The Chevron Doctrine is Dead

CHEVRON GOES DOWN!

This is a great clip on the Chevron Doctrine. pic.twitter.com/4nkhbeA6GK

— eve (@eveforamerica) June 29, 2024

All law is imposed morality

“All law is imposed morality. It’s not whether you impose morality, it’s which morality you impose.” Just so. https://t.co/csOsbMJhat

— Megan Basham (@megbasham) May 17, 2023

'Why Won't You Answer My Questions?': John Kennedy Grills Biden Judicial Nominee

Clay County judge Michael McHaney is a hero

Via Mark Steyn:

James Mainer of HCL Deluxe Tan in Clay City sued Governor Pritzker's lockdown regime - and won. Giving his decision from the bench, Clay County judge Michael McHaney gave a pithy summation of the new Law of Experts as one could wish. It deserves to be savored:

Before I rule, I'm advising everybody in this room, no public outbursts or displays. The court is still in session until you are told otherwise.

Since the inception of this insanity, the following regulations, rules or consequences have occurred: I won't get COVID if I get an abortion but I will get COVID if I get a colonoscopy. Selling pot is essential but selling goods and services at a family-owned business is not. Pot wasn't even legal and pot dispensaries didn't even exist in this state until five months ago and, in that five months, they have become essential but a family-owned business in existence for five generations is not.

A family of six can pile in their car and drive to Carlyle Lake without contracting COVID but, if they all get in the same boat, they will. We are told that kids rarely contract the virus and sunlight kills it, but summer youth programs, sports programs are cancelled. Four people can drive to the golf course and not get COVID but, if they play in a foursome, they will. If I go to Walmart, I won't get COVID but, if I go to church, I will. Murderers are released from custody while small business owners are threatened with arrest if they have the audacity to attempt to feed their families.

These are just a few of examples of rules, regulations and consequences that are arbitrary, capricious, and completely devoid of anything even remotely approaching common sense.

And things that are arbitrary and capricious cannot be laws - because, as I often say, it is tyranny that is always capricious. Judge McHaney continues:

Doctors and experts say different things weekly. The defendant cites models in his opposition. The only thing experts will agree on is that all models are wrong and some are useful. The Centers for Disease Control now says the virus is not easily spread on surfaces.

And then His Honor addresses one of the most repulsive aspects of the regime under which much of the "free world" has lived since March: those who make these new laws are not bound by them. For Governor Pritzker's family, as for Governor Whitmer's and Justin Trudeau's, the rules are different:

The defendant in this case orders you to stay home and pronounces that, if you leave the state, you are putting people in danger, but his family members traveled to Florida and Wisconsin because he deems such travel essential. One initial rationale why the rules don't apply to him is that his family farm had animals that needed fed. Try selling that argument to farmers who have had to slaughter their herds because of disruption in the supply chain.

When laws do not apply to those who make them, people are not being governed, they are being ruled. Make no mistake, these executive orders are not laws. They are royal decrees. Illinois citizens are not being governed, they are being ruled. The last time I checked Illinois citizens are also Americans and Americans don't get ruled. The last time a monarch tried to rule Americans, a shot was fired that was heard around the world. That day led to the birth of a nation consensually governed based upon a document which ensures that on this day in this, any American courtroom tyrannical despotism will always lose and liberty, freedom and the constitution will always win.

The Honorable Michael D McHaney, chief judge

Popehat: "The criminal justice system really is this malign and incompetent"

In a series of tweets

I get it. Epstein is one of the most famous and controversial prisoners in the world, a focus of immense media/political attention, and recently may have attempted suicide.

Therefore, you think, it is extremely implausible that jail officials would allow him to kill himself.

 But your assessment of plausibility is based on your assumptions about how the system works. Those assumptions are, mostly, wrong — naive Dick-Wolf-level law-enforcement-are-competent-good-guys stuff.

 You find it implausible because you think jailers would have to be freakishly incompetent to allow it to happen, and surely they aren’t. But they often are. You find it implausible because they would have to be wantonly indifferent to human life, and surely they aren’t. Dude.

 You find it implausible because jailers/law enforcement would surely get into huge trouble for letting something like this happen. Consequences? To law enforcement? For something happening to someone in custody? You gullible dipshit.

