Tag: law

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crime and punishment

Guilty. Guilty! Guilty?

justice, law, Mueller, innocence,

“No responsible prosecutor,” Alan Dershowitz writes in The Hill, “should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict.”

Don’t I know it.

The world-famous lawyer takes issue with the “statement by special counsel Robert Mueller in a Wednesday press conference that ‘if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.’”* Dershowitz makes a good case that the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle requires the government not merely to refrain from imposing punishment before obtaining a lawful conviction, but also to hold back from punishing people by making loud public claims about their supposed guilt. 

Which brings to mind my own experience at U.S. Term Limits. In 1994, we ran radio ads and sent mail to citizens in two Oklahoma congressional districts and one in Kentucky. We did not urge a vote for or against anyone, but merely provided information on where the candidates stood. 

Yet, prompted by a complaint from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which prefers ignorant to knowledgeable voters, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) investigated.

As if to foreshadow current prosecutorial proclivities, the FEC abandoned its witch hunt after two long years. Relieved the agency’s harassment was finally over, I remember opening an Oklahoma newspaper and discovering a story headlined, “Term Limits Group Violated Law in State, U.S. Agency Charges.”

This problem goes well beyond Mr. Mueller and President Trump. Government agencies that cannot prosecute, should not persecute.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Dershowitz calls Mueller’s comments “worse than the statement made by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

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justice, law, Mueller, innocence,

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education and schooling general freedom

Top School Fails

Common School, education, values, American, public school, law, lawyer,

Illiteracy, innumeracy, low standards, grade inflation — signs of a general failure of education, sure, and of public schooling in particular. But for the worst failing, look no further than Harvard University.

The Ivy League school just caved to a student mob. 

“Harvard said on Saturday that a law professor who has represented Harvey Weinstein would not continue as faculty dean of an undergraduate house after his term ends on June 30,” explains Kate Taylor at the New York Times, “bowing to months of pressure from students.”

The lawyer in question, Professor Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., has served with his wife, law school lecturer Stephanie Robinson, at one of Harvard’s residential houses for undergraduate students. 

Now, the African-American couple has not been fired from faculty. Just as deans. No great tragedy, if the official Harvard statement be true — that there were multiple reasons for not renewing their contracts.

But the context: pressure from students who expressed horror — “trauma-inducing”! — at Sullivan’s legal defense of the former Mirimax mogul accused of numerous sex crimes.

We expect lawyers to defend even the worst criminals. Everyone is entitled to a legal defense. It’s sad that not only do some students fail to accept this but also that this crimson-colored college plays along with their uncivilized complaint. Harvard has, in effect, denied one legal foundation of a free society. 

Remember that the “common school movement” for government schools was started to inculcate republican values. Horace Mann’s great big excuse for government control and taxpayer funding of schools was to promote civilized American liberties.

Schools, generally, have failed. And Harvard has just accepted their worst failure as the new passing grade. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common School, education, values, American, public school, law, lawyer,

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national politics & policies Popular term limits U.S. Constitution

The Court-Packers

Supreme Court, NPC, packing the court, FDR, law, justice, constitution

“What if there were five justices selected by Democrats,” presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke explored at an Iowa campaign stop, “five justices selected by Republicans, and those ten then pick five more justices independent of those who picked the first ten?”

Beto, meet FDR.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried something similar with the Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, which would have added six new justices to the nine-justice U.S. Supreme Court. It failed in the Senate, even though FDR’s Democratic Party controlled the chamber.

This “court packing” gambit may have been the most unpopular action of FDR’s whopping three-plus terms. 

Despite the obvious self-interested power grab, “Sens. Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand . . . would not rule out expanding the Supreme Court if elected president,” Politico reported.

“It’s not just about expansion, it’s about depoliticizing the Supreme Court,” Sen. Warren explained . . . with a straight face. Yet Beto’s suggested reform would officially turn the nation’s highest court into a partisan, two-party political institution.

To the good, Democrats are also bantering about term limits for the nation’s High Court. Trouble is, term limits require a constitutional amendment, meaning a two-thirds vote of both chambers of Congress as well as 38-state ratification. 

Court packing, on the other hand, only requires simple majorities of both houses and the presidency. Which Democrats threaten in 2020.

“You need to gain power,” Washington Examiner columnist Philip Wegmann reminds, “before you can abuse it.”

So the abuse, for now, is merely promising.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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Supreme Court, NPC, packing the court, FDR, law, justice, constitution

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies too much government

First Things First

Surely there’s something good in the first legislation put forth by the brand-new Democratic House majority — though nothing jumps to mind. 

The 571-page smorgasbord bill “addresses voting rights, corruption, gerrymandering and campaign finance reform,” writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, “as well as the creation of a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis — a first step toward a ‘Green New Deal.’” 

H.R. 1 would mandate that states adopt automatic voter registration, a step too far. It establishes a system of public subsidies for candidates running for Congress, with taxpayers forking over a six-to-one match on donations of $200 or less. 

