Tag Archives: freedom

Israel’s Judicial Reform

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Israel has taken a step toward limiting the governing power and authority of its Supreme Court. Prior to last Monday’s vote, Israel’s highest court could blithely strike down Knesset-enacted statutes based on nothing more concrete or measurable than the personal opinions of what constituted the statute’s “reasonableness” in the minds of the judges constituting the Court’s majority in any particular case. If those judges didn’t like the statute, they could cry “unreasonable,” and strike it.

This reform law will restrict

the power of the country’s top court and hand more control to lawmakers. It aims to restrict the Supreme Court’s ability to strike down government or executive decisions on the basis of reasonability…. Supporters say the reasonableness standard is too nebulous and allows the courts to overrule the will of elected officials for political purposes.

In fine, the new law requires the Supreme Court to have a far more specific and publicly measurable rationale for striking a law. Otherwise, the matter is returned to the representatives of the Israeli people, the Knesset, and to the people themselves. In particular, if the people disagree with the law, they can fire their Knesset representative(s) at the next election and replace those persons with representatives who will make the adjustments or recissions the people demand. The people have no such possibility with the Supreme Court; those worthies, once selected, are in office until age 70. The people making the ultimate decisions, rather than unaccountable office holders doing so, is the stuff of democracy, whether popular or republican.

Critics of the new law claim that it’s an attack on democracy. One citizen:

We refuse to accept this. It is clear to us all that there is no alternative. We either escalate or we leave the country.

And Yair Lapid, an opposition leader:

This is the destruction of Israeli democracy[.]

That’s democratic opposition? No, that’s opposition to democracy. It’s disappointing that the “opposition” in Israel is so opposed to the idea of the people’s representatives—and the people themselves through their democratically selected representatives—having the primary say in Israel’s laws. It’s also illustrative of the opposition’s ideology that they’re so opposed to that degree of democracy.

The kerfuffle also is illustrative of the problems stemming from not having an actual, written-down constitution to which anyone—government official (judge, member of the Knesset, Prime Minister) or private citizen—can point and say, “This is what our constitution requires,” and engage in open and transparent (to coin a phrase) debate concerning what a law or a proposed law says, rather than depending on cloistered judges’ obscure and too often limited explanations that are stripped of the reasonings and closed-chambered debates conducted as the Court arrives at its rulings.

An Opportunity to Reverse Kelo

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Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case involving our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause: a homeowner who didn’t want to sell her home in New London, CT, to a property developer who said he needed the property to finish out the development of shopping mall. New London agreed on the developer’s representation that his mall would produce more tax revenue for the city than the homeowner’s property tax remittances. In the resulting suit, the Supreme Court decided that government has the authority to commit such a Taking and redistribution for the public purpose of increasing government’s tax revenue.  The Court said that one man’s private purpose is superior to another’s so that other must surrender his property to the one.

What the Takings Clause actually says is

…nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

For public use, not for public purpose, and certainly not for a private enterprise’s claimed public purpose.

Now a case is developing that should end in the Supreme Court and present the Court with an opportunity to reverse that shameful ruling.

A public school district in Texas is pursuing an eminent domain process to remove a 78-year-old man from the home that his family has owned for more than a century in order to build a high school football stadium parking lot.

The 78-yr-old homeowner’s daughter, Tara Upchurch:

I want you to understand what the significance of this place is for my father. It is where he played as a child with his grandparents, where he woke up 4 a.m. to milk cows, it’s where he spent 39 years happily married to my mom, and it’s where he raised a family, and it’s a place we never thought he would leave[.]

On the other hand,

Aldine ISD is planning to build a $50 million football field and parking lot on his property and is using eminent domain options after the Upchurch family rejected an initial offer to purchase the property last year, KPRC reported. Eminent domain allows the government to acquire private property for public use.

Aldine ISD wants it, and its desire is more important than a property owner’s…ownership. Well, then. That settles it. That’s what Kelo has wrought.

Private property ownership isn’t actually ownership: if another private entity wants it, all that one needs to do is to persuade a government or quasi-government that its desire is greater than the original owner’s ownership, and the owner must give it up.

This is the mess that Kelo caused, and this is the mess that the Supreme Court should get an opportunity to clean up, and it should clean it up.

Government Surveillance

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The French government is on the verge [a Tuesday vote as I write on Tuesday morning] of authorizing its police forces to

remotely tap into the cameras, microphones, and location services of phones and other internet-connected devices used by some criminal suspects.
The proposed law plainly stipulates that the procedure can be executed “without the knowledge or consent of its owner or possessor” but is limited to suspects involved in terrorism, organized crime, and other illegal activities punishable by five or more years in prison.

Whether the French vote is up or down, imagine such a capability in the hands of a government that considers enthusiastically protesting mothers to be potential terrorists, or a government that openly worries about traditional Catholics (or traditionals of any other religion), or a government that spies into the emails of journalists and their families, or a government that already (illegally) spies on its general citizens with the tools of an intelligence organization and a secret court system.

Another Excuse…

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…for Leftist-dominated governments to grab power. Farmers Insurance, and other insurance companies, are moving to restrict policy sales in California and Florida due to rising payout costs from a recent spate of natural disaster claims. Public Citizen said that such moves are

prime example of the insurance industry’s hypocrisy on climate change.

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians insist that insurance companies aren’t doing enough to combat global warming and want to impose requirements on them to do more. Connecticut’s Leftist politicians are proposing a 5% surcharge on “any premium payments from any fossil fuel company” to any insurer licensed in the state.

Insurers, in a free market economy, are in the business of insuring risk—transferring the risk of a business venture, or ownership of a home, from the venturer/homeowner to the insurer in exchange for a fee based on the risk’s likelihood of occurring and its cost should it occur.

Insurers, in the Progressive-Democrat economy, are tools of the State, usable by the State to achieve the Progressive-Democrats’ personal goals.

“I Don’t Understand”

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Andy Kessler’s op-ed in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal centers on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, Kessler’s putzing around with a variety of firearms at a Nevada firing range, and his assessment of the effect of Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of an individual’s right to keep and bear any of a variety of Arms on the national firearm debate.

The importance of that debate is summarized in Kessler’s statement about having an AR-15, but which he implied was about a much broader matter:

…I still don’t understand why you would want to own one.

It doesn’t matter a whit that Kessler doesn’t understand. He’s only a journalist, though, and his level of understanding also is not all that important.

Far more importantly, is the fact that it’s the individual’s right to keep and bear; us American citizens, individually or as groups, do not require a government permission slip to do so, and that makes a government man’s level of understanding of the matter irrelevant, except to the extent that man attempts to act on his level and therewith move to restrict our individual right.

The 2nd Amendment of our Constitution, along with recent Supreme Court acknowledgments, make all of this crystalline, and they make the government man’s move to act on his level of understanding unconstitutional.