Tag Archives: responsibilities

Excuses

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Here, in higher education, or what passes for higher education. There were two letters in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section with excuses for American pupils in higher education, or even just getting into a higher education institution.

One lamented, using rowing as his example, the dearth of foreign students on his college’s rowing teams compared with today’s dearth of American students on those same teams. The rollover, he wrote, was due colleges actively recruiting winning athletes world wide and how that global recruitment squeezed out those American wannabe athletes, which in turn deprived those American wannabes their college educations. Even with his excuses, he’s on the right track with his concluding questions:

Is it not US universities’ main charter to educate productive citizens? What’s the purpose of collegiate sports in America?

Then there’s the other letter-writer.

When colleges take applications from other countries, the talent pool becomes the world. This affects American teenagers, who are squeezed out of the competition. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point into the most competitive schools in the same way top forehands and serves are no longer an entry point onto the tennis team … It gives us a chance to reflect on what we owe young Americans versus the importance of going for the absolute “best product” on the court or in the classroom.

This one hinted at the source of the problem, but it’s unclear to me that he understood his hinting. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point…. There are two areas of responsibility here. One is with the teachers unions dominating public high schools. Those unions are more interested union perks than they are in doing something about the well-documented years of decline and collapse of their student products as demonstrated by those students’ test scores. These are students who have no business even applying to any college or university: their union teachers have left them totally unprepared for a rigorous college/university education, or even for life in the real world earning their own way in any sort of job.

The other is with those students themselves, and their status consciousness and notorious lack of work ethic. Work hard and get ahead is the American middle class mantra, and it’s a Truth. What’s lacking in too many of today’s high school student population, though, is any understanding of that “work hard” part.

For example, our farmers are complaining about a lack of farm workers to help them get their crops planted and then harvested. Ranchers have spoken of the same lack in handling their cattle ranches, feed lots, and dairy facilities. How many of today’s teenagers spend their summers detasseling corn, picking lettuce, mounting up and herding cattle, shoveling feed or operating the feeders on those feed lots, milking dairy cows or operating the milking machines? And, by the way, earning some college money along the way.

The competition in life for American children has gone global. So what. Those children need to work hard so they can compete globally. And one more thing: today’s parents need to lose their self-focus and work with their children, helping them, encouraging them to work hard enough during the school year and during the summer to be able to compete globally.

Complaining about competition gone global is a loser’s game.

No Records Kept

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Minnesota has a process whereby prospective voters lacking identification or proof of residency

can bypass the requirements by having another registered voter from the same precinct vouch for the voter wanting to register or signing a proof-of-residence oath in front of an election judge, which is attached to the voter’s registration application.

America First Legal filed FOIA requests with the State’s Secretary of State seeking documentation regarding those completed vouchers, and the State’s SecState answered No data responsive. At all.

Records? We ain’t got no records. We don’t have to show you any stinking records.

This is Minnesota actively permitting anyone to vote, citizen or not, legally present or not, in the State’s elections and in the State’s national-level elections.

Whose Fault is That?

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The woman’s plaint opens with a catalog of online and personal device reminders of her daughter’s death in February 2024:

MY CAR’S BLUETOOTH asks if I’d like to connect to “Miranda’s iPhone.”
Facebook pings me with “memories”: photo carousels of my adult daughter and me on a beach or posing for goofy selfies.
Miranda’s name appears on my list of “favorite” numbers on my phone. A shared streaming account offers recommendations that cater to Miranda’s high-low tastes: a historical drama, and the new season of “Real Housewives.”
Then there’s my Amazon account, which lists Miranda’s shipping address in Brooklyn.

Then she wrote

Every time her ghost pops up on a device, my heart is ripped anew.

And

OUR ONLINE PROFILES outlive our physical bodies. We can pack or give away possessions, but the tech gods preserve the digital lives forever of those we’ve lost.

However.

My sympathies for the woman’s loss of her daughter, but really, whose fault is it that all of that personal information was put into the Internet cloud in the first place? Whose fault is it that these data were not deleted from the cloud—or from the contact list she still has loaded into her car—some time after she laid her daughter to rest, but instead were left scattered about among the cloud and her devices these 14 months after her daughter’s death?

And: the despicable behavior of AT&T in the face of a court order and of Apple’s and Alphabet’s differing decisions to censor what information each would release in the face of a court order, notwithstanding, the decision to give up the court fight was this woman’s alone, even though she was making progress on the matter.

Again, my sympathies for the woman, but she doesn’t get to hide behind her grief to duck responsibility for her own decisions and actions.

No Question Here

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Federal District Judge Loren AliKhan is the presiding judge in Soffer v George Washington University, a case centered on allegations that antisemitic activity is rampant on the GWU campus. While serving in that capacity, the GWU Law School hired the judge as an adjunct professor.

The overlap has prompted questions about a potential conflict of interest, given federal rules requiring judges to avoid cases in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned. AliKhan did not immediately step aside but issued a 10-day stay in late March to consider whether recusal is warranted. Since the April 20 status conference, no final decision has been publicly announced.

??

How is this even a question? Those Federal rules don’t just bar judges’ conflicts of interest, nor is this merely a matter of questions of impartiality. Those rules bar judges from actions that create even the appearance of a conflict of interest, a requirement that, if honored by judges, preempts any questions of impartiality.

It’s more than that, though. While AliKhan was presiding, she should never have even considered the GWU offer of employment, or she should have resigned from the bench altogether: teaching in a law school hews too close to the ethical line and creates that barred appearance of conflict.

That she hasn’t even deigned recuse herself yet (as I write on Sunday) is instructive of her level of ethics. Given that lack, GWU’s Law School should reconsider its hiring of her, and if the Law School can’t figure it out, GWU should act in its subordinate Law School’s stead. Either of those entiities’ decision to do nothing would be instructive, also.

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.