Tag Archives: rights

“Hold the Floor”

Posted on by
Reply

President Joe Biden (D) is pretending he doesn’t want to get rid of the filibuster.

There’s no reason to protect it, other than you’re going to throw the entire Congress into chaos and nothing will get done. Nothing at all will get done. There’s a lot at stake. The most important one is the right to vote, that’s the single most important one.

So far, so good.

But. Because there’s always a but.

Biden referenced former Senator Strom Thurmond (D at the time) of South Carolina, who once conducted a 24-hour filibuster in a failed bid to halt passage of civil rights legislation in 1957.

And then he gave his game away with this:

The president reiterated his stance that lawmakers should be required to “hold the floor,” or deliver continued remarks in the Senate chamber, in order to maintain a filibuster.

What happened after Thurmond’s “hold the floor” filibuster? A straight party-line, strictly partisan vote on that bill. Just as would have been done were the filibuster abolished outright, only with a few hours’ delay.

The point of a cloture vote of 60 or more Senators agreeing to bring a bill to the floor for debate—even strictly partisan debate—is to force a measure of bipartisanship to legislation, even if it’s only a matter of some Senators from the minority party agreeing enough with the bill to debate it.

Requiring “holding the floor,” requiring Senators to speak to exhaustion, as the means of filibustering is no filibuster at all. It only delays the strictly partisan, party line, vote for some hours.

An honest Senate, a truly deliberative body, will keep the cloture vote filibuster.

Utterly Illegal

Posted on by
Reply

And the Progressive-Democrats don’t care. They have the power, so they don’t need any stinking authority, and they’re going ahead: with censorship of what average Americans are allowed to say, even allowed to know.

The White House announced their efforts with Facebook to take aggressive action on problematic social media posts. The administration said they would work to flag and censor anything they deemed to be disinformation about COVID-19.

Biden’s Surgeon General Dr Vivek Murthy:

We expect more from our technology companies. We’re asking them to operate with greater transparency and accountability. We are asking them to monitor misinformation more closely.

Biden himself, through his Press Secretary, Jen Psaki:

“There are also proposed changes we have made to social media platforms, including Facebook….

And

We are flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation[.]

And overt spying on private citizens’ personal communications to facilitate the censorship, per the Progressive-Democratic Party’s Democratic National Committee:

…plans to work with SMS carriers to monitor text messages and dispel misinformation about vaccines.
“If you send a text message to a friend or to a family member or to whoever and it includes whatever they deem as misinformation that somehow you’re going to get a message on your phone from the government,” David Rubin of the Rubin Report.

And the threat, from none other than President Joe Biden (D):

Mr Biden was asked what his message was to social media platforms when it came to Covid-19 disinformation.
“They’re killing people,” he said. “Look, the only pandemic we have is among the unvaccinated, and that—and they’re killing people.”

Never mind that the censorship is a blatant violation of our 1st Amendment and of long-standing and myriad case law:

As recently as 2019, the Supreme Court reasoned “‘a private entity can qualify as a state actor,’ subject to First Amendment protections….” Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019) …;
“When the private entity performs a traditional, exclusive public function,” Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974);
“When the government compels the private entity to take a particular action,” Blum v. Yaretsky, (1982);
“When the government acts jointly with the private entity.” Lugar v. Edmondson Oil Co. (1982).

The government doesn’t get to avoid censorship by farming out its censoring to third parties.

And there’s this: it’s well established in Civil Rights law and Supreme Court rulings that private enterprises that are public accommodations (of which diners are a canonical example) may not discriminate, under the 14th Amendment, on the basis of race. It’s an easy extension of that “may not discriminate” to include 1st Amendment speech, and it’s quite clear that Facebook et al., have become, if they weren’t created as, public accommodations.

Us average Americans need to keep this blatant disregard for our Constitution firmly in mind in November 2022.

 

H/t Grim’s Hall

Washington State and Abortion

Posted on by
Reply

Washington passed a law—SB6219—that mandates all health coverage policies issued in that State provide (and charge for) coverage for abortions, with no exceptions whatsoever, including no exceptions for religious belief regarding life and conception. Under SB6219, no insurer can offer a policy that does not include abortion coverage.

Leave aside the cynical claim by Washington’s lawyers that

its no-exception abortion coverage mandate in health plans does not necessarily require health plans to include abortion coverage.

Leave aside that the Supreme Court has already ruled—repeatedly—that religious exceptions and conscience exceptions must be included in any such law.

The Cedar Park Church, in Bothell near Seattle, is challenging that law in Cedar Park Assembly of Kirkland v Kreidler (Kreidler is Myron Kreidler, Washington’s Insurance Commissioner; Jay Inslee, Washington’s Governor, also is a defendant. Both are defendants in their official capacities); the case currently is before the 9th Circuit.

What really jumps out at me, though, is this assertion by the State [emphasis added]:

The state lawyer emphasized what the church didn’t allege: “no carrier” would offer a plan consistent with its beliefs, it sought such a plan from other carriers, or that the state rejected a submitted plan.

On what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private enterprise’s business decision?

More importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority over a private citizen’s medical decision that should only involve that citizen and his doctor and secondarily (with no tertiary) his health coverage provider?

Most importantly, on what basis does the State (or any State, or the United States) claim a preemptive, a priori, authority to allow a baby to be killed before it’s born?

The answer to each of those questions is that there is no legitimate basis for such claims.

Today’s Attorney General

Posted on by
Reply

The Progressive-Democrat appointee to Attorney General, Merrick Garland, is showing his overtly political bent as our nation’s chief prosecutor. One characterization of The Wall Street Journal‘s editors especially stands out, a characterization of Garland’s suit against Georgia and its new, more expansive voter law.

…a fair guess is that Mr Garland succumbed to White House and progressive pressure to make a political statement to support Democratic efforts in Congress to federalize state election laws in HR1.

Garland—especially with his willingness to surrender to White House political pressure—is demonstrating the wisdom of not confirming him to the Supreme Court. Imagine the destruction he’d have wreaked from the Court as the tool of a President that he’s demonstrating himself to be, given the damage he’s attempting to wreak as AG.

I Dissent

Posted on by
Reply

…from the dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled that Arizona’s voter law is entirely legitimate. That law, you’ll remember, among other things limited who is allowed to return early voting ballots for another person—banned ballot harvesting—and barred counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct.

Among the reasons for upholding Arizona’s law is this:

The court rejected the idea that showing that a state law disproportionately affects minority voters is enough to prove a violation of the law.

Writing in dissent (it was a 6-3 majority), Justice Elena Kagan claimed in part

What is tragic is that the Court has damaged a statute [the 56-yr-old Voting Rights Act] designed to bring about “the end of discrimination in voting.” I respectfully dissent[.]

The irony in Kagan’s dissent is breathtaking in its depth. She complains of damaging the “end of discrimination in voting” even as the Arizona law treats all voters equally rather than giving special treatment to some. Reducing special treatment somehow increases discrimination.

The rejection of the concept that disproportionality is by itself, regardless of whether it’s a mere side effect, discriminatory also represents a great reduction in special treatment for particular groups—but this, too, is somehow an increase in discrimination in Kagan’s world view.