Tag Archives: politics

A Couple of Election Law Thoughts

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I have some, on occasion, and this is one of those occasions. The Supreme Court is considering taking up a case regarding whether a State may (not can) count absentee ballots received after voting day. The particular case involves Louisiana’s law that allows such ballots to be counted if received within five days after voting day; the 5th Circuit court said nope, absentee ballots must be received by voting day to be countable.

Those defending the law appealed to the Supremes, making this argument among others:

Adopting that ruling would require scrapping election laws in about 30 states, lawyers for Mississippi told the court.
“The decision below thus invites nationwide litigation against laws in most States—risking chaos in the next federal elections, particularly given the tendency of election law claims to spur last-minute lawsuits,” they said.

That a Supreme Court ruling upholding the appellate court (the only correct ruling IMNSHO) would invalidate election laws broadly is wholly irrelevant. All that matters here is what our Constitution requires and what statutes that are themselves within the bounds of our Constitution say. The convenience of government is distinctly unimportant.

The second beef, that concern about last-minute lawsuits filed just before an election, is legitimate, but it’s easily handled. States can enact laws (so can the Federal government under its Article I, Section 4 authority) that bar courts hearing lawsuits occurring within [six months] of an election from issuing injunctions or temporary restraining orders that alter the status quo and that bar court rulings that are handed down within those same [six months] from having effect until after the next occurring election.

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.

They Won’t Sign

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The lede has it.

Major media outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN have said they won’t agree to a new Defense Department policy restricting journalists’ communication with military sources.
Those who don’t sign on to the new policy must forfeit their Pentagon press badges and won’t be issued new ones.

Among the restrictions being applied by DoD internally is

military personnel need approval before sharing information with the media, even if it isn’t classified. It says members of the media should be aware that agency “personnel may face adverse consequences for unauthorized disclosures.”

That should always have been the case. For far too long, there has been inconsistent, even contradictory, messaging coming out of DoD as a result of leaks, to say nothing of security failures in too many of those leaks. The journalism guild, of course, is spilling its collective ink pots over this.

The policy drew rebukes from press-rights organizations, which have highlighted the role journalists have played in revealing wasteful spending, conflicts of interest and misconduct.

This is self-serving and disingenuous. Pressmen should go back to doing original reporting instead of repeating each other’s rumors and printing leaked “information.” Pressmen surely understand—as the rest of us do—that leaks and their leakers are unreliable sources, and pressmen should rely instead on whistleblowers and other sources with the integrity of speaking on the record.

Their disingenuousness extends: the news outlets aren’t even being required to signify their agreement with the policy limiting DoD personnel’s interactions with the press; their signatures would merely indicate their understanding of the policy and the implications for DoD personnel.

News outlets don’t have an intrinsic right to wander the halls and poke into rooms in the Pentagon, nor do they have any need to do so, accosting any DoD personnel they happen on. Not even their self-proclaimed specialness gives them that.

It’s entirely appropriate, since the outlets won’t sign, to confine their writers to the various services’ public affairs offices, and it’s entirely appropriate to require all DoD personnel, military and civilian, who are encountered by a news writer, to refer those pressmen to the PAO and to refuse further interaction with the pressmen.

There are far too many leaks from government agencies, and those from DoD can have particularly dangerous national security implications. There are, also, far too many pressmen who don’t care a fig about national security, only about their personal bylines and notoriety.

Invitations

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Ex-Russian President and current Russian Security Council Deputy Chair Dmitry Medvedev now is making not so veiled threats of nuclear war and of assassination of our President. On the matter of supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk cruise missiles, weapons with an 1,800 mile reach, he said,

that “could end badly for everyone…most of all, for Trump himself,” according to a Google translation of his Russian-language Telegram post.
“It’s been said a hundred times, in a manner understandable even to the star-spangled man, that it’s impossible to distinguish a nuclear Tomahawk missile from a conventional one in flight[.]”

Is Medvedev inviting a nuclear response every time the Russians fire a nuclear capable ballistic missile at Ukraine, every time one (or more) of their nuclear capable bombers launches and flies headlong at Ukraine before launching its nuclear capable cruise missiles, every time one (or more) of its nuclear capable fighter-bomber aircraft invade Baltic State airspace?

Is he threatening the murder of President Donald Trump (R)?

Of course not on the former. The barbarian underboss is simply demonstrating Russian dishonesty. On the latter? Russia does have a history of murdering politicians they don’t like, including murdering them on foreign soil.

Medvedev’s threats, though, are reason enough to double up on the number of Tomahawks originally under discussion, and to authorize their transfer with no strings attached regarding Ukraine’s target lists for them.

A Misconception

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The headline and subheadline say it all.

Funding Freeze Threatens an Economic Lifeline in Chicago
Washington’s move halts plan to extend a train line into a depressed pocket of the city

Except that Washington’s move needn’t halt anything. Chicago could reallocate its spending priorities and fund the extension itself.

There’s no political will to do so, though; too many politicians in the city are addicted to Federal dollars, and apart from that, they benefit personally politically from bringing in the pork rather than spending city money.

Too, relying on Federal dollars—the taxes paid in by citizens from elsewhere in the State and especially by citizens of other States—lets city politicians avoid the drudgery of worrying about, and doing something about, the costs of such a project. And that benefits the politicians’ union employers donors.

A major factor in those costs is labor, which is driven by Federal construction dollar strings mandating union wage rates whether the builders are union shops or not. Allowing non-union wages would greatly reduce the cost of any construction project, including this train line extension.

One small example of the city officials’ shortsightedness on the revenue side is this from Wendy Jones, who runs a nonprofit that mentors young men:

The Red Line would have been a huge improvement, and it probably would have increased the property value here[.]

That increase in property value would have increased property tax revenues for the city. There would be sequelae, too, were the city managers ever to get serious about solving its crime problem: an influx of businesses, with attendant jobs, into the area fed by the train line extension, with an associated increase in income and business tax revenue to the city.

All of that would be in addition to all the construction jobs that building the extension would entail, and would still be available were the city to spend its own money on the construction.

As a bonus, the city spending its own money on the project would reduce the city’s dependency on the Federal government and reduce the latter’s leverage over the former.

That it’s a widespread and longstanding misconception that halting Federal construction funds transfers must perforce halt construction projects only demonstrates the knee-jerk response to and dependency on Federal funding that too many on both sides—politicians and citizens—have settled into.

The Federal government isn’t the only level of governing where spending discipline and reallocations are necessary.