Category: Constitution

Headline of the Day

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Courtesy of @KatherineMiller at BuzzFeed:

We Never Tried To Impeach Bush,
Says Democratic Lawmaker Who
Co-Sponsored Bush Impeachment Bill

Remember: It is Democrats who are currently raising millions of dollars through fearmongering e-mail appeals that accuse Republicans of planning to impeach President Obama. And in June 2008, Dennis Kucinich introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush, a measure co-sponsored by Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), who seems to have forgotten all about that:

I ask my colleagues to oppose this resolution for it is in fact a veiled attempt at impeachment and it undermines the law that allows a president to do his job. A historical fact: President Bush pushed this nation into a war that had little to do with apprehending terrorists. We did not seek an impeachment of President Bush, because as an executive, he had his authority. President Obama has the authority.

Democrats: No one can ever accuse them of honesty.

 

Joseph Ellis Underscores The Need For The Convention Of States

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by Smitty

Ellis at the L.A. Times serves a moot point as though it were wisdom:

But, seriously, a second Constitutional Convention? It could never succeed, chiefly because the secrecy, elitism and the rest of 1787 reality could never be duplicated in our time. (And ought not be.) Besides — and here I feel an obligation to defend the legacy of the founders — the current gridlock in Congress is not a function of anything in the language of the Constitution.

Gerrymandering and primary election politicking are surely part of the problem. So too is the plutocratic character of our political culture in what has become, in effect, a second Gilded Age. But the core problem in getting legislation through the House and the Senate are procedural rules adopted by both bodies over the last century.

In the Senate, the culprit is the filibuster. Its history is long and labyrinthian, but, in the form it has assumed over the last 30 years or so, a supermajority of 60 votes is required for passage of any and all legislation. (The “nuclear option” weakened the filibuster when applied to some presidential appointments, but not to legislation.)

I think these are tangential points, at best.

  • The House has been frozen in size since 1910; it is relatively less representative.
  • The States as such have had no voice in DC since 1913 and the 17th Amendment. Senators are far more beholden to their party than their state, and generally rich enough to ignore the peasantry back home.
  • The beloved IRS has had eminent domain over the American wallet since 1913 and the 16th Amendment. Recently it has been an iron rod in the service of the White House.
  • The Federal Reserve has successfully demolished the purchasing power of the dollar since 1913.

In response to this, Michael Farris is offering the sort of leadership that the GOP would, were the Republican elite not a pack of anemic, spavined, emasculated examples of the species homo bureaucratus. John McCain, you broken down old tool, I mean you.

An Article V convention, properly controlled and pondered for years beforehand to get it right, (in other words, the precise opposite of ObamaCare), is Exactly. What. We. Need.

We’re going to recover this country from Progressive collapse, Ellis. Do try to keep up.

via HotAir headlines

In Which @AceOfSpadesHQ Becomes a First Amendment Cause Célèbre

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One June 4, 2012, Ace published a blog post that began, “I’m writing a post about what’s happened to Ali Akbar.”

That post was cited by Brett Kimberlin as “evidence” that Ace was part of a vast conspiracy. Now, it’s like a latter-day Dreyfuss case:

Convicted bomber Brett Kimberlin’s federal lawsuit against bloggers and journalists is “an attack on free speech,” a prominent First Amendment attorney said Tuesday, announcing that he would represent an anonymous blogger who is a defendant in the case.
Paul Alan Levy of the non-profit group Public Citizen noted that he had once represented Kimberlin, at the time a federal prison inmate, in a case where Kimberlin’s First Amendment rights were at stake. However, Levy said, Kimberlin is now threatening the rights of others in his attempt to use his current federal lawsuit to obtain the identity of the popular conservative blogger known as Ace of Spades: “Among the defendants in the action is an anonymous blogger whom Kimberlin sued for allegedly ‘imputing’ that Kimberlin was involved in SWATting. . . . Because the blog post said nothing of the kind, I agreed to represent defendant ‘Ace of Spades’ in opposing Kimberlin’s request for judicial permission to pursue discovery to identify Ace of Spades.” . . .
In his court motion on behalf of Ace of Spades — whose defense is also supported by the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) — Levy argues: “Protection for the right to engage in anonymous communication is fundamental to a free society. … Not only his conservative adversaries but other bloggers attentive to free speech issues have taken Kimberlin to task for improperly using the courts as a weapon against his critics, a technique that they call ‘lawfare.’ … For example, several bloggers have taken Kimberlin to task for using a subpoena to identify one Aaron Walker, which resulted in Walker’s being terminated from his employment, and then pursuing a series of peace orders in Maryland state court which led to Walker’s arrest because a state trial judge believed that Walker’s having blogged about Kimberlin was a violation of a previous peace order.”

Read the whole thing at The American Spectator. I doubt Kimberlin v. Ace of Spades will ever become a landmark Supreme Court ruling, something your grandchildren will read about in histor4y books, but crazier things have happened, so you never know.

 

Why Keep Feeding the Gay-Rights Tiger, Hoping to Be Eaten Last?

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One of the things we must understand about the Left is the essentially totalitarian nature of their ambitions. There is no logical stopping point on the progressive road to the Utopia of Equality that they insist is always ahead of us, a destination never reached.

