Why Card Check Is Unconstitutional
by David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey - March 30th, 2009 - Wall Street Journal
The Employee Free Choice Act of 2009 -- otherwise known as "card check" -- is organized labor's dream. As a practical matter, this legislation, pursued by both the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress, would do away with the secret ballot in the unionization process. Although card check's advocates and critics have spilled much ink arguing about the bill's fundamental fairness to labor and management, so far the debate has not focused on the other compelling interest at stake: the constitutionally protected right of employees to keep their opinions on controversial issues like unionization to themselves.
What frightens me is that you cannot trust the current liberal and corrupt judges of our nation's courts to believe in a constitutional right to freedom. They are quite sure that anyone has a right to be a pervert and no parent has the right to protect their children from these perverts. However they seem to be rather reticent to interpret constitutional protections if they help individual liberty.
Bailing Out Of The Constitution
by George F. Will - March 29th, 2009 - Washington Post
It is high time Americans heard an argument that might turn a vague national uneasiness into a vivid awareness of something going very wrong. The argument is that the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) is unconstitutional.
By enacting it, Congress did not in any meaningful sense make a law. Rather, it made executive branch officials into legislators.
Congress seems predisposed to turn over more and more of its legislative function to the executive branch. At the same time congress seems more and more predisposed to "punish" any citizen who it feels should be punished, without any of the protections of fairness and justice required by a court.
How else did the legislature get the right to subpoena various business executives to appear before congress for the abusive denunciations and ridicule that we have seen in recent weeks. Why are judges not outraged?
I have already posted a few articles talking about the banana republic quality of our current Obama regime and the Democrats who rule congress. Match this with the tyranny of a court system that has long since abrogated any concern for justice or the rule of law and we find ourselves in a nation headed for tyranny and revolution.
A Clear Danger To Free Speech
Editorial - March 27th, 2009 - National Review Online
At issue is a film called Hillary: The Movie, a documentary produced by the nonprofit group Citizens United, which did not wish to see Senator Clinton elected president. Because McCain-Feingold prohibits so much as mentioning a candidate’s name in pre-election communications paid for by certain disfavored groups — unions and “corporations” — the filmmakers were informed by a federal judge that showing their work would constitute a crime. The filmmakers sued, and the case is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Mr. Stewart is defending the government’s ban on this film; the same rules that apply to a campaign commercial apply to a documentary film, his reasoning goes. Justice Alito alertly pressed Mr. Stewart on that issue: If commercials and films are covered, how about books? How about campaign biographies? Yes, Mr. Stewart answered, the U.S. government is prepared to ban books, under certain circumstances, and is legally empowered by McCain-Feingold to do so. Jaws dropped, black robes fluttered.
The amazing thing is that like most of these issues, the law does not mean a tinkers damn. We may have another 5 to 4 political decision, but it will not represent law. It will represent judicial tyranny no matter which way it goes. If conservatives win, and free speech is once again permitted, there is no doubt that liberals on the court will start waiting for their first opportunity to subvert the decision. If liberals win, and free political speech is driven even further into oblivion, it will have no impact on the defense of outrageous pornography which has characterized the only speech the liberal perverts see as absolute.
Our courts today represent judicial tyranny. Whether it is right wing or left wing is the only question.
Attainder For Beginners
by James Taranto - March 23rd, 2009 - Wall Street Journal
The House's vote last week to impose a confiscatory tax on bonuses earned by employees at bailed-out financial institutions led many readers to write us arguing that, or asking if, the legislation is an unconstitutional bill of attainder--a measure imposing punishment through legislation without a trial.
The short answer is probably not, and the reason is that the bill would confiscate bonuses from many employees who are not accused of any wrongdoing or mismanagement.
What an amazing concept. If a law punishes a few innocents in addition to the so-called "guilty" because congress knowingly tries to hide that it is a bill of attainder aimed at individuals (who they whipped up mob anger towards) then it is okay and we can pretend it is not truly aimed at the real targets. Is there any better definition of court corruption than this?
