Tag Archives: rights

A Misunderstanding

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This one, a Wall Street Journal editorial centered on a coerced unionization of ride share companies Uber and Lyft. The editors got their misunderstanding in early, via their lede:

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday announced a “deal” with ride-share companies Uber and Lyft that they couldn’t refuse. Democrats in Sacramento will reduce auto insurance coverage mandates that are driving runaway litigation in return for the companies letting drivers collectively bargain.

Yes, they could have refused the deal. The California government foisted onto them a supremely ugly choice, but it was no less a freely taken choice for all its ugliness. The companies’ managers were just too timid to resist, too timid to leave the State altogether, as their own powerful alternative to Sacramento’s demand.

There’s no reason for any business, not just Uber and Lyft, to suffer the politically imposed costs of operating in California. Nothing is stopping businesses from leaving other than the timidity of their managers.

I alluded to it just above: the cost of doing business in California isn’t just fiscal. It’s political, too, reducing as that cost does, a company’s ability to manage its own business affairs in accordance with its own free market imperatives.

The Core of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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It’s moving ever closer to Party’s grass roots. The face of that core is Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his parallel membership in Democratic Socialists of America. DSA’s core position is

“dismantle and move beyond” America’s capitalist society and create a “wholesale socialist transformation of our national and global economy.”

DSA’s platform is specific, too, including such nakedly socialist things as these:

  • city-run grocery stores
  • free bus rides
  • increased public funding for hormone therapy and surgery for transgender people
  • rent freeze, not just rent control
  • ending “all misdemeanor offenses”

It’s not just Mamdani, either. The Progressive-Democratic Party selected its own socialist candidate for mayor of Minneapolis, Omar Fateh, who is a carbon copy of Mamdani. It’s true enough that Party then unendorsed (leaving him on the ballot) Fateh, but only on a technicality regarding their convention nominating process and only in response to some opprobrium. But here, Party spoke their truth in selecting Fateh and now only is covering its political behind.

In the end, the two, these most public two, are simply concretizing prior Party commitments: then-Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s brag just prior to his first election that he was just “days away from fundamentally transforming” our nation, and then-Progressive-Democratic Party President Joe Biden in his State of the Union address saying that he intended to “fundamentally change” our nation’s economy.

This is Party initially acting at the national level and now trying to move down into our cities.

“Materiality”

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Texas voting law requires voters voting by mail-in ballots to verify identity via a state ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number (SSN4). A Federal district judge ruled in 2023 against the law using the fictive logic that

It is self-evident that a voter’s ID number is not material….

Judge James Ho, writing for a unanimous 5th Circuit, articulated how clearly the appellate court saw through that district judge’s…argument.

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.

He expanded on that [citations omitted]:

The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is indeed who he claims he is. And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.
So there is no “disconnect between the State’s announced interests and the statute enacted.” And the ID number requirement “meaningfully corresponds” to the State’s legitimate interests in preventing the scourge of mail-in ballot fraud.

It seems to me the district judge slept through his high school logic class, and his law school provided no training in logic at all.

The 5th Circuit ruling can be read here.

Fault and Blame

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This example is all too typical. An elderly couple was scammed out of their life savings–$5 million—by a “pig butcherer” who conned the husband into wiring the couple’s savings, in a number of tranches, to the scammer under the guise, among others, of investing the money in a sure-fire investment.

What happened:

A year or so earlier, Craig had responded to an online ad about investments and later received a text message from someone calling themself Tiffany, according to his hazy account. The person struck up a flirtatious exchange and was soon telling him about a lucrative opportunity. All he needed to do was wire money from his bank account.

And

The adviser [at an earlier bank where the husband had begun his “investing” with Tiffany] had repeatedly tried to convince Craig that “Tiffany” was scamming him, to no avail.

The husband after that had pulled his—their—money from that bank and placed it with another bank, from which the husband continued “investing” with Tiffany.

