Tag Archives: rights

In Which the New York Times and the BBC Miss Again

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It seems the women journalists in the pay of the BBC were being paid significantly less than their male colleagues, to the point that Carrie Gracie, BBC’s China Editor, resigned her position in protest (I’m citing a New York Times report about the BBC.  Why that’s important, rather than citing a BBC report directly, will come clear in a bit).  Gracie has returned to London, still a BBC journalist, but there she’ll be paid the same as her male colleagues.

And how did that equal pay come about, you might ask?

According to “the organization” (presumably a BBC mucky-muck or BBC mucky-muck’s spokesman),

The BBC has agreed to pay cuts with a number of leading BBC News presenters, and others have agreed in principle[.]

Jeremy Vine, one of the high-powered, and highly paid, journalists getting his pay cut, agreed with the move, and he did so in all seriousness.

I think it needs to be sorted out, and I support my female colleagues who have rightly said they should be paid the same when they’re doing the same job.  I think the BBC’s on it, and this story is part of it.

Wow.  Just wow.

If Gracie really is the doing substantially the same work as her colleagues, why shouldn’t she get a pay raise to get to substantially the same pay?  That’s how bad it is, folks.  This is the Left’s mindset.  It doesn’t even occur to them to raise the pay of the lower paid.  All they can think of is to cut the higher paid.

Hold back the successful.  Don’t push forward those behind.  Instead of a win-win outcome, the Left prefers the everybody loses outcome.

On second thought, the NYT, which was as silent on the pay cut/pay raise question as the BBC, and the BBC didn’t miss.  This is what progressives, the Liberal NLMSM, and the US’ Progressive-Democratic Party want.  Hold back the ones ahead, don’t help the ones behind catch up.

The Supreme Court Gets One Wrong…Maybe

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A murderous felon in Alabama was, on conviction in 1994, sentenced to life in prison by his jury, and that sentence was overridden by the presiding judge, who ordered his execution.  The man was scheduled to be executed Thursday, but the Supreme Court has stayed the execution pending its decision on whether to hear the man’s appeal of his execution.

The stay is consistent with the Court’s prior rulings striking State laws that allow judges to overrule juries and to impose death sentences where the juries decided otherwise.  In this regard, I agree: the jury is the proper sentencer where a man’s life is in the balance.

However.

The Court’s prior no-judge-overrules precedent is based on its original precedent in a 1958 ruling in Trop v Dulles in which Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society mean that the 8th Amendment’s injunction against cruel and unusual punishment necessarily means that a born-citizen’s citizenship cannot be revoked by action of the Federal government—that would be a cruel and unusual destruction of a citizen’s political life.  Over a series of subsequent rulings, that evolving standards standard has been applied to an ever broader series of cases the Court has heard (recall that this is deliberate for a Liberal Court: Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s “living Constitution” ideology, for instance).

And so, here we are.  The felon currently appealing his sentence is making the argument, among others, that his execution would itself be a cruel and unusual punishment under those evolving standards because the execution would result from a judge overruling the jury.

No state currently allows a judge to override a jury’s capital sentencing verdict. This constitutes not merely “national consensus,” but unanimous agreement that a sentence of death imposed by a judge contrary to a jury’s life verdict does not comport with our evolving standards of decency and the Eighth Amendment[.]

But this is wrong.  Our society’s standards of decency may well be—I believe they are—evolving (whether the evolution necessarily, or even merely monotonically, moves in a maturing direction is a separate question), but the Constitution has not changed on this.  The only way the Constitution lives, and it lives quite vibrantly, is through Article V and We the People, which provide for amending—evolving, if you will—this supreme Law of the Land.  We the People have not amended our Constitution to say that execution is cruel and (or even “or”) unusual.  Indeed, for judges, or Justices, to presume to carry out this evolution from the bench is, in the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s words, simply not compatible with democratic theory.  No part of the Constitution can be held to mean whatever [it] ought to mean, and that unelected judges decide what that is*.

It’ll be interesting, and instructive, to hear the Court’s rationale for declining to hear the appeal, as it will be to hear the Court’s rationale, if it decides to hear, for overriding the trial judge’s sentence.

 

*A Matter of Interpretation, 2018 New Edition

Update: Corrected poorly selected noun in the 4th paragraph.  The Court hears cases; it renders opinions.

Distraction

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Top Democrats are calling on Facebook and Twitter to investigate and release information behind potential Russian-linked accounts pushing for the release of a sealed congressional memo allegedly containing details on US government surveillance abuses.

It couldn’t possibly be that there really is a broad public hue and cry to that information released.  Us uninformed voters, denizens of fly-over country, couldn’t possibly know enough to demand the release on our own.

No, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Congressman Adam Schiff (D, CA), the two “top Democrats” in the quote, are desperate to have a distraction.  Us uninformed might find out too much.

