Tag Archives: politics

Redrawing Districts

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The Supreme Court is hearing a case, Merrill v Milligan, that concerns whether Congressional districts will be drawn in accordance with census outcomes concerning the distribution of American citizens in a State, or whether they will (continue to) be drawn to favor race in a State.

Alabama, the State in question in Merrill, redrew its Congressional districts as a result of the 2020 census outcome and kept substantially the same districts with substantially the same population distributions as the prior district map, making tweaks at district boundaries to account for minor population moves. The plaintiffs in the case, though,

argue the map should be redrawn so that Alabama has two majority-Black districts instead of just one….

Alabama, on the other hand, is arguing

that should the lawsuit prevail, the state will be forced into an unconstitutional practice of prioritizing race in creating election rules….

Alabama also would be forced to violate Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which explicitly bars (re)districting on the basis of race. There is only one legitimately correct outcome to this case, and it favors Alabama. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has the right of it, having written in other venues that Section 2 of the VRA, the center of the present case, has

involved the federal courts, and indeed the Nation, in the enterprise of systematically dividing the country into electoral districts along racial lines—an enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands that amounts, in truth, to nothing short of a system of political apartheid.

Absolutely. Under law, all American citizens are equal. All American voters are the same: we’re Americans. There are no white Americans and black Americans and Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans—under law there are only American Americans.

Requiring us to be set apart by race in our interactions with our government is nothing but racism written into our laws. And that’s contrary to our Constitution, which is supreme over Congressional statutes like the VRA and its Section 2. Here’s the relevant clause of our 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting…the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Voting is at the core of assembly, and it’s at the center of redressing our grievances with Government: it’s where we come together to fire those Government persons with whom we are most dissatisfied and to hire replacements for them.

It’s time for the Court to rule, decisively, in favor of drawing Congressional district boundaries according to the distribution of American voters, and to stop drawing them to favor one group of Americans while disfavoring other groups of Americans.

Based on What Evidence?

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Acting Archivist of the United States Debra Steidel Wall claims the National Archives hasn’t received all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration. She wrote this to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D, NY) in all seriousness:

While there is no easy way to establish absolute accountability, we do know that we do not have custody of everything we should[.]

And

Specifically, Mr. Ferriero informed you in his February 18, 2022, letter that NARA [National Archives & Records Administration] has identified that some White House staff conducted official business using non-official electronic messaging accounts that were not copied or forwarded into their official electronic messaging accounts, as required by section 2209 of the PRA [Presidential Records Act]. NARA has been able to obtain such records from a number of former officials and will continue to pursue the return of similar types of Presidential records from former officials.

Since Wall has succeeded in tracking down “missing” records of messaging accounts by tracking down the messages’ recipients, on what basis does she claim there are further such accounts—or is she simply…assuming?

In the end, if she doesn’t know, by her own statement, how does she know? Or is Wall just another Party acolyte making politically convenient allegations without any substantiation at all?

Wall’s letter can be read here.

It’s a Start

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Congressman Andrew Clyde (R, GA) has legislation he intends to introduce that would bar

federal officials from collaborating with Big Tech to censor Americans’ voices and create some legal recourse for those harmed by free speech infringement.

Explicitly, Clyde said,

It would also give an opportunity for those people who have been harmed by it to take legal action[.]

It’s a promising start, but I suggest a couple of fillips. One is to explicitly bar the agencies and departments of which those officials are a part from spending any money on the collaboration.

The other is to hold the agency and department heads and deputy heads personally liable for violating this law, regardless of who in their organization actually did the deed(s): these two are the MFWICs, and nothing goes on in their organization without their permission, if only because these two create the culture within which the misbehavior occurs and/or have the lax enforcement processes that let this sort of misbehavior go “unnoticed.”

In addition to that, and as a means of giving teeth to the responsibility deeming, the legislation should explicitly remove sovereign immunity and qualified immunity as defenses for the organization heads and deputy heads and the person(s) who actually did the deed.

Clyde needs to follow through on this, with the added fillips, as soon as Republicans gain majorities in both houses of Congress (whenever that happens), get the bill passed, and get it signed into law—or force President Joe Biden (D) to veto it, thereby demonstrating Progressive-Democrats’ continued insistence on government censorship of us citizens’ speech.

