Tag Archives: supreme court

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson says some foolish things

Posted on by
5

The Justices of the Supreme Court make their living with words. They read them, they write them, they speak them, they listen to them, and they rule with them. We currently have a Justice who uses words very poorly.

At her confirmation hearing before the Senate, Justice Jackson was asked to give a definition of “woman.” That’s a legitimate question, since many legal matters depend on whether a given person is a woman or a man.

Her answer was:

“I can’t. Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”

Jackson was of course dodging the question. Fine, that’s what you do when you’re being cross examined by a hostile questioner. But the unartfulness of her dodge was striking. A person trained and working with the tool of words should have been able to craft an answer along the lines of:

We all know that words can mean different things in different settings. In the case of the word “woman,” there is of course a traditional definition in genetics which is ‘a person with two X chromosomes.’ We also know that there are people in the world without two X chromosomes who view themselves as women. I respect their views of themselves, just as I respect the views of geneticists. I can’t say without the particular facts of a case in front of me how those views should be weighed, if at all, in a court of law.”

Blah, blah, blah, right? Yes, but that’s the point of an artful dodge – don’t give the questioner a sound bite. Jackson didn’t seem to recognize that she’d handed her questioner – and her present and future critics – a sound bite that will live forever.

Continue reading →

Will we use reverse discrimination to “correct” the gender gap the way we disastrously “corrected” the racial gap?

Posted on by
6

A persistent myth is that, for the same job, women in America are paid only 84 cents for every dollar that men are paid.

I explain below, first, why that myth is false and, second, why it’s dangerous.

There are the several reasons why it’s false. The figures use a category of “full time work” for their comparisons. That’s defined as any work over 35 hours per week. That means a man working 55 hours a week is compared to a woman working 36. So, a man making, say, $30/hour for those 55 hours for a total of $1650/week is deemed to be making $210 more for a “full time” job than a woman making $40/hour for 36 hours for a total of $1440/week for a “full time” job – even though in point of fact, the woman is making $5/hour more.

It’s not like this all balances out in the end because women and men overall work the same number of hours. They don’t. The high-hour work is mainly by men.

Continue reading →

The Colorado Secretary of State says she now trusts the people to make the decision she didn’t trust them to make four months ago

Posted on by
4

The cabal that calls itself the Democratic Party of Colorado nearly pulled a coup last fall. Unburdened by any inconvenient process that might have been due, a Democrat state judge decided that Donald Trump was an insurrectionist. Therefore, under a clause of the 14th Amendment designed to prevent former Confederates from running for federal office, Trump was ineligible to run for president.

Never mind that Trump had never been convicted or even charged with the crime of insurrection.

On appeal, four of the seven Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court agreed. The other three in their strident dissent all but wondered out loud what kind of Colorado-legal weed the majority was smoking.

Continue reading →

The Aloha Court just overruled the U.S. Supreme Court

Posted on by
4

In 2008, the United States Supreme Court decided in the Heller case that the Second Amendment right to bear arms applies not just to militias, but also to individual people. While militias are mentioned in the Amendment, the noun to which the right is granted is the “people.”

Individuals are “people.”

After Heller, much teeth-gnashing and garment-rending ensued from the left. They had hoped that the Second Amendment applied only to militias. There being essentially no legal militias in the country anymore, that would mean the Second Amendment would apply to nobody.

And so, nobody could have guns. Well, nobody could have guns legally. Anyone with a gun would be in possession of it illegally. (You know where I’m going with this.) Such illegal possession of a gun would be outside the law. The possessor would be an outlaw. When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.

You gotta admit, that’s a pretty good line.

Continue reading →

Based on today’s oral arguments, it will probably be a decision for Trump

Posted on by
1

As I expected and predicted, the Supreme Court will probably decide the Trump/Colorado case in favor of Trump.

I doubt the decision will be unanimous. On the liberal side, Justice Sotomayor was outspoken in her questions to Trump’s lawyer (Jonathan Mitchell who was arguing his sixth Supreme Court case). Justice Kagan’s questions, too, suggest to me that she will come down against Trump.

Justice Brown Jackson was hard to read, with questions that seemed sympathetic to Mitchell’s point that the 14th Amendment bar fails to mention the presidency and also sympathetic to Trump’s due process argument – the argument that he was effectively convicted of the high crime of insurrection without ever being charged with it.  

