Tag Archives: rights

A Sanction of New York over its Board of Elections

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New York’s State Board of Elections has inadequate safeguards regarding its elections and appears to be refusing to correct that.

Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE), a nonpartisan organization focused on election security, alleges the New York State Board of Elections (NYSBOE) stonewalled a request to fix the state’s voter registration form to comply with federal voting law.

Absent those corrections, the State-dominating Progressive-Democratic Party could register loads of voters of whom Party approves, thereby cementing Party’s reign over the State for generations.

If RITE’s allegations are true, and the NYSBOE continues to refuse to correct its errors, there is a sanction that would have strong and sharp teeth. Here’s Article 2 of our 14th Amendment:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

The 19th and 26th Amendments modify this Article only to the extent of extending the right to vote to women and lowering the minimum age of eligibility to 18 years old.

Allowing ineligible persons to vote dilutes the votes of eligible, legitimate voters, and that is a functional, even if not direct, denial of those eligible voters’ right to vote. That dilution means their votes no longer count as whole votes, but only as reduced, fractional votes. In our system of elections, any reduction in the value of a vote to less than that of the entire vote is a denial of that vote.

The sanction, then, should be a reduction of New York’s representation in Congress according to the proportion of registered ineligible voters to registered eligible voters plus the proportion of eligible voters denied registration to the whole number of voters in the State.

Big Brother’s Nanny Sister

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President Donald Trump (R) wants to let businesses allow private equity investments be included in their 401(k) Plans so employees can invest in them with their retirement savings. After all, unions, those voting bloc and funders for the Progressive-Democratic Party do, with enthusiasm.

Nope, say those same Progressive-Democratic Party politicians. We get to do it. You others don’t. Just look at those collapsing private equity funds now. Besides, the Labor Department is only letting those 401(k)s have risky investments that could include Trump meme coins.

Labor says otherwise.

The Labor Department is proposing to clarify that employers don’t violate their fiduciary duty merely by incorporating private equity, real estate and other “alternative” investments in 401(k) fund options.

Nothing else.

I agree that private equity is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad investment. However, that’s a matter for the individual investor to decide. It should not be a matter for Nanny Statists like Party politicians to actively bar, nor should it be a matter for Republicans of any stripe to passively bar by not permitting.

Caveat emptor, and caveat collocator.

ACLU Exposes Its Intrinsic Racism

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Janai Nelson, ACLU President, made the organization’s, and her own, racism plain in her Sunday letter to The Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, a letter in which she accused DoJ’s Assistant AG of its Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon of

undermin[ing] the rights she was appointed to protect. In a case before the Supreme Court, the department under her leadership filed an amicus brief arguing that Louisiana’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Constitution. Her position on this issue would limit voting rights for black Americans by making it incredibly difficult for black voters to elect their candidates of choice.

Nelson is ignoring her BFF’s and favorite Progressive-Democrat ex-President. then-Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama’s statement at Party’s 2004 Convention:

[T]here’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

Especially that last: There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. Race doesn’t matter in this nation, for all that bigotry (hold up a mirror facing you, Ms Nelson) still exists here. There are only citizens of the United States.

I repeat the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution, even though that’s lost on an entity and its chief for whom our Constitution has no meaning:

No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There’s not a black voter and white voter and Latino voter and Asian voter; there’s the United States of America voters. Gerrymandering by race is racist at its core.

Nelson would have a stronger case were she to argue that that same 14th Amendment clause makes gerrymandering on the basis of political party unconstitutional. It’s instructive, though, that she chose race as the core of her special-treatment-by-gerrymandering argument.

Gerrymandering

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Polls are increasingly showing that Americans oppose gerrymandering based on political partisanship; a Rasmussen poll illustrates.

Overall, 86% of likely US voters considered it a “problem” when states draw congressional district lines to favor one party over the other, including 61% who deemed it a “very serious problem.”

Americans hold that for good reason. Here’s what our Constitution has to say on Congressional representation:

Article I, Section 2: The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative….

There’s nothing in there about setting up districts according to political partisanship or for any other reason.

Additionally, here’s what the 14th Amendment says:

Article 1: No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

There’s nothing in there that authorizes a State to treat any of its citizens differently from any other of its citizens based on individual political holdings. That last clause makes the matter crystalline. Equal protection means exactly that. The Supreme Court has held as much, quite explicitly, in its speech and religion rulings. Congressional districts and the American privilege of voting are no different.

The only real way to stop gerrymandering is to divide a State into square districts of substantially equal populations, with district boundaries differing from straight lines only when the district abuts a neighboring State.

Some might argue, taking this argument a step further, that such strict district-drawing would favor urban area citizens over rural in terms of their collective power in government. That may be, but that isn’t the here and now; that’s a case better debated—politically, not in our courts—in two or three generations. Our courts aren’t in the business of speculation, only in adjudicating based on the text of our Constitution today.

Bad Logic

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Arizona passed a law five years ago that essentially banned forceable DEI training. An ASU professor brought suit to clarify that the law also

gives public employees an “implied private right of action” to stop such coercion, which in his case was ASU training on how to “critique whiteness.”

A State district court agreed with the professor and ruled accordingly. An Arizona appellate court

“astonishingly” construed lawmakers’ silence on enforcement as confirmation that individuals cannot sue….

The euphemism quotes are from the professor’s lawyers in their reaction to the ruling and as they prepare to appeal to the State’s supreme court.

The lawyers—and any high school student who didn’t sleep through his logic class—are right to be astonished. The appellate court’s “argument” (my euphemism quotes this time) that saying nothing means cannot sue is textbook logic failure. The lawmakers’ silence means nothing other than that they said nothing. The appellate court’s claim otherwise is the court’s putting words into the lawmakers’ mouths the judges have no way of knowing belong there—unless the judges are claiming heretofore unheard of powers of mind reading.