 In short, you find it implausible because you’ve accepted the fairy tale version of the criminal justice system, one utterly divorced from the reality. And you’ve managed to convince yourself that your view is “sophisticated” and that thinking this could happen is “naive.”

 Could there be more than malign indifference and incompetence? Sure. Maybe they hoped he would kill himself. Maybe he even bribed someone to look the other way so he could. Maybe there even is deliberate foul play.

 But if your belief is “it has to be murder, because nobody is this incompetent or indifferent,” you’re a willfully blind fool, a useful idiot for a despicable system.

That's the excuse I would use if I were the warden.  The "I'm not evil, I'm stupid" excuse.

In my opinion U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman is an idiot and hates the little people smeared by the Washington Post

 If a person as private and unknown as Nick Sandmann can be libeled and slandered in this fashion without any recourse to the courts, then none of us is safe from this abuse at the hands of the media with the collusion of judges who are more interested in currying favor with the right people than administering justice.

In a 36-page ruling, U.S. District Judge William Bertelsman noted that the Post never mentioned Sandmann by name in its initial coverage of the incident, referring only to groups of “hat wearing teens.” Bertelsman added that “the words used contain no reflection upon any particular individual” and thus could not be constituted as defamation. The judge also ruled that the newspaper used language that was “loose, figurative,” and “rhetorical hyperbole” which is protected by the First Amendment.

This is insane. It is now legal for a major newspaper to single out a teenager and label him a racist and generate an online mob to make death threats and to cause incalculable to the kid’s future because this incident will be on the internet forever, visible to college admissions staff and human relations staff, none of whom are the sharpest tools in the shed and could fail to find the resolution of the issue.

The Sandmann family said they would be asking the appellate court to review the trial court’s decision on appeal.

“I believe fighting for justice for my son and family is of vital national importance,” said Ted Sandmann, Nicholas’ father. “If what was done to Nicholas is not legally actionable, then no one is safe.”

“The law must protect innocent minors targeted by journalists publishing click-bait sensationalized news,” Todd McMurtry, co-counsel for the Sandmann family, said in the statement. “This is especially true in the current hyper-partisan political environment.”

Bingo. What the Washington Post did was wrong and they did it for the political hit against Trump and for the f***ing clicks. What this shows more than anything else is how we are now subjects and not citizens. The institutions of government and the large corporations are allies. They protect one another against the powerless and we’re expected to nod at their wisdom and move on. If a person as private and unknown as Nick Sandmann can be libeled and slandered in this fashion without any recourse to the courts, then none of us is safe from this abuse at the hands of the media with the collusion of judges who are more interested in currying favor with the right people than administering justice.

This proves conclusively that the judiciary is partisan, biased and evil.   And Judge William Bertelsman is exhibit "A" for what's wrong and needs to be impeached.   These are members of the ruling class, protecting each other.

TV Client Sues Celebrity Attorney Gloria Allred for Fraud, Legal Malpractice

The legal action comes on the heels of recent reports that Allred is under investigation by the State Bar of California. Allred, a renowned civil rights attorney, is known for getting involved in controversial celebrity cases, especially those involving allegations of sexual assault and discrimination. Most recently, she announced a defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump on behalf of Summer Zervos, a former Apprentice contestant who claims Trump groped her. She is also representing several women who have accused comedian Bill Cosby of sexual assault. According to a letter from the State Bar of California viewed by LawNewz.com, her case has been forwarded to the State Bar’s Enforcement Unit for further investigation and possible prosecution.

News Flash: Chicago gang bangers don't get their guns legally!

A recent study that was conducted by the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab has learned that Chicago criminals do not acquire their guns from gun shops, gun shows or the internet.

The study examined and interviewed inmates in Chicago’s Cook County Jail who are either facing current gun charges, or have a background consisting of firearms related convictions.

The study learned that virtually zero criminals have ever used the internet or gun shows, because that method is easily traceable. It’s much safer for a criminal to acquire firearms on the streets where they’re harder to keep track of, and that’s most criminals method of choice.

Furthermore, University of Chicago Crime lab co-director, Harold Pollack, said that criminals “were less concerned about getting caught by the cops than being put in the position of not having a gun to defend themselves and then getting shot.”

What would we do without experts?  And this is why more gun laws don't work.

