Category: The Courts

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Justice Alito responds to Pro Publica personal attacks.

Pro Publica attack on Justice Alito.

Editor’s note: Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan of ProPublica, which styles itself “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” emailed Justice Alito Friday with a series of questions and asked him to respond by noon EDT Tuesday. They informed the justice that “we do serious, fair, accurate reporting in the public interest and have won six Pulitzer Prizes.” Here is Justice Alito’s response:

ProPublica has leveled two charges against me: first, that I should have recused in matters in which an entity connected with Paul Singer was a party and, second, that I was obligated to list certain items as gifts on my 2008 Financial Disclose Report. Neither charge is valid.

• Recusal. I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites. First, even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate. ProPublica suggests that my failure to recuse in these cases created an appearance of impropriety, but that is incorrect. “There is an appearance of impropriety when an unbiased and reasonable person who is aware of all relevant facts would doubt that the Justice could fairly discharge his or her duties” (Statement on Ethics Principles and Practices appended to letter from the Chief Justice to Senator Durbin, April 25, 2023). No such person would think that my relationship with Mr. Singer meets that standard. My recollection is that I have spoken to Mr. Singer on no more than a handful of occasions, all of which (with the exception of small talk during a fishing trip 15 years ago) consisted of brief and casual comments at events attended by large groups. On no occasion have we discussed the activities of his businesses, and we have never talked about any case or issue before the Court. On two occasions, he introduced me before I gave a speech—as have dozens of other people. And as I will discuss, he allowed me to occupy what would have otherwise been an unoccupied seat on a private flight to Alaska. It was and is my judgment that these facts would not cause a reasonable and unbiased person to doubt my ability to decide the matters in question impartially.

Second, when I reviewed the cases in question to determine whether I was required to recuse, I was not aware and had no good reason to be aware that Mr. Singer had an interest in any party. During my time on the Court, I have voted on approximately 100,000 certiorari petitions. The vast majority receive little personal attention from the justices because even a cursory examination reveals that they do not meet our requirements for review. See Sup. Ct. R. 10. To ensure that I am not required to recuse, multiple members of my staff carefully check the names of the parties in each case and any other entities listed in the corporate disclosure statement required by our rules. See Supreme Court Rule 29.6. Mr. Singer was not listed as a party in any of the cases listed by ProPublica. Nor did his name appear in any of the corporate disclosure statements or the certiorari petitions or briefs in opposition to certiorari. In the one case in which review was granted, Republic of Argentina v. NML Capital, Ltd., No. 12-842, Mr. Singer’s name did not appear in either the certiorari petition, the brief in opposition, or the merits briefs. Because his name did not appear in these filings, I was unaware of his connection with any of the listed entities, and I had no good reason to be aware of that. The entities that ProPublica claims are connected to Mr. Singer all appear to be either limited liability corporations or limited liability partnerships. It would be utterly impossible for my staff or any other Supreme Court employees to search filings with the SEC or other government bodies to find the names of all individuals with a financial interest in every such entity named as a party in the thousands of cases that are brought to us each year.

• Reporting. Until a few months ago, the instructions for completing a Financial Disclosure Report told judges that “[p]ersonal hospitality need not be reported,” and “hospitality” was defined to include “hospitality extended for a non-business purpose by one, not a corporation or organization, . . . on property or facilities owned by [a] person . . .” Section 109(14). The term “facilities” was not defined, but both in ordinary and legal usage, the term encompasses means of transportation. See, e.g., Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 690 (2001) (defining a “facility” as “something designed, built, installed, etc., to serve a specific function affording a convenience or service: transportation facilities” and “something that permits the easier performance of an action”). Legal usage is similar. Black’s Law Dictionary has explained that the term “facilities” may mean “everything necessary for the convenience of passengers.” Federal statutory law is similar. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C §1958(b) (“ ‘facility of interstate commerce’ includes means of transportation”); 18 U.S.C §2251(a) (referring to an item that has been “transported using any means or facility of interstate commerce”); Kevin F. O’Malley, Jay E. Grenig, Hon. William C. Lee, Federal Jury Practice and Instructions §54.04 (February 2023) (“the term ‘uses any facility in interstate commerce’ means employing or utilizing any method of . . . transportation between one state and another”).

This understanding of the requirement to report gifts reflected the expert judgment of the body that the Ethics in Government Act entrusts with the responsibility to administer compliance with the Act, see 5 U.S.C. App. §111(3). When I joined the Court and until the recent amendment of the filing instructions, justices commonly interpreted this discussion of “hospitality” to mean that accommodations and transportation for social events were not reportable gifts. The flight to Alaska was the only occasion when I have accepted transportation for a purely social event, and in doing so I followed what I understood to be standard practice.

For these reasons, I did not include on my Financial Disclosure Report for 2008 either the accommodations provided by the owner of the King Salmon Lodge, who, to my knowledge, has never been involved in any matter before the Court, or the seat on the flight to Alaska.

In brief, the relevant facts relating to the fishing trip 15 years ago are as follows. I stayed for three nights in a modest one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a comfortable but rustic facility. As I recall, the meals were homestyle fare. I cannot recall whether the group at the lodge, about 20 people, was served wine, but if there was wine it was certainly not wine that costs $1,000. Since my visit 15 years ago, the lodge has been sold and, I believe, renovated, but an examination of the photos and information on the lodge’s website shows that ProPublica’s portrayal is misleading.

