RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.discoursemagazine.com/politics/2021/04/21/packing-the-court-then-and-now/

Not every war is won on the battlefield or ends with a surrender ceremony. Some are won quietly, sometimes before the killing starts, when the weaker side backs down because it expects to lose. The victory is achieved by intimidation and credible threats.

That is exactly what happened with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme in 1937. Unfortunately, the nature of his victory, and even the fact that he won, is widely misunderstood. Most commentators blathering on TV or the internet about current court-packing proposals actually think Roosevelt lost because he failed to add additional justices to the Supreme Court.

In fact, the president won because he got what he really cared about: acceptance of his major policy initiatives as constitutionally proper. The sitting justices listened to FDR’s threats, recognized his enormous political power after a sweeping election victory, and caved in. Then, one by one, the most conservative justices retired, allowing Roosevelt to reshape the court without adding to the existing nine members.

Why does Roosevelt’s victory still matter? For two reasons. First, it matters because progressives are trying to pack the court once again. And although their effort is unlikely to succeed (as they now realize), it is animated by the hope that, once again, the threat of court-packing will intimidate sitting justices, especially Chief Justice John Roberts, who has repeatedly shown he wants to avoid any conflict with the president or Congress. The recent clamor could also intimidate President Biden’s new judicial commission, pushing its members to recommend packing the lower courts. (More on that later.)

Second, it matters because Roosevelt’s court-packing episode was crucial to the reconfiguration of American politics, particularly the growth of the centralized state. That growth was only possible because the Supreme Court bent to Roosevelt’s demands and approved his regulatory programs. No issue is more important today. That is especially true now that the Biden administration is attempting yet another vast extension of federal power, the largest since President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/20/enemy-of-the-people-minneapolis-star-tribune-publishes-biographical-information-of-derek-chauvin-trial-jurors/

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is being blasted online for releasing biographical information of all twelve jurors plus two alternates in the Derek Chauvin trial in the killing of George Floyd.

Without naming the jurors, reporters Paul Walsh and Hannah Sayle on Tuesday published enough details about their lives, internet sleuths and local snoops may be able to figure out who they are.

Walsh is a general assignment reporter at the Star-Tribune, and Sayle is a digital features editor. Online critics are accusing the paper of trying to intimidate the jurors into reaching a guilty verdict.

The reporters provided general information about the jurors’ ages, race, professions, where they’re from, and where they went to school. They even leaked that one juror is related to an area police officer.

Abby Simone, the “public safety” editor for the Star-Tribune, shared the story on Twitter.

“Why does the “public safety editor” think it’s ok to publish enough information to identify these jurors?” asked one Twitter user.

Some Twitter users like former Trump Campaign advisor Steve Cortes and conservative journalist Rachel Bovard argued that the article was clearly designed to intimidate the jury.

“Why are you making it easier to dox, harass, and threaten jurors?” asked Geoffrey Miller, a psychology professor. “Do you want the mob to come for them? Do you have no journalistic integrity?”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/supreme_courts_failures_are_putting_america_on_a_path_to_tyranny.html

Rarely do the generation experiencing the actual events and decisions that lead to their nation’s demise fully appreciate the enormity of their oversight until sometime after their culture’s destruction has been rendered incurable.  Largely, it is not due so much to their negligence as it is to most of them being too preoccupied with simply living and making a living.

Perhaps that would explain why, in just the first four months of 2021, the Supreme Court issued four decisions — or, perhaps better viewed as non-decisions — that should have caused all legitimately patriotic Americans to be alarmed and called to action…but did not seem to. 

Only a few weeks ago, without offering any substantive explanation, the Court summarily refused to even look at — much less seriously consider — any of the evidence of the 2020 election irregularities offered by attorney Sidney Powell and others.  Evidently, the Supreme Court of the United States of America was not interested in doing what it could — and should — to let America know decisively whether or not its presidential election had been shamelessly stolen by those now in power.

Why would they not do this?

Perhaps the answer is best revealed by the fact that, at the same time, the Court was also apparently too busy to halt a New York prosecutor from obtaining former president Trump’s tax returns.  The practical effect was for SCOTUS to give that prosecutor an assist with his unconstitutional effort to search for any crime that might make President Trump’s ouster from office permanent.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17302/derek-chauvin-conviction-supreme-court

The Minnesota appellate courts might not reverse the conviction but the United States Supreme Court well might, as they have done in other cases involving jury intimidation.

In seeking to put her thumb on the scales of justice, Rep. Maxine Waters perhaps unwittingly borrowed a tactic right out of the Deep South of the early 20th century.

In the Deep South during the 1920s and ’30s, elected politicians would organize demonstrations by white voters in front of courthouses in which racially charged trials were being conducted. The politicians then threatened, explicitly or implicitly, that violence would follow the acquittal of a black defendant or the conviction of a white defendant. The U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts reversed several convictions based on these tactics of intimidation.

The judge in the Chauvin trial made a serious error in not sequestering the jury during the entire trial.

Already, we have seen blood sprayed over the former home of a witness who testified for Chauvin; the defendant’s lawyers have received threats. An aura of violence is in the air. Jurors breathe that same air….

This is not the Deep South in the 1920s. It is the “Identity Politics” of the 21st century. But the motives of the protesters are not relevant to whether jurors in the Chauvin case could be expected to consider the evidence objectively without fear of the kind of intimidation threatened by Waters.

The evidence, in my view, supports a verdict of manslaughter, but not of murder. Any verdict that did not include a conviction for murder was likely to be unacceptable to Waters and her followers, however, even if the facts and the law mandate that result. Waters is not interested in neutral justice. She wants vengeance for what she and her followers justifiably see as the unjustified killing of George Floyd…. That is not the rule of law. That is the passion of the crowd.

We must be certain that threats of intimidation do not influence jury verdicts. That certainty does not exist now in the Chauvin case, thanks largely to the ill-advised threats and demands of Maxine Waters and others.

The convictions of Derek Chauvin might not mark the end of this racially divisive case. The US Supreme Court might ultimately decide whether to uphold the convictions.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/04/dc-blm-insurrectionists-get-pass-daniel-greenfield/

The face of the Black Lives Matter insurrectionist who was arrested in Washington D.C. with an axe, a laser, and a “destructive device” will not be plastered by the FBI over any local billboards. 

The BLM insurrections who rioted in Washington D.C. over the death of Daunte Wright, who had choked a woman to steal her rent money, threw fireworks and heavy objects at police. They shone lasers in the eyes of police officers and vandalized the Columbus monument with the obscene and hateful graffiti of a racist black supremacist movement. And they’ll get a pass.

Even when the racist insurrectionist mob chanted, “burn the precinct to the ground.” 

While the D.C. police department has asked for the public’s helpin identifying one of the BLM insurrections who attacked a police officer and is offering a reward, the national media has not picked up the story the way that it did when there was an effort underway to identify the Capitol rioters, nor has the FBI taken to buying billboards asking anyone who knows the thug for tips.

Fighting with a police officer in January was profoundly morally different than doing so in April. 

That’s all the more striking since the D.C. Metro police force is 52% black, while the Capitol Police are 29% black. Black lives don’t matter when they’re also blue. Just ask Captain Dorn.

Only a handful of months after the media agonized over the spectacle of a riot in D.C. and our political class acted as if fights between protesters and police was some inexplicably horrifying event, worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor put together, instead of the top outdoor sport of 2020, it’s okay to riot in D.C., assault government buildings, and call for burning them down.