Tag Archives: ethics

The Dangers of a Biden Judiciary

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It’s well enough known that Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden disdains the conservative nature—which is to say that of adhering to the actual text of our Constitution and any statute in a case—of the judiciary as populated by President Donald Trump (courtesy of Biden’s BFF, ex-President Barack Obama (D), who left so many judicial seats empty).

Now, it’s become especially crystalline. Here’s Cynthia Hogan, who was then-Vice President Biden’s counsel and earlier, then-Senate Judiciary Committee member Biden’s counsel:

Joe Biden thinks the law should be interested in protecting the little person. Not to determine an outcome, but to say people should not be at a disadvantage because they’re working class, they’re poor, they’re Black, they’re women, they’re immigrants.

Laudable as those goals are, they’re fundamentally political and not judicial goals. Demanding potential judges and Justices to push for those ends from the bench can only accomplish two things. One is to force those judges to violate their oaths of office to support and defend our Constitution rather than to alter it from the bench. Related to that is forcing those judges to agree similarly to alter the text of any statute before them, and thereby arrogate to their bench legislative authority that is the sole province of our Congress.

The protection of the little person, the person who is working class, poor, black, a woman, an immigrant is best done through strict adherence to our Constitution, which is changeable, legitimately, solely by We the People, us citizens. That protection is best implemented by us citizens through our choices for representation in our Congress and our White House—a representation that has the responsibility for legislating the means by which those goals will be implemented and that protects all Americans. Its also a representation that is directly answerable to us.

Those two tightly related things aggregate to the second, even more dangerous, thing: it makes our judiciary a political branch rather than the legal, judicial one that it is designed to be. That would reduce our nation from a nation of laws to a nation ruled by a few robed individuals who would make law according to their views. Law would no longer be a political matter determined by We the People through our elected political representatives.

Those few men, unelected and so unanswerable directly to us, will not protect all Americans, not even the little person. Instead, law—our very Constitution—will be whatever those few say it is. Beyond that, what those few will say will change over time and vary widely from man to man as each acts according to his own imperatives.

In very short order, those few will be protecting those imperatives, not Americans, not even the little American.

Mark Gitenstein, a former Judiciary Committee chief counsel under Biden:

We want to have as many vacancies as possible and get as many modern progressives in those slots as we can.

Indeed.

And Ted Kaufman, a Biden confidante:

We want to make sure that the courts, and not just the Supreme Court, really are a mirror of America[.]

Here is the danger emphasized, as these worthies don’t care that the courts are designed to be mirrors of our Constitution and of our statutes. It’s the elected political branches of our government who are the true and sole mirror of America.

Tech Company Protections

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Tech companies, primarily Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet, get nearly blanket immunity from responsibility for the content that’s published on their outlets. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was instrumental to their initial success, gives them that broad immunity, based on those companies’ initial status as agnostic pipelines that merely provided a place for disparate commentary to be promulgated.

Protected monopolies (vis., pre-breakup Ma Bell) gave government-sanctioned special, protective, treatment to selected companies in order to facilitate their initial success. There came a time when that protection no longer was warranted, and the protection was eliminated.

So it is with Facebook, Twitter, and Alphabet. Their special, protective, treatment is no longer warranted, and it needs to be withdrawn. Those companies are no longer agnostic pipelines; they’ve taken—increasingly over the last few years—the role of controlling (some might say censoring) the content they allow on their platforms. They block some content, limit access to other content, even delete content after promulgation. They’re no longer agnostic; they limit discussions to directions that satisfy their management teams’ approval. They’ve become publishers of content.

Tech companies acknowledge they need to improve their content moderation practices, but they deny negligence or political bias.

These tech companies cannot be trusted to “improve their content moderation practices,” not when they issue such openly ridiculous denials. Those denials demonstrate either those companies’ management teams’ dishonesty or those teams’ inability to recognize their own negligence or bias.

Indeed, the very existence of “content moderation practices” beyond that required by the FCC—which center on barring active incitements to violence—demonstrates the teams’ dishonesty or inability to recognize their own bias.

Turning Children into Snitches

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This time, it’s Vermont’s Republican governor.

Vermont Governor Phil Scott said during a press conference on Tuesday that schools in the state will include new questions during daily health checks about whether students and their parents attended gatherings outside of their households following the Thanksgiving holiday.

Never mind the carefully high-minded claimed motives for this—it’s trying to get children to denounce their parents to authorities.

This using the Wuhan Virus situation as an excuse to drastically increase government power has gotten ‘way out of hand.

Rule By Law

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Rather than Rule of Law, which is how we do things here.

The men and women of the government of the People’s Republic of China change the nation’s laws whenever convenient to their personal aims and whenever convenient to their personal power. This is how those men and women have acted, have preserved their power, since the beginning of the days of Chinese emperors.

Two current examples: their enactment in 2017 of an intelligence cooperation law that requires all PRC companies, whether state-owned or “private,” to cooperate with any intelligence community request for information, including about any company affiliate or customer wherever in the world that affiliate or customer might be.

There’s also the just-enacted law that permits the PRC government to remove—outside of the courts—anyone in the Hong Kong governance apparatus of whom the emperor’s men the men and women of the PRC government might decide to disapprove.

Now we come to the Progressive-Democratic men and women of the Wisconsin State government.

At a special meeting that lasted more than five hours, [Progressive-]Democrats on the state elections commission sought to change recount guidelines after the Trump 2020 Campaign filed a petition to review the state’s votes in Dane and Milwaukee counties.

Existing State law on the matter had become inconvenient to those Progressive-Democrats, so—time to change the rules. As Reince Priebus noted,

The Trump campaign sent the Wis Election Comm. $3 mil and filed its petition for a recount. Then the WEC immediately called a special meeting to change certain recount rules that deal with the issues brought up in the petition? You can’t make this up!

Here are Progressive-Democrats in action.

WaPo Contempt

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The Washington Post is at it again. Abolish the electoral college, its editors demand. And they thereby display the same contempt for ordinary Americans, our Constitution, and our federal republic structure as did Herb Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and more recently Ezra Klein, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, among a long list of today’s Leftists and Progressive-Democrats.

The electoral college, whatever virtues it may have had for the Founding Fathers, is no longer tenable for American democracy.

After all,

Right now, our presidential elections are conducted by 51 separate authorities, each with its own rules on registration, mail-in balloting and more. Each state counts its own ballots, and each decides when recounts are needed.

You bet. That’s right there in that pesky Constitution, because federation. That’s where the individual States, by design, are nearly on a par with the central government. That’s so a far away, remote government cannot rule the roost with its one-size-fits-all diktats. Those pesky States just keep getting in the way of Progressive-Democrats’ need to implement their Know Better policies. Absolute control from the center would make that so much more convenient. Here’s Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the need for a Progressive-Democrat majority, reigning from DC:

[Jake Tapper, interviewing Ocasio-Cortez]: Are you going to work with more moderate Senate Republicans to try to pass something in the House that can get through the Senate?
[Ocasio-Cortez]: Well, I’m going to be spending my next couple of months doing everything that I can to extend help and offer support…that we secure a Democratic Senate majority, so that we don’t have to negotiate in that way[.]

Back to WaPo‘s need to clear away the obstacles to Leftist control of the promise of American life.

Small states already have disproportionate clout in our government because of the Senate, in which Wyoming’s fewer than 600,000 residents have as much representation as California’s 39.5 million.

With the Electoral College having far more popular representation than the Senate, surely, these wondrous exemplars of what passes for journalism will be demanding proportional representation in the Senate, too. Truly equal representation gives the dinky States, those locales too small to be worthy of notice, ‘way too much representation.