I wonder if this will come as news to the editors of the Virginian Pilot who seem fixated on ending gun violence by passing more laws keeping criminals from getting guns.  But then, the Virginian Pilot writers and editors drive for gun control laws is really a lie.  They want you disarmed because a disarmed people are more easily controlled by the government and they are the Party of Government. Fascists with a smiley face. 

Mark-Viverito’s message: Only saps obey the law

The message that the decent folks are saps, that the law is a joke. That the public has no right to impose basic standards of behavior in public places.

It’s a giant raised middle finger to everyone who honestly cares about other New Yorkers’ quality of life.

Then again, the speaker sees many things in her own special way.

Consider her hopes to close the city jail on Rikers Island: She’s not worried about where to put all the bad guys, because in Melissa Mark-Viverito’s world, there are no bad guys — only bad cops.

Laws are for the little people

State Dept. breaks judge’s deadline on Clinton emails

Judge who freed ‘cop-killer’ apologizes: ‘I am truly sorry’

That will fix things for the family and friends of the slain officer, won't it?

Now she’s sorry — five months ­after freeing the career drug dealer who is charged with murdering ­Police Officer Randolph Holder.

The hero cop’s death this week, by a bullet to the forehead during a shootout in East Harlem, “breaks my heart,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Patricia Nuñez said Friday.

“I know. I am truly sorry,” Nuñez said sadly when a Post reporter reminded her about the 33-year-old cop’s devastated family.

...

And her partner in this travesty:

Meanwhile, the judge who had suggested rehab instead of prison for Howard, Justice Edward McLaughlin, has defended his and Nuñez’s decision to free the accused cop-killer.

“I don’t get a crystal ball when I get a robe,’’ McLaughlin told reporters the day after Holder’s death.

Or a brain.  

At some point, someone will take "full responsibility."  And that will be it for public officials.

Yes, Hillary Clinton broke the law

On April 23, Petraeus pled guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials under 18 USC §1924. Many in the intelligence community were outraged at the perceived “slap on the wrist” he received, at a time when the Justice Department was seeking very strong penalties against lesser officials for leaks to the media.

According to the law, there are five elements that must be met for a violation of the statute, and they can all be found in section (a) of the statute: “(1) Whoever, being an officer, employee, contractor, or consultant of the United States, and, (2) by virtue of his office, employment, position, or contract, becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, (3) knowingly removes such documents or materials (4) without authority and (5) with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location [shall be guilty of this offense].”

The Petraeus case meets those conditions. Does Clinton’s?

Clinton originally denied that any of her emails contained classified information, but soon abandoned that claim. So far, 150 emails containing classified information have been identified on her server, including two that included information determined to be Top Secret.

She then fell back on the claim that none of the emails in question was “marked classified” at the time she was dealing with them. The marking is not what makes the material classified; it’s the nature of the information itself. As secretary of state, Clinton knew this, and in fact she would have been re-briefed annually on this point as a condition of maintaining her clearance to access classified information.

Then there’s location. Clinton knowingly set up her email system to route 100 percent of her emails to and through her unsecured server (including keeping copies stored on the server). She knowingly removed such documents and materials from authorized locations (her authorized devices and secure government networks) to an unauthorized location (her server).

Rolling Stone blames University of Virginia for fake rape story

And they're right!

DRUDGE has a link to an article in The Hollywood Reporter on the defamation suit brought by University of Virginia (UVA) Dean  Nicole Eramo.   Rolling Stone responds by blaming UVA.

Rolling Stone was sued by Dean Eramo for defamation. The article by Erdely implied that Eramo and UVA did nothing to help "Jackie" and was "indifferent to rape on campus, and more concerned with protecting its reputation than with assisting victims of sexual assault."

Rolling Stone's lawyers said that it wasn't their fault that they got their facts wrong.  They claim that the UVA administration, faculty and students all aided Sabrina Erdely  as she wrote a totally fictitious story about a brutal gang rape in a UVA fraternity house.  For how the story unraveled go here.

Rolling Stone's defense is that a UVA staff member named Emily Renda referred Erdely to "Jackie," the victim of the imaginary gang rape.  

 Here's the Rolling Stone version:

"Ms. Erdely did not stumble on Jackie's story. She was directed to Jackie by Emily Renda, then working closely with Dean Eramo in the Student Affairs office the — same Emily Renda that included Jackie's account of being 'gang-raped' in her Congressional testimony about campus sexual-assault policies. There is no question that both the author and Rolling Stone had full faith in Jackie's credibility and the accuracy of its Article at the time of publication. In no small measure, Rolling Stone believed in the credibility of Jackie's story because it came with the imprimatur of UVA, and of Dean Eramo specifically."

