Monthly Archives: August 2014

The Case for an Elected Judiciary

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From time to time you hear much moaning about how election of judges somehow introduces “politics” and “money” into the pristine world of the judiciary.  It’s an “attack on the independence” of the judges, we’re told.  It corrupts the process, we’re told.

I don’t think you can deny that election of judges introduces a political element into that branch of government.  Of course it does.  On the other hand, the appointment of judges is also highly politicized, and anyone who doesn’t think that happens is a drooling imbecile who does not deserve to be taken seriously.

Here in my own humble federal district we have two egregious examples.  One of our U.S. district court judges is married to a fellow who just happened to be one of the chief fund-raisers for a very prominent politician from around here.  A national, and even to some extent, world-wide prominent politician.  The fellow’s wife, who did not and does not enjoy any particular reputation for brilliance either as a lawyer or judge, somehow got herself on the local bankruptcy court bench (where the debtors’ lawyers found her to be dumb even by that court’s standards), and then equally magically fleeted up to the district court bench.  Where she will be until she drops dead or gets tired of it.  Another lawyer around here is a big union lawyer (that’s hard to do in a right-to-work state where unions have never been strong and are even weaker now); his firm even has the little union “bug” at the foot of its stationery.  His wife, whose practice revolved heavily around leveraging local political connections and who is equally undistinguished otherwise, is now on the federal appellate court for our circuit.  To pretend that either of those individuals got where they are by any means other than pure money politics is insulting to the listener.

Well, if both methods are riven with politics and money, what is the material point of distinction (if any)?  I’ll suggest the point of distinction lies in the answer to who makes up their constituency.  Is it the voters of the state at large, or is it a coterie of political insiders, mutually assisting each other to prominence through government connections?  I know which I prefer.  If a judge is going to have to suck up to someone to get his job, I’d just as leave that someone be me.

Can we agree that both election and appointment are, except in the single respect outlined above, indistinguishable on the issue of the role played by politics and money?  So how about garden-variety competence?  I pay attention to what happens in the court systems, both federal and state around here.  It’s sort of my job.  For the life of me I cannot tell that either method of selection is better about putting highly competent, highly ethical, and highly . . . judicial (for want of a better adjective) candidates on the bench.  Neither seems to do very well at picking all-stars or avoiding idiots.  Neither seems to do very well at picking judges who will not play favorites, or home-cook, or interject their personal politics into their decisions.  Neither does a very good job at identifying and avoiding those susceptible to black-robe fever.  In fact, the only argument in favor of either method of selection is that short of drawing lots for compulsory judicial service, no method conceivable and practicable would be any better at those things than the two we’ve got.

Does that leave us with anything to choose between the two?  I suggest we do have such a point on which to base a decision.  Which of the two methods makes it easier to get rid of the objectionable judges?  I think popular election to be the hands-down winner there.  Granted, it’s not easy.  Very, very few judicial recalls succeed, at least at the appellate level.

Rose Byrd out in California took it in the shorts a number of years ago, for her habitually far-left decisions.  Penny White in Tennessee paid the price for an outrageous capital punishment decision, when that supreme court ruled that, as a matter of law, an escaped felon’s raping a 70+ year-old virgin, stabbing her, and leaving her to bleed to death on the rear floor of her own car was not sufficiently “heinous, atrocious, and cruel” (as I think the relevant statute provided) as to support a death penalty.  As a matter of law, and bugger what twelve jurymen who’d heard all the proof, seen all the witnesses, and then unanimously decided otherwise had to say.  A couple of years ago a group of judges in either Kansas or Nebraska got run out of town, but just this month three supreme court judges in (once again) Tennessee survived a very well-financed effort to show them the door.

Un-election of trial-level judges is not always that difficult, but you still have to find a lawyer who’s willing to run and willing to deal with the fall-out of an unsuccessful effort.  Any candidate who’s willing to challenge an incumbent has to ask himself how well his practice is likely to do if he makes an enemy of the fellow he made actually run.  And if the incumbent is also tight with the other judges on that court, you have to ask what will that do to a lawyer’s livelihood if suddenly everyone in town knows that whenever a decision on any particular point could go one way or the other, that particular lawyer will never see one go his way.  The result of course is that you very seldom see a challenge made to an incumbent unless he’s commonly despised by both the bar and his colleagues.  While not a fool-proof standard, most judges don’t receive that degree of contempt unless they’ve well earned it.

