Tag Archives: law

Bogus

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A Wall Street Journal article on the requirements to vote under the SAVE Act had this bit of nonsense:

What happens if someone doesn’t have a passport or birth certificate?
The University of Maryland estimated in 2023 that more than 21 million American citizens don’t have ready access to a passport or other documentary evidence of citizenship. ….

Birth certificates are, most definitely, readily available, even if they’re not already in the prospective voter’s immediate possession. It’s straightforward to write to the hospital in which he was born, or the county, if the hospital is no longer operational. Even adoptees, in almost all cases, can determine their birthplace; it’s in their adoption records. It’s a bit more cumbersome when the adoption records have been sealed, but many of those can be opened by a court and the birthplace revealed. The few cases where that’s still not possible are very few, indeed, and present no excuse at all for blocking securing our elections against voter fraud. The fee for birth certificate copies is nominal.

Passports also are readily available; although the timeline for getting one is longer, and the fee is larger.

And this:

What about people who change their name when they get married or due to other circumstances?
The legislation doesn’t explicitly mention married voters or name changes, but does account for situations where a voter’s documents might not perfectly align by addressing “discrepancies in documentation.” Under the bill, an applicant would need to provide additional documentation to election officials to prove their citizenship.

In the particular case of married voters—the vast majority of whom are women—the changed name is an easily solved non-issue. It’s straightforward here, as with birth certificates, to write to the county where the marriage license/certificate was issued. Again, the fee is nominal. Most women in common law marriages haven’t changed their names. Those few occasions where they did and cannot provide documentation can follow the alternative procedures; in any event, these cases also present no excuse for holding up securing our elections.

Those who’ve changed their names “due to other circumstances” can write to the court in which they changed their name and get a copy of the documents recording the change. Here, too, the fee is nominal. The timeline for getting the copies might vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The plaint that evidence of voter fraud being scant is a red herring. It exists; this is an easy way to reduce it further. The thousands of “voters” illegally present in States’ voter rolls presents far too exploitable an opening for fraud. The fact that someone never locks his house door and hasn’t been robbed presents no rationale for continuing the foolishness.

This sort of misinformation, more likely borne of lazily repeating other news writers’ claims rather than doing actual original reporting, is yet another reason why it’s increasingly difficult to take a new writer’s natter seriously.

The FJC Has Become Unreliable

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Federal Judicial Center writes a manual that it alleges—and too many judges and Justices accept at face value—to be an unbiased source of information to help judges make unbiased assessments about scientific testimony.

It has ceased to be that. The Wall Street Journal has written before that the FJC‘s manual had a thoroughly biased chapter on so-called climate science, and that when that chapter was exposed for the disinformation section that it was, the FJC removed the chapter.

But wait—there’s more.

In the climate science chapter, footnote 77 says “discussion of attribution research has been adapted, and, in some cases, excerpted from the authors’ prior publications on this topic.” A review by American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Roger Pielke Jr noticed that one of those earlier publications was co-authored with a third person who wasn’t named as an author in the climate chapter.
Mr Pielke says the mystery author is Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center [of which the late chapter’s lead author is a Senior Fellow]. But here’s the shocker. He is also of counsel at Sher Edling, a plaintiff firm pushing climate-related lawsuits. The firm has promoted dubious legal theories, suing fossil-fuel companies for failure to warn about climate effects and public nuisance over the “cost of weather induced events.”

As nakedly biased as this chapter was, and which the FJC removed only when exposed, and whose authors defended the bias of their chapter with no correction of that disinformation, the obvious question becomes: what other nakedly biased “educational information” is included elsewhere in its manual that hasn’t been discovered yet?

The FJC, by rendering itself unreliable, has made itself irrelevant. Judges and Justices need to rely on their native intelligence and on better—or at least more and more varied—advisors.

Most of all, judges and Justices need to limit themselves to the evidence, scientific or otherwise, actually presented at trial. Outside sources of information are irrelevant and should be disregarded, even when disguised as “information” by sources like the FJC manual.

