Category Archives: The Courts

Ducking Around As Freedoms Go POOF

Constitution, Fascism, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Law, Liberty, The Courts

Face it, the idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government is worse than naive. Rather, it WAS recklessly naive of the American Founding Fathers to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve as a check on one another.

Today, Judge William Pauley, “a Clinton appointee to the Southern District of New York,” ruled that “privacy protections enshrined in the fourth amendment of the US constitution needed to be balanced against a government need to maintain a database of records to prevent future terrorist attacks. ‘The right to be free from searches is fundamental but not absolute,’ he said. ‘Whether the fourth amendment protects bulk telephony metadata is ultimately a question of reasonableness.’”

Pauley argued that al-Qaida’s “bold jujitsu” strategy to marry seventh century ideology with 21st century technology made it imperative that government authorities be allowed to push privacy boundaries.

As if the purview of an American justice is to “marry” American law with Islamic ideology; a US judge must apply the constitution to the facts. In truth, any protection the natural law once provided us has been lost, buried under the rubble of legislation, statute, precedents, whatever.

The Guardian:

The judgement, in a case brought before a district court in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union, directly contradicts the result of a similar challenge in a Washington court last week which ruled the NSA’s bulk collection program was likely to prove unconstitutional and was “almost Orwellian” in scale.
Friday’s ruling makes it more likely that the issue will be settled by the US supreme court, although it may be overtaken by the decision of Barack Obama on whether to accept the recommendations of a White House review panel to ban the NSA from directly collecting such data.

There you have the sum of American freedom and federalism: Legislation that flouts the Fourth Amendment is already in place to provide Pauley with all the positive-law backing he needs to justify an anti-Constitutional ruling.

To wit:

The [Judge dismissed the] ACLU case against the NSA … primarily on the grounds that bulk collection was authorised under existing laws allowing “relevant” data collection to be authorised by secret US courts.

And if the Supreme Court doesn’t play (as nicely as Supremo Roberts played for ObamaCare)—there is always an extra-constitutional committee to kill off/override constitutional protections.

As the nation f-cks around with the huckster Ducksters, the ‘privacy protections enshrined in the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution’ just got still weaker, as if this were possible.

The Zimmerman Zoo

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Justice, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Race, Reason, The Courts

B37 is a Zimmerman juror who is known to have said that “the best use for newspapers was lining her parrot’s cage.” A wise woman, both in her choice of companion and cage-liner. In “The Evergreen State’s Profligate Oink Sector,” I marveled at the pabulum published by my local press. How did I know? “I line my parrot’s cage with its pages.”

Parrot lady aside, poor George’s trial is a zoo. Some of the most telling coverage came courtesy of CNN, where a male lawyer—clearly focused on the law and the facts of the case—argued with a slew of females. These included Anderson Cooper and attendant attorneys and judges to whom the concept of applying the law to the facts was foreign. Instead, these agitators and activists, all (except AC) having officiated in the legal system, had convicted Mr. Zimmerman because of a political narrative concerning racism that had been woven into the case by a prosecution answering to special interests, and not the law.

For example, the “Instructions read to jury by The Honorable Debra S. Nelson, Circuit Judge” laid out the law quite clearly. On CNN, Sunny Hostin, a former (very scary) prosecutor turned CNN commentator, doesn’t like the law, so she declared these clear instructions confusing, and tried to suggest that the letter of the law is bound to be ignored by reasonable jurors.

Hostin, like other tele-lawyers, is oriented towards a desired outcome.

If they follow the Judge’s instructions, the jurors should exonerate Zimmerman.

Sen. Graham: ‘Not Fair to Let President Get Hit.’ But What About The Drone’s Victims?

Barack Obama, Homeland Security, Justice, Law, Technology, The Courts, War, WMD

Bloodthirsty neoconservative Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican Senator, supports President Obama’s drone policy, which, as I noted on 02.05.13, is being debated only because of the very public confirmation hearings for John Brennan, President Obama’s nominee to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Sen. Graham says it’s not fair to leave the president out there on his own while he’s getting hit from libertarians and the left,” reports MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.

