Tag Archives: government

Abandonment of Duty, Attempt at Tyranny

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Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) has asked the Texas Supreme Court to remove State Congressman Gene Wu from office and declare his seat vacant. Wu is the Texas House Democratic Caucus Chair and one of 57 Progressive-Democrats who ran out of Texas for the explicit purpose of denying the Texas legislature a quorum and thereby prevent it from operating at all.

Abbott’s argument centers on this [citations omitted]:

Every elected officer of this State, including Wu, swears an oath to “faithfully execute the duties of the office” to which they are elected. The principal duty of a legislator is to attend and participate in legislative sessions as required by Article III, Section 5 of the Texas Constitution. The quorum provisions further underscore that attendance is not optional; it is an affirmative constitutional obligation. The Texas Constitution authorizes the House to “compel attendance of absent members.” That power would be meaningless if members could freely make themselves absent for political advantage without consequence. Such actions also render meaningless the Governor’s authority to call a Special Session, for which the Legislature “shall meet.”
Representative Wu has openly renounced these constitutional mandates by fleeing the State of Texas to break quorum, obstruct legislative proceedings, and paralyze the Texas House of Representatives.

Wu answered via television interview (he doesn’t have to respond to the filing until late this afternoon).

Let me be unequivocal about my actions and my duty. When a governor conspires with a disgraced president to ram through a racist gerrymandered map, my constitutional duty is to not be a willing participant.
Denying the governor a quorum was not an abandonment of my office; it was a fulfillment of my oath. Unable to defend his corrupt agenda on its merits, Greg Abbott now desperately seeks to silence my dissent by removing a duly-elected official from office.

Aside from the fact that Wu’s irrelevant ad hominem inclusion illustrates the intellectual bankruptcy of his position, his oath of office requires him to obey his constitutional duty to appear in the State Congress when it is in session. There is no leeway for absenting himself solely because he disagrees with the outcome of a policy debate and ensuing vote—most especially is there no leeway for absenting himself as part of an effort to prevent that vote from occurring.

That he’s part of Party’s movement to block a single piece of legislation, a redistricting bill, from being acted on is merely the narrow, proximate implication of his action.

The question here, though, is much larger than a single disputed piece of legislation; it embraces the nature and basis of democratic governments. In a democracy, especially in a republican and representative democracy such as ours, there are those who win in a policy contest and those who lose. The foundation of (representative, republican, even popular democracy) requires that the defeat be accepted by those in the minority and that those who lost are free to try again in a succeeding, even later renewed, policy debate but are not free to shut off all legislative capacity unless and until they, this minority, get their losing position fully accepted.

Texas’ Progressive-Democratic Party politicians who are deliberately shutting down the Texas government, denying it its ability—its obligation—to legislate, are not filibustering a single piece of legislation in an effort to block its passage. Their behavior is categorically different from that. These persons are not just violating their oaths of office. They are attempting to impose, from their minority position, their demands on an entire government at the cost of no functioning government absent the majority acquiescing to them. This is the stuff of tyranny, and thus their preventing a quorum is antithetical to democratic principles. All of them should be removed from office.

Abbott’s filing 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.

Gerrymandering

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It’s time to ride this horse again, this time due to a Wall Street Journal op-ed on racial gerrymandering, Texas, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which sought to balance minority access to electing government representatives with majority access (itself an unconstitutional unequal treatment law IMNSHO).

The op-ed centered on Texas’ move to redraw its current Federal House of Representative districts and “liberal” beefs that Texas’ current districts already disadvantage Hispanics is, here, irrelevant; it’s that unequal treatment that matters.

The second clause of the first Article of the 14th Amendment of our Constitution makes the matter crystalline.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States…nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Gerrymandering on the basis of race is clearly unconstitutional, and that VRA should have been struck down long since—the latest opportunity having come when the Supreme Court released the Southern States from government oversight regarding their voting laws. Beyond that, one of the central privileges of a citizen of the United States is the ability to vote in an election (in this post, a national election) and have his vote count as much—neither more nor less—than the vote of any other citizen of the United States.

The concept—equal protection of the laws—extends easily to political parties: gerrymandering on the basis of political party also plainly denies us average Americans our equal treatment by limiting the value of our votes in some districts and artificially increasing the value of our votes in other districts solely on the basis of political stance.

The clear, constitutional, equal treatment solution to this is to draw our Congressional districts without regard to political belief, race, or any other criterion other than our status as American citizens (and citizens of the State in which we reside, as the first clause of that Article specifies), but strictly within (or as practice has overcome the explicitly stated requirement) within the spirit of equal population requirement stated in Article I, Section 2 of our Constitution:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand….

Thus: beginning with the geographic center of the State, draw the districts as squares, with the only deviation from a straight line being at a State’s boundary with an adjacent State. Otherwise, the number of districts must equal the apportionment of Representatives the State’s total population allows, and each of the districts must be geographically sized so that each of the districts has substantially equal populations of citizens.

We’re all Americans, and so we’re all equal under law. Race, political position—religion, etc—are wholly irrelevant to this.

Jurisdiction

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A commenter on an earlier post suggested I define “jurisdiction.” Herewith.

Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution define and create our social compact as a nation whose people are sovereign and whose government men and women work for us by our consent (in government’s existence) and by election (of those men and women actually serving*).

Johnson’s Dictionary, 4th ed, contemporaneous with the writing and ratification of our Constitution:

JURISDICTION.
1. Legal authority; extent of power.
2. District to which any authority extends.

Modern American dictionaries, viz., Merriam-Webster Online, define jurisdiction:

Jurisdiction
1: the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law a matter that falls within the court’s jurisdiction
2a: the authority of a sovereign power to govern or legislate
b: the power or right to exercise authority: control
3: the limits or territory within which authority may be exercised

The definition of jurisdiction as our Founders understood it remains the same as it is understood today. (Aside: that only keeps things convenient. Were the definition materially changed today, our Constitution still would have to be understood and applied in those original terms; an Amendment would be needed, not judicial decree, to bring that definition forward to today.)

Our government’s jurisdiction, thus, does not extend beyond the limits of our nation’s social compact.

Our social compact (any social compact) isn’t only geographically defined, however. It’s also, and primarily, a two-way commitment, a mutual agreement to protect the compact’s members and the members’ agreement to submit to and obey the rules associated with that agreement.

Hence, my claim in that earlier post: illegal aliens, by entering our nation illegally and remaining illegally present, are holding themselves outside the tenets of our social compact. By holding themselves outside our social compact, they are holding themselves beyond the reach of our government’s jurisdiction. Their presence within the territorial limits of our nation only cedes control via raw power to our government.

*Unelected bureaucrats in government, from Congressional and Executive Branch staffers through the men and women in civil service are selected and hired—at bottom—by those elected representatives.

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.