Tag Archives: freedom

Right on the Law

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Great Britain’s High Court has ruled that Prime Minister Theresa May may not and can not trigger, on her own initiative, Article 50 and begin negotiations with the European Union about the mechanisms and details of Great Britain’s going out from the EU.  The Parliament must first vote in favor of invoking the Article.

Great Britain’s Supreme Court likely will hear an appeal of the ruling.  Upholding the High Court’s opinion likely will spell the end of Brexit for the near future and possibly permanently and the end of May’s government.  The former is because a majority of MPs want to stay in the EU and so can be expected to vote against invoking the Article.  The latter is because May (who opposed Brexit, also, but said she’d abide by the people’s vote) would be forced, if she’s a lady of her word, to seek a new set of MPs by dissolving her government and forcing early elections in an effort to get a collection of MPs more favorably disposed.

Likely, the High Court is right on the law.  The EU is a collection of treaties which Great Britain’s Parliament has ratified, and only the Parliament, not a popular referendum, can abrogate the treaties.  But the High Court is not right on law, and it’s not right on justice.

The people have spoken.  The courts may be bound by the letter of the law (though not as tightly so as American courts are, in theory at least), but the Parliament, if it must vote, would do well to remember that they work for the people, and so the MPs should vote accordingly rather than on the basis of their own petty opinions.

A Couple of Litmus Tests

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The two major party Presidential candidates have them.  All Presidents and candidates who wish to nominate Supreme Court Justices have them; some are more or less legitimate than others.

Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s wants:

The kind of people that I would be looking to nominate to the court would be in the great tradition of standing up to the powerful, standing up on behalf of our rights as Americans[.]

Read that again.  Clinton wants Justices who put social agendas ahead of the actual law before them, ahead of the text of the Constitution, ahead of the Justices’ own oaths of office, which swear them to uphold and defend the Constitution, not ignore it, or “reinterpret” it.

Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s wants:

[Justices who would] interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted.

Notice that.  Justices who will do the opposite of what Clinton’s choices will do: rule on the basis of what the law and the Constitution actually say, rather than on what the Justices might wish had been said.

There’s just one more litmus test that I would add, one as general and carefully nonspecific as Trump’s: lose deference to the other branches of the Federal government.  The founders also wrote the Judicial branch as the equal of the Legislative and Executive branches.  No deference is owed, no deference is legitimate.  Deference subordinates what is intended to be a coequal branch of the government to the other two.  Besides, a law is Constitutional, or it is not; that does not depend in any way on who says it.   Further, a matter before the Court comports with the law and the Constitution on its merits, or it does not; that does not depend on who is bringing or defending the matter.

One of these two will be nominating Justices in the next term—at least one, likely three, and maybe four or five.  The next President will determine the tenor of the Court and the viability of our legal system for generations.

It’s clear which set of choices are better for the present and long term health of our nation.

What’s the Chinese Term for Aппара́тчик?

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Law firms in the People’s Republic of China are about to get them.  In addition to two new Rule by Law directives that prohibit PRC lawyers from criticizing the government on the one hand and that require PRC lawyers to overtly support the Chinese Communist Party on the other, these law firms are required to accept into their organizations

establishment[s] of Communist Party branches[.]

To ensure proper behavior.

Cowed by the PRC?

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Canberra confirmed last week that the Australian Navy won’t conduct freedom-of-navigation patrols in the international waters of the South China Sea, giving China’s bid to dominate the strategic area a boost.

And

An international tribunal ruled in July that China’s bid to claim most of the sea violates international law. But the verdict will be rendered moot unless law-abiding states are willing to push back. That would give Beijing effective control over the 60% of Australian trade that transits the sea.

However, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop appear to have gotten their marching orders from PRC President Xi Jinping and Wang Yi.  Embarrassingly (did Turnbull have the grace for embarrassment), Turnbull has decried opposition to this acquiescence as “highly political,” and a measure of “immaturity and unreadiness to take responsibility for these issues.”  Bishop is terrified that enforcing freedom of navigation imperatives—even international law—would “escalate tensions.”

You bet the matter is highly political, Turnbull.  Enforcing international law—or surrendering the rights involved to the biggest bully—is purely political.  In what venue would you place it otherwise?  Your inability to understand that, or your timidity in acting on an accurate understanding, marks your own political immaturity and unreadiness.

Escalating tensions?  The PRC is already doing that with its seizure and occupation of the South China Sea, and it’s actively pressing its advantage gained from your backing away from tension.

You guys used to be made of sterner stuff.  What happened to the Australian government that faced down a rampant Japan on your doorstep just 75 years ago?

Or are you thinking you have no support from the US, which already is in retreat before the PRC?  That, at least, would have a ring of shameful truth to it.

Pay to Play, or Slants

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From a Kimberley Strassel column in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal comes this nugget.

…the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors.

What she said.

And yet the NLMSM insists—brags, really—that it’s entirely appropriate to take sides against Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, not in their opinion pieces, but in their “fact” reporting pieces, also.  Objective journalism be damned.

Here’s Ezra Klein, of JournoList infamy:

The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon[.]

And Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

It’s made starkly clear by Jorge Ramos, of Univision:

…journalists cannot be objective when they are confronted with “racism, discrimination, corruption, public life, dictatorships or violations of human rights.”

These views of Trump, in opinion pieces, are entirely legitimate, but it’s interesting to note that none of this criticism, this assumption of nefariousness, is evident in the same press’ coverage of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite her plain lawlessness and her evident conflicts of interest.

If the press feels free to be this proudly biased against one party, one candidate, it can only feel free to be similarly biased toward any other politician, any other party.  Too much of the Fourth Estate has transformed itself into a fifth column.