Tag Archives: government

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.

Emails

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How do you get 650,000 State Department emails onto one laptop, even if accumulated over some years?  Especially when it’s a laptop that isn’t routinely used by a State Department employee or confidante of a State employee, but instead is owned by (or at best shared with) a State employee/confidante spouse and dependent?

Separately, might some of these be copies of the emails Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton deleted under the claim that they were personal, centered on wedding planning and yoga?

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.

Democrats and Security

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First there was Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, personal and private email server on which she conducted official State Department business and which she used for handling over 2,000 classified emails—some of which also were marked classified.

Then there was the breathtakingly easy hack of Democratic National Committee email servers.

Then there was the similarly breathtakingly easy hack of Democratic National Convention Committee email servers.

Now there’s this.

[I]n 2009, Hillary Clinton’s top aide mistakenly left potentially classified papers in the front seat of the car she was traveling in.

Huma Abedin realized the significance of her error and sent an email to a fellow Clinton staffer asking that the papers be moved to the trunk.

“I’m going to have ambassador ride on next drive,” she wrote on July 20, 2009. “There’s a bunch of burn stuff in the pocket of my front seat.”

This displays an utter lack of concern by this highly experienced Clinton Aide for the classified documents with which care she’d been entrusted, both in her abandoning them on the front seat of her car and in her request to have them stored (however temporarily) in the unsecured trunk of her unsecured car rather than have them properly taken under control.

There’s also no indication Abedin gave any thought to whether her colleague had either the clearance or the need to know (both of which are necessary before an individual can be allowed to handle classified material) before she requested him to take possession of those abandoned documents.

Nor is there any indication that the unnamed staffer ever was debriefed on his handling of the documents.

There clearly were no sanctions applied to Abedin for her extreme carelessness in her handling of these classified documents.

It seems pretty evident that Democrats, at least senior Democrats, don’t understand security, or they don’t care about security.  Either way, our nation cannot afford such as these in our government.