Tag Archives: courts

“Materiality”

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Texas voting law requires voters voting by mail-in ballots to verify identity via a state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number (SSN4). A Federal district judge ruled in 2023 against the law using the fictive logic that

It is self-evident that a voter’s ID number is not material….

Judge James Ho, writing for a unanimous 5th Circuit, articulated how clearly the appellate court saw through that district judge’s…argument.

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.

He expanded on that [citations omitted]:

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.
So there is no “disconnect between the State’s announced interests and the statute enacted.” And the ID number requirement “meaningfully corresponds” to the State’s legitimate interests in preventing the scourge of mail-in ballot fraud.

It seems to me the district judge slept through his high school logic class, and his law school provided no training in logic at all.

The 5th Circuit ruling can be read here.

Should be a No-Brainer

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As The Wall Street Journal‘s editors put it,

Get ready for what could be another landmark Supreme Court case. On Friday the Justices agreed to consider whether majority-minority Congressional districts drawn to comply with the Voting Rights Act are compatible with the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

The Court has asked the litigants in Louisiana v Callais to assess whether creation of a second majority-minority Congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments.

This is long overdue, as states are now caught in a vice. If they weigh race too heavily, they can run afoul of the Equal Protection Clause. But if they ignore race, they can be sued for violating Section 2. Louisiana’s House map is a prime example.

It is long overdue, from as far back as 1965 when the Civil Rights Act was first enacted. The relevant clause of the 14th Amendment is in its first Article:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 15th Amendment is even more explicit:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Favoring one group of Americans over another—which especially in the zero sum game of voting favors one group at the direct expense of another—denies both groups equal protection of the laws by that favoring. Tailored to the right to vote, creating a voting district to favor one group on the basis of race or color explicitly abridges the voting rights of those citizens in that district who are not members of the favored race or color while simultaneously exaggerating the voting rights of those who are members.

This should be a no-brainer: Louisiana’s voting districts, drawn as they are on the basis of race, are unconstitutional, and the Voting Rights Act, which mandates such favoritism is itself unconstitutional. Any use of race, however seemingly slight, to create a district or any policy that considers race is unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court should listen to and heed its recently prior ruling that any consideration of race in college/university admissions is unconstitutional.

California’s Disdain for our 2nd Amendment

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The 9th Circuit(!) has ruled that California’s demand for background checks (and associated delays in obtaining) as a precondition for citizens of that State buying ammunition is unconstitutional.

Naturally, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Gavin Newsom, is up in arms over that ruling:

Strong gun laws save lives—and today’s decision is a slap in the face to the progress California has made in recent years to keep its communities safer from gun violence. Californians voted to require background checks on ammunition and their voices should matter.

It’s a well-deserved slap in the face, though; in response to Newsom’s administration’s and State legislature’s own slap in the face of American citizens. What Newsom and his fellow Party syndicate members carefully ignore is that we already have a strong gun law—the strongest—in the form of our 2nd Amendment. Writing for the 9th Circuit, Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta tacitly reminded Newsom, et al., of this:

By subjecting Californians to background checks for all ammunition purchases, California’s ammunition background check regime infringes on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms[.]

She expanded on that [citations omitted]:

…a person who wants to keep an operable firearm must necessarily acquire ammunition. Because the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to keep operable arms, rules on ammunition acquisition implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment if they meaningfully constrain the right to keep operable arms.
We conclude that California’s ammunition background check meaningfully constrains the right to keep operable arms.

The 9th‘s ruling was on Rhode v Bonta, and it can be read here.

Credulous Editors

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are in a tizzy over the Senate Judiciary Committee having voted out to the Senate floor the nomination of Emil Bove to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, having done so after the Progressive-Democratic Party’s committee members staged another of their toddler temper tantrums and stormed out of the committee meeting because they couldn’t get their way. Especially, though. the editors are upset because the Republican majority on the committee chose to ignore a so-called whistleblower’s beef about Bove.

At a March 14 meeting, discussing the possibility that a judge could block those removals [illegal alien deportations], “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.” That’s according to a “whistleblower” letter by a former government lawyer.

And

The Judiciary Committee’s GOP majority dismissed this evidence as “completely devoid of context.” That sounds like an argument by plausible deniability. The whistleblower made specific claims, and isn’t his account context?

That also sounds like an argument for facts and specifics rather than anonymous claims. It’s telling that the editors chose one interpretation while completely ignoring another, much less identifying that other and explaining their logic in choosing the one interpretation over the other. And, no, the person’s account isn’t context; it is itself shorn of context: for instance, to whom was his letter written, what are the relationships between the letter writer and the letter’s recipient with Bove?

And this: the editors never even identify the whistleblower, whose name as the protected person that all whistleblowers are, should be a matter of public record. There’s also a reason that the editors put their characterization of whistleblower inside those euphemism quotes. Maybe that’s because the person isn’t actually a whistleblower, but a leaker with an axe to grind. What proof—what evidence, even—do the editors have that the person exhausted all of his whistleblower avenues before he chose to leak? Too, if the whistleblower isn’t actually one, but a leaker, why do the editors not worry about that leak context?

Still Another Reason

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This time, another reason to eliminate the Federal government’s Star Chamber that is its FISA Court. The reason is in the lede:

The nation’s spy court has quietly approved a Justice Department request to review information tied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that targeted former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as FBI Director Kash Patel seeks to hand over more Russiagate evidence to Congress.

The timeline of this…approval:

  • 6 June: DoJ filed its request with the FISA court
  • 17 June: FISA approved the request
  • 7 July: FISA made its approval public

That’s entirely too slow. DoJ—and the FBI—had their own copies of what they’d filed with FISA (didn’t they?); they had their own approval authority for the documents they owned. Aside from that, FISA has had its own copies of those filings, along with records of its deliberations of the related matters being considered with those filings for all these years. The judges on that court must have known that this day would come; of course, responsible and rational persons that they are, they’d already worked out at least the outlines of how they would respond. Taking 11 days to review that outline and to act on it is sloth. Taking an additional three weeks to make public their decision is irresponsible secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

That’s secondary, though. Coming ahead of that, and so obviating any need to consider any of that, is this: this court, as long as it’s going to operate entirely in secret, should have no say about the progress of an FBI or a DoJ investigation or about those agencies’ dispositions of materials associated with those investigations. To the extent our courts should be involved in such decisions, that should be the role, solely, of our public Article III courts, each of which is fully capable of handling classified information.