Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
In late June, the Supreme Court declined to end an unlawful CDC-enacted national moratorium on evictions.
Things have apparently changed. The court just ruled — in a 6-3 decision — that the “balance of equities” has tilted in favor of qualified deference to property rights and letting landlords try to financially survive.
Now it will be easier, or possible, for many beleaguered property owners to maintain properties — on which they depend for their livelihoods and tenants depend for things like heat as well as their residencies.
The three dissenters on the high court say that the “balance of equities” still tilts the other way, in favor of violating the property rights of landlords to help tenants unable or unwilling to pay the rent.
The court’s decision does not mention property rights. It does cite a 1972 precedent that cites other precedents “[requiring] Congress to enact exceedingly clear language if it wishes to significantly alter the balance between federal and state power and the power of the Government over private property.”
Of course, the U.S. Constitution gives Congress no authority to violate individual rights at will — even if it uses exceedingly clear language to do so. The Constitution does not say it’s OK to violate the Constitution.
What now?
Many landlords are still subject to state or municipal restrictions on evictions that this decision does not overturn. But the ruling may help them press for relief.
And we must hope that the U.S. Congress doesn’t get around to intelligibly re-revoking the rights of property owners.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
“It’s one thing to let people post UFO content about crop circles in Arkansas,” Ciaran O’Connor was quoted in a recent Washington Post article, talking about YouTube competitor Rumble. “It’s another to allow your platform to be used by someone claiming vaccines are actively harmful and that people should not take them based on conspiracies and misinformation.”
As a cited expert for the Post’s hit piece, O’Connor is the big gun, whom reporter Drew Harwell uses to conclude his vivisection of the upstart video platform: “There’s a duty of care and responsibility as your platform grows and scales up.”
After a year and a half of government lies and flip flops about the novel coronavirus and its treatments, coupled with Big Tech censorship, we must not allow O’Connor’s bald “vaccine” assertions to go unnoticed, but we have other fish to fry.
Sizzling on the platter? Ciaran The Expert.
Who is he?
Well, writes Harwell, O’Connor’s “an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.”
Rumble, claims O’Connor, has “become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world.”
But let us consult one of those right-wingers, Rumble investor and online commentator Dan Bongino, to learn something more about this “Institute for Strategic Dialogue.”
Bongino points out that the institute gets its funding from various governments, including our own, as well as from Rumble’s competitors Facebook and YouTube.
And several more subdivisions of YouTube’s parent company also support this critic of Rumble.
The Post, of course, disclosed none of that.
You know, cuz Journalism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
Satius est supervacua scire quam nihil.
It is better, of course, to know useless things than to know nothing.
Seneca the Younger, Letter LXXXVIII: “On liberal and vocational studies.”
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.
Paul Jacob’s vlog version of the weekend podcast is up on YouTube:
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle, Politics, Book V, 1311a.11.
August 29 marks the 1632 birthday of British philosopher John Locke, author of Two Treatises of Government, and one of the strongest intellectual influences on America’s 18th century secessionist movement and subsequent constitutional thinking. Locke died on October 28, 1704.
On August 29, 1786, Shays’ Rebellion began. The rebellion was an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers reacting very negatively against the high debt and tax burdens enacted to pay off the Revolutionary War. This rebellion scared American leaders into revising the Articles of Confederation, a process that led not to a mere few changes, but to the writing and adoption of a whole new Constitution.