Courts Unlikely to Strike Down
AIG Tax Law, Legal Experts Say
by Greg Stohr - March 20th, 2009 - Bloomberg News
The House yesterday voted 328-93 in favor of a 90 percent tax on bonuses, including the $165 million insurer AIG paid last week after receiving $173 billion in bailout funds. The Senate plans to vote next week.
The measure raises a number of legal questions, and New Hampshire Republican Senator Judd Gregg yesterday said the legislation was unconstitutional. Still, any legal challenge will meet a significant obstacle: the historic reluctance of the Supreme Court to second-guess Congress on tax issues.
“Given the state of the law, it will be unlikely that the Supreme Court will strike down this legislation,” said Edward McCaffery, a University of Southern California tax-law professor who says he questions the wisdom of the proposal.
Gregg said the legislation would violate the constitutional ban on bills of attainder, or laws that single out individuals for punishment. “It’s basically targeted on a small group of people,” he said.
The House took several steps to shield the measure from that argument, said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School.
Is there anyone in America too stupid to realized who this bill was targeted at? Is it okay to pass a bill clearly targeted at a group like the AIG executives if you "purify" the language to pretend you really meant it to cover a greater group that just happens to include the group that all the legislators were publicly railing against?
What about the whole "ex post facto" thing which is also banned in our Constitution. Our corrupt judges have long since ignored that ... so clearly that "right" will not protect anyone either. In fact, the whole bill of rights thing to protect people from an out of control government has long since been rendered a joke. Today, it is used to protect one group of government favored citizens from other citizens, and is used to crush that second group. So much for protection from government. Our judges are so corrupt, nothing in the Constitution means anything any more.
Abusive Lawsuits:
Suing America Into Ruin
by Staff - March 19th, 2009 - San Francisco Examiner
To save jobs, stop abusive lawsuits. That was the gist of the timely message Monday at a hearing on legal reform sponsored by the Senate Republican Conference.
The hearing’s biggest emotional punch was delivered by Crystal Chodes of Rancho Cordova, who in May of 2006 worked for Basketball Town, a special-events sports facility serving as many as 100,000 families. When one family scheduled a birthday party for the facility’s upper floor, the wheelchair-bound uncle of an invited friend could not attend. Basketball Town offered to move the party downstairs, and the facility was fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
The uncle still sued, and, Chodes said, “The cost of defending the lawsuit ultimately became more than we could bear. After about a year of fighting the lawsuit, we were forced to settle and to close our doors forever.”
Business after business gets caught up in this extortion process. No other word than extortion accurately describes the problem.
Few Ripples From
Supreme Court Ruling
On Guns
by Adam Liptak - March 16tf, 2009 - The New York Times
About nine months ago, the Supreme Court breathed new life into the Second Amendment, ruling for the first time that it protects an individual right to own guns. Since then, lower federal courts have decided more than 80 cases interpreting the decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, and it is now possible to make a preliminary assessment of its impact.
So far, Heller is firing blanks.
If anyone had any doubt that the American Constitution has become a joke, they need only follow the logic of this article. The Supreme Court ruling that the specific wording of the Second Amendment guaranteeing the "right to bear arms" really meant what it said has been reversed by judicial interpretation of incredible duplicity. Liberal judges have used that ruling to extend legal protections to perverts and criminals ... but not to law abiding citizens. The fact that profanity is offered more legal protection than political speech has long angered anyone who sees our Constitution as a protection for all citizens from government, rather than a document that protects liberals from conservatives.
Our corrupt courts have made a mockery of that idea and made sure that all judicial interpretations give criminals greater power to destroy citizens, or give greater power to bureaucrats to interfere with the lives of law abiding citizens.
I love the conclusion of this article. “My own bet,” said Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas, “is that Heller will more likely than not turn out to be of no significance to anyone but constitutional theorists.”
In other words, liberals are going to take your guns and they don't give a damn what the Constitution or the Supreme Court says.