The legislation also empowers* the Federal Election Commission, including by ending its supposedly “neutral” composition, i.e. an equal number of Democrat and Republican commissioners. This would either allow the FEC to be more “decisive” or unleash the dogs of partisan political witch hunts . . . depending on the case and/or your politics.**

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.), the lead sponsor of the legislation, bill it as the best way “to rescue our broken democracy.” 

“It should be called the Democrat Politician Protection Act,” argues Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Washington Post. 

David Keating, president of the Institute for Free Speech, tells NPR, “A lot of [H.R.1] looks to be unconstitutional.”

No problem, for one provision calls for a constitutional amendment to partially repeal the First Amendment, so to authorize Congress to regulate campaign spending and speech.

Remember: the First Amendment is a single sentence, a mere 45 words.

Succinct and effective.

The former does not apply to this new bill, and the latter, I hope, does not apply to this new Congress.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Let’s not give greater power to the FEC, which, according to a federal judge, “acted arbitrarily and capriciously and contrary to law” in the 2016 election.

** Of course, for Ross Perot in the 1990s or Libertarians, Greens and independents today, that “bipartisan” make-up isn’t neutral but stacked like a Star Chamber

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meme moral hazard too much government

How to Know

straw, regulations, law, punishment, punish, authoritarian society

Many people don’t seem to realize that a prohibition (banning something) is AUTHORITARIAN BY DEFINITION. Whether it’s drugs, guns, alcohol, offensive language, dangerous ideas, texting while walking(!), plastic straws(!)… authoritarians are perfectly happy to use government violence to force the rest of us behave as they wish. Because they think they know what’s right for everybody else. They are the authorities. They are the keepers of the truth. For the rest of us, the message is clear: obey or be punished.

The spectacle of people screaming about Trump’s “authoritarianism” while simultaneously demanding more regulations, more bans, more restrictions… would be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

A “rule of law” is based on general principles, and makes room for — or, better yet, is based upon — the protection of individual rights.

It used to be common to say, “a rule of law, not of men”; it was even as common in political oratory as was spouted out over drinks at the Rotary. But as the modern Regulatory State has grown in scope and power, most folks seem to have lost track of the notion. It is now not even a cliché. Few even of our most educated folks can explain this idea. Vast swaths of the mis-educated public appear not to “get” the idea of limiting government to the enforcement of a few general principles; instead, they cry for more “regulations” (along with additional spending and maybe even a whole new division of the executive government) every time a crisis, tragedy or atrocity occurs.

So we are left with a political culture in which the words of Tacitus seem to a majority as implausible at best, evil at worst: “The more the laws, the more corrupt the State.” Contrary to today’s trendy prejudice, we do not need “more laws” — edicts legislated by representatives, or regulations concocted by bureaucracies — we need Law.

As in, “a rule of Law.”

regulations, rule of law, control, freedom

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free trade & free markets judiciary

The Cheese Stands “Unprotected”

Witte WievenKaas, cheese, copyright, law

Governments tempt us — with special privileges and advantages. 

You know what also tempts us?

Cheese.

Cheese? Yes. In the Netherlands, cheese is a big deal, as Baylen Linnekin relates in “Cheese Fight Ends With Court Declaring Producers Can’t Copyright Taste,” over at Reason — where I go for all my cheese-related coverage. (Don’t you?)

The tale is about two cheese companies and the European Union’s “Directive 2001/29/EC,” which tries to reconcile copyrights among member states. Specifically, it involves the legal fight between “two Dutch herbed cream cheese spread makers,” as Mr. Linnekin relates, “Heksenkaas (‘witches’ cheese’) and Witte Wievenkaas (‘wise women’s cheese’).” The former sued the latter for infringing on “its copyright on the taste of Heksenkaas.”

The case went from a Dutch court to the European Court of Justice, where the Court (Grand Chamber) ruled against Heksenkaas. There can be no copyright on “taste.”

This is of no great significance, I suppose, but in a world where the government gets involved in everything, it’s worth noticing when the government resists its temptation to tempt us.

The rationale for non-involvement, in this case, was not a move against intellectual property as such, but against the idea of property involved in subjective taste. “The taste of a food product cannot,” the Court determined, “be pinned down with precision and objectivity. . . .”

Well, sure. But what was really going on here was one company not wanting competition from another company. 

A temptation, for sure. But some temptations (like some cheeses?) must be resisted.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Categories
crime and punishment Tenth Amendment federalism

Atrocity Meets the Commerce Clause

federalism, Capital Building, Commerce Clause, federal, law, prosecution

There may be no better example of an evil, real-world villain needing to get justice (good and hard) than the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter. 

Since he survived the shoot-out, he must now be put on trial.

But by whom?

In Allegheny County Court, Pittsburgh police filed a 34-count criminal complaint against the mass murderer. Meanwhile, the federal government has filed its own charges.

“The federal criminal complaint . . . charges him with 29 felonies, including 11 violations of 18 USC 247, which authorizes the death penalty for fatally obstructing any person’s ‘free exercise of religious beliefs,’” summarizes Jacob Sullum at Reason. “Such a crime can be prosecuted in federal court as long as it ‘is in or affects interstate or foreign commerce.’”

