Tag Archives: law

Muddled Editor “Thinking”

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This time, by the August Ones of The Wall Street Journal‘s board of editors. They’re upset because Attorney General Pam Bondi openly decried “hate speech,” and then said that when that speech clearly crosses a line, it becomes criminally actionable. Their lede:

Is a basic understanding of the First Amendment too much to expect from the nation’s Attorney General?

What Bondi said that drew their…attention:

There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place—especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.

Targeting someone with hate speech isn’t general hate speech; it’s making threats, and it’s incitement to violence, and that is illegal.

Bondi went on the next day, as…paraphrased without context by the editors:

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.” But then she incoherently mixed in everything from “violent rhetoric,” to doxxing, to calling a SWAT team to the home of a Member of Congress.

Those all are forms of threats of violence or of actual violence. The only incoherence is in the imaginations of the editors.

And this from the editors:

The AG also didn’t recant her statement on Monday that the Justice Department might “prosecute” Office Depot or its ex-employee who refused to print a Kirk vigil poster.

Nor is there any reason to. What the editors omitted from this particular excerpt is that DoJ might prosecute on illegal discrimination grounds, not on speech grounds.

Apparently, basic reading/listening comprehension is too much to expect from opinion writers.

Willful Ignorance

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Or preferring her Newspeak Dictionary definitions over those in actual American English dictionaries.

That’s Arizona Progressive-Democrat Representative Yassamin Ansari’s view. In response to the hue and cry over her terming illegal aliens members of her constituency, she had this:

So, I didn’t realize this was such a controversy until the right-wing media started attacking me for using the word, so I Googled the word constituent. The definition of constituent is somebody who is part of a community, doesn’t matter what their legal status is,

She Googled for the definition of “constituent.” She could have consulted an actual dictionary of the American English language, but she chose not to. ‘Course, if she had, she would have seen her narrative collapse around her. This is what Merriam-Webster, for instance, has to say about the American English meaning of the term:

constituent
1 : a member of a constituency
pledged to help her elderly constituents

Following that first and thus primary definition over to constituency, we get this first and primary definition:

constituency
1 a : a body of citizens entitled to elect a representative (as to a legislative or executive position)
the governor’s liberal constituency

Citizens. Not illegal aliens. Even the second part of that first definition lends no support for Ansari’s Newspeak definition:

b : the residents in an electoral district
The senator’s constituency includes a large minority population.

Since illegal aliens are not legally resident, they are outside even the residents of an electoral district.

Inconvenient facts are, to a Party member, inconvenient.

Rights from Men, Not from God

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That’s the view of Virginia’s Progressive-Democrat Senator Tim Kaine.

The notion that rights don’t come from laws and don’t come from the government, but come from the Creator—that’s what the Iranian government believes. It’s a theocratic regime that bases its rule on Sharia law and targets Sunnis, Bahá’ís, Jews, Christians and other religious minorities. And they do it because they believe that they understand what natural rights are from their Creator. So the statement that our rights do not come from our laws or our governments is extremely troubling.

Kaine is deliberately distorting (because I don’t believe so intelligent a man doesn’t know better the logic he’s tacitly using) the situation: he claims that because others make similar claims, they must all be equally false. Analogies, as Kaine is using here, can be useful in clarifying phenomena, but they also can be useful, as Kaine is doing here, to obfuscate and to seem to disprove phenomena (without any capability to prove or disprove anything).

Kaine chooses to ignore the differences between a culture, one the one hand, in which its citizens believe fundamental rights come from our Creator and that government is subordinate to the sovereign people. In our culture, our laws are intended to defend and implement those fundamental rights, not to create them.

That’s in contrast with nations (not necessarily the cultures of those nations) whose governing men and women insist that government is sovereign and its people subordinate and whose governing men and women speak words of rights coming from God but who appoint themselves as God’s interpreter and then define those rights for themselves, adjusting them from time to time at need to maintain their power.

In Kaine’s view, our fundamental rights would come from men like Kaine, who Knows Better and would define our rights in accordance with his superior knowledge, and women like Kamala Harris, whose handed-down rights would be salads of words, or Nancy Pelosi, whose handed-down rights would be State Secrets, allowing us to know what is in them only after she chooses to publish them.

In Kaine’s world, too, “rights” would evolve as the men and women in power change over time, and that would evolve as the men and women in power change their minds over time while they’re in power. Because they are rights created by men and women, they cannot be fundamental, intrinsic in our being. They are merely political rights, politically granted and politically taken away as the men and women in power deem fit.

This is entirely consistent with the Progressive-Democratic Party’s goal of fundamentally transforming our nation (Barack Obama) and of fundamentally changing our economy (Joe Biden). This is the risk we face in 2026, 2028, and subsequent elections.

H/t ralflongwalker

A Misunderstanding

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This one, a Wall Street Journal editorial centered on a coerced unionization of ride share companies Uber and Lyft. The editors got their misunderstanding in early, via their lede:

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday announced a “deal” with ride-share companies Uber and Lyft that they couldn’t refuse. Democrats in Sacramento will reduce auto insurance coverage mandates that are driving runaway litigation in return for the companies letting drivers collectively bargain.

Yes, they could have refused the deal. The California government foisted onto them a supremely ugly choice, but it was no less a freely taken choice for all its ugliness. The companies’ managers were just too timid to resist, too timid to leave the State altogether, as their own powerful alternative to Sacramento’s demand.

There’s no reason for any business, not just Uber and Lyft, to suffer the politically imposed costs of operating in California. Nothing is stopping businesses from leaving other than the timidity of their managers.

I alluded to it just above: the cost of doing business in California isn’t just fiscal. It’s political, too, reducing as that cost does, a company’s ability to manage its own business affairs in accordance with its own free market imperatives.

A Random Question

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I have one, triggered by a settlement between the Federal DoJ and Kentucky regarding the latter’s granting of in-state college/university tuition rates to illegal aliens living in the State. The settlement has Kentucky rescinding that grant.

Thus:

The first clause of the first article of the 14th Amendment says this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The second sentence of that clause says this in pertinent part:

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

What does this suggest about a State’s colleges’ and universities’ use of resident—citizen of the State and of these United States—vs non-resident—but still citizen of these United States—tuition?