“Ukraine Needs More Security Guarantees”

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That’s the position of The Wall Street Journal‘s headline writer and of Andriy Yermak and Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who opined as much in their Thursday op-ed. They were actually serious, too. The position is, though, to use the technical term, a bunch of bull.

They demonstrate the foolishness of their position in their lede:

When Ukraine’s army is given the weapons it needs, it defeats Russia on the battlefield. That is the lesson the world learned as it watched Ukrainian forces quickly retake the Kharkiv region this month. Since the beginning of September, Ukrainian forces have liberated more than 2,300 square miles of territory in the south and east of the country.

However.

They want to build on this success with an international “guarantee:” a Kyiv Security Compact between Ukraine and its partners. Then they muddle their position further by insisting (correctly so, here) that Ukraine should be given modern and effective air-defense and antimissile systems—in addition, I say, to much more heavy weapons of the type currently being supplied in dribs and drabs, and with the addition of tanks and other armor.

Ukraine has already been the victim of international guarantees. The Budapest Memoranda guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity if they gave up the nuclear weapons then held by the nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine agreed. Not too long later, Russia occupied and partitioned away Crimea and seized and occupied a significant fraction of the Ukrainian portion of the Donbas.

The guarantors’ response? Bleatings, finger-waggings, and the empty promises of the Minsk Protocols. These were followed by the barbarian’s naked invasion of Ukraine and the atrocities inflicted on Ukrainian women, children, and men, both civilian and soldier; those atrocities continue apace today. The Minsk guarantors’ response here? Russia was one of those guarantors…. The others responded by slow-walking and actively withholding weapons from Ukraine as the barbarian’s pre-invasion build-up proceeded in Belorussia and across the border in Russia near Belgorod.

When the barbarian sent in its invasion, the West’s guarantors continued to slow-walk serious weapons transfers until only lately. These worthies still won’t transfer tanks and other armor, led by Germany, which government men insist that Ukrainians—Slavs all—are just too stupid to be able learn how to operate a German tank.

No. No empty, misleading, won’t-be-enforced guarantees.

What Ukraine needs are the weapons it needs, but the full suite of them according to Ukraine’s articulation, not the Know Betters of the timid West. The barbarian’s invasion must be utterly crushed and the barbarian forced to tear up its roads and railroads some considerable distance into Russia from the Ukrainian border, with the -road beds and the flatter terrain between sown with the aptly named Russian olive. The horde must not be left able to invade again.

Rasmussen, especially, should know better. He was NATO’s Secretary General from 2009 to 2014. So should Yermak, come to that; he’s the sitting head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and he’s living through the outcome of the empty words of those prior “guarantees.”

A Good Move

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Finally.

The Biden administration has granted a waiver to the Jones Act so American shippers can ship diesel fuel directly from American refiners to Puerto Rico, which desperately needs the fuel—still—after Fiona ran over it.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement that the administration granted the “temporary and targeted” waiver to “ensure that the people of Puerto Rico have sufficient diesel to run generators needed for electricity and the functioning critical facilities as they recover from Hurricane Fiona.”

Finally, because the Biden administration should have granted this waiver preemptively a month ago, if not sooner: they knew the hurricane was going to do serious damage to the territory—which still hasn’t fully recovered from the prior hurricane—whether or not this hurricane ran over the island. Worse, this administration had been sitting on a request for the waiver since 20 September, when BP asked for it for just this reason.

It would be even better if President Joe Biden (D) granted a broader and longer-lasting waiver so New England States could get the natural gas, oil, diesel fuel, gasoline, and so on that they so desperately need and for which they must pay especially exorbitant prices to foreign entities to get.

New England also could get these energies overland, but for the Progressive-Democratic regimes running New York. Those regimes have blocked development of a natural gas pipeline from Pennsylvania into New England that must transit New York, and they have block development of that part of the Marcellus Formation that lies under New York—which obstruction inflates energy costs not only for New England’s citizens, but for all the rest of us citizens, as well.