Yes, that’s the Constitution’s Commerce Clause being cited. You see, the guns used were — get this — not made in Pennsylvania.

Call it the insanity clause.

“There is no general, overarching federal police power,” Andrew C. McCarthy explains in National Review. “Under the Constitution, the states were supposed to handle virtually all law enforcement, and certainly all enforcement involving offenses committed wholly within their territories — common crimes of violence.”

Why flout this principle? Historian Brion McClanahan says the Republicans, in this case, just cannot help themselves — posing as the “law and order” party, they feel the need to be seen to “do something.” So Attorney General Jeff Sessions tortures the Constitution to intervene where the federal government does not belong.

Not only is the State of Pennsylvania constitutionally authorized to handle the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre, it is more than competent to do so.

The federal government should, for once, stick to its own constitutional business.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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First Amendment rights too much government

Burning Isn’t the Only Way to Attack Books

copyright, Sysyphus, censorship, books, law, folly

The U.S. Copyright Office is enforcing an unjust and destructive law merely because it is there.

Selectively enforcing.

Valancourt Books prints books on demand. It keeps no stocks of books in a warehouse in between orders. Even so, the Copyright Office is demanding to be supplied with physical copies of each of the 400+ books in Valancourt’s catalog.

Failure to comply means crippling fines.

Why the harassment?

Well, once upon a time the Copyright Office required publishers to submit physical copies of books in order to receive copyrights for them. Yet the work of authors is now automatically copyrighted as soon as they create it.

Of course, the government doesn’t demand printed copies of their titles from every small publisher in the country. The Copyright Office just happens to have noticed and targeted Valancourt Books.

The Institute for Justice, which is representing the publisher in court, argues that this requirement unconstitutionally forces people to give up property without compensation, violating the takings clause of the First Amendment.

IJ also argues that the law violates the right of freedom of speech protected by that amendment. “People have a right to speak and to publish without notifying the government that they are doing so or incurring significant expenses,” IJ’s Jeffrey Redfern concludes.

“Because it’s there” may be a good reason to climb a mountain. It is a very poor reason to use an old — and outdated — law to destroy the livelihood of innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard

Until the Fat Lady Offends

Richard Wagner, Israel, censorship, radio, law, offence, offensive, outrage

We live in a new Age of Offense. A whole lot of people make a whole lot of fuss about what other people say and listen to, view and experience.

Then again, some things are enormously offensive.

One of the latest offense-takings takes place in Israel, where a classical music station played music by Richard Wagner. And so of course had to apologize.

The music played was from the final opera in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Not my cup of tea. Or coffee. Or latte. As those who follow me on Facebook know, I have varied musical tastes, but more classic rock than classical.

Israelis who listen to classical tend to be none too fond of Wagner not because he was an especially bad composer (I’m told he is a “Great”) but because he was very much an anti-Semite, and Hitler’s favorite composer.

“While there is no law in Israel banning the German composer’s works from being played,” The Telegraph informs us, “orchestras and venues refrain from doing so because of the public outcry and disturbances accompanying past attempts.”

Understandable.

Still, some Israelis do like Wagner’s music. But since the radio station is State-owned and -controlled, the Israel Wagner Society’s president’s admonishment that “Whoever doesn’t want to hear the music can always turn the radio off,” doesn’t quite work.

That would apply only were the station owned by the Israel Wagner Society — willing to bear the loss of customers one might expect in Israel.

In America, of course, Wagner is often on the air. 

And those who object . . . turn the dial. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly free trade & free markets general freedom moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government

Taking a (Lemonade) Stand

lemonade, freedom, regulation, FDA, free market, law, authoritarian, media

When life hands you lemons. . . .

Once upon a time, putting up a summertime lemonade stand was the American way for kids to learn about hard work, good will, and entrepreneurship. Almost every kid had one, making some spendable profit selling the nectar.*

Some of the youngsters grew up to become Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and, well, lemonade’s one heck of a gateway drink.

But then, along came “progress” — that is, mandates and regulations slapped upon businesses. And the hordes of regulators required to enforce the morass of rules — “swarms of Officers.”

Soon lemonade stands were vanquished from our neighborhoods.

And America was made safe (at long last!) for . . . inane bureaucracy.

“Reports of kids’ lemonade stands being shut down for breaking local health or permitting laws have long left grown-ups feeling sour,” today’s Wall Street Journal informs. But the story also details how “a growing movement of adults is fighting back.”

So, when government policies hand you lemons, what do you do?

Make a map of all the lemonade stand clampdowns.

“I think the Constitution covers [lemonade stands] as written,” Dave Roland told the Journal, explaining the map he and his wife Jenifer have produced. “But if there’s any doubt about that, let’s get it fixed.” The Rolands run the Freedom Center in Missouri, but theirs is a regrettably national map.

Last month, the popular lemonade maker Country Time started “Legal-Ade,”  pledging to come to the defense of any kid “busted” for trafficking in lemonade.

Seriously.

“When life gives you arcane laws,” the company’s video says, “make lemonade.”

Taste the Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The profit was made possible largely by pushing their costs off onto their parents. But isn’t that sorta what parents are for? And good lessons were still learned.

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