Tag Archives: law

There’s More To It Than Just Race

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opined recently on race-based gerrymandering. Their second paragraph was this:

In recent years, the Justices have considered challenges to maps in Texas, South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana. They punted last term on deciding the Louisiana case (Louisiana v Callais) that they will reconsider Wednesday. They will also take up the question of whether the intentional creation of majority-minority districts violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and the Fifteenth Amendment’s prohibition against abridging a citizen’s right to vote based on race. The right answer is yes.

The editors are absolutely right on this.

They missed a Critical Item point, though, as they closed with this:

The Justices would do the country and themselves a favor by correcting the Gingles error and declaring that the Constitution forbids race-based map-making. As the Chief wrote in a 2006 redistricting opinion, “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

Here’s the Constitution on citizen representation in our Federal government.

Article I, Section 2:

The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

14th Amendment, Article 1:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

14th Amendment, Article 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.

Our Constitution also forbids political party-based (faction-based in the Founders’ terms) map-making. Our Constitution also takes clear precedence over statutes, including 1965’s Voting Rights Act requiring racial gerrymanders or putative statutes allowing gerrymandering by political party.

What our Constitution does require, and all that it requires, is that Representatives’ districts have substantially equal populations of American citizens.

Full stop.

Lower Court Obstructionism

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In a legal environment in which Federal district court judges routinely block President Donald Trump’s (R) initiatives and the Supreme Court, via Trump emergency appeals, overrule those judges (and the occasional appellate court ruling) more often than those lower court judges deem appropriate, we’re seeing increasing whining from those lower court judges: they’re getting quite cross over not being listened to, all the while pretending not to understand the Supreme Court’s stays of these lower court blocks while the underlying case works its way through the legal system. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer put it,

The court, has given Trump much of what he has asked for so far, but the brevity of its orders has flummoxed judges who say there is no way to interpret them.

This is the measure of the lower courts’ defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court lifts the stays explicitly to let the underlying cases concerning the Trump initiatives proceed pending a final judgment. Often, appellate courts and district court judges, in lifting a stay or HIAing one, will say they’re doing so because they think the relevant party to the litigation is likely to prevail in the underlying case. The Supreme Court cannot say such things without prejudicing its eventual ruling in the case while it’s before those lower courts. The Court does say, often but not always, that it’s staying a case while the case wends its way. Even in those cases where the Court does not say, though, that much is clear to anyone reading with objective eyes.

These district (and appellate) judges know that.

Here’s an example of lower court defiance in the judge’s attempts at obstruction:

“Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system,” Gorsuch wrote.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts fired back at Gorsuch a couple of weeks later when she ruled the administration’s cuts to Harvard’s research funding were unconstitutional. In a footnote, Burroughs said it was “unhelpful and unnecessary” to criticize judges for defying the Supreme Court “when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”

What part of set that precedent aside is unclear to this judge? If it appears to her to be set aside, then from her perspective it is set aside. Is Burroughs really insisting she’s unable to follow a simple ruling without having in hand a long, detailed dissertation on why the ruling exists and why she must follow it? Would that ruling need to be written in words of one syllable or less? If so, she needs to find another line of work where her bosses have the time and inclination to hold her hand every step of the way.

On the other hand, it sounds like this judge is letting her disdain for Trump lead her to disrespect for and defiance of the Supreme Court. In that case, too, she needs to find another line of work, maybe with Bill Kristol.

“We cannot normalize”

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ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.

A Mistake

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DHS, according to Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, is looking at so-called “ICE tracking apps,” which allow users to share locations of immigration enforcement activity in real time. Of course they should be looking at these.

However.

According to McLaughlin, while such apps might currently be legal, they are “being used by gangs, suspected terrorists, and others to evade law enforcement and even target officers.”
She said the Department of Justice might consider whether the apps and other tracking tools amount to obstruction of justice.

That’s looking at the wrong end of the apps. It’s certainly true that, as McLaughlin also says, there has been a 1,000% increase in assaults against ICE officers.

But the way to deal with that is not to go after the apps as obstructions of justice. The proper way to deal with that is to treat the use of the apps in particular ways as obstructions of justice, backtrack those uses to their users, and then to go after the users who actually obstruct justice or who interfere with law enforcement officers in the course of their actions.

The apps themselves are merely tools. They’re agnostic in themselves; it’s the users who are…not agnostic.

Moreover, targeting the apps over their misuse also would fuel the Left’s war on our 2nd Amendment, making it easier to target our weapons over their misuse.

The Party that Invented Political Weaponization

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Progressive-Democratic Party politicians have been bleating for most of this year about the alleged weaponization of the Department of Justice. However, Party invented that weaponization with ex-President Barack Obama’s DoJ and his Attorney General Eric Holder, who swore fealty to Obama with his “I’m his wingman” oath, and then proceeded to use his AG office to go after us American citizens for daring to disagree with Obama’s pen and phone activities. Obama expanded that weaponization with his use of the IRS to go after Conservative nonprofit political organizations.

Biden expanded, while particularizing, that Party weaponization with his DoJ and its subordinate FBI categorizing concerned mothers as domestic terrorists and traditional Catholics as far-right extremists that bore watching. He and his followers engaged in explicit, politically motivated prosecutions of Trump over the riots at the Capitol and over his concerns about election integrity in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Trump has been attacking political opponents during his second term? Or is he going after wrong-doers who happen to be, also, in the other party?

Whatever those answers might be, here’s Party’s House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) promising more, explicitly more, Party weaponization with promised attacks, not just on Trump, but on anybody “doing the bidding of the Trump administration.”

One thing to understand as people who are flirting with the Trump administration, or doing the bidding of the Trump administration, or engaging in the “pay to play schemes” of the Trump administration, the statute of limitations is five years…there will still be accountability to be had. And that process begins now, but it will not be complete until there is an independent Department of Justice and certainly an independent House of Representatives in Democratic hands.

In Democratic hands—my irony meter pegged hard.

This is the level of integrity Party has on offer for 2026, 2028, and in the out years.