Continue reading →

Trump’s brief to the Supreme Court is solid, well-written, persuasive, and underreported

Posted on by
2
Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows

Six days ago, Donald Trump’s lawyers filed a 34-page brief in the Supreme Court. In legal-speak, their brief is called a “petition for certiorari.” It asks the U.S. Supreme Court to review the 4-3 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court banning Trump from the Colorado ballot. (The brief is available, in full, at the Supreme Court website.) 

This case presents one of the most important legal and political issues of this century: Whether a state can exclude a national candidate from the state’s ballot on the grounds that he committed a federal crime that he was never convicted of or even charged with.

But the media has largely ignored Trump’s brief. I have not seen a single news report about it. Reporters embarked on crazy endzone dancing when the Colorado decision came out last month, which has apparently left them too woozy and hungover to report on a particular salient fact – namely, that this play is almost certainly under review1 by the real Supreme Court. And initial indications point to the on-field ruling being overturned.

Trump’s brief cites and quotes extensively from the well-reasoned three-justice dissenting opinion in Colorado – another piece of news that was little-reported.

Continue reading →

Thank Joe Biden for pulling an egotistical Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Posted on by
7

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a Supreme Court Justice and a darling of the left. She was endearingly referred to as “Notorious RBG” for her strident opinions invariably siding with the Democrats on political issues.

But she grew old. She also grew feeble physically and, sadly, to some extent mentally as well. She started breaking Court tradition by giving television interviews, where she unfortunately spoke intemperately about political issues.

Shortly before the 2016 election, she told a reporter that Donald Trump was “a faker.”

And then she said something to the reporter that apparently came into her head at that moment because she really had an ego. She said Trump “says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego.”

Continue reading →

Diversity czars are getting the ax

Posted on by
23

You should pity czars. Things never end well for them.

The reign of diversity czars began a few years ago when a jury found that a violent drug-addled Black criminal was murdered by an idiotic white police officer ostensibly trying to subdue him.

This rarely happens, thankfully. In fact, more cops get murdered by Black criminals than the other way around. And when Black criminals do get murdered by cops, the cops are usually Black themselves (though the left would say cops are never Black even if their skin color is black because, after all, cops promote white justice and not Black Justice).

Anyway, the establishment decided they had to make a show of their opposition to Black people getting murdered by white cops, even if it hardly ever happens. This little minstrel show was called Black Lives Matter. Corporations gave millions to a few Black people to whom Black Lives Matter mattered a lot, moneywise. 

Continue reading →

Democrats will defy the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision outlawing racial discrimination in schools, just as they did in Brown v. Board of Education

Posted on by
8

The Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously declared in Brown v. Board of Education that racial discrimination in schools is unconstitutional.

The reaction of Democrats was indignation and defiance. Democrat Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the state National Guard to prevent Blacks from entering white schools.

Democrat Virginia Senator Harry Byrd organized the “Southern Manifesto” calling for Brown to be reversed and vowing never to implement it. It was signed by 99 Democrats but only two Republicans, including all but two of the Democrat senators from states in the former Confederacy. Democrats in Virginia passed the Stanley Plan, named after Democrat Virginia Governor Thomas Stanley, barring any state school receiving state funds from following the Brown ruling.

Democrat-controlled legislatures across the South closed many schools to avoid having to integrate them. The Democrat legislature of Florida passed a resolution declaring Brown “null and void.” A Democrat member of the Ku Klux Klan murdered a Black civil rights activist for daring to file a lawsuit to enforce Brown in Mississippi.

Democrat Alabama Governor George Wallace personally stood in the doorway to block Black enrollment at the University of Alabama.

Continue reading →

The Supreme Court is preparing to strike down forced speech

Posted on by
14

In a case argued at the Supreme Court this week, a Colorado website designer appealed a decision from lower courts requiring her to create wedding websites for gay couples in violation of her religious belief that marriage is between a man and a woman. The Court is likely to reverse the lower court decision, and allow her to decline to create such websites. 

The liberal minority on the Court and the liberal media argue that such a decision will lead to a new Jim Crow era where the providers of public accommodation are allowed to refuse services to people on the basis of their sexual preferences or skin color. 

That argument is incorrect and probably not even sincere. Here’s why.

The First Amendment of course prohibits the government from banning speech. Less recognized is that the First Amendment also prohibits the government from compelling speech. That means it’s unconstitutional for the government to prohibit you from voicing support for gay marriage and it’s equally unconstitutional for the government to require you to voice such support. 

Continue reading →