Tag Archives: responsibilities

Right Answer, Wrong Reason

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In 2023, Texas enacted its Senate Bill 4, which

makes illegal entry into Texas a state crime. It gives Texas law enforcement the authority to return illegal foreign nationals to a port of entry and/or arrest them for unlawful entry, among other provisions.

Governor Greg Abbott (R) justified the law on the basis of the Biden administration’s open borders policy which required Texas to act on its national Constitution Art I, Sect 10 obligation to resist the functional invasion that resulted. Progressive groups promptly sued.

Last Friday, the 5th Circuit upheld that law. That was the correct answer, but the court did it for the wrong reason, so the critical underlying question remains unaddressed.

On Friday, the court issued a 12-page ruling solely on procedural grounds, arguing the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to sue. It didn’t address the merits of the claims.

This ruling, avoiding as it does the constitutionally important question that was raised by the suit, is badly flawed. That question is this: does a State have the right (much less the obligation) to enforce its own border with another country when it believes the Federal government is not enforcing that same border, and material harm to the State and to its citizens result?

Chief Justice John Mashalll writing for the Court in 1803’s Marbury v Madison, made all judges’ obligations crystalline:

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.

To say what the law is, to speak up, not to avoid that duty by deflecting on procedural grounds.

That’s not to say judges should never consider questions of standing or other procedure; that way lies tons of fee-seekers bringing cases without regard to necessary procedure. As the 5th Circuit wrote,

Federal courts have a solemn responsibility to apply neutral principles, such as standing, to the cases that come before them and must resist the temptation to confer Article III standing any time an advocacy group or political subdivision challenges a law it passionately dislikes.

But the province and duty of judges does require them to say what the law is and to act on that saying. Doing so need not automatically confer Article III standing for every case concerning a passionately disliked issue. The Supreme Court has begun applying the Major Questions Doctrine to cases involving the limits of Executive Branch power vs the Legislative Branch’s. The Court needs to apply a similar Major Controversies Doctrine to its decisions regarding whether a case’s core question is more or less important than the specifics of procedure in that case.

The 5th Circuit’s ruling can be read here.

Is This Believable?

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Yale has completed a report based on self-criticism that evaluates the school’s adherence to academic seriousness.

After a useful summary of the problems, the report offers 20 recommendations that run from the obvious (“lead by example”) to the challenging (“grade like we mean it”). On grading, the report recommends a new mean policy of 3.0 from the current norm of nearly all A grades. Older readers will think a standard of 2.0 ought to be the real mean, but 3.0 is progress.
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Most encouraging is a full-throated endorsement of free inquiry and “enhancing open and critical debate on campus.” It urges each department, starting in 2026-27, to examine its “intellectual and methodological commitments” as well as the “range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty” and “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.”

No, this isn’t believable without corroboration. Phishing efforts have grown markedly in their skill and imitation of the real enterprises they’re imitating and from which they’re redirecting their victims’ responses to their own nefarious sites. This Yale report seems nothing more than a similarly skillfully done misdirection effort. As the WSJ noted toward the end of the piece,

the reforms will have to be implemented by the same people who had no problem with university failings until they began to cost dollars and public support.

Three corroborations must occur before Yale can be taken seriously. In the near term, those same people who had no problem with university failings must be replaced in toto by others actually committed to reforming, with those same people being removed from all connection, however remote, to the school. In the intermediate term and longer, those reforms must be put in place, adhered to, and strictly and draconianly enforced. In the longer term, the self-evaluation must be repeated after one year to evaluate success and failure and to determine further reforms that are necessary along with corrective action regarding those failures.

“The lady should always walk on the inside.”

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Like nearly all blanket, all-encompassing rules, this one is just dumba*. A letter writer recounted an anecdote from early in his relationship with his wife.

My wife and I were walking down 5th Ave. in Manhattan with her on the outside closer to the street while I was on the inside…. We passed a man who promptly chastised me: “The lady should always walk on the inside.”

The letter writer meekly complied, and he was wrong to do so; although, his error was not in his timidity in the face of the officious, self-important accoster.

When my wife and I go for our walks, significant parts of the walks are along a greenbelt frequented by bobcats and, occasionally, coyotes. The bobcats mostly leave humans alone, though they want watching with the same caution with which they watch us. Coyotes, though, are much more aggressive and often attack the humans they encounter.

When we’re along those greenbelts, we cross, and my wife walks on the outside, the street side, while I switch to the inside, the side toward the danger. That danger is small, but it’s larger than the danger from the street.

The letter writer should have similarly assessed the relative dangers and adjusted their walking sides accordingly. In an earlier time, the lady generally walked on the gentleman’s left so he could keep his sword hand free in order to draw promptly against a brigand. That sort of danger obtains today, also, even if it isn’t a sword that the gentleman, or the lady, is carrying.

Saudis Want Negotiations

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Saudia Arabia is worried that the Houthis, a terrorist client of Iran, will close the Bab al-Mandeb and thereby block Saudi oil shipments from leaving the southern end of the Red Sea enroute to India, Asia, and points east. They fear an Iranian push on the Houthis in response to President Donald Trump’s (R) move to block the Strait of Hormuz against Iranian oil leaving, ships entering with a view to loading up on Iranian oil, and ships exiting that have paid the Iranian protection money.

Never mind that ships leaving with non-Iranian oil or other cargo—including the Saudis’ oil—and that have not paid the protection vig are free of the Trumpian blockade.

Against all that, the Saudis want Trump to go back to negotiating with the Iranian terrorists. Negotiate, the Saudis want, anything, anything to keep the Bab al-Mandeb open. Please.

No. Trump’s blockade must stay in place, and the destruction of the IRGC’s small boat fleet must resume forthwith, along with the resumed destruction of Iranian missiles and rockets and their launchers, along with the destruction of Iran’s drone inventory, launchers, and ability to manufacture any weapons of any type. It’s not possible to have meaningful negotiations with terrorists.

If the Saudis really are that married to negotiations and attendant terrorist accommodations, let them reach their own accommodation with the Houthi terrorists. Alternatively, the Saudis could get serious about fighting and destroying the Houthis themselves in place of their years of desultory, perfunctory potshots at the occasional Houthi enclave.

Misreading

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In his letter in The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, the Reverand Carmen Mele decried the deaths of more than 100 children at an Iranian school that occurred as a result of our country’s armed forces‘ bombing as a violation of just war principles.

This is a misreading of the situation. What the highly intelligent and learned man of the cloth chose to omit is that the school was adjacent to the military target, an adjacency that the Iranian regime deliberately chose in an effort to use those children as shields for its military, a common practice by terrorists.

The deaths of those children are deeply regrettable, but the responsibility for those deaths lies on the backs of those terrorists who so badly abused those children. This is well understood by any serious student of just war concepts.