Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., penned his Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama, for protesting segregation, on April 16, 1963.
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Letter from Birmingham Jail
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Term Limits or Death?
“The only responsible choice for Justice Breyer is to immediately announce his retirement,” contends Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, “so President Biden can quickly nominate the first-ever Black woman Supreme Court justice.”
Not merely pushing identity politics, Fallon is warning of the risk of “Democrats losing control of the Senate before a Biden nominee can be confirmed.”
No retirement announcement yet from 82-year-old Stephen Breyer, who recently advised Democrats against court-packing. Having served on the High Court for the last 27 years, he is the oldest justice and second-longest serving.*
“Democrats’ fears about Breyer come after [Justice Ruth Bader] Ginsburg refused to heed calls from liberals and former President Barack Obama to step down,” notes Forbes, “which ultimately resulted in Trump appointing conservative-leaning Justice Amy Coney Barrett to succeed her when Ginsburg died in September.”
It is painfully obvious: life terms at the highest court have produced gamesmanship — not on the Court, mind you, but in Congress, that cesspool of even longer tenure where our supposed representatives do anything but.
And why allow personal circumstances or the vagaries of death to decide such potentially critical matters in our republic?
To prevent politicians from politicizing the Supreme Court of the United States, put the number of justices (9) into the Constitution and term-limit those justices to a single 18-year term. No renomination. With nine justices, cycle one out and a new one in every two years.
There are other matters to consider and settle. Do so in constitutional form, so the whole country is engaged and the Court is hereafter more secure and independent of that branch most in need of term limits.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* On the all-time Supreme Court longevity list, Breyer thus lags ten places behind Justice Clarence Thomas, who has served 10,767 days on the court and currently ranks 16th.
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Albert Einstein
Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty, there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.
Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (1954).
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Bergen-Belsen Liberated
On April 15, 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated.
“Microaggression” is the alleged sin of committing a verbal slip that the alleged victim, eager to be offended, aggressively interprets in the most invidious possible way. It’s one of many faddish notions used to rationalize the squelching of speech and to abrogate basic rights.
In October 2018, Kieran Bhattacharya, a medical student at the University of Virginia, attended a discussion on “microaggression.” He asked questions like: “Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?”
Beverly Adams, an assistant dean, told him no, it isn’t, and the two argued about it for a bit.
Afterward, an organizer of the event, Nora Kern, filed a complaint against Bhattacharya that led to demands that he get counseling, and, ultimately, to his suspension. His protest was taken as proof that the complaint and demands made against him were justified.
Bhattacharya has sued the school for retaliating against him. His crime, so to speak, was nothing more than asking the wrong questions — or asking them wrongly.
Even if he had asked them heatedly (which he denies), so what?
A district court says Bhattacharya has a point and is allowing his lawsuit to proceed: “Bhattacharya sufficiently alleges that Defendants retaliated against him. Indeed, they . . . suspended him from UVA Medical School, required him to undergo counseling and obtain ‘medical clearance’ as a prerequisite for remaining enrolled, and prevented him from appealing his suspension.”
Some kind of aggression is happening here, and it’s pretty macro.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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John Stuart Mill
Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme,’ not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), Chapter 2, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion.”
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Americanisms
On April 14, 1775, the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, the first American organization committed to the abolition of slavery, was formed in Philadelphia.
On April 14, 1818, Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language, one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words. The dictionary, which took him more than two decades to compile, introduced more than 10,000 “Americanisms.”
On April 14, 1988, representatives of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, the United States, and Pakistan signed an agreement calling for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. In exchange for an end to the disputed Soviet occupation, the United States agreed to end its arms support for the Afghan anti-Soviet factions, and Afghanistan and Pakistan agreed not to interfere in each other’s affairs.
Major League Baseball has renewed its contract with a Chinese telecommunications company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Professional baseball thus avoids the fate of the National Basketball Association, ejected from Chinese airwaves for a year after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.
This doesn’t mean that the folks running MLB lack a moral compass.
It could be just a skewed one.
One day after Chinese state media confirmed that American baseball games would continue to be shown on Tencent’s streaming platform, MLB yanked its All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia. The idea? To protest the state’s new election reform.
Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred would have us believe that demonstrating “our values as a sport” requires
- cutting deals with the tyrannical and murderous government of China while simultaneously
- noisily punishing Georgia because friends of slack voting rules dislike the voter ID requirements and other provisions of Georgia’s new election law designed to limit the potential for fraud.
MLB’s press release does not bother to explain what is wrong with the law except to say that the league “opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
All restrictions?
MLB officials ignored the Epoch Times’s inquiry about “how continuing business with China demonstrates its values considering the recent U.S. recognition of a genocide being carried out by the CCP against the Uyghur Muslims.”
Hmm. Chinazi dictatorship or Georgia election reform: Which is worse?
I guess for those with a skewed moral compass, that’s a tough one.
But for the rest of us the question answers itself.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Isaiah Berlin
The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.
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Thomas Jefferson
On April 13, 1743, Thomas Jefferson was born. Author of Notes on the State of Virginia and the first draft of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was also a scientist, philosopher, inventor, diplomat, and American politician. He also composed music, designed buildings, and translated works from his favorite French writers, whom he had met in his diplomatic missions to Paris: Volney and de Tracy.