It’s rich coming from a Senator who released to the public, unethically, a Senate Judiciary Committee report concerning Fusion GPS and then blamed her unethical behavior on having taken cold medicines and so she wasn’t thinking clearly.  Feinstein and I are of an age, and I’ve taken cold medicines, too.  They’ve never addled my brain.

It’s also a bit much coming from a Congressman who’s not the least bit curious about the Steele dossier; he just wants that matter dropped.

Warrantless Searches of Cell Phone Data

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The Supreme Court has a case before it, Carpenter v US (it heard oral argument Wednesday), concerning the 4th Amendment and the personal data of a defendant in the form of his cell phone location data.  The data were obtained from the cell phone company by police without first getting a search warrant.  There is precedent.

The high court reasoned then [in ’70s cases involving business records that banks and landline phone companies maintain about customer transactions and that the Supreme Court then reasoned police could seize without warrants] that individuals had voluntarily revealed their financial transactions or numbers they dialed to a third party—the bank or phone company—and so had forfeited any privacy interest in that information.

Smith v Maryland is illustrative of that general position.

There is growing criticism of that position.

allowing authorities to compile such granular data about an individual’s life, without a judicial warrant, no longer meets society’s “reasonable expectation of privacy”—the touchstone of the Supreme Court’s approach to constitutional limits on searches and seizures.

The objectors’ heart is in the right place, but their criticism is wide of the mark.  Compiling data—seizing a person’s personal information, which most assuredly includes where he situates himself from time to time—without a court’s order never has met society’s or that individual’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Consumers (the individuals, the particular members of society in question here) have a reasonable—indeed, a loud and vociferously stated—expectation of privacy concerning their personal data, and an equally loud and vociferously asserted ownership of those data held by third parties.  This is clearly demonstrated by the raucous and repeated hoo-raw raised every time a Facebook or a Twitter or a bank or a phone company gets caught using those personal data in ways to which the consumer-owner objects.

This is further and just as clearly established by the even louder hoo-raw raised every time one of those third parties is discovered to have inadequately protected those personal data entrusted to it by being hacked and those personal data stolen, and too often exposed.

The Supreme Court ruled erroneously then, and Carpenter is a good opportunity to correct that error.  The Court should have known at the time that revealing financial transactions or numbers they dialed to a third party was not at all a voluntary action.  The revealing was a mandatory condition of doing business with the bank or phone company, and there was no opportunity to go elsewhere—all the banks and phone companies required that: give up the financial data or the phone numbers, or don’t do business at all.  Take careful note: that the technology of the time—or today—means that [phone numbers] must be revealed to [phone companies] in no way makes the reveal voluntary: it’s still a wholly involuntary privacy exposure.  The data are owned in whole by the consumer; the third party is merely a caretaker, bound to protect the privacy and sanctity of these papers, and effects.

Prosecutors can indict ham sandwiches with their grand juries, and policemen can just as easily get search warrants, but do get the warrant.  Cell phone location data, financial transaction data, et al., all are part of the papers, and effects, of the individual.

Full stop.

German Democracy

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Germany’s President, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, whose position is less than that of the Chancellor’s (the current incumbent is Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union) but currently has a critical role, has let the cat out of the bag regarding the attitude of that nation’s political elite toward democracy and the people of the nation.

Recall that Germany held an election a few weeks ago in which the governing CDU/SPD coalition was heavily defeated.  The Social Democrat Party, a center left party, lost most heavily, and it has announced that it will not ally with the CDU in any new government.  The CDU also lost heavily, although it retains the most seats in the German parliament, the Bundestag.  That most seats, though, is a bare plurality, not enough to govern effectively.  Merkel entered talks with The Greens Party and the Free Democrats Party, whose numbers combined with the CDU’s would have given such a coalition a (bare) majority in the Bundestag.  These were difficult talks since the three parties are polar opposites socially, economically, politically, pick a dimension (and yes, I’m aware of the difficulty of a three-way opposite construction—as were Merkel and the heads of those two parties, but they went for it, anyway).

The talks broke down, and with the SPD in firm opposition, Merkel is left with the choice of a minority government or new elections.  She prefers new elections.

Here’s where Steinmeier has exposed the elite’s Know Better attitude.  The Wall Street Journal has quoted his position:

The parties have campaigned for responsibility in the Sept 24 elections, a responsib[ility] that Germany’s constitution says can’t simply be handed back to voters.  This responsibility goes far beyond someone’s own interests.

Except that the German Constitution says exactly that, were the newly elected Bundestag unable to agree on a new coalition or a Chancellor.  However, the elites Know Better, and they insist that the people—the voters, Germany’s citizens—can’t be trusted with governance.  After all, they screwed up their just concluded chance, right?

Hmm….