Category Archives: Law

Killer Justice

Guess the official. “He helped 11 people win contracts and promotions in return for bribes … totalling over $10m over 25 years,” and now, following a trial, he’s being given a very stiff sentence. “The indictment reportedly said that” our anonymous minister’s “malpractice” led to “huge losses of public assets and damage to the interests of the state and people.”

This sounds like a standard description of a state official anywhere, really, but this one is different. The man was stopped and sentenced.

If you’ve been following the news and still hold hope for the US, you might have thought that I was speaking of Gregory Roseman, former IRS deputy director for enterprise networks and tier support systems.

But then you’d have scratched your head and wondered aloud about the paltry sum for which the stiff sentence was meted. The Roseman scumbag, on the other hand, “pushed for contract awards worth up to $500 million to a company owned by a friend,” and has “pleaded the Fifth Amendment and refused to testify at a House hearing Wednesday.”

Perhaps I am referring to Roseman’s pal, so-called war hero Braulio Castillo, the owner of a “small disadvantaged business,” whatever that means, who grew his hobbling business thanks to “contract steering”—contracts to the tune of the $500 million aforementioned taxpayer funds, funneled to him by the thugs at the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service.

(Castillo’s war injuries, for which Veteran’s Affairs awarded him compensation, were sustained after a prep school injury. I suppose America’s government schools are a war theatre of sorts.)

No. The official who was given “a suspended death sentence for bribery and abuse of power” is Chinese Railways Minister Liu Zhijun.

Greg Roseman, Braulio Castillo and the rest of the American gang at IRS will be allowed to plead the Fifth, will net a book deal from some big American publisher, and will go on to officiate as experts on network or cable TV.

Apoplectic Over Legal Reversals On Race

Constitution, Law, Race, Racism, States' Rights, The State

Any weakening of laws that privilege protected groups will be decried by … the groups the law protects and others vested in “advancement through affirmative action, quotas, contract set-asides based on race” and race-based redistricting. The latter is “the intentional formation of majority–minority districts (districts in which voters of color constitute a majority of eligible voters).

Supreme Court setbacks to the racial spoils-system run by federal and state enforces is bound to annoy the system’s beneficiaries and supporters. In this, The National Law Journal stands firmly with “Attorney General Eric Holder Jr.” The former called a Tuesday decision over “a key provision of the Voting Rights Act by the U.S. Supreme Court” a “gutting” of the law. The latter decried this legal reprieve as “a serious and unnecessary setback,” promising that “the department will press on in the enforcement of voting rights laws.”

Basically the South was declared to no longer pose a danger to blacks. Read The National Law Journal’s laughable lamentations:

A divided U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday dealt a crippling blow to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by striking down the formula devised by Congress to determine which states are covered by the act.
“In 1965, the States could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the Nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.”
By invalidating the coverage formula in Section 4(b) of the act, the court, in effect, rendered Section 5—the heart of the act—useless. Section 5 requires covered jurisdictions—those with a history of voting discrimination—to submit any changes in their voting practices for preclearance by the Department of Justice or the federal district court in Washington. …

MORE.

UPDAED: Rand Paul’s Reversal On Oink-Filled Immigration Omnibus

IMMIGRATION, Law, Republicans, Welfare

Rand Paul strikes more political poses than a practitioner of tantric sex.

In March this year, he joined the Gang of Eight (Gof8) with his own goof-proof “case” for amnesty. It was that “de facto amnesty” must give way to amnesty de jure. In other words, Rand’s non sequitur was that, given reality on the ground, legislators must take action to turn it into a legal reality.

The one condition doesn’t necessarily follow from the other. Since when are legislators obligated to legislate over every reality that forms on the ground?

Two days ago, Rand told CNN’s chief political correspondent Candy Crowley that, “Without some congressional authority and without border security first, I can’t support the final bill.”

I suspect Rand Paul “heard” a thing or two from his constituents. The omnibus immigration bill is a pork-filled power grab of a bill, if ever there was one. (Aren’t they all? A pork-filled power grab is the definition of legislation.) It is “headed toward bipartisan passage in the U.S. Senate, but is going nowhere from there.

