Tag Archives: courts

Fatuous

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The Supreme Court has ruled that the White House’s East Wing conversion into a ballroom and an uprated secure facility can proceed. The majority (a 5-4 decision) said, in part, that the single individual the plaintiffs had trotted out, a woman whose aesthetic sense was being offended because she heavily favored the original architecture of the White House over the new architecture created by the East Wing conversion, was insufficient to stop the conversion.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing in dissent, disagreed with that. He wrote, regarding this aspect of the matter, that

one of the group’s [National Trust for Historic Preservation, the main plaintiff] members is “deeply committed” to the preservation of historic American buildings.
“The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” he wrote.
Preservationists can be “aesthetically injured” in a way that gives them standing to sue, just as environmentalists can have standing to sue over the destruction of wildlife, Roberts wrote….

Aesthetics—personal taste—can be a source of material injury? Really?

I have questions, then.

Personal taste can be used to stop projects? What about the personal tastes of those who favor the project? What about the personal tastes of those whose aesthetic sense leads them to not care about the progress? On what basis does Roberts determine the minority should reign over the majority?

Roberts’ position is so fatuous it’s hard to believe he gave any thought at all to the matter.

“Serious Legal Error”

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That’s what Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson claims the Supreme Court made when it lifted an injunction against President Donald Trump’s (R) Executive Order requiring, among other things, HHS to collect States’ voter registration rolls and the Post Office to work out procedures for not delivering mailed ballots to recipients who are not on those rolls. Her beef is that

the ruling could create election chaos and leave states trapped between filing legal challenges too early or too late.

And

“The Court does a disservice to all concerned by distorting Article III standing and ripeness principles to issue a ruling that contributes to pre-election chaos instead of quashing it,” she wrote.

This is fatuous. If there is any uncertainty associated with drawing too close to Election Day, it’s not from Supreme Court, or any lesser court, ruling, it’s from the steady drumbeat of quibbling lawsuits from Leftists who want the ineligible to vote and from others pushing unserious boundary and corner cases just to see what trouble they can cause.

The majority dealt with that, whether they realized it or not by ruling the suit in the present case out of bounds because they’d suffered no injury because no procedure had yet been set up that caused or would cause injury.

Jackson wasn’t done.

Jackson said the decision “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

We’re supposed to believe that a lawyer so highly trained and so talented that she became a Supreme Court Justice is unable to work her way through a couple of clearcut rulings. This from a Supreme Court Justice who’s already confessed she’s not capable of saying what a woman is.

But she still wasn’t done.

“When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize,” Jackson wrote….

Here she is, claiming to be able to read minds.

Good grief.

Go to Trial

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In the “legal” battle between Larry Ellison’s Paramount on the one hand and California, et al,, on the other over whether Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Brothers amounts to an anticompetitive monopoly, as California AG Rob Bonta claims, Ellison is pushing for a 4 November trial start date while Bonta and his fellow attorneys general in this case are holding out for a 5 April of next year start date.

Consider, though: Paramount, as part of the acquisition deal, agreed to pay Warner Brothers $650 million per quarter for every quarter the deal stays unclosed after 7 September this year, and a final payment of $7 billion, if the deal collapses or remains unclosed by June of next year. That’s what put the quote marks around the legal part just above.

If the defendant is ready to go to trial in early November, then that’s when the trial should start. That the defendant shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury is explicit in our Constitution for criminal cases, but the principle holds just as firmly in civil cases. California, et al., don’t get to delay the trial at government’s convenience.

Aside from that, they were ready to go to trial, tautologically, when they filed their suit. Delaying five months is nothing but an unethical effort to delay, delay, delay for the sole purpose of running up the costs to the defendant—hoping, perhaps to spend the defendant into giving up—for its impertinence in insisting on defending itself.

One More Thought on our Second Amendment

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The thought coalesced, finally, on reading a post over at Grim’s Hall, a blog I strongly recommend on GPs.

A problem I’ve had with Bruen from the start, hanging its hat on historical tradition as it does, is that the opinion, thereby, accepts as constitutionally legitimate any weapon regulation, so long as it’s been historically long-standing.

The Second Amendment carries no such caveat or exception, though. Its bar on the government is universal and unequivocal: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. The first attempt to regulate that right should have been ruled unconstitutional. It’s not too late today.

…7th Circuit recently upheld Illinois’ ban, noting that the ubiquitous firearm from 1791 through the mid-19th century was a single-shot muzzleloader. AR-15s with large-capacity magazines, the majority said, are “a far cry from these antecedents.”

This seems to me a patently erroneous argument by the Sages of the Seventh Circuit. The Founders, along with, especially, those members of the first Congress who wrote the Second Amendment, along with the People who ratified it, were no strangers to innovation and to technological advancement. Yet no one in any of the courts that I’ve seen have addressed the premise that with that broad awareness, and against the backdrop of so many of the Continental Army’s and Navy’s large weapons systems employed in the just-concluded Revolutionary War were privately owned, the Amendment was written to be technologically agnostic.

That backdrop, those large weapon systems being privately owned, strikes me as the only valid historical tradition.

Denying Visas

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When a person, whether private or a government official, applies for a visa to come into the United States, the fact of his application clearly means he has not entered our nation; he’s still outside of it.

That brings up Chief Judge (DC District) James Boasberg’s ruling regarding the administration’s denial of visas to foreign officials and other foreign nationals considered responsible for or complicit in suppressing American free speech.

Boasberg ruled that the administration’s reason constituted viewpoint discrimination and so was a First Amendment violation of the applicants’ free speech rights. He dressed up his opinion with this:

The policy [to deny visas to those considered responsible for or complicit in suppressing American free speech], at its core, does not burden all speech about platforms, all research into content moderation, or all advocacy about online harms. It presses its enforcement thumb against one side of the scale: the view that platforms should do more to moderate content, label disinformation, restrict abuse, share data with researchers, or take responsibility for the harms their systems amplify.

The problem with Boasberg’s position is that those folks, being outside our nation, have no US constitutional (or any statutory) rights whatsoever. His argument is, thus, nothing more than a cynically offered non sequitur.

Boasberg’s rationalization is all too typical of the hysterically anti-Trump bias in his rulings.