Tag Archives: law

Tension?

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The Supreme Court has taken up the question of whether Louisiana’s redistricting effort for its Federal Congressional representation is legitimate, or not. The Just the News‘ news writer, the unusually (for JtN) anonymous “Just the News Contributor,” posed the central question before the Supreme Court:

In Louisiana v Callais, the Supreme Court is confronted with a direct tension between two legal commands: the VRA’s mandate to protect minority voting rights and the Constitution’s limits on race-based decision-making by the state.

There is—or should be—no tension here. Our Constitution says this in Art VI:

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land….

In Marbury v Madison, the Supreme Court made clear that conflicts between statute and Constitution must be resolved strictly and solely in favor of what our Constitution says, and every Supreme Court decision since has hewed to the ultimate supremacy of our Constitution. Any tension can exist only in the minds of activists and activist judges and Justices.

Nor can there be any half-measure wherein some level of race-based discrimination is OK. Any race-based discrimination or “preference” in political gerrymandering is too much and a violation of our Constitution. Here’s the 14th Amendment on the matter:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The clause does not say No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, except when it’s convenient to do otherwise.

Full stop.

“Multicultural”

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A news writer for The New York Times, Peter Baker, in typical journalism guild, misstated American culture in an interview with the left-wing network PBS‘ Washington Week With the Atlantic, as excerpted by The Wall Street Journal.

One of the things that they’ve [the Trump administration] been very successful at, and I would expect to see more of, is their war on DEI, on the notion of diversity, equity and inclusion, the notion that diversity is an admirable goal, even if you don’t necessarily want quotas. They have managed in just a very short amount of time to create a new culture in the country—not just in the government, across the board—where private employers feel the need to retreat from DEI. And you’re going to see, I think, an acceleration of that in the second year…. I think the question, though, is in a multicultural country, at some point does that begin to go too far for people and by the midterms?

Leave aside Baker’s blithe assumption that there’s nothing intrinsically racist or sexist in DEI, which favors approved races and the approved gender at the direct, deliberate expense of disapproved races and the disapproved gender. Those favoring criteria, however far down the selection tree they might be, are explicitly and by design racist and sexist.

More than that, the United States is not a mix of race, of old-world cultures, of religions, or of whathaveyous. The Unites States is a nation of a single culture, one unified by a common belief in a basic system of intrinsic rights: to life, to liberty, and to the pursuit of happiness and of a limited government granted to which by our nation’s sovereign citizens only enough power and authority to protect those intrinsic and basic rights.

Baker’s bald claim that the United States is a multicultural country is as cynical as it is wrong.

Even that queen of European identity politics, Germany’s ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel, ultimately recognized that multiculturalism is an abject failure. And that’s something that Americans have known since our inception, if unevenly put or kept in effect.

A Step in the Right Direction

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Against the backdrop of the multi-billion dollar Medicaid fraud being pulled off in Minnesota and so far only partially uncovered (for all the dozens of indictments and convictions), a fraud that centers on sending those billions of dollars overseas, comes this move by Missouri’s State Treasurer Vivek Malek:

Missouri State Treasurer Vivek Malek told Just the News he is teaming up with the state legislature to impose new requirements that remittance payment businesses ensure that customers are lawfully in the United States before they can send money to foreign countries….

It’s not just Somali immigrants and illegal aliens resident in Minnesota, either.

“It has been found that at least $4.4 billion in remittances sent to Mexico have been tied to cartel money laundering through small wire transfers,” [Malek] said. “Cartels don’t sneak money across the border or throw the bag across the border. They wire it. And if we are serious about crushing cartels, we have to shut down their financial arteries.”

This is a strong move, and it’ll be instructive to see which States—Progressive-Democrat-run vs Republican-run—start taking similar steps. State by State legislation, though, is patchy, incomplete, and slow. What’s needed is the same move done at the Federal level. Treasury should monitor such transmissions, blocking those sent by inappropriate senders—illegal aliens, for instance. Treasury has ample authority under our Constitution’s Commerce Clause.

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations….

Remissions of US money to foreign relatives of those present in the US, whether legally so or illegal alien, is pretty clearly Commerce with foreign Nations.

Drug Mistake

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President Donald Trump (R) signed an Executive Order that reclassified marijuana from a Schedule 1 drug (highly dangerous and tightly controlled) to a Schedule 3 drug (not so dangerous, not so tightly controlled, but still illegal at the Federal level.

This is a mistake.

Leave aside all the dangers of modern-day marijuana or its unproven medical uses (multiple studies conflict with each other on the effectivity of a variety of constituent chemicals).

If the purpose really was to improve access for research (to, among other things, address those medical uses and those dangers), there was a simpler way to do that. Schedule 1 drugs are, in fact, deucedly difficult to obtain, even for researchers. However, that could have been addressed by setting up a licensing facility that would ease access to marijuana by approved laboratories and approved researchers working in those laboratories specifically on marijuana research.

It still can be. Trump’s EO can be rescinded, and that licensing facility still can be stood up.

Typically Liberal “Misunderstanding”

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It’s William Galston, this time. Galston, in his op-ed for last Tuesday’s The Wall Street Journal disparaged SecDef Pete Hegseth’s alleged disdain for the laws of war.

Leave aside the fact that Galston cynically and deliberately chose not to cite any of these laws of war. Instead, he actually wrote extensively about Hegseth’s supposed disdain for rules of engagement. In this vein, Galston generalized, without logic or facts, Hegseth’s disdain for particular rules into a disdain for all rules of engagement.

However, Galston’s more serious…error…is this. Rules of engagement are not Laws of War. RoE are the particulars, tailored to specific combat and short-of-combat environments, intended for particularized implementation of those general laws of war. Yet he opened his piece with this lede, and his piece continued solely in that vein.

It’s no surprise the US Navy’s September 2 strike on an alleged drug-carrying boat near Venezuela has been controversial. The man who now leads the Defense Department has ridiculed the laws of war throughout his military career.

I’m not that convinced, though, that Galston’s mistake is a misunderstanding Given his high skill as a journalist for a leading news outlet, for whom words are his stock in trade, I lean more toward outright distortion in his use of rules of engagement and laws of war interchangeably.

Oh, and one more “leave aside:” The controversy surrounding that second strike is entirely a journalistic construction. Those of us with actual military experience and who are not trading on that experience for political gain see no fault in sending in a second strike to finish a task that the first strike had not completed.