UPDATED (6/27): The Heritage Foundation on the “Expansion of Government Bureaucracy” that is the Oink-Filled Immigration Omnibus, which passed today with Republican support in the Senate:

In addition to creating an open season on government spending, the provisions within S. 744 would also substantially expand government bureaucracy. The bill creates several new offices, task forces, and commissions including the:

Southern Border Security Commission, composed largely of appointed members and charged with making recommendations to achieve effective control along the border;[31]
Department of Homeland Security Border Oversight Task Force, composed of members appointed by the executive and charged with providing review and recommendations on government immigration and border enforcement policies and programs, and their specific impact on border communities;[32]
Task Force on New Americans, composed largely of Cabinet members and created to establish coordinated federal policies and programs to promote assimilation.[33]
Joint Employment Fraud Task Force, created to investigate compliance with immigration employment verification requirements;[34] and
Bureau of Immigration and Labor Market Research, charged with analyzing labor shortages, developing methodologies for determining the annual cap for the newly created employment-based W visa, and help employers to recruit W visa holders.[35]

Even where the bill does not explicitly create new government agencies and offices, it is likely to expand government bureaucracy. For one, the amnesty provisions contained within S. 744 would create a flood of applications to be processed by USCIS, an agency that is already struggling to keep up. Yet, instead of providing much-needed reforms to USCIS that would create a healthier and more responsive agency, an issue that is not addressed within the bill, the likely response will be to simply throw more money and manpower at the problem.[36] The same response is likely to be true for the Internal Revenue Service, which may require more personnel to enforce the bill’s requirement that amnesty applicants satisfy applicable federal tax liability.

Additional provisions also establish burdensome government regulations and fees that promise to have a direct effect on business, including the setting of mandatory wages for nonimmigrant agricultural workers and pro-union provisions restricting agriculture employers’ ability to hire needed workers.[37] The bill also established numerous fees to be paid by employers seeking foreign labor, which add to business costs and ultimately fund many of the bill’s other misguided priorities.[38] Such regulations and fees will only serve to burden business, raise costs, and decrease the incentive for employers to create new jobs.

UPDATE II: The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector

Constitution, Crime, Debt, Democracy, Government, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“By now, Americans with a modicum of cerebral alacrity have a sense of the attitude among Washington State Democrats toward the immutable right of the people to keep their earnings. You all witnessed the despicable Jim McDermott’s intimidating verbal assaults, leveled at conservative property owners, during the House committee hearing on the den of iniquity and vice that is the Internal Revenue Service. For what is the seeking of ‘tax-exempt status’ if not a plea, directed at our overlords who art in D.C., to keep more of what is rightfully ours?

What Edmund Burke said about the House of Commons in his day applies in spades to a House packed with the likes of Rep. Jim McDermott D-Wash. ‘Designed as a control for the people,’ the House has become a control ‘upon the people.’

And the trend extends to local governments, gone from which are the old-fashioned county governors, once devoted to low taxes and careful spending.

Here goes.

While trying to be neighborly, I made the mistake of being less than reverential about my property taxes in ‘The Evergreen State,’ and in particular, the 51.4 percent appropriated for ‘State and Local Schools.’

I was informed in high decibels that my husband and I, hardworking both, ought to thank our lucky stars for this valuable index—thousands paid per year toward ‘State and Local Schools’—for without it we’d be clueless about … the value of our home. (If anything, taxes distort market prices. But more about the curious fallacy of the benevolent property tax, as a price signal in the housing market, in a follow-up column.)

Yes, siree. The bad tempered diatribe then swerved to the plight of local law enforcement, who, my interlocutor alleged, were powerless to police a squatter camp in the North Bend vicinity, for lack of resources. Some believe that twice did a man from this homeless encampment invade a homestead in the community.

We fork over thousands in property taxes per annum, yet, as was being asserted, the police were without the necessary funds to fulfill the State’s only constitutional duty: protecting the people. Naturally, where the State fails to carry out its sacred duty, as is almost always the case, The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution instantiates the individual’s natural right to do exactly what the heroic homeowners did to safeguard life and property: hastened the intruder’s descent into hell.

Commensurate with the value this Washington-State locality places on limited authority and republican virtues—none at all—law enforcement is not even itemized in the property-tax bill issued.

The truth is that the lion’s share of our property taxes goes toward …

Read the complete column. “The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector” is now on WND.

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UPDATE I: The “wasteful monstrosity” discussed above was celebrated by the local newspaper’s intrepid reporters. It too is local in name only—for most “local newspapers” are corporately owned. In our case, the pabulum published weekly is by permission of The Seattle Times Co. When our local rag is not reporting on a theatre that will close, a cinema that is hiring, or a pizza place that’ll host “Raise the Dough for Seattle Children’s”—the newspaper simply parrots the partyline on everything. I know, because I line my parrot’s cage with its pages.

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UPDATE II (7/24): For more of an idea of the all-pervasive profligacy of the oink sector in my state, check out the “Seattle Parasite-To-Resident Ratio.”