Appointment, on the other hand, and especially lifetime appointment, produces statements like this, from a sitting U.S. Supreme Court justice:  According to Justice Ginsburg the “turmoil” in Ferguson, Missouri indicates that there is “a real racial problem” in America.  And the court is doing “little to help.”  This, by the way, from someone whose exposure to the lives and problems of ordinary Americans is likely limited to something asymptotically approaching zero.  She’s got no more clue as to how people in Ferguson (or in 99.9998% of other American towns, for that matter) live than she does of how Marines survive in modern combat.  So we can agree that she’s comfortable running her mouth about things that are closed books to her.

Where her comments really suggest that she could do with a contested election is her statement to the effect that once upon a time, the philosopher-kings of the Supreme Court were “leader[s] in rooting out discrimination,” citing specifically one of the worst-reasoned cases in recent decades, the Duke Power case, as what once was and should still be the court’s approach to “rooting out” things it doesn’t like.  Duke Power formally accepted the proposition that actionable discrimination can exist where a facially-neutral rule (such as, we have to assume in Ginsburg-land, “Do not beat police officers so badly you fracture their skull and they have to go to a hospital”) has a “disparate impact” on an identifiable group which you happen to favor, because their volitional behavior under or in response to that rule produces results that are distasteful to them, or as the ABA cheerleaders characterize the approach, “to evaluate polices that are neutral on their face but have a disproportionate impact on minorities.”

Notice, by the way, how the concept of “minorities” is divorced from the concept of “behavior” and “choices made.”  Here, let’s try another policy that is “neutral on its face” but that has a measurable “disproportionate impact” on “minorities”:  the rule that only licensed attorneys are eligible for most judicial office.  Obviously that policy is going to preclude the overwhelming majority of the “minorities” that are presently in favor with  the extreme-leftists of the ABA from holding judicial office.  For instance, a terrifying proportion of black males are convicted felons by the time they hit age 35 (if they live that long).  You can, and people do, honestly debate the policy of the statutes under which they are most frequently convicted (read: “war on drugs”), but unless something changes, those statutes are in fact the law and conviction of their violation in fact does establish you as a convicted felon.  Period.  And in pretty most states, convicted felons are for all practical purposes ineligible for admission to the bar, even if they pass through law school walking on water and parting it for those who can’t.  The alleged policy of restricting judicial office to lawyers is that supposedly only lawyers can be trusted not to bugger up decisions that impact people’s lives and fortunes.  I might accept that, except that for generations that was not the law and I’m not aware that the quality of jurisprudence back then was identifiably worse than it is now.  Further, a felon can lose his law license by reason of his conviction.  He’s not a lawyer any more, but you can’t show that his having been convicted has made him a damned bit less learned in the law.  Alternatively, you can know a boat-load about the law without ever holding a law license.  Case in point:  Herb Wechsler, one of the most respected constitutional scholars of the last half-century (he taught at Columbia) was not a lawyer.  Further, unless you’re willing to accept the proposition that all lawyers are equally qualified to be judges <sound of snot bubble blowing and bursting>, then you cannot allege that merely holding a law license qualifies you for judicial office.  Oh, but the Deep Thinkers will respond, that’s why you restrict the selection process to responsible political leaders, who will vet nominees and who will hold exhaustive confirmation hearings to ensure that Only the Best Need Apply.  Remind me again how holding a law license enables that process to work as designed?  Is a legislative panel unable to tell a numb-skull when presented with one unless he holds a law license?  Does holding a law license somehow make your character more transparent, so that an Alcee Hastings will sit revealed as a criminal when he comes before a senate judiciary committee (answer: no)?

In short, you’ve got a rule that has absolutely no verifiable relationship with the ill which it is supposed to avert, and yet which automatically excludes millions of Americans from holding judicial office.  So why then is it not unconstitutional, on a disparate-impact test, to require a law license for a judge?