The Rolling Stone story hit UVA like a thunderbolt.  Without waiting for an investigation UVA President Theresa Sullivan swung into action by banning all fraternities.  The UVA administration, faculty and students assumed the story was true.  There were marches on the fraternity, attacks on the building, and demands for the expulsion of the fraternity members.

 In other words, the leaders of UVA believed in their hearts that the story was true even before an investigation was conducted. They "knew" that the men at that school were rapists ... and worse. They believed because they were primed to believe. They "knew" the story was true because it fit the belief in "rape culture" that covers academia like a noxious mist.

People at UVA were complicit in attempted destruction of their own school's reputation.  But Sabrina Erdely is not an innocent victim of UVA women activists like Emily Renda.  Erdely is the author of a number of what appear to be "rape hoax" stories like The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer and The Catholic Church's Secret Sex-Crime Files that have a common theme:

The narrative in each case is used to advance the theory that the institution in question (college administrators in the UVA case, military command in the Blumer case) is indifferent to the problem of systemic sexual assault occurring right under their noses.

Sabrina Erdely may well be the most prolific published serial liar since Stephen Glass.   It's a sad commentary on the depth to which the media has fallen that Glass was exposed and his stories scrubbed while Erdely is still employed.  But perhaps it's a good thing.  It helps to put a face on evil.    

What Harvard Law actually teaches.

The Harvard Law School course catalog frequently reads more like an ideological training academy than it does a program for teaching lawyers how to practice law.

Read the catalog summary.  If it were not so scary it would be funny.

Democrats want to put man-made global warming opponents in jail

Hey, it wasn't me:

Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic Senator from Rhode Island thinks that there's reason to think that people who reject man-made global warming just could be racketeers and should be prosecuted.

Top men like Sheldon Whitehouse can make sure we don't hear anything that we don't need to hear about scientific research and legally punish anyone who publicly disagrees. Otherwise, the natives get restless and start opposing whatever economic restrictions seem necessary to save us from ourselves. And as we all know, everything about the global warming debate is guided by altruism. No one's looking to get rich by artificially inflating the cost of fossil fuels and benefiting from green energy subsidies, right? (As I write this, four of top ten Google results for "Solyndra" are about how the Department of Energy's "scandalous" loan program that funded the notorious bankruptcy is actually turning a profit -- which is not true and a dramatic example of how badly the media covers the issues surrounding green energy.)

The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing

The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing a number of things, and here's just one ... and the media is worried.

There’s also a chance, at least according to those worried media allies of the president, that the Supreme Court will strike a blow against Obama’s big domestic triumph in the already embarrassing King v. Burwell case. That’s the one challenging the subsidies for Obamacare being offered through federally-run health insurance exchanges, on the grounds that the law clearly states that the subsidies are only available to to those enrolled through state-run systems, and because 36 of the states reasonably chose to have nothing to do with the Obamacare monstrosity the decision will have significant consequences. The former adjunct professor constitutional law’s lawyers are arguing that to insist a law be enacted as written is picky-picky-picky, and that no one should expect a 2,000-plus page bill to be free of significantly consequential errors, and never mind those statements by the bill’s “architect” that the language was clearly intended to coerce states to go along, and that, c’m’on, it’s Obama. This will probably prove persuasive to at least one of those wobbly Republican appointees, although we can hope that Chief Justice John Roberts might seize the opportunity to repent for his vote in that awful decision on the general constitutionality of Obamacare, and in any case there will be some black comedy in the arguments and a cautionary tale about passing 2,000-plus page bills that fundamentally transform a sixth of the economy and don’t promise to be free of errors with significant consequences.

Wisconsin's Neo Nazis

Bud Norman mentioned this Battering Rams in Wisconsin about the Nazi-syle reign of terror in Wisconsin against those who sided with Scott Walker.

This is America, where a citizen is free to express opinions and participate in politics without fear of retribution. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but the ideal seems to be slipping away. The diminution of fresh speech is not just a matter of the increasingly confined parameters of polite opinion, enforced by boycotts and restricted career opportunities and the howling of mobs, or even the usual heavy hand of government, such as the harassment of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service or the politicized prosecutions by the Department of Justice or the extra regulatory scrutiny applied to those businesses donating to the wrong candidates. It has now come to the point that armed agents of the government have been invading homes, seizing property, and bullying ordinary citizens into silence for no reason other than their political beliefs.

