Columnist.
[Monday] morning, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to the requirement in California that government employees, such as public school teachers, pay fees to the local union even if they choose not to join the union.
There is no question that the omnibus appropriations bill that Congress passed just before its holiday recess is full of wasteful spending. Even worse, it completely funds Obama's unilateral, above-the-law executive actions in almost every area, from his immigration amnesty program to his overregulation of power plants. However, there is one area where Congress acted through the omnibus (and tax extenders bill) to stop part of the administration's assault on the First Amendment.
In other words, instead of students attending colleges that match their academic background, training, and credentials, the racially discriminatory admissions programs of universities like the University of Texas push many students into universities where they are in the bottom of the class from the very start of their college careers. This leads to lower grades, lower graduation rates, and students dropping out of more academically rigorous disciplines like science and engineering – black and Hispanic students abandon those areas of study at much higher rates than whites.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch has no intention of reversing the Justice Department's defiance of the Inspector General Act. She made that clear during a House Judiciary oversight hearing last month. Indeed, her own Office of Legal Counsel has issued a badly flawed opinion that insists DOJ and FBI officials can, at their discretion, withhold information from the Justice Department's inspector general — the individual tasked by Congress with investigating those very same officials.
San Francisco and other cities across the United States have created so-called "sanctuaries" for illegal aliens. These municipalities are defying federal immigration law, just like some Southern jurisdictions that defied federal civil rights laws in the 1960s. But unlike that earlier era, today's sanctuary cities are creating safe havens for known criminals. Their policies have victimized innocent Americans, enabling illegal aliens to commit thousands of crimes that would not otherwise have occurred.
It was "déjà vu all over again" as Yogi Berra would have said, at the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday, with protesters outside the court and race agitators like Al Sharpton leading the crowd, as the justices heard the case of Abigail Fisher for a second time. Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Fisher's favor and sent her suit against the racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin back down to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two important voting rights cases. How the Court rules could have a huge impact on the composition of state legislatures across the country. Both cases involve the "one person, one vote" guarantee embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. This guiding principle requires that all voters have approximately equal voting power. The first case of the morning, Harris v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, dealt with state legislative districts drawn by Arizona's so-called Independent Redistricting Commission.
Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin
In a decision on Monday that preserves the thanks of a nation for the sacrifice of Americans who died in World War I, Maryland federal judge Deborah Chasanow (a Clinton appointee) threw out a lawsuit filed by the American Humanist Association over a forty-foot-tall war memorial that is almost 100 years old.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving, take a moment to remember the many Americans who gave their last full measure 72 years ago in the attack on the Tarawa Atoll in the Gilbert Islands. Almost two years after Pearl Harbor, the assault by the 2nd Marine Division on a Japanese-held stronghold started on Nov. 20, 1943, five days before Thanksgiving. In a brutal three-day battle, over 1,000 Americans were killed, and almost 2,300 were wounded. In proportion to the forces engaged, it may have been one of the most costly battles in U.S. military history, with as many casualties suffered in three days as in the six-month campaign on Guadalcanal.
On Friday, the U.S. Justice Department filed a 35-page petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review Texas v. U.S., the case filed by 26 states against President Obama's immigration amnesty plan. The government is appealing a preliminary injunction that stopped implementation of Obama's amnesty plan, which was issued by a federal district court and upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals on Nov. 9.
It's bad enough having a state hold an election that is racially discriminatory. Now we have a judge willing to allow it to move forward. That would be federal district court Judge J. Michael Seabright (a George W. Bush appointee, surprisingly enough). He's refused to issue an injunction to stop an election in Hawaii to set up a separate government that excludes anyone who doesn't meet the state's definition of "Native Hawaiian." Seabright's deplorable decision in Akina v. State of Hawaii is on an emergency appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — which, unfortunately, doesn't always seem to believe in following Supreme Court precedent.
Call the cops! It looks as though someone is committing voter fraud in Indiana again! Ironically, in this case, however, the alleged fraudster who has been arrested by the Indiana State Police was a cop. Unfortunately, even officers who graduate from the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy are capable of violating the public trust by allegedly trying to steal an election. That is the case with Officer Lowell Ross Colen of the Rising Sun Police Department, situated in a small Indiana town of around 2,300 people on the Ohio River across from Kentucky.
Everyone reading this should do the attorney general of New York, Eric T. Schneiderman, a big favor: buy a copy of the U.S. Constitution, highlight the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights with a bright yellow or orange Sharpie, and mail him a copy. Schneiderman obviously needs a remedial lesson in the fact that the government is banned from censoring or restricting speech, and certainly has no business "investigating" Americans, including corporations, for their views on — of all things — a contentious scientific theory.
If you wonder about the bias and lack of objectivity and accuracy of reporters in the mainstream media, look no farther than what they are learning at schools like the University of North Texas, where Dorothy Bland is the dean of the school of journalism. Bland recently wrote an article in the Dallas Morning News about her supposed harassment by police officers for "walking while black" that doesn't bear even a passing resemblance to what really happened. Of course, we would not know this based on her allegations of racist treatment. But fortunately for us and the Corinth, Texas, Police Department, the officers who encountered Bland turned on the dashcam video in their police cruiser before they stopped her.
What, exactly, is the Senate's role of "Advice and Consent" when it comes to the nominations made by a president? It's a topic of perpetual debate in Washington. One wrong-headed argument holds the role to be quite modest: Senators should defer to a president's choices except in extreme circumstances. That position is advanced far too often by Republicans, and almost never by Democrats (except when a member of their party is doing the nominating). It has led some Republican senators to have a policy against filibustering presidential nominees, no matter how much their confirmation may endanger the rule of law and adherence to the constitutional order.
Here Are the Problems With the 'Investigation' That Cleared Her
Thought the litigation battle over Obamacare was over? Think again. Texas, Kansas, and Louisiana are about to file a new lawsuit against Obamacare, claiming that a fee being imposed by the IRS as a condition of states continuing to receive Medicaid funds is both unconstitutional and a violation of federal law. And they are in discussions with more than a dozen other states about joining this new lawsuit.
Recently, the acting head of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Principal Deputy Attorney General Vanita Gupta, gave a very long speech for the "Community Policing Summit," hosted by the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey. The speech was a longer and more detailed version of remarks delivered repeatedly by Obama administration officials these days, so it is worth reading with some care.
Recently the acting head of the U.S. Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Principal Deputy Attorney General Vanita Gupta, gave a very long speech for the "Community Policing Summit" hosted by the U.S. Attorney's office in New Jersey. The speech was a longer and more detailed version of remarks delivered repeatedly by Obama administration officials these days, so it is worth reading with some care.
