Category: judiciary

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general freedom judiciary too much government

The Vaxxers’ War on Truckers

Justin Trudeau, Canada, truckers, vaccine, Covid

It’s always good when a federal court tells a federal government that it shouldn’t have done some horrible autocratic thing.

Much better had it never been done in the first place — but at least now there is official acknowledgement and, hope against hope, a chance that it won’t recur. 

Hey, a guy can dream.

According to a ruling by Canadian Federal Court Justic Richard Mosley, although truckers’ protests a few years ago against insane pandemic mandates “reflected an unacceptable breakdown of public order” (he seems to be forgetting that the government unacceptably broke things first), invoking of an Emergencies Act “does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility.”

No, it doesn’t bear those hallmarks. There “was no national emergency justifying invocation of the Emergencies Act.”

The truckers were clogging traffic to bring attention to a plight caused by the government. That’s it. The truckers weren’t nuking cities or anything. But in reply, the government nuked the rights of truckers by, among other things, freezing their bank accounts and even penalizing people who had donated five bucks to help the truckers out.

Truckers were protesting the fact that they were not being allowed to decide for themselves whether to risk an experimental vaccine. The government banned them from crossing the Canada – U.S. border unless they got the shot.

Luckily, Canada’s federal government has announced that it has seen the error of its ways and — ah, who am I kidding? It is appealing the decision.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ballot access election law judiciary

Democratic Mountain High

Donald Trump, Colorado Supreme Court, election, insurrection

How to spark a civil war?

“A divided Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot,” wrote David Knowles for Yahoo News. This will, of course, induce a “showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-​runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.”

The idea — half plausible, I suppose — is that President Trump’s actions on January 6 spurred an insurrection attempt, therefore he is ineligible to run for any federal office.

But emphasize the half-​plausible, since, no matter how often Democrats repeat it, the rally-​turned-​mini-​riot-​turned-​incursion into the Capitol Building did not amount to anything like an insurrection. Capitol Hill interlopers on January 6 were neither prepared nor demonstrating a plan to overthrow the peaceful succession of power. 

They certainly didn’t try to take over the government.

Nor has Mr. Trump been convicted of any such thing.

But, as we all know, this is a controversial matter falling mostly on partisan lines (the Colorado State Supreme Court being made up entirely of Democratic appointees) … which makes interpretation of the third section of the 14th Amendment rather tricky.

The state-​by-​state lawsuits have been sponsored by progressive interest groups trying, desperately, to stop Donald Trump from pulling off a Grover Cleveland: returning to office after a fluke one-​term “pause.”

Yet, even if the Supreme Court balks at putting down this too-​clever-​by-​half-​plausible scheme, the best Democrats could hope for is preventing Trump from running in blue states with blue courts. Trump might still win despite not being on some state ballots. 

Or lose in an election obviously rigged because he is barred. 

A recipe for deep distrust, resentment and anger.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment First Amendment rights judiciary

Court Halts Imprisonment for Speech

free speech, satire, mind control

Left-​wing enemies of right-​wing freedom of speech, specifically the freedom of speech of Douglass Mackey, recently got their way when U.S. District Judge Ann Donnelly sentenced him to seven months in prison.

But now, a month after sentencing, another court has said wait a minute.

As I reported in October, Mackey was convicted for actions in 2016 that nobody could have known would later be treated as crimes. The FBI had arrested him shortly after Joe Biden became president in January 2021 — as if waiting for a favorable political climate for an obviously partisan action.

According to selectively prosecuting U.S. Attorney Breon Peace, Mackey threatened democracy and sought to “deprive people of their constitutional right to vote.”

What attempted deprivation of voting rights? Did Mackey lock people in their homes so that they could not go out to vote? Steal ballots? Glare and scream at people walking toward a voting site?

No, all that this obvious opponent of Hillary Clinton did was publish satirical posts telling Hillary voters to vote by text, much easier that way. Obnoxious, maybe; or silly. But the posts had no power to hypnotize or derange anyone or, for that matter, prevent anyone from double-​checking with an election office or Google. And prosecutors brought in no voters who claimed to have been fooled by the obvious jest — which arguably was satire, a jape upon Mackey’s political opponents.

There’s no there there. Nevertheless, Mackey’s liberty has been at risk at least since 2018, when his legal name behind his pseudonymous social media presence was revealed.

It’s still at risk. But the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked Mackey’s seven-​month imprisonment until his appeal can be decided and the free-​speech issues properly adjudicated.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights judiciary

Untruth Speaker, Untruth Speaker

Donald Trump

“You can’t call anyone a liar?” Judge Patricia Millett asked federal prosecutors, “with a tone of incredulity,” according to The Washington Post report.

