Tag Archives: courts

Where Were the FISA Court Judges?

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DoJ’s Inspector General is finding yet more, yet more rampant, miscreancies in and done by what used to be our nation’s—the world’s, even—premier law enforcement agency.

DOJ’s new assessment indicated that FISA problems were systemic at the bureau and extended beyond the Page probe. In four of the 29 cases the DOJ inspector general reviewed, the FBI did not have any so-called “Woods files” at all, referring to documentation demonstrating that it had independently corroborated key facts in its surveillance warrant applications. In three of those applications, the FBI couldn’t confirm that Woods documentation ever existed.
The other 25 applications contained an average of 20 assertions not properly supported with Woods materials; one application contained 65 unsupported claims. The review encompassed the work of eight field offices over the past five years in several cases.

The IG went on.

“As a result of our audit work to date and as described below, we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the DOJ IG wrote in a memo today [31 Mar] to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

That’s damning enough, but the problem is much wider than just a failed FBI.  The judges sitting on this Star Chamber FISA court knew those materials needed to be present, yet they approved the warrants in all of those flawed, to the point of dishonesty, warrant applications. Every single one of them.

This is another demonstration that this secret court cannot be fixed; it must be eliminated.

Full stop.

The Threat to our Court System

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…was made plain last week with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D, NY) naked threat against two of our Supreme Court Justices if they don’t start ruling the way Progressive-Democrats dictate.

Schumer’s threat follows threats by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI) and his cronies in the Senate to stack the Supreme Court if that body didn’t start ruling the way Progressive-Democrats dictate.

These follow long-standing “liberal” judges’ and Justices’ utter disregard for our Constitution. Such disregard includes district judges presuming to issue nation-wide injunctions—arrogantly reaching into the jurisdictions of other judges’ districts, other appellate court districts.

It includes Justices like Thurgood Marshall whose mantra was an even more arrogant attitude of ruling wholly independently of the law and then demanding the law catch up

It includes the attitude of current liberal Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who considers our Constitution to be a document that lives through and is alterable by rulings from her judicial bench. She contemptuously ignores the fact that our Constitution actually lives through its Article V and is alterable solely by our Constitution’s owners, We the People.

Keep the power balance of the Senate—which must confirm or reject all judges and Justices—and the party residing in the White House—which originates all judicial nominations—in mind this fall.

(Double) Standards of Protection for Government Officials

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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) threatened two Supreme Court Justices if they didn’t rule his way on a Louisiana law requiring doctors to have hospital admission privileges as a prerequisite to doing abortions. (The case actually has little to do with abortions; it concerns whether third parties—doctors here—can sue on behalf of others, especially when those others have suffered no harm from the matter.)

Schumer stood on the steps the Supreme Court building in front of a noisy protest crowd and, pointing back at the Supreme Court building, said [the quote below starts at about 0:45],

I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.

The lack of “Justice” honorific might seem merely rude on Schumer’s part, but he omitted it to emphasize the directness and seriousness of his threat. The smirk on his face as he took in the crowd’s noisy approval illustrates the matter, too.

Schumer, of course, denied through his spokesman (apparently he didn’t have the courage to speak directly), that he was threatening the Justices, insisting that he was talking political retribution for Republican politicians. The video at the link demonstrates the lie of that. Schumer, in one paragraph of his speech was clearly addressing—facing, pointing at, calling by name—two Justices. It wasn’t until the next paragraph that he addressed—facing his crowd, no pointing, no Republican addressed by name (not even his chiefest opponent, the Senate Majority Leader so instrumental in getting those Justices confirmed)—Republican politicians.

On the floor of the Senate Thursday, Schumer doubled down on his threat. First, he lied about making a threat; his words weren’t intended that way, he claimed. He’s from Brooklyn and Brooklynites speak in strong language, he said—as if being his habit makes it all right. Then he tried to downplay his words by insisting that Republicans are creating the situation with their politics and with their “manufactured outrage” over Schumer’s remarks.

Then Schumer, still on the floor of the Senate at the end of his doubling down, refused even to apologize to the Justices. He just yielded back his time.

The Wall Street Journal, in its op-ed on the matter, mentioned President Donald Trump’s call for Justice recusal in emphasis of the seriousness of Schumer’s escalation of the Left’s political rhetoric:

Mr Trump recently tweeted that liberal Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor should recuse themselves on cases involving his Administration.

It’s much more than this, though.  Trump didn’t threaten Ginsburg and Sotomayor, individually or together, if they didn’t comply. Not tacitly, especially not as nakedly as Schumer threatened Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

The Secret Service gets after folks who threaten Presidents. Don’t Justices—on the same government hierarchical level as Presidents—deserve the same protection? Apparently not, when it’s a Progressive-Democrat who makes the threat.

