Category Archives: Law

Leftists Are Convulsing Over A Conservative Court. It Doesn’t Get Better. OK, Maybe It Will.

Conservatism, Constitution, Law, Republicans, The Courts

Quite correct: Republicans have had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority on the Supreme Court and … FAILED, REFUSED, or chose to break bread with the opposition, rather than keep the faith with the base and the original Constitution. As the author of this New York Times Review of Books essay suggests, the “mishaps” of previous republican presidents in appointing justices to the SCOTUS suggest “something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part.”

… In retrospect, it is remarkable that a strong conservative majority on the Court has not emerged before now. Since 1980, Republicans have held the presidency for twenty-two years and Democrats for sixteen. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on the platform of choosing conservative judges, appointed three justices—Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Kennedy—and elevated William Rehnquist to the chief justiceship. That should have established conservative control. Yet O’Connor turned out to be a centrist, controlling the Court for a quarter-century by casting the decisive fifth vote in controversial cases. When she retired in 2006, Kennedy assumed her position as the swing justice and unexpectedly emerged as a liberal hero, voting, for example, to extend constitutional rights to detainees in Guantánamo Bay and marriage rights to same-sex couples.

George H.W. Bush also had the chance to consolidate a conservative majority. He appointed Thomas to replace Thurgood Marshall but also replaced William Brennan with David Souter, who underwent a subtle yet significant evolution from Burkean conservative to Burkean liberal. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama each got two justices confirmed, which maintained the Court’s balance. That conservative control has been so long in coming reflects either miscalculation by Reagan and George H.W. Bush or (more likely) something less than full-throated judicial conservatism on their part. …

… THE REST IN “Tipping the Scales by Noah Feldman.”

TV Judge Napolitano’s Nonsensical Indictment Of Trump Border Policy

IMMIGRATION, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Natural Law, UN

Judge Napolitano is a left-libertarian. Always said so. On this site, I have often exposed and argued against his lefty exploits. Here he essentially asserts that if X trespasses into your home, you can’t, in natural law, remove him. Crap. I hazard that, were you to research this bit of Napolitano legalism, you’d find he’s hiding/finessing certain aspects of due-process jurisprudence.

UPDATE (7/2): I might not have phrased my words above well. Responses on Facebook certainly indicate so. My bad. I am a huge proponent of natural law. However, I think Napolitano here is not articulating natural justice at all, but is full of it. His is more legalism than natural law. I am sure there is a state-passed law somewhere that judges like him can use to criminalize what President Trump is doing. I doubt it’s natural law. Where in natural law does it imply that trespassers have to be kept in their natural clans and formations? That nonsense would be the purview of the positive law, most certainly “international law.”

Of course, “Libertarian and leftist protest over any impediment to the free flow of people across borders is predicated not on the negative, leave-me-alone rights of the individual, but on the positive, manufactured right of human kind to venture wherever, whenever.”—ILANA (May 1, 2009)

Today’s It’s Manafort, Tomorrow It’s YOU: Police State USA

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, The State

Prosecutors “argue,” and a judge agrees, that Paul Manafort is a “danger to the community,” to the public—not the legions of criminals and grifters pouring over the Southern border, but President Trump’s former campaign chairman.

“When Manafort was first arraigned and pleaded not guilty in October, a magistrate judge set a $10 million bail price and placed him under house arrest.”

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort will await his trial for foreign lobbying charges from jail.
Two weeks after special counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecutors dropped new accusations of witness tampering on him, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday revoked Manafort’s bail, which had allowed him to live in his Alexandria, Virginia, apartment under house arrest.

The order marked an end to almost eight months of attempts by Manafort to lighten his house arrest restrictions after he was charged and pleaded not guilty to foreign lobbying violations.
“The harm in this case is harm to the administration of justice and harm to the integrity of the court’s system,” Berman Jackson told Manafort in court.

The judge emphasized to Manafort how she could not make enough rulings to keep him from speaking improperly with witnesses, after he had used multiple text messaging apps and called a potential witness on an Italian cellphone.

MORE.

Trump Is Trying To Overcome Radically Liberal Immigration Laws & Shitty Lawmakers

Critique, Donald Trump, IMMIGRATION, Law, Military, Republicans

Whether ordered by Barack Obama or Donald Trump; sending National Guard troops to the border, it must be clear, has always been about optics, no more.

Indeed, previous administrations have done so.

But it remains true that the National Guard can act as “extra eyes and ears for border guards,” and no more, notes The Economist, in its April 7th-13th (2018) issue. As we know all so well, “there are legal constraints on using soldiers for law-enforcement.”

In Trump translation: “We have horrible, horrible and very unsafe laws in the United States.”

The president was, therefore, wrong when he announced in April that, “We are preparing for the military to secure our border between Mexico and the United States.”

Certainly President Trump’s “proclamation to deploy the National Guard” does nothing to stop Central American asylum-seekers. These brazen border-crossers “rarely hide from border agents,” for they know that, to stay in the US, and live off the American taxpayer’s avails, all they need do is “lodge a legal claim to stay.”

In Trump translation: We have the crappiest, most liberal immigration laws.

RECENT HISTORY: “During Trump’s first nine months in office, arrests for immigration violations were 42% higher than they were during the same period in Barack Obama’s last year. Non-border deportations rose 25% in fiscal 2017. Deportations of illegal immigrants who have committed no other crime, and who were not a priority in the Obama era, nearly tripled. Refugee admissions have plummeted. This fiscal year 16% of them are Muslim, compared with 42% a year ago.”

ICE agents have increased their presence at courthouses. ICE said they will use courthouse arrests only for “specific, targeted aliens” with criminal records, gang affiliations or removal orders, or who pose national security threats.

MOREOVER, I don’t know if Jeff Sessions’ Department of Justice has done so yet, but it was “to set quotas for clearing cases for immigration judges to hit.”

White House officials had been “drafting a package which would, among other things, make it easier to deport children who arrive alone at the border.”

All good stuff the sainted Sarah Sanders, White House spokesperson, never mentions.

So, to bypass the shitty lawmakers who’re unprepared to heed the country, should Republicans “eliminate the rule that most new laws can pass the Senate only with a 60-vote supermajority”? Should they, before it’s too late?

(Source: “Be Very Afraid: Donald Trump takes a hard turn on immigration.“)