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Stuart K. Hayashi
There are many philosophic YouTube videos (including at least four TEDx Talks), putting on a pretense of profundity, saying that because all new ideas are inspired by prior ideas, no artwork or invention or even scientific idea has ever been original. That’s a straw man, as originality doesn’t hinge on the complete absence of prior developments to provide inspiration and
Why the majority in Chatrie v. United States (Fourth Amendment geofence warrant case) reached the right result for the wrong reason — and why it matters
The Supreme Court held yesterday in Chatrie v. United States that the government conducted a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it acquired digital records about the cell phone location of a man accused of robbing a bank. This means that police generally need a warrant to obtain your location information from a service provider like Google. But what this means for other types of private information or media held digitally by countless service providers we rely upon daily is all but clear.
At issue was whether law enforcement can use a “geofence warrant” to demand location information from Google about customers, here including Okello Chatrie, whose phones happened to be near a crime scene. The government’s answer: Yes, because once you share your location with Google, you have no Fourth Amendment interest in it and a warrant isn’t required anyway.
The Court disagreed. Privacy advocates are celebrating. But Justice Elena Kagan’s majority opinion missed the opportunity to declare that a person’s location data belongs to him, even if it is stored on the servers at a company like Google. The majority calls the records “his” freely, even likening them to Chatrie’s own emails and photos. What it refuses to do is let that ownership decide the case. And thus, the privacy test stays what it has been since 1967: whether “society” is prepared to recognize a person’s “expectation of privacy” as reasonable.
Read more (for free) at MS NOW
Ayn Rand’s planning material for We the Living is available with full-text searching
The post <i>We the Living</i> Material Released appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.
I’m Rob Tracinski, and I’m running for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District.
I want to say a few words about the big recent Supreme Court decision on birthright citizenship—and folks, we got through by the skin of our teeth here.
This was one of those cases—it’s become a thing in the Roberts Court in recent years. Trump and his supporters will go out and make a totally ridiculous, outrageously unconstitutional argument about how he has total immunity for all crimes, or he has unlimited executive power, or he can just rewrite the Constitution at whim. And the lower federal courts issue a ruling that is clear, straightforward, and well-argued and basically amounts to saying, “LOL, no.” And we think that’s the end of it, and then the Supreme Court decides to take up the case.
And I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach, because that can only be bad. The lower court rulings are so definitive, the issue is so clear-cut, that the only proper action by the Supreme Court is not to take the case, to let the lower court rulings stand and to leave in place all the precedents that the lower courts are affirming. And in a bunch of these cases, the conservatives on the Supreme Court go out and use this as an opportunity to overturn all those precedents and just rewrite the Constitution to fit their partisan interests, which is the big scandal of this court.
But in a few cases, after a kind of mental and emotional roller-coaster ride, the Supreme Court does eventually arrive at the right decision, which is what it did in the birthright citizenship case. And this is a huge relief, because getting rid of birthright citizenship would literally destroy this country—more on that in a minute.
So it’s good that the court ruled how it did, but I’m not celebrating, because like I said, we got through by the skin of our teeth. Trump’s executive order to throw out birthright citizenship was blocked by a 6-3 ruling, with three of the conservative justices in support. But that’s deceptive, because Justice Kavanaugh supported the outcome but pointedly did not affirm that birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment, which it absolutely 100% is.
So this is really a 5-4 ruling in favor of one of the very most basic, well-established principles in the US Constitution. That gives you an idea of how much of a knife’s edge the Constitution is on with this court.
And so do the rest of the rulings. Some people have pointed out that Chief Justice Roberts deliberately waited to announce the birthright citizenship ruling as one of the last decisions from this term to be released to the public. And he did that so he could do something good that people would like, and this would distract everyone from all the other rotten stuff he and his conservative buddies did that was announced earlier.
Well, I’m not distracted. So one of the things they did was to finally throw out a precedent called Humphrey’s Executor—long story on the name, but this is an old decision that affirmed the right of Congress to create independent agencies and boards, like the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, and set limits for when the president can fire officials in these agencies. Take the FCC, which controls broadcast radio and television. This was obviously to prevent the president from using his power over the FCC to impose censorship, which is what Trump has been trying to do. And in a case involving the Federal Trade Commission, this is exactly what the Supreme Court just empowered him to do.
There’s no basis for this ruling in the Constitution, it’s all invented. But this hyper-partisan court just loves unlimited executive power—so long as there’s a Republican in the White House. And this is a decision so awful it’s literally going to turn the clock back 150 years, because it’s undermining civil service reforms that were the big political issue in the 1880s. Back then, Congress was trying to create a government bureaucracy that was not flagrantly corrupt, where competence would be more important than political loyalty. That meant Congress had to be able to use the power it actually has to create rules about how people are hired and fired—and the Supreme Court just threw all of that out.
Also notice that they’re still trying to create a special exception for the Federal Reserve, because they love executive power, but God forbid it should impact their stock market portfolios. That’s really revealing about the priorities here.
