remarks are badly wide of any serious mark. He posited

What if she and the administration she works for actually believe their own narrative that they are engaged in an existential, twilight struggle against the forces of darkness among us.

With this, Baker demonstrates two enormous, and mutually independent, misunderstandings in the same sentence.

The one is that there is no question that Harris and the rest of the Biden-Harris administration believe this. Their actions, their constant attacks on the fabric of our nation, many of which are delineated in Baker’s piece, demonstrate this.

The other is that Kamala Harris does not work for “the administration;” she works for We the People. The administration is merely the mechanism through which we employ her.

Update: Even had to correct the title. Jeez….

Clyburn Misleads

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Congressman Jim Clyburn (D, SC), in an interview on Fox News Sunday, made the below claim in defense of his Progressive-Democratic Party’s Freedom to Vote Act and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together are intended to take the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives of Federal elections away from the States and to entirely Federalize those election procedures. In citing Alexander Hamilton’s (as alleged by Clyburn) statements that elections “cannot” and “should not be left up to the states,” he made this claim:

That’s why the voting rights act was necessary and that’s why the fifth amendment to the constitution, why the 18th amendment to the constitution are necessary—all because it had to go beyond the states to determine.

It’s impossible to determine what “amendments” Clyburn was referencing here: the 5th Amendment is concerned with trials, punishments, and takings; it has nothing to do with voting or elections. The 18th Amendment was the Prohibition Amendment attempting to outlaw liquor; it, also, has nothing to do with voting or elections, and it was rescinded a few years later with the 21st Amendment.

It’s clear, though, that Clyburn, far from misspeaking on the Amendments, was badly misinterpreting Hamilton’s views on elections to Federal office and the relationship between the States and the Federal government regarding those elections.

This is what Hamilton wrote in his Federalist No. 59 essay [emphasis added]:

[I]t will therefore not be denied, that a discretionary power over elections ought to exist somewhere. It will, I presume, be as readily conceded, that there were only three ways in which this power could have been reasonably modified and disposed: that it must either have been lodged wholly in the national legislature, or wholly in the State legislatures, or primarily in the latter and ultimately in the former. The last mode has, with reason, been preferred by the convention. They have submitted the regulation of elections for the federal government, in the first instance, to the local administrations; which, in ordinary cases, and when no improper views prevail, may be both more convenient and more satisfactory; but they have reserved to the national authority a right to interpose, whenever extraordinary circumstances might render that interposition necessary to its safety.

He introduced that discussion with this, in his lede [emphasis added]:

The natural order of the subject leads us to consider, in this place, that provision of the Constitution which authorizes the national legislature to regulate, in the last resort, the election of its own members.

The States, according to Hamilton, are to set their own rules for how their own representatives and those of their citizens in the Federal government will be elected, and the Federal government is to act in the last resort and only under extraordinary circumstances, most assuredly not in the first, or even merely default, resort. Clyburn’s touted bills would go beyond that, and make the Federal government the only serious determiner of how each State will determine its representation.

The Federal government, according to the Progressive-Democrats, will tell us citizens who it will permit to speak for us to it. We average Americans, after all, are, in the words of Herbert Croly, one of the modern Progressive movement’s founders,

morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conception of [our] responsibilities as a democrat.