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judiciary local leaders

Arresting Speech Victory

Institute for Justice, Sylvia Gonzalez

I am happy that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the way it did, letting Sylvia Gonzalez proceed with her litigation.

But why was there even a question?

The case is Gonzalez v. Trevino. It started in 2019 when Gonzalez was elected to the council of Castle Hills, Texas. After winning, she led a petition drive to remove the city manager from office for abusing employees and neglecting his duties.

Soon the mayor and the police chief were falsely accusing her of tampering with a government record. She was arrested and jailed. But the district attorney dropped the charges after a day.

After Gonzalez resigned from the council because of “ongoing intimidation,” the Institute for Justice helped her file a federal lawsuit against the town for selective prosecution.

A lower court had gone along with the city’s request to dismiss the case. The rationale was that Gonzalez had not shown that others who trivially “mishandled a government petition” in exactly the same way Gonzalez did were not then arrested.

In reversing this decision, the Supreme Court said that “the demand for virtually identical … comparators goes too far.” Plausible evidence that Gonzalez had been singled out for retaliation, thus violating her First Amendment rights, was enough to let the case proceed.

It’s an important issue for all of us, not only for Sylvia Gonzalez. As IJ stresses, this kind of retaliation “against citizens engaging in protected speech or activity” is more common than we may suspect.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo provided by Institute for Justice

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Thought

William Leggett

A legislature is always badly set to work in manufacturing crime. To risk money in a wager is not a crime per se, whether the wager be on the result of a race, on the fate of a lottery ticket, on the turn of a dicebox, or on any other like contingency. It is folly, perhaps, in all cases, and it becomes crime and madness in some; but to draw the line between allowable folly and criminality, in a matter of this kind, is rather the office of publick opinion, than of the law.

William Leggett, in an editorial in the Plaindealer, January 28, 1837, republished in A Collection of the Political Writings of William Leggett (1840), and titled “Gambling Laws.”
Categories
Today

Atahualpa

On July 26, 1533, Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors strangled to death Atahualpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, thereby ending 300 years of Inca civilization. The conquistadors were greedy and murderous, but the Inca civilization, arguably, was worse: totalitarian and radically inegalitarian. But they made great high-​mountain roads. (Arguments about infrastructure promoted by Big Government continue to this very day. And it is quite possible that an earlier civilization made the roadways, which the Inca merely renovated.)

On this day in 1948, U.S. President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 desegregating the U.S. military.

Categories
free trade & free markets general freedom international affairs

Bombers Off the Coast

China, Taiwan, defense

No wonder Taiwan is going ahead, despite a typhoon battering the island, with its annual war games. 

China threatens. And threatens. And threatens. 

As discussed yesterday, it is unclear just how committed a Trump 47 administration would be to protecting Taiwan. 

President Joe Biden, on the other hand, has repeatedly pledged to engage U.S. military forces in defense against China. But since he is physically and cognitively unable to run for the presidency, are we safe letting Joe hang out at the White House for the next six months performing the “lesser” job of being America’s commander-in-chief?

That position might suddenly take on a less sleepy character.

Just prior to Biden’s Oval Office address, NORAD disclosed that it had “scrambled fighter jets to intercept two Russian Tu-​95 ‘Bear’ bombers and two Chinese H‑6 bombers off the coast of Alaska.”

Lately, the Philippines has gotten most of the CCP’s bullying, enforcing their ridiculous claim to 90 percent of the South China Sea. The U.S. has an unambiguous treaty obligation to the Philippines. 

On the other hand, the U.S. position toward Taiwan, right there 80 miles off the Chinese coast, is friendly … but the U.S. doesn’t officially recognize Taiwan as a country and our policy toward its defense remains one of “strategic ambiguity.” 

Still, unless the U.S. plans to leave Asia, and maybe even then, we will have to stand up to China. Best to draw that line, to mount that defense at Taiwan.

Why? 

  • Because of the island’s worldwide dominance in producing vital computer chips, a New York Times headline declared, “Pound for Pound, Taiwan Is the Most Important Place in the World.” Kept free, that is.
  • But it’s more than that: without a free Taiwan uniting Japan and the Philippines in the “first island chain,” China can divide those two countries — both of which the U.S. is treaty-​bound to defend — and conquer.
  • Taiwan is freedom and democracy’s success story of the last half-​century, successfully throwing off four decades of martial law authoritarianism to become, arguably, Asia’s freest and most democratic nation. 

Making it in my interest and yours to disallow the snuffing out of freedom on the other side of the globe. 

We need a president who knows the world is a dangerous place, understands how critical Taiwan is, and levels with the American people about the challenges ahead.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Gordon Cooper

Nothing like I’d ever seen.… I knew that we didn’t have any vehicles of that kind, and I was 99 and nine tenths percent sure that the Russians didn’t have any of that type either.… At that point in time there was no doubt in my mind that this vehicle was made at some other place than here on Earth.

NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper, on one of his several encounters with UFOs in the 1950s.
Categories
Today

A Fine Point of the War

On July 25, 1861, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-​Johnson Resolution, stating that the war with the seceded states of the Confederacy was being fought to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.