The other big rotten thing the conservative court did—and look, there are others, this is not a comprehensive list—the other big thing was allowing the administration to cancel protected immigration status en masse for Haitian immigrants. And the argument in this case is that there was abundant evidence that the basis for this decision was racial prejudice. There was no reason to think Haitians as a whole are violent or are a threat or that there is any reason to deport them. Quite the opposite. But we know—it’s a matter of record—we know that white nationalists, and I mean actual explicit, self-identified Nazis, a group that calls themselves Blood Tribe, which gives you an idea of how primitive this whole thing is—that they were the ones who started a smear campaign against Haitians in Ohio. And their lies were picked up and amplified by Vice President J.D. Vance, and then repeated by Donald Trump, and this was the basis for removing immigration status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians.
And the Supreme Court let it go through, and their reasoning was—in the face of all the evidence showing this was based on blatant racial prejudice stoked by literal Nazis—their basis was that they could imagine that there might be some other, non-racist basis, so therefore the president can do it. This just goes to show how determined the Supreme Court’s conservatives are to bend to this president, and to affirm basically whatever is the latest conservative hysteria promoted on Fox News Channel.
And this, by the way, is one of the reasons I think a new Democratic Congress has to start impeachment proceedings against members of this Supreme Court, if only to show them who’s boss. Because I don’t think there has ever been a more flagrantly corrupt and partisan Supreme Court.
But the case of the Haitians brings us back to birthright citizenship, because it’s important to grasp how hugely important this issue was. I said earlier that if this decision went the other way, it would destroy the country, and I was not exaggerating.
Here’s the thing. Trump’s executive order said it would not recognize birthright citizenship for people born in the United States starting in January of 2025. But legally, that means nothing. That cutoff is totally made up, and it can be changed at any time.
If the Constitution does not mandate and protect birthright citizenship, then there is nothing to prevent the president from applying it to people who were born at any time. And we know that they want to do this, because we already have people in this administration talking about deporting 100 million people. There are not 100 million immigrants in this country, not even close. But there are 100 million people of Hispanic descent. And if the president can just decide that their parents or grandparents, etc., were not real citizens, then he can deport them.
It’s even more ominous than that. Even more ominous than a giant ethnic cleansing to get rid of one third of our population. Because if the Constitution doesn’t protect Hispanic citizens, it doesn’t protect anybody. And that includes the Tracinskis—and the McGuires.
Think about it. Without birthright citizenship, just try proving that you are a citizen. There is no way to do it, because there never is and never has been any other way of establishing citizenship. There never was one, because we didn’t need one, we had birthright citizenship.
Actually, that’s not quite right. One of the ironies of trying to get rid of birthright citizenship is that if Trump got his way, the only people who would have a truly firm basis for claiming citizenship would be naturalized immigrants. These are immigrants who came here and went through the process of applying for citizenship and were sworn in. They would be the only people who actually have a certification establishing them legally as citizens. Because for the rest of us—all we’ve got is that we’re born here. And if we don’t have that, we have nothing else.
Obviously, in practice, Trump and his goons don’t want to do this to everyone, and people as pallid as I am are generally safe. But what they want is to be able to decide, to be able to use their arbitrary power, to be able to call into question the citizenship and the rights and the equal standing of anyone in this country.
What they want is that instead of the citizens getting to choose who’s president, the president gets to choose who’s a citizen. That’s what they want.
That would destroy America as a free country, and it would destroy it as a place where all men are created equal and have equal rights.
So, good news: We escaped that fate, for now. But the fact that four out of five Supreme Court justices are currently so hostile to the most basic principles of the Constitution and our government, and the fact that they are continually distorting the law to enable a president who is even more hostile—that’s a really sobering thought.
It shows just how much danger we’re in, and why we need, not just a Democratic Congress, but a Democratic Congress that is determined to assert its power, to rein in the arbitrary power of the president, which this Supreme Court has been busy expanding, and to rein in this hyper-partisan Court.
That’s why I’m running. And remember that the Democratic primary is August 4, and early voting is already open. So vote for me, because this is what I’m promising to do.
Support my campaign so we can bring this fight to the US Congress!
Save the credit card processing fees and mail a check to Tracinski for Congress, PO Box 6997, Charlottesville, VA 22906.
Donors must be US citizens and spending their own money. Campaign finance laws limit donations to $3500 per person per election.
Download audio: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/204371997/705cc7c56855ffdf76744f67531c52c8.mp3
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on three important Supreme Court rulings, freedom of speech, the “dirtbag” left, God leaving the Bible Belt, technological non-unemployment, and the usual good news.
A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
“Originalism” Survives by the Skin of Its Teeth
Supreme Court Upholds Principle that Almost All Born on US Soil Are American
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion for the ideologically mixed group of justices that included the court’s three liberals, as well as conservative Amy Coney Barrett.
Conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented from the 5-4 majority in ruling the executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but he joined the 6-3 majority in finding the order violated federal law….
The opinion came over the objections of conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Alito wrote a dissent, while Thomas wrote an opinion that Gorsuch joined.
About 250,000 children would have been born without citizenship in the US each year under Trump’s order, or roughly 5 million by 2045, according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by dozens of professors. Some would probably have been left stateless because their parents would be unwilling or unable to obtain citizenship for their children in their homelands.
The professors argued that Trump’s order would create a permanent underclass.
Or Maybe Not So Much
You have died of dysentery. Again.
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