If this sounds like the most far-fetched sort of paranoid right-wing fantasy, we’d urge you to read David French’s chilling article, headlined “Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought it Was a Home Invasion,'” at The National Review. Although there had already been scattered reports about the outrageous “John Doe Investigation” that a renegade prosecutor and a rubber-stamping judge had launched against various groups that supported Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to reform the state’s collective bargaining laws regarding public sector unions, a fishing expedition which was eventually halted by a higher court that rightly considered it a clear attempt to intimidate the prosecutor’s political opponents into silence, only now are those targeted in the investigation coming forward with stories about doors being broken down with battering rams, computers being confiscated, children being terrified, neighbors being scandalized, and dozens of heavily armed police officers shouting warnings that no lawyers were to be contacted and no was to be told. The descriptions evoke Nazi-era Germany or the Soviet bloc, but it happened in Wisconsin, the birthplace of the “progressive movement.”

Norman notes that even though there has been some coverage of these outrages against innocent citizens exercising their free speech rights, the media - never a supporter of conservatives - is either spiking this story or continues to spread the smears of wrongdoing against Walker and his supporters.  That's why the rogue prosecutors and judges in Wisconsin went ahead with this, the media had their backs.

The NR article itself is more detailed:

Meet the Real Abortion Extremists

Ace:

Colorado Legislatures Are So Zealously Committed to Abortion, They Will Not Even Criminalize Killers Who Cut Babies Out of Their Mothers' Wombs Against Their Wishes

That is not some hypothetical, of course -- that just happened. An attacker stabbed a pregnant woman in her home, and left her for dead -- but not before cutting her baby out of her.

The baby died, the woman did not -- but this grisly murderer can't be charged with murder, because prosecutors claim the law doesn't permit murder charges involving a fetus. (Though I smell a strong whiff of "I don't want to" in this claim of "I can't.")

So some Colorado legislatures want to write the law so that it explicitly covers this situation.

But abortion extremists -- the real abortion extremists -- insist that cutting a pregnant woman's baby out of her and killing it, even against her wishes, should not be a crime in and of itself. You could charge this guy with assault for cutting the woman -- but the deliberate cutting out of her unborn child would support no further charges, because it's simply not a life. It's not even property that could be vandalized.

Not even that.

It's a slippery slope,see. If slitting a woman's belly open and removing her baby and killing it could lead some people to think that an abortionist doing it could be committing murder.

This law, by the way, explicitly exempts voluntary abortions. So it can't be claimed this is back-dooring a ban. Nope, abortions are outside the scope of this bill.

Ace notes that reporters are not interested in asking the tough questions about this case because reporters are, by and large, in favor of abortion and certainly are not about to raise questions about an abortion caused by a deranged woman who lured a pregnant woman to her home to steal her baby .. before it was born.

Judge accuses Obama lawyers of misleading him, refuses to restart amnesty

President Obama’s new deportation amnesty will remain halted, a federal judge in Texas ruled Tuesday night in an order that also delivered a judicial spanking to the president’s lawyers for misleading the court.

Judge Andrew S. Hanen, who first halted the amnesty in February, just two days before it was to take effect, said he’s even more convinced of his decision now, particularly after Mr. Obama earlier this year said he intends for his policies to supersede federal laws.

Judge Hanen pointed to Mr. Obama’s comments at a February town hall when the president warned immigration agents to adhere to his policies or else face “consequences.”

“In summary, the chief executive has ordered that the laws requiring removal of illegal immigrants that conflict with the 2014 DHS directive are not to be enforced, and that anyone who attempts to do so will be punished,” Judge Hanen wrote.

“This is not merely ineffective enforcement. This is total non-enforcement,” the judge continued, saying that Mr. Obama’s own descriptions of how he is carrying out his policies have hurt his case.

Mr. Obama in November announced a new amnesty for illegal immigrant parents whose children are either U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. The amnesty could apply to as many as 5 million illegal immigrants.

George Zimmerman: Obama ‘Broke the Law’ with ‘Baseless Prosecution,’ ‘Incendiary Comments’