I admit the lawyers-only rule is an extreme example.  Let’s look at something more prosaic:  school disciplinary rules.  The United States Department of Education now formally takes the position that even if neutral rules of discipline are administered absolutely, perfectly impartially, if members of a favored group get disciplined under them more frequently, that in and of itself can establish discrimination under the “disparate impact test.”  Let’s go to the money quotation:  “Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race. The resulting discriminatory effect is commonly referred to as ‘disparate impact.'”  Lest Gentle Reader think I’m cherry-picking an upper-level summary and quoting it out of context:  “Examples of policies that can raise disparate impact concerns include policies that impose mandatory suspension, expulsion, or citation (e.g., ticketing or other fines or summonses) upon any student who commits a specified offense – such as being tardy to class, being in possession of a cellular phone, being found insubordinate, acting out, or not wearing the proper school uniform[.]”

Thus, even if a black child who takes a baseball bat to a school locker is neither more nor less likely to be punished, and at an indistinguishable level of severity, than the child of Korean immigrants who similarly amuses himself, if just by the numbers more black children are punished under that rule because more black children engage in that behavior, then the rule is constitutionally suspect.

Justice Ginsburg thinks this is a swell way to run a school.  I’ll kiss your ass under every red light in town if either her children or grand-children have ever had to try to learn geometry in a classroom run along those lines.

Oh but “disparate impact” is harmless, Gentle Reader might say.  I mean, c’mon — school rules?  Can’t you think of something weightier than school rules?  Show me something with some substance to it.  Show me something where tip-toeing around a minority because that’s what they do actually has caused someone some harm.  Show me, in short, a reason to think that fuzzy-headed thinking like Ginsburg’s actually poses a risk to ordinary people in ordinary circumstances.

By curious happenstance, I can.  There’s a city in England, Rotherham, of about 250,000 people.  Roughly 8% of its population is Pakastani (whom the politicians and newspapers insist on describing as “Asian,” as if they were indistinguishable in their habits from the folks living in Rotherham whose ancestors came from Hong Kong).  For 16 years now the police and the town council have been fully aware (in fact numerous written studies were commissioned and completed) that organized gangs of Pakistani males, ages 20-30, have been systematically preying on white girls as young as 11 and 12 years old, gang-raping them, whoring them out, and generally sexually exploiting them.  Books, in fact, have been written by survivors; they have been interviewed and those interviews published.  As long ago as 2007.  The minimum known number of victims is around 1,400, although the true number is likely to be well in excess of that.  One thousand four hundred.  One of the children referenced in one of the many official reports was having sex with up to five men . . . at age 12.  One of the perps was caught with a pre-teen victim, drunk in his car, and with naked pictures of her on his cell phone.  She was 12 at the time (she was already known to the police; they’d identified her at age 11 as having sex with adult males); he walked.

All this was known.  Known to the police.  Known to the child welfare agencies.  Known to the town council.  And not a damned one of them did anything.  Not.  One.  Goddam.  Thing.  Why not?  Well, let’s let the MP from Rotherham for 18 years tell it like it was:  “Denis MacShane, MP for Rotherham from 1994 to 2012, actually admitted to the BBC’s World At One that ‘there was a culture of not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat, if I may put it like that. Perhaps, yes, as a true Guardian reader and liberal Leftie, I suppose I didn’t want to raise that too hard.'”  But why Pakistani males and English girls?  Surely the Pakistani males could have had much easier access to their own girls, right?  “There are other hopeful signs. The Rotherham scandal seems temporarily to have silenced those who insist, every time a child-grooming case is exposed, that most paedophiles are white. Indeed they are; but the Rotherham abusers were not paedophiles. They were men of Pakistani heritage slaking their lust on young girls they regarded as white trash because they knew they could get away with it.”

Because they could get away with it, and knew they could get away with it.  Because the law was not enforced against them.  “Perhaps we should expect no more when community preservation is outsourced to bureaucracies, but the unavoidable reality is that on many occasions, Rotherham police came upon children being sexually exploited—in some cases, in the very instance of being raped—and arrested no one. The perpetrators are Pakistani; they might call us racists. The children seemed to consent. These gangs are violent.”

In short, because enforcement of the laws against gang-raping 11-year-olds might have had a “disparate impact” on a minority.  In Rotherham we see the logical conclusion of the philosophy that Justice Ginsburg thinks such a wonderful thing.

And this is why we need an elected judiciary.

All Your Children are Belong to Us — Or Not?

