Tag Archives: law

Contradiction in Terms

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This time, regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) move to remodel and expand the White House East Wing so that, among other things, important diplomatic events involving large groups of dignitaries, their significant others, et al., can be held indoors inside a facility fitting for the occasion rather than outdoors, in the White House’s back yard, in tents.

Leftist critics, of course, object. One of their more risible objections is this:

Critics say Trump barreling through bureaucracy to reshape an iconic piece of American history reflects a wider disdain for democratic norms.

Never mind that giving an unelected bureaucratic authority functional veto power is what violates democratic norms.

Red Tape Redundancy

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal was rightly concerned about red tape redundancy, but he missed the mark on one form of it.

One can’t work with children without undergoing specific training and, in many states, extensive background checks. There’s value in those measures, but how about some coordination?
While living in New Jersey, I was fingerprinted for my teaching license in Somerset County and, later, in Middlesex County, despite having permanent certification in New York. I was then fingerprinted for gun purchases, coaching recreational soccer, and teaching Sunday school. At some point, it all becomes too exhausting.

There’s nothing redundant about being checked via immutable personal characteristics at each of those application points. Fingerprinting is an important way of determining that the person doing the applying is who he claims to be. Those multiple applications may or may not be by the same person.

Having been IDed by fingerprints and confirmed to be the same person across those multiple applications, though, there should be no need to repeat the rest of the applications beyond what’s unique to the function being applied for. Those repeats are what would be redundant and want better coordination.

The Judge Erred Badly

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A Minnesota jury convicted a man and his wife of stealing $7.2 million from the state’s Medicaid program. After the jury rendered its verdict, Minnesota State District Judge (4th District) Sarah West overturned it in its entirety.

In her decision, West wrote that prosecutors “relied heavily on circumstantial evidence,” adding that the state didn’t rule out other potential “reasonable inferences.”

If West really thought that, why did she let the case go to the jury and then let the jury reach its verdict and then read out that verdict?

If West really thought that, why didn’t she, when both sides had rested their cases—or even just when the prosecutor had rested—simply issue a directed verdict of not guilty instead of wasting so much time? Those jurors were private citizens with day jobs, after all. Her claim of other “reasonable inferences” that could have been drawn seem to me would approach reasonable doubt.

Sarah West seems to be a State district judge who does not understand her role as judge or her oath of office.

“The trade in babies and women’s bodies is an affront to freedom.”

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That Wall Street Journal subheadline is about surrogate motherhood and whether it ought be allowed to exist. Lois McLatchie Miller’s lede and next two paragraphs consist of this:

A New York ballroom filled with men discussing how to procure women’s bodies to produce babies, then discharge the mother from her role.
It sounds dystopian, but the September gathering was the latest conference of Men Having Babies, a group that helps gay couples—and single men, and even groups of three that call themselves “throuples”—form families through surrogacy. Online, they post photos of smiling male couples holding infants still slick from their mothers’ birth canals, celebrating a triumph of “modern family building.”
Those newborns know nothing of politics or reproductive technology. They know only the voice and scent of the woman who carried them for nine months—and whom they will never know again.

That truly is terrible, but it’s far from the norm. Surrogacy is broadly employed to provide healthy babies to families unable to have any of their own.

Alternatively, adopt a baby? Certainly. But the adoption, while also broadly beneficial to both the baby and the new parents, doesn’t get the parents a baby of their own blood, their own genetics. Surrogacy opens a path to that, wherein the father’s sperm is combined with the mother’s egg and the result implanted in the surrogate mother. Or a mother’s egg is combined with a sperm bank donor’s sperm and the result either implanted in the mother, or for her health reasons, implanted in a surrogate mother. Or the same with a donor’s egg and the father’s sperm.

The surrogate mother, then, in those cases carries the baby to term and then turns it over to the baby’s parents. That can be wrenching for the surrogate mother, but it isn’t always, and it does allow the surrogate mother to participate in the formation of a loving family. Even in the wrenching, the surrogacy contract takes care of the surrogate mother’s post-delivery needs.

Miller is a Senior Communications Officer at Alliance Defending Freedom International, so she should know better.

What’s necessary is not banning surrogate motherhood, nor even heavy regulation of it. What’s necessary are strong regulation, with heavy sanctions for misbehaviors and civil sanctions for egregious mistakes, of the outcomes. Along with that is the necessity of producing quality information that will allow childless families and prospective surrogate mothers to identify reliable and effective facilities—and each other—so as to allow both sides of the surrogacy to have satisfactory, rewarding outcomes.

Banning surrogacy altogether is what would be truly an affront to freedom. It would be an affront—a denial—of the freedom of families and individuals to decide for themselves how they will approach a family problem.

Don’t Obey Unlawful Orders

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Six Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have published on X a political ad calling on senior military and intelligence officers to disobey unlawful orders. They’re also doing this as though it’s a new concept. They know, full well, though, that obeying unlawful orders has been illegal for decades, if not centuries, and made most famously plain during the Nuremberg trials.

Those six are Senators Elissa Slotkin (D, MI) and Mark Kelly (D, AZ) and Congressmen Jason Crow (D, CO), Maggie Goodlander (D, NH), Chris Deluzio (D, PA), and Chrissy Houlahan (D, PA).

Kelly was challenged on X repeatedly to name the allegedly illegal order(s); he repeatedly refused to do so. Instead, he cowered behind his combat experience and having been “shot at” along with his breathtakingly arrogant claim that he knew what insurrection was, even if his challenger did not.

Congressman Jason Crow was repeatedly asked by Martha MacCallum on her show to name the law(s) that were violated. He repeatedly refused to do so, cowering instead behind cynical evasion and Alinsky-esque attempts to change the subject.

None of the others were willing to identify the order(s) they considered illegal, and they were similarly unwilling to identify the statute(s) or constitutional clause(s) those allegedly illegal orders violated. All they have is this deliberately unsubstantiated, cynical, dishonest conspiracy theory that they’re proselytizing as loudly as they can.

This is, sadly, and dangerously, all too typical of Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. They lost an election they thought was all theirs. They have no policies they believe in enough to put on the table and debate the merits of. Now, these six, cowering behind their intelligence and military service, are spewing the nonsense of smear.

That’s all Party has. That’s what makes it so dangerous.