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.

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/22/war-by-affirmative-action/

“Third-party managed proportionality, accompanied by the banality of “both sides are at fault,” is not morality but pretentious amorality—as well as a sure prescription for endless war.”

Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives?

Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity.

Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped.

Given Iran’s and its surrogates’ incompetence, the administration, then, must extend the theocracy some allowances “to level the playing field.” Biden believes in an equality of opportunity in war, when an aggressor does its best to attack or indeed destroy a defender, who in turn does its own best to retaliate and achieve victory.

Instead, the Biden administration sees war leading to equality of result as something to be waged “proportionally,” especially when the power attacked is stronger and Western while the attacking aggressor is weaker and non-Western. The method, then, is to restrain the western power and give repeated chances for the non-western aggressors to catch up.

As a result, the Biden administration’s strategic attitude toward Iran ignores Iranian intent and agendas. So it does not respond fully to its acts of aggression and thereby almost rewards the incompetence of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis without consideration of their murderous aims.

Americans are thus baffled that Biden has not responded to some 170 or more attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East by Iranian-backed terrorists in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. But in his calculus, Americans “can take the hit” due to their superior defenses—appeasement that only assures more hits.

Thus, other than a few apparently acceptable wounded or dead, there is no need for disproportionate responses to reestablish deterrence and end such opportunistic attacks. Such calculus in the Biden team’s mind would be “over the top,” perhaps “unfair,” or even “medieval.” And yet, it certainly would stop all such aggression quickly and warn aggressors not to touch a single American.

After the successful but mostly demonstrative Israel April 19 retaliatory strike against the Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan, Biden cautioned Israel “to take the win” and apparently not to rub in the fact of Iranian incompetence, much less stage a follow-up and much greater response.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/04/the_world_s_leaders_including_biden_must_learn_the_lesson_of_passover.html

Tonight, at sunset, Jews across the world will celebrate Passover, something they’ve been doing annually for around 3,500 years. The holiday commemorates the miracle (and gift) of God leading the Jews out of slavery in Egypt. This was the world’s first slave revolt and led to God’s handing down the moral laws that are the backbone of the Judeo-Christian faiths. But the Passover story also tells us something important about the nature of tyranny, and the world’s governments, from Biden on down, would do well to heed that lesson.

The story of Passover appears in Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament. It explains that 400 years after Egypt took in the Israelites (i.e., today’s Jews) who were escaping a famine in Canaan (modern Israel), a new Pharaonic line had taken the Egyptian throne and enslaved the Israelites.

The Pharaoh on the throne at the time the narrative begins was so hostile to the Israelites that he ordered the slaughter of all newborn Israelite boys. The mother of one of those newborn boys successfully hid him in a basket on the Nile, where one of Pharaoh’s daughters found him, named him Moses, and raised him as a Prince of Egypt.

Because his older sister had stayed near the basket and become his nurse, Moses knew he was an Israelite, not an Egyptian. When the adult Moses saw an overseer cruelly treating a slave, Moses killed the overseer and fled to Midian. There, he became a shepherd and married a priest’s daughter.