Tag Archives: law

California’s Disdain for our 2nd Amendment

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The 9th Circuit(!) has ruled that California’s demand for background checks (and associated delays in obtaining) as a precondition for citizens of that State buying ammunition is unconstitutional.

Naturally, California’s Progressive-Democrat Governor, Gavin Newsom, is up in arms over that ruling:

Strong gun laws save lives—and today’s decision is a slap in the face to the progress California has made in recent years to keep its communities safer from gun violence. Californians voted to require background checks on ammunition and their voices should matter.

It’s a well-deserved slap in the face, though; in response to Newsom’s administration’s and State legislature’s own slap in the face of American citizens. What Newsom and his fellow Party syndicate members carefully ignore is that we already have a strong gun law—the strongest—in the form of our 2nd Amendment. Writing for the 9th Circuit, Circuit Judge Sandra Ikuta tacitly reminded Newsom, et al., of this:

By subjecting Californians to background checks for all ammunition purchases, California’s ammunition background check regime infringes on the fundamental right to keep and bear arms[.]

She expanded on that [citations omitted]:

…a person who wants to keep an operable firearm must necessarily acquire ammunition. Because the right to keep and bear arms includes the right to keep operable arms, rules on ammunition acquisition implicate the plain text of the Second Amendment if they meaningfully constrain the right to keep operable arms.
We conclude that California’s ammunition background check meaningfully constrains the right to keep operable arms.

The 9th‘s ruling was on Rhode v Bonta, and it can be read here.

Jurisdiction

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A commenter on an earlier post suggested I define “jurisdiction.” Herewith.

Our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution define and create our social compact as a nation whose people are sovereign and whose government men and women work for us by our consent (in government’s existence) and by election (of those men and women actually serving*).

Johnson’s Dictionary, 4th ed, contemporaneous with the writing and ratification of our Constitution:

JURISDICTION.
1. Legal authority; extent of power.
2. District to which any authority extends.

Modern American dictionaries, viz., Merriam-Webster Online, define jurisdiction:

Jurisdiction
1: the power, right, or authority to interpret and apply the law a matter that falls within the court’s jurisdiction
2a: the authority of a sovereign power to govern or legislate
b: the power or right to exercise authority: control
3: the limits or territory within which authority may be exercised

The definition of jurisdiction as our Founders understood it remains the same as it is understood today. (Aside: that only keeps things convenient. Were the definition materially changed today, our Constitution still would have to be understood and applied in those original terms; an Amendment would be needed, not judicial decree, to bring that definition forward to today.)

Our government’s jurisdiction, thus, does not extend beyond the limits of our nation’s social compact.

Our social compact (any social compact) isn’t only geographically defined, however. It’s also, and primarily, a two-way commitment, a mutual agreement to protect the compact’s members and the members’ agreement to submit to and obey the rules associated with that agreement.

Hence, my claim in that earlier post: illegal aliens, by entering our nation illegally and remaining illegally present, are holding themselves outside the tenets of our social compact. By holding themselves outside our social compact, they are holding themselves beyond the reach of our government’s jurisdiction. Their presence within the territorial limits of our nation only cedes control via raw power to our government.

*Unelected bureaucrats in government, from Congressional and Executive Branch staffers through the men and women in civil service are selected and hired—at bottom—by those elected representatives.

Still Another Reason

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This time, another reason to eliminate the Federal government’s Star Chamber that is its FISA Court. The reason is in the lede:

The nation’s spy court has quietly approved a Justice Department request to review information tied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants that targeted former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as FBI Director Kash Patel seeks to hand over more Russiagate evidence to Congress.

The timeline of this…approval:

  • 6 June: DoJ filed its request with the FISA court
  • 17 June: FISA approved the request
  • 7 July: FISA made its approval public

That’s entirely too slow. DoJ—and the FBI—had their own copies of what they’d filed with FISA (didn’t they?); they had their own approval authority for the documents they owned. Aside from that, FISA has had its own copies of those filings, along with records of its deliberations of the related matters being considered with those filings for all these years. The judges on that court must have known that this day would come; of course, responsible and rational persons that they are, they’d already worked out at least the outlines of how they would respond. Taking 11 days to review that outline and to act on it is sloth. Taking an additional three weeks to make public their decision is irresponsible secrecy for the sake of secrecy.

That’s secondary, though. Coming ahead of that, and so obviating any need to consider any of that, is this: this court, as long as it’s going to operate entirely in secret, should have no say about the progress of an FBI or a DoJ investigation or about those agencies’ dispositions of materials associated with those investigations. To the extent our courts should be involved in such decisions, that should be the role, solely, of our public Article III courts, each of which is fully capable of handling classified information.