I guess it’s fair to leave kids like little Shakira to brave the cowardice of Uncle Sam’s Assassin. As you see, not much remains of the child’s small, charred face.

The Los Angeles Times concedes that it is time “to press the architect of the administration’s policy of targeted killings about its legal rationale and practical application.”

…the document espouses a “broader concept of imminence” in which a suspect can be killed even when the U.S. government lacks “clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” Another passage suggests that the determination of whether there is an “imminent” threat can take account of the fact that certain Al Qaeda members are “continually plotting attacks against the United States.”

Despite the horror of the concept of “Targeted killings”—and the violation of 4th and 5h amendment safeguards—the LA Times posits the need only to “limit” rather than “eliminate” this barbarism.

UPDATE II: A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts

Bush, Constitution, Federalism, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Justice, Law, The Courts

HERE are excerpts from “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts,” now on RT.

Is John G. Roberts Jr. no more than a smooth operator, I wondered on September 15 2005.

I began tracking the now infamous Justice Roberts a month earlier, around the time he was exciting admiration from gay-rights activists for winning “Romer vs. Evans” for them. The Los Angeles Times, at the time, noted that “Romer vs. Evans” had “struck down a voter-approved 1992 Colorado initiative that would have allowed employers and landlords to exclude gays from jobs and housing.”

Gay activists still consider the decision Roberts won for them the “single most important positive ruling in the history of the gay rights movement.” Special pleading not being this column’s “thing,” arguments from and against so-called gay rights did not sway me much.

Rather, I urged readers to pay attention to Roberts’ efforts against the private property and freedom of association of Coloradans. “When property is rendered insecure,” said Edmund Burke, “so is liberty.”

Alas, Roberts’ (pro bono) work comported with 14th-Amendment jurisprudence, aspects of which violate private property rights and freedom of association. Simply put, to the extent that the Constitution coincides with the natural law, it is good. More often than not, it has buried natural justice under the rubble of legislation and statute.

My choice for the Supreme Court of the United States, back when President Bush was pushing the goofy Harriet Myers, was Justice Janice Rogers Brown. An originalist, Justice Brown is also black. Pigment, however, only works in favor of candidates of the Left.

“Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free stuff’ as the political system will permit them to extract.” This was just one of Justice Brown’s many admirable utterances. (Today’s brazen cannibals would object to Brown’s maligning as vociferously as the obese derided this writer for telling the truth about their fat and flaccid icon, Citizen Karen Klein.) …

… But, here’s the thing that unsettled so about Roberts’ performance during confirmation proceedings. Or so I wrote on September 15, 2005:

“He seems to be all about the moves” …

READ the complete column. “A Romp Down Memory Lane With Justice Roberts” is now on RT.

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UPDATE I: “A vast new federal power to ‘tax'” has been birthed by the philosophical successor to chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, the “intellectual progenitor of federal power”:

No one can know the true motivations for the idiosyncratic rationale in the health-care decision written by Marshall’s current successor, John Roberts. … Perhaps Chief Justice Roberts really means what he wrote – that congressional power to tax is without constitutional limit – and his opinion is a faithful reflection of that view, without a political or legal or intra-court agenda. But that view finds no support in the Constitution or our history. It even contradicts the most famous of Marshall’s big government aphorisms: The power to tax is the power to destroy.
The reasoning underlying the 5-to-4 majority opinion is the court’s unprecedented pronouncement that Congress’ power to tax is unlimited. The majority held that the extraction of thousands of dollars per year by the IRS from individuals who do not have health insurance is not a fine, not a punishment, not a payment for government-provided health insurance, not a shared responsibility – all of which the statute says it is – but rather is an inducement in the form of a tax.

“The logic in the majority opinion is the jurisprudential equivalent of passing a camel through the eye of a needle. The logic is so tortured, unexpected and unprecedented that even the law’s most fervent supporters did not make or anticipate the court’s argument in its support. …”

UPDATE II (July 6):

From: J
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2012 11:49 AM
To: Ilana Mercer
Subject: Recent article

Your article today was excellent.

Most notably the part about how Roberts answered the question posed by the Senator about the administrative state….. so true. That’s our biggest problem in this country because half of all “conservatives” are for it. Very strange how he steered around the question.

J.