Millett, along with Judges Cornelia T.L. Pillard and Bradley Garcia, serves on the three-​judge panel of the federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This week they devoted two hours to the appeal of a federal district judge’s gag order placed on former president Donald Trump.

Under Millett’s questioning, federal prosecutor Cecil VanDevender agreed that under the order Mr. Trump could say that someone testifying against him was “an untruth speaker” but not call that person a “liar.”

“He has to speak ‘Miss Manners’ while everyone else is throwing targets at him?” inquired Judge Millett. “It would be really hard in a debate, when everyone else is going at you full bore.”

She noted that the First Amendment importantly protects inflammatory speech, adding with some exasperation: “Your position doesn’t seem to give much balance at all to the First Amendment’s vigorous protection of political speech.”

Trump’s attorney argued that the current leading Republican presidential candidate has taken advantage of the order’s stay, pending this appeal, by “posting about this case almost incessantly since the day it was filed and they haven’t come forward with a single threat that’s even arguably inspired by any evidence in his social media posts.”

The three-​judge panel, at least as The Post reads the hearing’s tea leaves, “indicated it may narrow the order prohibiting the former president from attacking individual prosecutors … or from calling potential witnesses against him ‘liars’ in the heat of next year’s campaign.”

It should. Unless the speech is specifically criminal it should be freely allowed. Orange Man should have the same rights we all rightly possess.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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judiciary property rights

Greed & the Innocent Owners

civil asset forfeiture

“We know there are abuses of the forfeiture system,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor declares. “We know it because it’s been documented throughout the country repeatedly.”

Civil asset forfeiture is a crime — if a legal one. I’ve devoted numerous columns to it, here, these past few decades. Interestingly, there’s no overt political reason for it not to stop, for opposition to it comes from both left and right — and middle.

The problem, explains left-​wing Justice Sotomayor, is that this legal practice of seizing property associated with crime does not have checks and balances in American law, since, until the 1970s, it had been used circumspectly, for the most part — against pirates and such. Since then, and in great part because of the War on Drugs, it has gotten out of hand: greedy functionaries in law enforcement have grabbed property and kept it, requiring even “innocent owners” — people not directly engaging in any crime — to go through absurdly difficult legal maneuvers, expending inordinate time and far too much money to get back what’s theirs.

It’s all very corrupt, as Justice Neil Gorsuch — no left-​winger, he — observes. “Clearly, there are some jurisdictions that are using civil forfeiture as funding mechanisms,” he said.

All this I glean from a terrific article by Jacob Sullum in Reason. Like many of my past columns, Sullum identifies litigation by the heroic Institute for Justice.

What strikes me now, however, is how unresponsive our governments have been. We are still dealing with this horrific practice year after year despite near universal opposition to it by citizens. Politicians could have stopped it cold years ago. 

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Why pussyfoot around this? Because politicians are not serving us. They are greedy, too. For power. They’ll even use our property for their cause.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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crime and punishment insider corruption judiciary

Not Having It

Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, classified files, race, racism

U.S. District Court Judge Maryellen Noreika is not having it, as yesterday’s headlines indicate. The super-​lenient “deal” that Hunter Biden’s lawyers made with the Department of Justice to let the president’s son off with barely a scrape stinks.

And she’s not signing off on it.

But there is a hitch, which Reason summarizes in its title to Jacob Sullum’s coverage: “Hunter Biden Shouldn’t Go to Prison for Violating an Arbitrary Gun Law.”

And Sullum is right. Sort of. 

And wrong. Really.

The letter of the law that Hunter most definitely ran afoul of is, as Sullum argues, definitely ill-​advised and almost certainly unconstitutional. And, to add cream to the jest, had Hunter committed his lying infraction a little later, after his father signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act last year, he would have been in even deeper doo. 

“The fact that President Joe Biden stubbornly defends a policy that could put his own son behind bars,” Sullum concludes, “should not blind us to the injustice that would entail.”

True, but it’s not just about gun laws. It’s tax law, too, that Hunter defied.

The real problem, of course, is that Hunter Biden was engaged in an uber-​corrupt shake-​down operation — with his family, including his father — leveraging his father’s position in government. Letting Hunter off with a wrist-​slap onlesser charges, allowing the statute of limitations to expire on various crimes, bestowing wide immunity, also lets President Biden andthe whole crime family off, thereby keeping a lid on a corruption scandal that makes Teapot Dome look like a child’s tea party.

Besides, shouldn’t the children of politicians be prosecuted to the fullest extent of their parents’ laws?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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