RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/the-rule-of-law-depends-on-john-eastman/

Editor’s Note: America is in the midst of a cold civil war. On the one side are the defenders of our constitutional regime. On the other is a revolutionary enemy: the group quota regime, which has turned our own legal system into one of its primary weapons, lawfare. When someone runs afoul of the group quota regime, he can expect lawfare to be inflicted on him with all the viciousness appropriate to wartime. 

This is what happened to John Eastman, an attorney who has been ruthlessly persecuted by the enemy for the crime of providing legal advice to President Trump amid the contested 2020 election. As Mark Pulliam writes, the questions at stake here are foundational ones; the rule of law, and the rights of citizens. These are threatened in this war. Whether the group quota regime triumphs over the American regime may well hinge on whether this lawfare is allowed to stand.

The rule of law depends on the even-handed application of laws—thus, the blindfold on statues depicting Lady Justice, derived from the Roman figure Justitia. In our adversary system of justice, a legacy of the Anglo-Saxon common law system brought to our shores by colonists from England, the resolution of legal disputes requires the zealous representation of litigants by attorneys and an impartial—or “neutral”– decisionmaker. Legal scholars have described the adversary system as a keystone of individual liberty and due process of law. The indispensability of legal representation, even in unpopular causes, has been a pillar of American jurisprudence since 1770, on the eve of the American Revolution, when John Adams courageously undertook the defense of British soldiers accused of murdering five colonists in the so-called Boston Massacre.

As we shall see, this historical episode, which legal journalist Dan Abrams has called the “most important case in colonial American history,” provides a stark contrast to travails resulting from the representation of President Donald Trump by California attorney John Eastman, who is facing disbarment, criminal prosecution, and other forms of retribution for providing legal advice to an unpopular client in connection with the controversial 2020 presidential election. How times have changed. 

Adams, a leading patriot and a lawyer, risked his family’s livelihood and incurred the considerable opprobrium of his fellow Bostonians because he believed that everyone—even the hated Redcoats–was entitled to a fair trial.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/04/24/__trashed-3/

Maybe insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. But insanity is also whatever the California Legislature is doing at any given time. The most recent example? A reparations bill that would establish the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency has sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Senate Bill 1403, one of at least 14 reparations bills introduced in the Legislature, cleared the committee by a 8-1 vote two weeks ago, confirming one more time that lawmakers have descended into madness. Unless they regain their wits, reparations will break the state.

But a return to reason is unlikely. Even though California was not a slave state, the Democratic side is all in. This was obvious in 2020 when they established a task force to study reparations.

“It appeared to me that the legislators were violating a fundamental rule of governance: Never create a commission to ‘study’ a controversial problem unless you are relatively certain that you’re going to want to follow its recommendations,” University of San Diego School of Law professor Gail Heriot wrote Monday on Instapundit. Yet it was clear “from the start” that the task force “appeared to be stacked in favor of reparations.”

There’s a lot of political mileage to be gained for lawmakers in blue states who glom onto progressive initiatives that make no sense to centrists and exasperate conservatives and libertarians. Nowhere is this more true than in California, where bad ideas are birthed and then surge across the country, infecting other Democratic citadels. In terms of rank, reparations might be the worst of them all.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/campus-free-speech-first-amendment-columbia-protests-palestine-israel-hamas-3ff5092d?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Universities are supposed to be places where students and faculty can debate politics and other subjects without fear or censure. As the anti-Israel protests spread at Columbia, Yale, Harvard, New York University and elsewhere, however, progressives are claiming that any restriction on the protesters is a violation of free speech.

That isn’t true, and it’s important to understand why. Under its “state action doctrine,” the Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment applies to government actions toward citizens. It doesn’t apply to private citizens or institutions except in rare instances when they are acting as government agents.

As University of California, Berkeley law school dean and ardent liberal Erwin Chemerinsky explained recently to anti-Israel students who wanted to protest on his lawn, his property is “not a forum for free speech.”

As a private university, Columbia has the right to set its own rules on speech as part of a contract to teach or study at the school. It does so in a way that is consistent with a public institution’s obligations under the First Amendment. Here’s what Columbia’s Rules of University Conduct say about protests: “Every member of our community . . . retains the right to demonstrate, to rally, to picket, to circulate petitions and distribute ideas” and to “express opinions on any subject whatsoever, even when such expression invites controversy and sharp scrutiny.” The code of conduct protects speakers’ rights even when “ideas expressed might be thought offensive, immoral, disrespectful, or even dangerous.”

Sounds good. But Columbia’s code of conduct says a person violates the rules who “engages in conduct that places another in danger of bodily harm,” or “uses words that threaten bodily harm in a situation where there is clear and present danger of such bodily harm.”

Columbia’s anti-Israel encampment and protests have included physical intimidation of Jewish students and antisemitic declarations. In October 2023, 100 Columbia professors signed a letter defending students who had flooded the campus in support of Hamas’s “military action” on Oct. 7. Columbia has every right to restrict speech or actions that threaten other students.

Protesters also don’t have a “right” to assemble on school property to disrupt the functioning of the university or intimidate students on the way to class. Even at a public university, all these rules would constitute reasonable restrictions on the time, place and manner of speech.