Tag Archives: rights

Cynical Union

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Recall President Donald Trump’s Executive Order limiting the amount of time public union employees can spend doing union business during their work day.

The American Federation of Government Employees has demurred and gone into court to seek an injunction blocking enforcement of the EO.  AFGE General Counsel David Borer insisted

We will not allow this or any other administration to trample on the Constitutional rights of federal workers[.]

This cynical claim is based on Borer’s insistence that his members’ freedom of association right is violated by the EO.

This, of course, is nonsense.

There is no constitutional violation here. No association right is violated by requiring union member employees of a government institution to do the work of the institution when they’re on institution time and the taxpayer payroll.  Union members remain free to associate with a union or with each other in a union.  They remain free to conduct union business.  There is no constitutional obligation, though, for taxpayers to pay anyone for associating or for doing non-work related tasks.

This is a case that should result in a declaratory judgment that the law—the supreme Law in this case—is on the side of the government.  Alternatively, it should be tossed on its face and Borer and such of his staff as are participating in bringing this case, as well as the AFGE, strongly sanctioned for wasting the court’s time with such a blatantly frivolous case.

Most of What They Wanted

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Recall that, in a breathtaking attack on Italy’s democracy, the nation’s President Sergio Mattarella vetoed formation of the coalition government that hard-Left 5Star Movement and hard-Right League, as the two winners of Italy’s elections, had formed because Mattarella didn’t like the coalition’s choice for Economics Minister, Paolo Savona.  Mattarella held Savona personally unacceptable over the latter’s disdain for the euro and for the European Union.

5Star and League have formed a new coalition, and it seems that Mattarella has approved the new coalition.  The coalition’s Econ Minister will be Giovanni Tria, an economist from the Tor Vergata University.  Tria has “criticized the eurozone, saying it had failed to achieve the convergence of the different economies;” he doesn’t seem that far from Savona’s position or from the coalition’s, just perhaps a bit more politic in expressing it.

Also, far from being banished to the sticks, Savona also will get a position in the new government: Minister for European Affairs.  The position has no formal portfolio, but he’ll still be in a position of influence and in the venue for which he was found ill-suited by Matterella.

Maybe Mattarella is figuring out that he’s President of Italy, not a mucky-muck of the EU.

A Concept of Privacy

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Personal privacy and protections against warrantless searches got a boost from the Supreme Court earlier this week.

The Supreme Court said Tuesday that police need a warrant to search vehicles parked at private homes, the second time this month the justices rejected government arguments for expanding the “automobile exception” to Fourth Amendment rules against unreasonable searches.

The case at hand involved a stolen motorcycle parked in the driveway of a private residence and protected from the elements (and perhaps (even probably) from being seen by police) by a tarp.  A police officer recognized from Facebook postings the residence, saw the fact of a motorcycle under the tarp, entered the property, lifted the tarp, and looked over the motorcycle—all without a warrant.

Writing for the Court in an 8-1 decision, Justice Sonya Sotomayor wrote

Just like the front porch, side garden or area “outside the front window,” the driveway enclosure where Officer [David] Rhodes searched the motorcycle constitutes [the area where] activity of home life extends….

And

Given the centrality of the Fourth Amendment interest in the home and its curtilage and the disconnect between that interest and the justifications behind the automobile exception, we decline Virginia’s invitation to extend the automobile exception to permit a warrantless intrusion on a home or its curtilage[.]

Justice Samuel Alito was the lone dissenter.

…the officer should have been permitted to search the motorcycle visible in the driveway, just as he could have were it parked in a public street. “Officer Rhodes’s brief walk up the driveway impaired no real privacy interests,” he wrote.

Surprising out of Alito; it seems he doesn’t completely understand curtilage or of privacy.  Notwithstanding, I’d further curtail the motor vehicle exception* allowing warrantless searches to bar such from motor vehicles parked on the street in front of the vehicle owner’s residence (or beside it in the case of a corner lot) or parked in an apartment complex’s parking lot near the vehicle owner’s apartment or in the apartment renter’s designated parking slot.

 

*The motor vehicle exception to the requirement for search warrants allows warrantless searches based on a prohibition era ruling that motor vehicles were too mobile and could be moved before a warrant could be obtained.  That ruling was itself erroneous IMNSHO because it assumed that the police were incapable of keeping a motor vehicle under surveillance until the warrant arrived.

Free Speech

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…British style.  There is a trial in progress in Leeds (northern England, a bit up the road northeast of Manchester) concerning a

Muslim gang on trial for raping and grooming hundreds of victims, some as young as eleven.

Tommy Robinson, a British activist-journalist, was arrested and hauled off to prison for the heinous crime of reporting information about the defendants—public information, mind you.

British media are forbidden from reporting on certain trials….

The rationalization is that reporting might taint the jury.  Because some juries are more easily tainted than other juries on other trials.  Cue Bill the Cat.

No, it’s a matter of the British government, in the land that gave the world the Magna Carta and John Locke—and jury trials—not trusting its own citizens with the truth.  It’s also a matter of political correctness run amok.  Telling the truth might hurt the feelings of the defendants.

This is the culture the Progressive-Democrats and the Left generally want us to have.

 

h/t Ralph for this one.

A Tenth Circuit Speculator

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The Institute for Justice summarized a 10th Circuit case regarding a car involved in an immediately prior weapons case, its driver, and a weapon thusly:

Aurora, CO, police run tags on car with broken tail light, discover the car was seized three weeks earlier in weapons-possession case and a man (a known gang member) associated with the car was arrested. They pull it over; the man is in it; they frisk him and find a gun. He’s charged with being a felon in possession. Suppress the evidence? No need, says the 10th Circuit. Though he was calm and compliant, officers were justified in patting him down to ensure their safety.
Dissent: The gov’t is going to use this decision to justify frisks in a much broader variety of circumstances than the ones here.

The dissenting judge may well be right, but he’s speculating only.  Treat those speculatedly future cases one by each, as the unique cases they will be, and rule in accordance with the facts of those cases, not the facts of this case.