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Some months ago I wrote about a family in Germany, the Wunderlichs, who wanted to, and for a time did, home-school their children.

For their troubles, a group of 20 police officers and sundry official hand-wringers descended on their home in a suburb of Darmstadt in the early morning hours of August 29, 2013.  They’d brought a battering ram with them.  Did I mention that the Wunderlichs are both gardeners by trade?  Not weapons smugglers, domestic terrorists, nor even <sharp intake of breath> Tea Partiers.  Fortunately for all concerned, Mr. Wunderlich opened the door, and so the SWAT-style equipment wasn’t deployed.

Their children were taken away from them, physically for three weeks (the parents were allowed one visit, on their youngest child’s birthday), and only returned upon their undertaking to send them to a “regular” school.  But the courts stripped them of the legal authority to made educational decisions for their children, to select where they lived with the children, and in fact of just about every right or power over them except to provide them with housing, clothing, and food.

I linked both the original German court ruling and the HSLDA’s translation of it.  I won’t plow that field again, but suffice it to say that the court’s reasoning was deeply disturbing in its implications.

This week the Oberlandesgericht in Frankfurt am Main (there’s actually another Frankfurt, way out east, on the Oder River) reversed the lower court decision, at least as to the children’s custody, granting the parents full custody and decisional authority over their children.  Here’s a report from a local paper (unfortunately it’s in German); here’s a write-up over at the HSLDA.

While they’re doubtless relieved once again to be recognized by the eye of the law, as well as that of their God (their home-schooling the children is based ultimately on their religious convictions), to be lawfully charged with their children’s up-bringing, the Wunderlichs are in legal limbo now.  The OLG ruled that depriving them of custody was “disproportionate” to their offense, but specifically pointed out that they’re subject to the criminal laws on the subject.  Fines and/or up to six months in jail are the tariff in that respect, it seems.

While not as disturbing as the administrative court, the OLG’s reasoning, at least as reported (I’ve looked for a link to the actual decision but haven’t able to locate it yet) is still unsettling.  The court reiterated the official line that home-schooling represents “endangerment” to the children’s welfare.  Well, why?  It’s not because the children are stupid or uneducated or maladjusted, because they’re not.  In fact the newspaper report describes the court’s characterization of their educational level as “high.”  Likewise their “social competency” does not appear limited.  But if not those, then what else?  Well, the court pointed out that mere transmission of knowledge is not the full function of the school.  Rather, attending a regular school serves the function of affording the children “the opportunity to grow into the community’s life.”  In other words, it’s a danger to the children because they might not grow up like us.

As I pointed out when I first posted on this story, to lay universal claim to the integration of children into a specific societal system through the mechanism of compulsory attendance in government-run schools is neither more nor less than the same claim, on the same basis, as that made by the fascists and the communists.  I hypothesized (because he didn’t live long enough to marry) the children of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and whether he would have been justified in home-schooling them to keep them out of the clutches of the national socialist school system.

I think my assertion on that point was correct then, and I’ll re-state it:  You must permit families like the Wunderlichs because you dare not forbid families like the hypothetical Bonhoeffers.

 

Anyone for a Nice Steaming Dish of I-Told-You-So?

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As I think I’ve observed here before, a number of years ago I heard someone with the smarts and education to know better make the statement, “There’s no difference between fundamentalist Christians, fundamentalist Jews, and fundamentalist Moslems.”

Bullshit.

Fundamentalist Christians don’t do this.

Where are the Imams in the West?  Where are the Imams in Indonesia?  Where are the Imams in the Middle East?  Where are the scholars of the Religion of Peace pointing out precisely in the Koran where it says this ol’ dog won’t hunt?  Why are we not cited to the writings, ancient and modern, of their theologians setting out in painful detail why these things are impermissible and are inherently impermissible?  I want someone to show me, book, chapter, and verse, how it is that these practices not only are not condoned by, but are irreconcilable with, the teachings of the prophet.

Is it, maybe, because it can’t be done?

A couple of months ago, over at PJMedia.com, there appeared a sobering article, “Islam’s ‘Protestant Reformation,'” the crux of which is the semantic problems with the notion of “reform” and “reformation.”  Just like Dear Leader’s proposing to grant up to 11,000,000-odd illegal immigrants the legal ability to subvert American law, society, and economy is branded as “immigration reform,” so those who talk about “reforming” the Religion of Peace don’t do a great deal of un-packing that expression.