Another Thought on Birthright Citizenship

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I start from two premises. One is the clear distinction in meaning between subject to the jurisdiction and subject to the power of. I continue with the premise that illegal aliens, who have entered our country illegally and remain here illegally, are subject only to the power of our government.

Our government sits at the head of our social compact. More to the point, our government has exactly zero jurisdiction beyond the limits of our social compact; this is well understood both in our domestic law and in international law. Illegal aliens have illegally entered our nation, and they continue to stay without turning themselves to positively seek to get themselves right with our laws, especially with that subset that is our immigration laws. By their own conscious behavior, they are holding themselves outside of our social compact where our government has no jurisdiction, only raw power.

Within or without our social compact is a distinction that applies also to pregnant women who enter our nation, even legally, solely to have their babies on American soil, and who then depart for their home country. These women, never having given up their home country’s jurisdiction, have never submitted themselves to our jurisdiction. Indeed, by their intention of returning to their home country as soon as they’re able after birth, these women have never intended to submit themselves to our government’s jurisdiction. These women have held themselves outside our social compact for the duration of their stay here.

From that, babies born to illegal aliens and to birth-tourist mothers are not—cannot—be citizens of our United States: they’ve been born outside our government’s jurisdiction.

Looking at this from another direction, here is the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment:

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 form of the clause’s logical construction is this: If A AND B, THEN C. Thus: If born or naturalized AND subject to our jurisdiction, THEN citizen.

Both A and B must be true for C to be true; that’s the meaning of the AND connector. Since the babies born to illegal aliens or to birth-tourist mothers do not meet the second condition, they cannot reach the THEN outcome.

There is a counterargument, and that one centers on the early 17th century British origins of the concept of citizenship by dint of place of birth, with further references to American court decisions on the matter prior to the 1868 ratification of our 14th Amendment. This argument also makes reference to long-standing policy as well as to that legal matter. The counterargument, though, fails for a number of reasons.

Last reason first: ‘long-standing policy” is irrelevant. Policy isn’t binding on anything outside the administrations that choose to maintain it; policy is not statute, it is too easily changed solely extra-legislatively, and it can be eliminated altogether by any subsequent administration.

British law and British legal history have value only for the logic and ideas contained in their derivation; they have nothing to contribute in terms of legally binding matters. They have no jurisdiction inside the United States; indeed, they have no jurisdiction outside the bounds of Great Britain. They’re wholly irrelevant.

Similarly, those American court rulings that predate ratification of the 14th Amendment are wholly irrelevant. With that ratification, those rulings’ vague descriptions of what an American citizen was were rendered entirely without effect by the clear definition of “citizen” that the 14th Amendment created and codified.

Even the counterargument’s references to court rulings subsequent to Amendment’s ratification are irrelevant: they merely expand on those prior irrelevancies; not affecting the Amendment’s dispositive definition, they do not render those decisions current and within the Amendment’s bounds.

Disingenuousness of the Abortion Industry

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Planned Parenthood is the industry’s canonical example. This organization has announced that it is going to sue the Trump administration over cuts in funds to it that are contained in the just-passed reconciliation bill.

The provisions contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act prohibits abortion providers from receiving Medicaid funding for up to one year for any other reproductive health services they may provide.

Those “other reproductive health services” are primarily related to Planned Parenthood’s and other abortion centers’ abortion activities. Access to any government funding for these is immoral and should be prevented.

Planned Parenthood’s legal beefs, though, are two: one is Planned Parenthood President Alexis McGill Johnson’s statement:

Everyone deserves access to high-quality, affordable health care.

This is absolutely true (just not by government issue, but that’s a different story), and that care can be provided by a host of facilities, government, NGO, and private. However, abortion is not health care, it’s strictly a matter of killing not yet born babies.

Planned Parenthood’s other beef is this:

Planned Parenthood said the provision puts nearly 200 centers across 24 states at risk of closure and that 90% of those closures would occur in states where abortion is still legal.

That makes explicit that Planned Parenthood puts abortion at the center of what they claim is health care. Aside from that, it’s an irrelevant beef, as is the sub-beef of those business’ locations. No business model creates a government obligation to fund it. If Planned Parenthood, or those centers, wherever they are, want to continue operating, they should change their business models to focus on actual health care provision.

The beefs are wholly irrelevant in another way: government has no obligation to send taxpayer money to any entity, whether NGO or private enterprise.

Even more cynical and disingenuous aspect of this is that nowhere in any abortion providers’ beefs about lack of government funding is there even the smallest syllable of concern for the welfare of the baby being killed by an abortion.