An EV Mandate Lawsuit

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California has enacted regulations restricting automobile emissions that are far stricter than national requirements. The Federal government is suing on the theory that Federal regulations, along with Federal law, preempt State regulations. If successful, this would render California’s regulations illegal and without force. The Federal government should win this suit easily, even if California drags it out and into the Supreme Court: our Constitution’s Supremacy Clause—this Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…shall be the supreme Law of the Land—is pretty dispositive.

On the other hand, no one is forcing the companies to build cars for sale in California in the first place. It’s expensive to do so, and those increased costs get spread across customers nationwide, because the car makers build all their cars to meet California’s requirements. Those car makers could both reduce their costs of production and so their prices charged the rest of their customers, if they simply built cars according to national standards and stopped selling in California. That would result in a increase in ex-California national sales that would swamp the per-car price reduction, which in turn would produce large aggregate increases in revenue, and profit.

“Nuisance” Laws

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The Supreme Court will hear this fall a case that will determine whether States can sue fossil fuel companies for damages related to global climate change.

The state and local government officials argued that fossil fuel companies are liable under nuisance laws.

As Just the News put it, though,

Typically, state nuisance laws are used in disputes with neighbors where an individual may be conducting activities that lower the value of another individual’s property. Legal experts said state nuisance laws are inappropriate to address damages from climate change.

Michael Williams, West Virginia’s Solicitor General, had this, also:

Questions that touch on global energy markets and interstate commerce and foreign policy, those are decisions that really belong in the hands of Congress or at the very least at the federal level[.]

Phil Goldberg, Manufacturers’ Accountability Project Special Counsel, on the broad variety of separate lawsuits currently in the lower courts:

This is throwing a bunch of legal spaghetti up on the wall and seeing what sticks. All these different kinds of the combinations and permutations undermine the idea that there is any kind of legal theory or finding behind these allegations that they may have.

Indeed. The climate funding industry supporters don’t have any serious case in progress or in the offing.

That brings me to related questions: what about all the plaintiffs and law firms behind these “climate” suits? Shouldn’t they be sued under those same nuisance laws for being themselves nuisances with these foolish lawsuits?

Aren’t they also vulnerable under a variety of SLAPP—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—lawsuits? After all, plaintiffs don’t actually expect to win these cases; they’re just suing to intimidate their targets with high and growing costs of defending themselves or to wear them down and force the defendants to change or outright abandon their positions. Plaintiffs here, with the complicity of lawyers, simply repeatedly sue and sue and sue until their goals are achieved.

A Pseudo-Seminarian Candidate for Texas Senator

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That would be the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Texas Senatorial candidate James Talarico. (That he was a shoo-in for the Party’s nomination is only because his opponent in Party’s primary election was the Extremist and part-time racist Jasmine Crockett.)

Here’s an example of Talarico’s own Leftist extremism:

God is nonbinary[.]

On which he expanded:

“Most Texans understand that God is beyond gender. The Apostle Paul says as much in his letter to the Galatians,” Talarico said. If Republicans have an issue with that, he added, “they should take it up with the Apostle Paul.”

This Texan non-seminarian went to the tape, or rather to the King James Version of Paul’s letter as recounted in Galatians, to see what the Apostle actually wrote. Paul opened his letter with this:

Paul, an apostle, (not of men, neither by man, but by Jesus Christ, and God the Father, who raised him from the dead;)
And all the brethren which are with me, unto the churches of Galatia:
Grace be to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ,

God the Father—not once, but twice in those three paragraphs. Not God the Binary—or Nonbinary—or God the Transgender, or God the Gender Fluid, or…. God the Father, which is the male sex and one of the two human genders and sexes.

Paul had several additional references to God in his Letter, and every time he referenced God with a qualifier, it was universally God the Father.

It’s a mystery to me whence Talarico got his “nonbinary” characteristic. Except from the swamp of his mind.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?
Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?