I’ve never read the Koran.  I’ve read what purport to be excerpts from the Koran.  In truth I’ve also never read the entirety of the Christian Bible, either, although my exposure to that is of course much greater.  The thrust of the above-linked PJM article is that, based solely on the ur-texts of the religion, those groups which we in the West think of as “radical” actually have the better argument of their co-religionists.  Oh, of course, all the folks with the “Co-exist” bumper stickers on their cars trot out the odd, not-too-particularized, upper-level sugar-coated line or three from the Koran to demonstrate that it is, in fact, a Religion of Peace.  But for every such all-join-hands-in-a-circle passage, the likes of ISIS, Boko Haram, and al Qaeda can — and do — un-reel yards of very explicit instructions to do precisely what they’re doing, viz. wiping out every religion other than the Religion of Peace by forcibly converting or exterminating their adherents.

So maybe the reason why we hear crickets from the Muslims in the West is because they know, even if they won’t admit it to us dhimmi, that it’s an argument they can’t win, at least not within the four corners of their scriptures.

If they do feel that they can win that argument on its own terms, then their silence is all the more unforgivable, they having a duty, I suggest, to win it.  If they do genuinely believe that what is being done by the likes of ISIS is repugnant to the very nature of their religion, but stand mutely by, then it means they must agree with what is being done.  Does Gentle Reader recall the Catholic American Conference of Bishops back in the 1980s, weighing in or what the United States was doing in Central America?  The bishops believed (stupidly and incorrectly as a matter of theology, I would suggest) that America’s support, covert and overt, for those groups fighting the communist infiltrators could not be squared with the precepts of Christianity.  And they stepped forward and said so, in plain Saxon.  Likewise the religious leaders of Christian Europe regularly stand up and pop off about things that are being done, on a secular basis, by their co-religionists.  Even during wartime, the Church of England openly debated to what extent the strategic bombing campaign over Germany could or could not be reconciled with Christianity.  So don’t hand me a bunch of shit that because the Religion of Peace is somehow “under attack,” by those awful Joooosssss who’ll insist on having rockets launched at themselves, it’s therefore morally acceptable for those outside the combat zones to stand by and watch in silence as these scenes of horror — explicitly pursued on a sectarian basis, by the way — unfold.

I’m not interested in a religion, or a God, who can’t tell the difference between what is being done by ISIS, Boko Haram, and al Qaeda on the one hand, and by loonies like the Westboro Baptist Church on the other.

Being Taken for Granted Looks Like This

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When you’ve mechanically voted at 90%+ margins for one political party for 80-odd years, no matter how objectionable that party’s candidate(s) is or are; when you turn out by the hundreds or thousands to carry the signs they’ve pre-printed for you and chant the slogans you’re instructed to yell; when you turn over your religious institutions to the party operatives, this is how the party you’ve given yourself to thinks of you.  A member of the Commission on Civil Rights points out the obvious:  Granting — or more exactly stated, purporting to grant — legal status to millions upon millions of criminals, people whose mere presence in this country is a criminal offense, will have massive and destructive effects on the people with whom all those newly-amnestied illegals compete for economic support, viz. blacks and especially black males.

“Illegal immigration has a disparate impact on African American men because these men are disproportionately represented in the low-skilled labor force,” writes a Peter Kirsanow, a member of the commission.  He’s exactly, precisely, spot-on.  The people yelping the loudest for amnesty are exactly those groups with whom the amnestied illegals will not be competing for work.  I could be wrong, but with the exception of the illegal immigrant who managed to graduate from law school and now wants to take the bar exam and be admitted to practice — which involves an oath, by the way, to uphold the constitutions of the United States and the state to which admitted — I’m just going to question whether there are many doctors, Ph.D. candidates, engineers, venture capitalists, or others of similar economic status among the millions of illegal immigrants here.

