Category Archives: The Courts

Co-Equal, Or Colluding, Branches of Government?

Constitution, Federalism, Government, Healthcare, Law, States' Rights, The Courts

The problem with the Commonwealth of Virgina’s pleasing legal victory in challenging the constitutionality of Obama’s “healthscare” is this: The individual mandate and much of the health care bill may be manifestly violative, but most of the limits the Constitution placed on the federales (and the courts themselves) are no longer upheld by the courts (or by Congress, that other co-equal branch of government), starting with the Tenth Amendment.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So, as PBS’s News Hour reported, once again so well (appending as it always does a PDF document of the Decision), “Federal judge Henry Hudson ruled Monday afternoon that a major provision of the health care reform law is unconstitutional. In his decision, the judge sided with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who argued that the Congress does not have the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance. ‘The Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution,’ Judge Hudson wrote.”

But along could come the Supreme Court Justices and nullify the health-care preferences of the people of Virginia. That’s because the framers’ constitutional dispensation is now nothing but a sad joke. The Appellate Court could beat the SCOTUS to it.

Under HIS Direction

Barack Obama, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Law, The Courts

“The Obama administration’s lawsuit against the state of Arizona offers a revealing window into the Holder Justice Department. And the picture isn’t pretty, ” writes Kris W. Kobach.

Consider what we learned when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton first let the cat out of the bag and told us about it during an interview in Ecuador. Clinton showed who was sitting in the driver’s seat when it came to the Justice Department’s decision: “President Obama has spoken out against the law because he thinks that the federal government should be determining immigration policy. And the Justice Department, under his direction, will be bringing a lawsuit against the act.”
The key words here are “under his direction.” In other words, the White House is calling the shots. The same political calculations that drove Obama to criticize the Arizona law in April also drove the filing of the suit. While that is fine for policy decisions in other executive departments, the litigation decisions of the Justice Department are different. Past administrations — both Republican and Democratic — have taken care to insulate these decisions from political forces.
The reasons for doing so are obvious.
The decision to file civil charges or to file a civil lawsuit should be based purely on the strength of the legal case against the defendant, not on politics. And when it comes to the Arizona law, the federal government’s case is a weak one.

“When one considers the Arizona lawsuit in contrast to last year’s Justice Department decision to drop the voter-intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party, the conclusion becomes inescapable. In the Black Panther case, the defendants had failed to answer the charges against them, and all the Department had to do was ask the judge for a default judgment. But the political appointees of the Holder Justice Department came in and ordered the career department attorneys to drop the case.

So the department dropped a slam-dunk case and yet files a suit that is half-court shot. Neither decision makes sense if the law is guiding the department’s litigation decisions. But both decisions make perfect sense if political calculations are foremost.”

[SNIP]

I’m appalled that other states have not stood up loudly for Jan Brewer who, while not the sharpest knife in the draw, is at least sharp enough to understand the importance of defending Arizonans against trespass, from within (the feds) and without (alien scofflaws and welfare consumers).

Has anyone heard what the Republican beauty queen Sarah Palin has to say about the Federal government’s frontal attack on Arizona? Where is Bachmann on the matter? Are republicans covering up for the terrible two’s relative silence on the topic?

Updated: Feds To Sabotage Arizona

Ann Coulter, Federalism, Founding Fathers, IMMIGRATION, Law, Rights, States' Rights, The Courts

ICE is supposed to deport, or at least process, illegals aliens apprehended by Arizona law enforcement—OR, MAYBE NOT.

A top Obama official, John Morton, assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement government, told the Chicago Tribune that the Arizona immigration-enforcement law, SB 1070, is not “good government.”

The best way to reduce illegal immigration is through a comprehensive federal approach, he said, and not a patchwork of state laws.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano backed the bastard up: “ICE,” she said, “is not obligated to process illegal immigrants referred to them by Arizona authorities.

ICE has the legal discretion to accept or not to accept persons delivered to it by non-federal personnel … It also has the discretion to deport or not to deport persons delivered to it by any government agents, even its own.”

FoxNews’ Megyn Kelly called this government by fiat.

This is how it rolls in the US. I’ve long contended that commentators who constantly hail America’s unique freedoms are willfully misleading their followers. States’ rights? Those died a long time ago.

The federal government no longer fulfills its most basic negative duty, and that is to protect its citizens. But this is not new.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Hot Air tracks the issue too.

Update (May 23): Ann Coulter is at her best when she gets legal. She dredges up the “UNITED STATES v. BRIGNONI-PONCE” (1975), in which the SCOTUS unanimously, including every liberal on the Court, decided that “border police could take into account the Mexican appearance of a car’s occupants. They could not do random stops based on nothing but that ‘appearance.'” The Arizona law does not go as far as the SCOTUS’ ruling.

Another interesting point made by AC: “Iconic labor leader, and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez, along with Ralph Abernathy, successor to Martin Luther King, marched against illegal immigration.”

Updated: Diversity À La Democrats

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Democrats, Law, Media, Race, The Courts

Doesn’t Pat Buchanan know that diversity is code for displacing da white man? Bush tried hard to appoint a woman simpleton to the SCOTUS, but the Party kicked him so hard for Harriet Miers, whose mind was even more pedestrian than SotoSoAndSo, that he withdrew her nomination and gave us the non-diverse Alito and Roberts.

Still, some interesting points from Pat:

“What kind of diversity is this – either in geography or life experience?

While Sotomayor went to Yale Law School, the other three liberals went to Harvard, though Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia. Seems a fairly narrow range for a party that once claimed to be America’s party.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg tied for first in her class at Columbia, but neither Obama nominee is academically distinguished. Sotomayor called herself an ‘affirmative action baby’ who, at Princeton, was urged to read children’s books in the summer to improve her reading and writing skills. Kagan never served as a judge, never litigated a case before being named solicitor general, never wrote a book or anything else anyone has turned up that manifests real legal scholarship.

From her Princeton thesis on the sad demise of 20th-century socialism, to her tears at the defeat of the radical liberal Senate candidate Elizabeth Holtzman in 1980, to her hostility to the U.S. military on the Harvard campus while dean of the law school, Kagan has revealed herself to be one more Ivy League leftist anxious to use a lifetime seat on the court, winning the plaudits of her peers by imposing her ideology on a nation that has never voted for it.

Conservatives will not soon get another opportunity like this to take down Ivy League pretensions to represent and rule America.”

[SNIP]

Back at the farm, liberals really do worship their magic mulatto. The mind boggles at this utterance from MSNBC’s LAWRENCE O‘DONNELL, sitting in for odious Ed of “THE ED SHOW”:

“… we don‘t know a lot about Kagan, but we do know a lot about the man who appointed her. Barack Obama is the wisest and most learned legal scholar ever to occupy the White House. That‘s who Kagan would have had to fool if she really were some sort of stealth conservative.”

Update (May 15): Remember: BHO, author of bestsellers, and not one law journal article (no that that means a thing) is being hailed as greater than Thomas Jefferson, lawyer (as far as I know), legal and political philosopher, author of the Declaration of Independence and generally a genius.

This is sick stuff (but then so is it sick to credit Palin with doing battle for Jeffersonian liberties).