Tag Archives: responsibilities

Empty Rhetoric

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A Progressive-Democrat attacked a journalist who was covering the latest CPAC convention…for his hairstyle.  Samantha Bee, the host of Full Frontal on TBS, took one look at the journalist and ran a segment in her show that included imagery of the journalist, who had a hairdo that might have been called a high-top fade in other circumstances (imagery at the link) and the remark

This year, the bow ties were gone, replaced by Nazi hair, Nazi hair, Nazi hair[.]

Never mind that the man is fighting an aggressive brain cancer, stage 4 glioblastoma.  That didn’t matter to Bee.

Not until the man’s sister call Bee out, anyway.  Then she tweeted that mealy-mouth pseudo-apology with its risible excuse.  There are two things about that “apology.”  One is that she did know because like any responsible adult Hollywood denizen, Bee had her intern check on the journalist and his hairstyle before putting her segment together, and then she ran it anyway.

The other thing is that, in her haste to demonize anyone not of the Left, she didn’t bother to check any facts related to the matter; she just ran with her segment.

But wait—there’s more.  The journalist she attacked turns out to be a registered Democrat.

The paranoia of the Left has gone so far out of control they even attack their own in their knee-jerk lashouts.

A Circular Judge-Made “Law”

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A jury can’t deliberate impartially and independently if its deliberations are going to be overseen by the presiding judge or any other government representative.  Such government oversight smacks of Bushel.  Yet that’s what the Supreme Court has decided must be in certain cases.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled courts must review typically secret jury deliberations when a juror relies on racial or ethnic stereotypes to convict a defendant.

The 5-3 opinion by Justice Anthony Kennedy found the Constitution’s call for a colorblind justice system outweighed traditional interests in promoting robust jury deliberations and protecting verdicts from challenge.

In an all too typical case of lawmaking from the Bench, Kennedy wrote

A constitutional rule that racial bias in the justice system must be addressed—including, in some instances, after the verdict has been entered—is necessary to prevent a systemic loss of confidence in jury verdicts….

And so, with his opinion, Kennedy usurped the authority of We the People and legislated on his own (lack of) authority.  It may be that such a statute, even an Amendment to our Constitution, is necessary, but that’s a political decision, and so it’s exclusively for us to decide, not a lone judge (or five lone judges in the present case).

Note that Kennedy’s “constitutional rule” is not, in itself, a direct attempt to amend our Constitution or otherwise to legislate.  It is, instead, a backdoor attempt, by creating a judicial rule that directs how the Constitution or a State’s law must be applied from outside of the plain text of the thing.

Aside from that, in order to legitimize (arguendo) such a penetration of the secrecy of jury deliberations, the existence of racial bias must first be shown.  Yet how that bias can be shown without penetration the cloak of secrecy has been elided by the five justices.  Kennedy centered his new rule on a juror in the present case voluntarily speaking up, but this is a thin reed, indeed.  Not all jurors will come forward, and of those that do, not all can be believed.  Especially with the former situation extant, under Kennedy’s rule there no longer can be equal protection under law—only “protection” when it suits a juror, and hopefully a juror with no axe to grind.

No, the answer is a proactive one, and it’s one that already exists: pre-trial juror selection.  A suitably qualified lawyer—and so are they all, all qualified lawyers—can tease out bias in a juror while the juror still is only prospective, and exclude him.

Disingenuous Targeting

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Recall that President Donald Trump has signed a revised Executive Order that imposes a short moratorium on entry into the US from six (down from seven under his original EO) Middle Eastern countries.  Hawaii Attorney General Doug Chin has filed suit in Hawaii’s Federal District Court to try to block this new EO.  The EO, Chin claims, will damage Hawaii’s

economy, educational institutions, and tourism industry; and it is subjecting a portion of the state’s citizens to second-class treatment and discrimination, while denying all Hawaii residents the benefits of an inclusive and pluralistic society.

This is disingenuous.  The folks whose entry is being temporarily blocked represent a vanishingly small per centage of Hawaii’s tourist population.  The foolishness of “damage” to educational institutions I’ve already addressed regarding a Washington Federal judge’s ruling on the earlier EO.  Chin’s beef about Hawaii citizens is nothing more than a cynically dragged red herring: the EO doesn’t even address American citizens, much less those who also are citizens of Hawaii.  This EO impacts only some refugees and potential immigrants.