And

Shortly after discovering the scam, Anamarie learned something else about Craig that helped explain what had happened. His doctor told her that Craig had vascular dementia, likely due to a brain injury from a fall he took in 2015 while walking his brother-in-law’s dog.

The first the wife knew anything was amiss was when her credit cards were declined at a Walmart.

In the end, the couple is blaming bank for their having been scammed, claiming that the bank hadn’t acted nanny-ish enough [my term] to protect the couple from themselves.

I have questions, and I’m not entirely sympathetic with the couple or with their blame-shifting.

Why didn’t the wife know more about the couple’s financial situation? True enough, they’re of an age where money matters usually was the husband’s job, but that doesn’t excuse her ignorance; it only illustrates how widespread such ignorance is.

What was the husband doing getting flirty with an online person about whom he knew nothing about, including whether the person even was female? See below for this before readers get up in morality arms.

Why didn’t the wife know anything about her husband’s medical condition? Certainly, this is related to a couple’s internal dynamics, but there’s little reason for one member of the couple to be so ignorant of the other member’s medical state. This is another aspect of couples of an age, but again, this doesn’t excuse the ignorance; it only illustrates the widespread nature of it.

Another Thought on Birthright Citizenship

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I start from two premises. One is the clear distinction in meaning between subject to the jurisdiction and subject to the power of. I continue with the premise that illegal aliens, who have entered our country illegally and remain here illegally, are subject only to the power of our government.

Our government sits at the head of our social compact. More to the point, our government has exactly zero jurisdiction beyond the limits of our social compact; this is well understood both in our domestic law and in international law. Illegal aliens have illegally entered our nation, and they continue to stay without turning themselves to positively seek to get themselves right with our laws, especially with that subset that is our immigration laws. By their own conscious behavior, they are holding themselves outside of our social compact where our government has no jurisdiction, only raw power.

Within or without our social compact is a distinction that applies also to pregnant women who enter our nation, even legally, solely to have their babies on American soil, and who then depart for their home country. These women, never having given up their home country’s jurisdiction, have never submitted themselves to our jurisdiction. Indeed, by their intention of returning to their home country as soon as they’re able after birth, these women have never intended to submit themselves to our government’s jurisdiction. These women have held themselves outside our social compact for the duration of their stay here.

From that, babies born to illegal aliens and to birth-tourist mothers are not—cannot—be citizens of our United States: they’ve been born outside our government’s jurisdiction.

Looking at this from another direction, here is the relevant clause of the 14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

The form of the clause’s logical construction is this: If A AND B, THEN C. Thus: If born or naturalized AND subject to our jurisdiction, THEN citizen.

Both A and B must be true for C to be true; that’s the meaning of the AND connector. Since the babies born to illegal aliens or to birth-tourist mothers do not meet the second condition, they cannot reach the THEN outcome.

There is a counterargument, and that one centers on the early 17th century British origins of the concept of citizenship by dint of place of birth, with further references to American court decisions on the matter prior to the 1868 ratification of our 14th Amendment. This argument also makes reference to long-standing policy as well as to that legal matter. The counterargument, though, fails for a number of reasons.

Last reason first: ‘long-standing policy” is irrelevant. Policy isn’t binding on anything outside the administrations that choose to maintain it; policy is not statute, it is too easily changed solely extra-legislatively, and it can be eliminated altogether by any subsequent administration.

British law and British legal history have value only for the logic and ideas contained in their derivation; they have nothing to contribute in terms of legally binding matters. They have no jurisdiction inside the United States; indeed, they have no jurisdiction outside the bounds of Great Britain. They’re wholly irrelevant.

Similarly, those American court rulings that predate ratification of the 14th Amendment are wholly irrelevant. With that ratification, those rulings’ vague descriptions of what an American citizen was were rendered entirely without effect by the clear definition of “citizen” that the 14th Amendment created and codified.

Even the counterargument’s references to court rulings subsequent to Amendment’s ratification are irrelevant: they merely expand on those prior irrelevancies; not affecting the Amendment’s dispositive definition, they do not render those decisions current and within the Amendment’s bounds.