Regrets Only? Native Hawaiians
Insist U.S. Apology Has A Price
by Jess Bravin and Louise Radnofsky - March 12th, 2009 - The Wall Street Journal
A century after a cabal of American sugar planters, financiers and missionaries overthrew the Kingdom of Hawaii, Congress said it was sorry. The U.S. Supreme Court soon will decide whether that apology meant anything -- from a legal standpoint, at least.
The Hawaii Supreme Court thought it did. Last year, that court cited the 1993 Apology Resolution to block the state from transferring any of the 1.2 million acres of land -- some 29% of Hawaii's total -- received from the federal government upon statehood in 1959. Those lands once belonged to the Hawaiian crown or its subjects, and were confiscated by the Americans without compensation.
This is all about reparations. The key issue is whether the descendants of some wronged group, can claim superior rights over other citizens. There is a minority of people of Pacific Island Heritage who live in Hawaii who came there after the sugar planters overthrew the Kingdom. Do they get to benefit even though they really have no claim to having been wronged by citizens alive today? If these Hawaiians have benefited as U.S. Citizens, which they apparently did since they voted in huge numbers to join our nation more than 50 years AFTER the supposed coup which ended the Kingdom, have they not superseded any claim of damages?
The idiocy is exactly the same as the one where descendants of blacks who came to America voluntarily after slavery ended, are going to benefit from the descendants of whites who came to America voluntarily after slavery ended, if reparations are enacted.
Equal protection under the law has become a farce in this corrupt court system found in our nation today. I do not trust the Supreme Court to ever really care about equal protection under the law. The entire concept has become a mockery of justice.
Clarence Thomas,
Supreme Court Liberal?
by David G. Savage - March 8, 2009 - Los Angeles Times
"We think Justice Thomas got it exactly right," said Doug Kendall of the Constitutional Accountability Center. "A key part of our constitutional system is respect for the states in protecting the health and welfare of their citizens."
Thomas has never been shy about breaking with conventional wisdom -- even when it is the conservative consensus. Over the years, he has spelled out a distinctive approach in several areas of the law. And his views do not always yield predictably conservative results.
The position of this writer on what is "conservative" is more left wing bias than reality. The problem is that the article is written by someone who neither supports or understands "conservative" views. It also indicates that many "conservatives" have become so pro "Wall Street" in their interpretations they have failed to notice that "Wall Street" is no longer "conservative".
Wall Street today practices a form of socialism that some have started to call crony capitalism to denote how far from the principles of free enterprise they have strayed. Reflexively defending this Wall Street version of crony capitalism has become the practice of some so-called "conservatives", like the "compassionate conservatives" of the George W. Bush ilk. The problem is that they are NOT conservative at all. They may call themselves "compassionate conservatives" but they are more accurately "compassionate socialists" as they define everything in terms of this crony capitalism melding of Wall Street and big government power. Big government is not conservative, nor Constitutional, and never will be.
Equating that hypocrisy with conservatism is simply wrong. Clarence Thomas, at least, sees that.
Cash Bar
The Supreme Court ponders when your right to a fair trial collides with their right to be divine.
by Dahlia Lithwick - March 3rd, 2009 - Slate
The Supreme Court is in a tough spot in Caperton v. A.T. Massey. The legal claim here is that Americans have a due-process right to a judicial system untainted by the appearance or likelihood of bias. And appearances alone are sometimes enough. Indeed, the facts here are so completely grotesque, they cause the usually mild-mannered John Paul Stevens to proclaim: "We have never confronted a case as extreme as this before. This fits the standard that Potter Stewart articulated when he said, 'I know it when I see it.' "
But the extravagant weaselliness of Chief Justice Benjamin sits uneasily beside an almost complete absence of law that might curb it. The advocates struggle to scrape together a handful of precedents, along with bits of the Constitution's due-process clause, in what rapidly starts to look like a constitutional comb-over.
We elect Judges here in North Carolina and the result has not always been judicial excellence. In fact I don't think that you could argue with the premise that trail lawyers select the Judges who will fatten their pockets while defeating Judges who try to eliminate corruption. I am curious how this case will come out. But the corruption of our court system does not give me great confidence.
