Tag Archives: rights

“Trial” Doesn’t Mean the Same to Progressive-Democrats…

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…as it does to the rest of us. This is in the subtext of Aaron Kliegman’s Just the News piece regarding Progressive-Democrat Congressmen pushing for a revival of their Bivens Act proposal, which would

allow citizens to recover damages for constitutional violations committed against them by federal law enforcement officials.

Kliegman, though, also pointed out another effect of the Act’s simple proposal:

the legislation would incidentally offer a path to civil remedy for those imprisoned without trial for alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol breach who say they’ve been mistreated by federal authorities to sue.

That’s certainly true, but I suggest that the prisoners held on claimed beefs related to the 6 January riot already have strong Constitutional grounds for dismissal of the charges and denial of qualified immunity against many of the gaolers–the prison warden included.

Most of them are being held without bail and without being actually charged, hence the “claimed beefs.”

They’re being unconstitutionally held on at least three counts:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury….

That’s from the 5th Amendment. No indictment or even the convening of a Grand Jury has occurred. That it’s allegedly an infamous crime is amply demonstrated by the number of Progressive-Democrats who are loudly proclaiming the riot to have been an insurrection.

…nor shall be compelled in any criminal case…be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….

That’s also from the 5th Amendment. Plainly the prisoners are being denied their liberty without due process; they’re being held for indefinite periods on no charges and no bail opportunity.

…the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial….

That’s from the 6th Amendment. This count has two specifications: they aren’t even accused yet, except by those Progressive-Democrats, but not formally in court, and they’ve been denied a speedy and public trial for so long that they cannot ever have a speedy trial.

Plainly, “speedy trial,” or merely “trial,” don’t have the same meaning for Progressive-Democrats that the terms have for us average Americans, for whom they have such contempt.

Those worthies’ pronouncements notwithstanding, the only cure here is the prisoners’ unconditional release with all current proceedings against them dismissed and any future proceedings related to the riot barred from being brought.

A Progressive-Democrat Threatens

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California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has issued a threat to try to destroy one of our most fundamental rights as Americans: our right to keep and bear Arms. He’s doing it, too, while drawing a disingenuous parallel between Arms possession and abortion—and in the process, threatening an even more fundamental right, one imbued in all humans not just in Americans.

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives.
We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA[.]

In the process, Newsom ignored a critical distinction here. Gun rights are in our Constitution.

The right to abortion exists only in a Supreme Court ruling and has only the force of statutory law—which is explicitly subordinate to our Constitution.

Regarding Newsom’s disingenuous claim about using legal authority to protect people’s lives, he’s also ignoring that our gun rights exist in critical (but not exclusive) part to defend lives and to defend against overreaching government. That the tools occasionally are misused to illegally kill only emphasizes the need to better catch and punish the killers, not to punish the vast majority of us for the crimes of those few. And to not keep letting the accused killers back out on the street with little to no bail.

Abortion laws, on the other hand, kill babies and tend toward blocking legal voices from speaking for them in court. That’s not very protective of our very youngest people’s lives.

Some Key Moments

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From the oral arguments regarding the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health case currently before the Supreme Court. And my responses to them. Because you know I don’t lack for hubris.

Perhaps the most famous example of overturned precedent was the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling, which reversed Plessy v Ferguson….

Well, there was another, preceding case—the Supreme Court’s ruling on Dred Scott v Sandford, which needed a Civil War to overturn because the Justices on the Taney Court and later lacked the integrity, the morals, the courage to overturn the ruling on their own.

And from CJ Roberts,

If we look at it from today’s perspective, it’s going to be a long list of cases that we’re going to say were wrongly decided.

If those rulings were wrongly decided at the outset, of course they should be reversed. Wrong doesn’t become right through the hoariness of age.

If the conditions of those rulings no longer exist, of course they should be reversed. The convenience of the Court isn’t relevant to any of that.

Additionally, Stewart gave Roberts a way out by saying Roberts’ examples are settled.

And,

“What would you say to the argument that has been made many times by people who are pro-choice and pro-life, that the line really doesn’t make any sense—that it is, as Justice Blackman himself described it, arbitrary?” Alito asked Rikelman.
Alito noted that while a woman may still want to terminate a pregnancy after viability, a “fetus has an interest in having a life” both before and after.
Rikelman replied[,] “It is principled because in ordering the interests at stake, the court had to set a line between conception and birth.”

Rikelman evaded Alito’s question. The baby always has an interest—the primary interest in the ordering of interests—in its own life.

Finally,

…a Supreme Court that has undergone enormous changes and currently sits at a 6-3 conservative majority.

No, it doesn’t. At best it sits at a 5-3-1 majority.

Cowardice

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Nadia Murad, sold into sex slavery by Daesh when she was 14, escaped that existence and wrote a book about it: The Last Girl: My Story Of Captivity (due out next February).

She was scheduled to speak with students from some of the 600 schools that are part of the Toronto District School Board about her book and the life it describes, but her presentation and discussion were canceled by Helen Fisher, one of the board’s Superintendents of Education.

But, according to Fisher’s concerns, the event might actually foster Islamophobia. Because Canadian schoolboys and girls are all a bunch of snowflakes who can’t understand such things. Of course, to the extent that’s actually true, that would be a coarse illustration of what Fisher’s Education facility is turning out.

Tanya Lee, proprietor of a book club for teenage girls, A Room Of Your Own—and mother—had a different take:

This is what Islamic State [Daesh] means. It is a terrorist organisation. It has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims. The TDSB should be aware of the difference.

But apparently Fisher’s terror has clouded her awareness. Indeed, even though a statement put out by the school board’s Director of Education, Colleen Russell-Rawlins, claimed to apologize to Murad (and to another, whose event was similarly canceled), the board has not un-canceled or rescheduled Murad’s speaking, even these two-plus weeks later.

Never mind that Murad also is a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, UN Goodwill Ambassador, and “a leading advocate for survivors of genocide and sexual violence.” And that she might know something of her subject and that subject’s implications outside of terrorism.

This isn’t just rank political correctness. This is raw cowardice by the Precious Ones of the Toronto school board.

These are not the Canadians who fought with such courage in WWII. Or only yesterday in Afghanistan.

The Control of the People’s Republic of China

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The nation appears to be close to running the United Nations as its own PR firm. Emma Reilly was an Irish Human Rights Officer with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Then she gave an interview to Le Monde [Google Translate is friendly enough] in which she described the UNHCR as having giving up the names of Chinese dissidents who were to travel to Geneva to testify before the UNHCR to the People’s Republic of China, just because the PRC demanded the information.

Indeed,

Since the beginning of September, this 42-year-old Irishwoman…has no longer had access to her professional emails. This is the price to pay for denouncing the privileges that the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) has granted to China under pressure.

That objection was raised first with High Commissioner for Human Rights, who chose not to respond, then with a number of governments, including ours, also with nary a meaningful response. Only then did she go to the press.

She was fired from the UN the day after her Le Monde interview, with no objection from any of the UNHCR members or from the UN membership at large. Not even the Biden-Harris administration directly or via the administration’s ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, dared issue a peep of objection. Not even when she raised the problems with the Biden-Harris administration’s UN missions in New York and in Geneva.