Blacks, and especially black males, and especially young black males, are perhaps the most vulnerable of all the statistically significant population groups.  Their labor force participation rate is abysmal.  Among the few who do have jobs, they tend to skew very strongly towards un-skilled or low-skilled jobs.  Those who do have jobs or who are actively seeking jobs also have powerful cultural forces dragging them down.  Day by day they get told that it’s objectionable for them to work, that they’re fools and patsies for not riding the system for everything they can get from it.  They can look around them and see large numbers of their age cohort living on the sweat of others’ brows.  Even if the actual proportion of their age cohort doing that isn’t in fact that large, it’s exactly that part of it that gets the most attention, and so the (bad) example they set is unusually influential.

Try to imagine yourself as a, say, 23-year-old black male.  Maybe you hung around to graduate from high school, but very likely you didn’t, if only because the public school you got sent to was a war zone staffed by all the dead-wood staff and administrators who got run out of every other school in the district but because they couldn’t be fired (gotta love them teachers’ unions, eh wot?) they sifted down to your school.  But somehow you’ve got a job on a construction site.  Right now you’re still in the gopher phase of your work; someone needs a bundle of re-bar, it’s yours to go fetch it.  Tote a wheelbarrow of mortar?  You.  But you’re young and ambitious and you’ve got your eyes and ears open, watching how the masons, the carpenters, the glaziers, the electricians, the HVAC guys, the plumbers do their work.  You’re trying to figure out which of those areas you’d like to make a play for.  You listen to them talk among themselves.  Now try to imagine how hard it must be to get out of bed at 4:45 a.m. so you can be on the site, hatted, booted, and ready to go, by 6:00 a.m.  Now try to imagine how hard that must be when you’re the first male in your family to have held a job in two or three generations.  When all your cousins and the guys you ran with in school are spending their days hanging out down at the bar, or propping up a lamp post on the street corner, or sitting around the living room watching television.  If you’re that kid you’ve got to have not just the ordinary get-up-and-go needed to get by, but a truly extraordinary degree of commitment to bettering yourself, because most of your universe is reminding you how easy is the life on their side.

And now imagine that a president who’s trolling for votes from another ethnic group just decides he’s going to free up 11,000,000 or so people to come gunning for your job.  And yes, a large number of those folks are also in the construction trades.  How hard is it to resist the human urge to say, “Aw, to hell with it all.  If I’m going to lose my job anyway, I may as well quit”?

Anyone want to bet on what that president’s calculus would look like if he had to reckon with a major exodus of support for his party from black America?  But he doesn’t, you see.  He knows that no matter what he does, they’ll still vote 90%+ for his party, cycle after cycle after disastrous cycle.  And the result has been nothing less than the re-creation of the Jim Crow South, only this time all over the country.  This time it’s all the harder to fight against because back then, all you had were laws.  Laws are easy to break.  This time you’ve got the population itself opting to live in a parallel universe in which there is a clear and nearly-hermetic separation between Things That Exist for One Group, and Things That Exist for Others.  You don’t have to do a great deal of searching to find hard numbers on the degree of segregation that now exists for much of black America.  Urban America is full of public schools the minority enrollment in which tops 95%.  There are entire parts of most cities where there are Places the Blacks Shop, and other, noticeably nicer, places where you can go and not see one black face in 200 patrons.  There are public parks, and areas of public parks, where the folks sitting around on blankets or at picnic tables are mono-chromatic.  Ever looked around the main downtown transit bus station?  Except in places like NYC, you’ll not see one white face in twenty.  Public swimming pools?  Ditto.

At least they don’t have whites-only drinking fountains.  I know it’s hyperbole to say it, but it’s hard to resist the temptation to wonder that if getting rid of whites-only drinking fountains was all the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement, just what was it all about in the first place?

They used to say that the credo of the Roman Catholic Church was pray, pay, and obey.  I’m struggling to see in exactly what respects the relationship between the Democrat Party and those of our fellow citizens whose ancestors were brought here in chains differs from just that.

I forget which war it was — First or Second — but years ago I read about a Belgian priest who was active in his city in, if not “resistance” to the occupation, then at least getting his people through the war alive.  He was widely beloved.  The Germans shot him, and left a note pinned to his clothes:  Schwein, du hast dennoch für uns gearbeitet!  Swine, you worked for us all the same!  I seem to recall coming across that story in The Arms of Krupp, which would make it World War II.

Dear Leader is about to leave just that note pinned to the clothing of those whom his attorney general calls “my people.”