Tag Archives: responsibilities

Hardly Overreach

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President Donald Trump (R) has offered nine universities preferential access to Federal funds if they sign on to an agreement that, among other things, bans race or sex in admissions, freezes tuition, and caps international enrollment. Whether or not that’s a good idea, or unsavory, or… can be debated.

However, the tenor of the hue and cry over the offer is badly overwrought and illustrative of the outright timidity of far too many.

[T]he proposal provoked strong reactions across higher education, with some decrying it as federal overreach….

There is no Federal overreach in the offer. No one is forcing these schools to sign up. They can do—they have been doing all along—with “ordinary” access to Federal funds. Moves to reduce or deny access to Federal funds by schools that are openly antisemitic or supportive of terrorist-supporting entities on their campuses is an entirely separate thing.

Many States and localities offer enormous financial incentives in return for making movies in those locales. Offering Federal financial incentives to companies, foreign and domestic, to produce goods and services in the United States or to increase current domestic production is a widespread and long-standing practice, and it is a far cry from withholding Federal funds from businesses who do not so produce or increase production.

This offer to nine schools is no different from those other financial incentives.

It’s sad, it’s a mark of how far fallen is an education system that produces such timid ones, and it’s an indication of how far we are—four generations–from our last struggle for our national sovereignty. Too many who should know better have gone soft and weak in the knees.

Hard times make strong men; strong men make easy times, easy times make weak men, weak men make hard times. We’re in a dangerous phase of that cycle. Western Civilization’s last weak time interregnum lasted 800 years.

Lower Court Obstructionism

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In a legal environment in which Federal district court judges routinely block President Donald Trump’s (R) initiatives and the Supreme Court, via Trump emergency appeals, overrule those judges (and the occasional appellate court ruling) more often than those lower court judges deem appropriate, we’re seeing increasing whining from those lower court judges: they’re getting quite cross over not being listened to, all the while pretending not to understand the Supreme Court’s stays of these lower court blocks while the underlying case works its way through the legal system. As The Wall Street Journal‘s news writer put it,

The court, has given Trump much of what he has asked for so far, but the brevity of its orders has flummoxed judges who say there is no way to interpret them.

This is the measure of the lower courts’ defiance of the Supreme Court. The Court lifts the stays explicitly to let the underlying cases concerning the Trump initiatives proceed pending a final judgment. Often, appellate courts and district court judges, in lifting a stay or HIAing one, will say they’re doing so because they think the relevant party to the litigation is likely to prevail in the underlying case. The Supreme Court cannot say such things without prejudicing its eventual ruling in the case while it’s before those lower courts. The Court does say, often but not always, that it’s staying a case while the case wends its way. Even in those cases where the Court does not say, though, that much is clear to anyone reading with objective eyes.

These district (and appellate) judges know that.

Here’s an example of lower court defiance in the judge’s attempts at obstruction:

“Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system,” Gorsuch wrote.
US District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts fired back at Gorsuch a couple of weeks later when she ruled the administration’s cuts to Harvard’s research funding were unconstitutional. In a footnote, Burroughs said it was “unhelpful and unnecessary” to criticize judges for defying the Supreme Court “when they are working to find the right answer in a rapidly evolving doctrinal landscape, where they must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus.”

What part of set that precedent aside is unclear to this judge? If it appears to her to be set aside, then from her perspective it is set aside. Is Burroughs really insisting she’s unable to follow a simple ruling without having in hand a long, detailed dissertation on why the ruling exists and why she must follow it? Would that ruling need to be written in words of one syllable or less? If so, she needs to find another line of work where her bosses have the time and inclination to hold her hand every step of the way.

On the other hand, it sounds like this judge is letting her disdain for Trump lead her to disrespect for and defiance of the Supreme Court. In that case, too, she needs to find another line of work, maybe with Bill Kristol.

State Auspices

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Louisiana’s Republican Governor, Jeff Landry, has acknowledged that his State has a crime problem for all that the State has made laudable progress against crime (that’s how bad it had been). It would be good if Progressive-Democrat Governors had the same integrity, introspection, and insight for their States, but they are what they are.

Where I disagree with Landry, though, is this:

Louisiana GOP Governor Jeff Landry has asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deploy as many as 1,000 state National Guardsmen to help curb crime.

Landry doesn’t need SecDef to Federalize the National Guard to do this. He can call up his State’s 1,000 Guardsmen for the purpose himself. If he needs the Guard, he needs to stop injecting delays and get it done.

New York Post Does the Same

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The New York Post condemned Socialist and Progressive-Democratic Party candidate for Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, over his refusal to condemn Hamas, the terrorist organization that invaded Israel two years ago, butchering Israeli women and children, raping Israeli women, and seizing hundreds of hostages, many of whom have been killed in captivity and many more of whom still are held by the terrorists.

The condemnation is entirely appropriate.

However, the NYP then proceeded to commit the same offense in the second paragraph of its article:

Mamdani stopped short of condemning the militant group after Netanyahu used his defiant address to the United Nations General Assembly on Friday to declare that Israel must “finish the job” in its war against Hamas.

No. Hamas is not a militant group. Far from it. Hamas is a terrorist organization through and through. I would have thought the NYP‘s publisher, if not its editors, knew better than this. Apparently, I’m too optimistic.

“We cannot normalize”

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ICE and CBP are patrolling downtown Chicago and arresting criminals along the way. DHS noted that (with accompanying images)

11 violent rioters were arrested last night in Chicago outside the ICE detention facility: these are two guns that were taken off rioters in Chicago right against the fence at our ICE detention facility. An investigation is underway into what appears to be some sort of explosive device found last night near the ICE Chicago detention facility.

Progressive-Democrat Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is dismayed, and he’s hyping the fact that ICE and CBP agents are armed in a dangerous city while they go about their intrinsically dangerous job of law enforcement. He said this, too:

We cannot normalize militarizing American cities and suburbs. Make sure you know your rights and stay alert.

Neither can we normalize violent lawlessness, even in Chicago. We do know our rights, we are staying alert, and so do—and are—those law enforcement personnel. Pritzker, though, would rather protect the criminals rampant in one of his State’s major cities than protect the residents of that city.