About those refugees and potential immigrants: Chin made this charge in his filing, and he actually kept a straight face as he filed it:

This new executive order is nothing more than Muslim Ban 2.0.  Under the pretense of national security, it still targets immigrants and refugees.

Of course, the EO cannot be a ban; it’s a temporary moratorium with an expiration deadline.  More than that, it cannot be a ban of Muslims; it impacts only about 10% of the world’s Muslims.

Of course, it does target potential immigrants and refugees—those are folks outside our nation, and they are not citizens of our nation.  As such, these people have no right to enter our nation without our prior permission, nor do we have an obligation to let them in.  That’s what nation means, that’s what borders are for.

Nor do we know who these folks are, really—which is why the EO imposes the moratorium: to give State and DHS time to improve our vetting procedures, another requirement of the EO, and a requirement carefully ignored by Chin.

Of course Chin knows all of this.  The utter disingenuousness of this Democrat’s charge ought to get his filing dismissed on its face.

A Key Point

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…from George Friedman’s piece in RealClear World, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy.  Friedman was writing about a different, if related matter, the relationship between liberalism (in the classic sense) and nationalism.  The point I’m calling out bears on our own immigration debate.

A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language, and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government.

Notice that: shared history.  This is not the same thing as possessing the same history.  Assimilation is what bridges the gap; assimilation is what brings people with widely differing histories—as widely different as English from Germans from Russians from Chinese from Japanese from…—into the jurisdictional boundary of a polity to become part of the nation that exists there.  Assimilation is what lets those folks with and from those differing histories obtain a shared history, the common history of the nation to which they’ve come and of which so many of them wish to become a part.

Assimilation is critical to nationhood because

a random collection of people without a core set of shared values cannot form a coherent regime, because nothing would hold the regime together or prevent internal chaos.

Misguided

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In light of whose DoJ it’s been doing this most recently, it’s easy to say it was nefarious.  But the whole thing could be eliminated with either of a couple of steps and a change in underlying procedure.

What is “it?”  It’s a secret (or merely secretive) slush fund fed by settlement proceeds from DoJ civil suits against large banks.

When big banks are sued by the government for discrimination or mortgage abuse, they can settle the cases by donating to third-party non-victims. The settlements do not specify how these third-party groups could use the windfall.

So far, investigators have accounted for $3 billion paid to “non-victim entities.”

Those third-party non-victims, under the Obama administration, were grassroots activist organizations favored by the Obama crowd.  These organizations consisted of the National Council of La Raza, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, the National Urban League, and the like.

That arouses suspicion.  As Ted Frank, Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Director of the Center for Class Action Fairness, put it,

The underlying problem with the slush funds is we don’t know exactly where the money is going. Using enforcement authority to go after corporate defendants, DoJ bureaucrats are taking billions away from taxpayers to fund their pet projects overriding congressional preferences.

It’s bad enough that the money is going to those favored groups—directly to them and not going through DoJ or Treasury enroute—but as Frank noted, it’s taxpayer monies once the banks have paid the settlements, whether these were legitimate settlements or coerced ones.

It also turns out that much of the funding of the slush funds are “voluntary” extra payments, “encouraged” by DoJ.  Except that when DoJ is holding a lawsuit over the banks’ heads, there’s very little voluntary about acceding to “encouragement.”

The better solution is one of two: pay the money exclusively to the Treasury Department for the use of the Federal government.  That, though, leaves in place incentives for DoJ to browbeat the banks rather than seek justice for those the banks have been alleged to be cheating.  The better alternative, then, is for the banks to pay the money directly to the alleged victims.

The change in underlying procedure—the best solution—is for DoJ to stop being spring-loaded to settling.  If they have a case, bring it to court, and push the pace on it (the banks should do this, too; neither side should be allowed to stall the other).  If DoJ isn’t ready to bring the case, it should drop it altogether.  The settlements, even well-intended ones, just look like lawfare extortion.