Grant all their demands today, and they will return tomorrow with a new list of demands. What do they want? More, always more.

Yesterday, a federal judge struck down Virginia’s state constitutional amendment prohibiting same-sex marriage, because obviously (a) the Fourteenth Amendment was intended for such a purpose, and (b) never mind the will of voters expressed in a referendum.

The ruling cites memorable Supreme  Court travesties — Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Lawrence v. Texas and Windsor v. U.S. — like so many mileposts on the Highway to Hell, and who can argue with such sophistry when it’s dressed up in costumes of legal precedent, bejeweled with a lot of emotional chatter about “loving, intimate and lasting relationships” and “sacred, personal choices”?

Translation: “Damn the Constitution, we’re not in Utopia yet.”

Meanwhile, in Kansas, the state House of Representatives approved a bill intended to impede the March Toward Utopia in the name of “religious liberty,” inspiring  an eruption of hyperbole about “vicious discrimination” and “anti-gay segregation.”

“Willkommen, Herr Chamberlain. Welcome to Munich. Today you will cede the Sudetenland. Tomorrow, we’ll demand the world.”

 

Federal Court Upholds Bloggers’ Rights

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Eugene Volokh cites a ruling yesterday by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the case of Obsidian Finance Group v. Cox:

The protections of the First Amendment do not turn on whether the defendant was a trained journalist, formally affiliated with traditional news entities, engaged in conflict-of-interest disclosure, went beyond just assembling others’ writings, or tried to get both sides of a story. As the Supreme Court has accurately warned, a First Amendment distinction between the institutional press and other speakers is unworkable: “With the advent of the Internet and the decline of print and broadcast media … the line between the media and others who wish to comment on political and social issues becomes far more blurred.” Citizens United, 558 U.S. at 352. In defamation cases, the public-figure status of a plaintiff and the public importance of the statement at issue — not the identity of the speaker — provide the First Amendment touchstones.

This is obviously relevant to the Maryland lawsuit Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., as well as to the federal lawsuit that my co-defendant John Hoge has dubbed Kimberlin v. the Universe, et al.

It’s interesting that the Ninth Circuit cited the Citizens United case, which figured prominently as a casus belli for the anti-Clarence Thomas campaign of Kimberlin’s Velvet Revolution.

It’s also interesting that in neither his state nor federal lawsuits against bloggers does Brett Kimberlin mention his role in founding Velvet Revolution which, the last time I checked, was located at the same Bethesda street address — i.e., Kimberlin’s mother’s basement — listed on Kimberlin’s legal filings in both cases.

 

BomberSuesBloggers.com




 


‘Emerging Awareness’ Update: Remember the Texas Polygamy Teen Sex Cult?

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You have perhaps forgotten the 2008 “underage sex cult” case in which Texas authorities seized 416 children at the Laredo compound of the polygamist Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Facts I noted at the time were that (a) Texas led the nation in teen pregnacy, and (b) in 2005 Texas raised the legal age for marriage from 14 to 16, specifically because FLDS moved to Texas.

(Of course, every enlightened liberal believes society should be hostile toward groups with high teen pregnancy rates, right?)

There were layers of irony in Texas officials raiding the FLDS and seizing hundreds of children because — shockingly! — some of these teenagers were having sex and even giving birth, as if fundamentalist Mormon girls were the only teen mothers in Texas.

Once a society discards its own cultural traditions and abandons constitutional principles, the ultimate results are not “freedom,” “equality” and “social justice” but rather anarchy, conflict and decadence. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “emerging awareness” doctrine, manufactured in order to abolish the Texas sodomy law in 2003, has had both intended and unintended consequences. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday, but it was in 2003, that Justice Antonin Scalia wrote this in his dissent:

 Countless judicial decisions and legislative enactments have relied on the ancient proposition that a governing majority’s belief that certain sexual behavior is “immoral and unacceptable” constitutes a rational basis for regulation. . . . State laws against bigamy, same-sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obscenity are likewise sustainable only in light of Bowers’ validation of laws based on moral choices. Every single one of these laws is called into question by today’s decision; the Court makes no effort to cabin the scope of its decision to exclude them from its holding. See ante, at 11 (noting “an emerging awareness that liberty gives substantial protection to adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters pertaining to sex” (emphasis added)). The impossibility of distinguishing homosexuality from other traditional “morals” offenses is precisely why Bowers rejected the rational-basis challenge.

Thus the question I have repeatedly asked: Who knows whither the “emerging awareness” shall henceforth emerge?

Gosh, you just never know what might happen next.

Federal Court Strikes Down
Criminalization of Polygamy In Utah
— Jonathan Turley

Federal court strikes down
portion of Utah’s polygamy law
— Hot Air

Federal Court Narrows Utah Bigamy Law
— National Review

Oh, so polygamy — the practice of which caused Texas to raise its age of consent from 14 to 16 in 2005 — has now been recognized as a constitutional right by a federal court? Do we suppose that lawyers for FLDS will ignore the possible implications of this precedent?

“Next stop on the slippery slope express, I assume, will be consensual adult incest marriages,” says Professor Bainbridge, but you just never know. The emerging awareness is so tricky to predict. Perhaps they’ll legalize lesbian pagan child brides next . . .

 

 


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