An Immigration Case and Legislation

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The Supreme Court is heard oral arguments on US v Sineneng-Smith last Tuesday. The case involves the convictions of a woman mail fraud and inducing illegal immigration. The woman billed illegal immigrants $6,800 to file paperwork for an expired pathway to legal residence.  Two of her victims has also testified that, but for the woman’s efforts and billings, they would have left the US otherwise.  That last formed the basis of the woman’s conviction of inducing illegal immigration.

The 9th Circuit struck the second conviction, holding the law unconstitutionally overbroad in violation of the First Amendment.

In the course of those oral arguments, came this item of primary interest, at least to me:

Justice Stephen Breyer noodled the idea of narrowing the law so “it is limited to solicitation of a crime.”

That may or may not be a useful thing to do, but it’s for the political branches of our Federal government to legislate, not for the judicial branch. Leave it to a…liberal…Justice to think it’s OK to modify a law from the bench.

In Which a Supreme Court Justice is Wrong

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Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor didn’t just get it wrong in her dissent, she is wrong.

In Wolf v Cook County, the Supreme Court upheld the Trump administration’s expansion of its public charge rule regarding immigrant visas to include a bar on

non-cash benefits such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), forms of Medicaid, and certain housing assistance….

Sotomayor opened her dissent from the Court’s decision with this:

Today’s decision follows a now-familiar pattern. The Government seeks emergency relief from this Court, asking it to grant a stay where two lower courts have not. The Government insists—even though review in a court of appeals is imminent—that it will suffer irreparable harm if this Court does not grant a stay. And the Court yields.

Lower courts said it two times—it must be true. Lower courts have already said it. The superior court is obliged, somehow, to accede to its subordinates.

Besides: a court of appeals (the 7th Circuit) is going to hear oral argument this week as I write. Oral argument. Not review the written submissions, much less rule; that usually comes some indeterminate amount of time, usually measured in weeks, later. Especially if lower courts, like Sotomayor here, don’t see the matter as the emergency that the government avers.

She went on:

But this application is perhaps even more concerning than past ones. Just weeks ago, this Court granted a stay of a different decision involving the same administrative rule at issue here, after the Government professed urgency because of the form of relief granted in the prior case—a nationwide injunction.

This is fractured logic, and Sotomayor knows better. The Court objected to the nationwide aspect of that district court ruling because that lower court badly overstepped its bounds. And having lifted the nationwide injunction, the Court had no reason to reach the emergency aspect of the situation.

And this:

The Government’s professed harm, therefore, boils down to an inability to enforce its immigration goals, possibly in only the immediate term, in one of 50 States. It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the Government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the Court would grant it.

Because the government should not—of course!—be allowed to enforce its immigration goals. And because unless the harm isn’t nationwide, can the harm only be limited to a single State in our Union, the harm doesn’t matter. Never mind that much of the cost on not enforcing in the one State, Illinois, will be borne by that one State—and Illinois is, by many definitions, bankrupt already.

And now Sotomayor’s arrogant self-importance begins to be revealed:

…even putting aside the dissent of four Justices in the New York cases and the plaintiffs’ weighty arguments on the merits….

The Liberal minority disagreed. And her prejudgment of the matter: the plaintiffs’ weighty arguments on the merits.

And Sotomayor closed with this [citations omitted]:

…most troublingly, the Court’s recent behavior on stay applications has benefited one litigant over all others. This Court often permits executions—where the risk of irreparable harm is the loss of life—to proceed, justifying many of those decisions on purported failures “to raise any potentially meritorious claims in a timely manner.” … Yet the Court’s concerns over quick decisions wither when prodded by the Government in far less compelling circumstances—where the Government itself chose to wait to seek relief, and where its claimed harm is continuation of a 20-year status quo in one State. I fear that this disparity in treatment erodes the fair and balanced decision-making process that this Court must strive to protect.

Never mind the non sequitur nature of her analogy. The execution cases that the Court has declined to (further) stay are cases that have been appealed repeatedly and on successively flimsier grounds (for the most part). They’ve already been extensively adjudicated, and further delay would at best be unnecessary—that ground having already been plowed lots of times—and would border on violation of the 8th Amendment.

On the other hand, the harm done by 20 years of too narrow (as now realized) enforcement of the public charge rule would be extended by not lifting injunctions against its enforcement pending final adjudication.

But her position is of a piece with her claim to personal superiority.

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

It’s hard for her bias to get any more blatant.

Finally,

I respectfully dissent.

There’s nothing respectful about her dissent; she attacked her fellow jurists’ integrity and morality, and she insulted the intelligence of all of us.

The Supreme Court’s stay of the Cook County case and Sotomayor’s dissent can be seen here.