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and others had already made arrangements to fly to Alaska when I was invited shortly before the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have otherwise been vacant. It was my understanding that this would not impose any extra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken commercial flights, that would have imposed a substantial cost and inconvenience on the deputy U.S. Marshals who would have been required for security reasons to assist me.

Justice Alito is an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Looking. Clean your own house ProPublica before you go after the Supreme Court Justices..

Pro Publica hit job

Looking. Clean your own house ProPublica before you go after the Supreme Court Justices. Recently Pro Publica has gone after several Supreme Justices. Claimed they weren’t revealing trips and gifts. But Pro Publica has dirty laundry of their own.

The organization, a self-described “independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force,” is bankrolled by charitable contributions. And while the group is transparent about the source of some of that money, it won’t say where millions of dollars of its funding comes from, according to the New York Post.

In the years 2020 and 2021, ProPublica accepted $6.3 million from anonymous donors, and a quarter of the group’s revenues in 2022 came from two unnamed donors.

Pro Publica is not an independent news organization. They are a far left  media outlet that favors leftist groups.

 

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Links from other news sources. The Courts

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ancestors were enslaved. Her husband’s were enslavers.

Lying through her teeth.

By Sally H. Jacobs-Washington Post.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and her husband, Patrick G. Jackson, share a moment following the third day of her confirmation hearing in March 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)

Hundreds of years ago, two men named John boarded ships to America to seek opportunity. One worked onboard as a barber; one was an indentured servant.

But when they landed in East Coast port cities hundreds of miles apart, their lives abruptly diverged. When John Greene, believed to be an ancestor of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, got off a schooner from Trinidad in Charleston, S.C., he was immediately enslaved and dispatched to a plantation, according to family lore. When John Howland, the 10th-great-grandfather of Jackson’s husband, Patrick Jackson, disembarked the Mayflower at Plymouth, Mass., he was given housing and several acres.

Thus were two newcomers to America cast into racially predetermined roles. Today, as new genealogical research illustrates, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Patrick Jackson are left with a historical subject in common: enslaved people. His ancestors owned them, while her ancestors were them.

Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks, with Vice President Harris and President Biden by her side, during an event celebrating her confirmation. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Patrick Jackson arrives to the April 2022 confirmation event with daughters Talia, left, and Leila. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)

“As more and more families from different backgrounds marry into one another, the experience of their ancestors is going to have a lot more variety than it might have had a hundred years ago,” said Christopher C. Child, senior genealogist with the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston. “This is what is happening over time.”

Few know the Jacksons’ ancestry better than Child and his colleagues. Shortly after President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court in February 2022, Sarah J. Dery, NEHGS’s research and library services manager, began to dig into Jackson’s roots. Child already had co-written a book on a line of Patrick Jackson’s relatives, as well as an article about a man enslaved by Patrick Jackson’s distant cousin. Child, Dery and other genealogists have since delved deeper into the subject, sharing their findings with The Washington Post.

 

The Jacksons met in a history class at Harvard, but the familial paths that took the couple there could not have been more different. Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the country’s nine most powerful legal arbiters, tracks her family history through generations of enslavement and coercive sharecropping. Patrick Jackson, a gastrointestinal surgeon in D.C., counts among his ancestors King Edward I of England, four Mayflower passengers and a signer of the U.S. Constitution.

“We were an unlikely pair in many respects,” Ketanji Brown Jackson said in a 2017 speech, noting their respective family histories and areas of study, “but somehow we found each other.”

American royalty and slavery

Patrick Jackson’s family history is well documented. In addition to his royal and Pilgrim ancestry, his distant cousins include Herman Melville, 15 U.S. presidents and a half-dozen governors of Massachusetts. His great-great-great-great grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks was the richest man in New England when he died, having made his fortune insuring ships, including some involved in the slave trade.

One thing many of his well-to-do relatives on his paternal side had in common was a Harvard education. All told, the family has at least 30 Harvard graduates over the course of 12 generations, according to Child’s research, including Patrick, who graduated in 1991. One generation of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s family had attended college before she went to Harvard and graduated a year after Patrick.

 

Patrick was raised outside Boston, but his maternal grandfather’s ancestors lived in the South. Based on public slave schedules from 1850 and 1860, Child estimates the family owned about 189 enslaved people at the time. “Every male ancestor of Patrick’s maternal grandfather over the age of 21 alive in 1850 or 1860 was a slaveowner,” Child said. One of his ancestors was also a Confederate soldier.

So well documented were the lives of some of Jackson’s prominent ancestors that narratives of some of the people they bought and sold can also be found. One of them was a Black man named Silvanus Warro, enslaved by colonial settler and civic leader Daniel Gookin in the 1600s. Gookin brought Warro to Boston from Maryland and promised to set him free but ultimately reneged and rented him to a local deacon. Warro remained enslaved until his death.

Then came a man identified as Chance, born in slavery to one of Patrick’s relatives in Marblehead, Mass., in 1762, according to a 2010 article by Child in American Ancestors magazine. When he turned 14, his enslaver leased “all rights & title to my Negro boy Chance & his Services, for the space of twelve years” to another man for the sum of 30 pounds. That slavery was effectively eliminated in Massachusetts seven years later appeared not to matter: Chance remained enslaved until the lease expired.

Patrick’s ancestor Patrick Tracy, a wealthy merchant who came to Newburyport, Mass., from Ireland, went against the family’s stance on slavery. He freed his enslaved worker Apropos and his wife after “the idea began to spread that even men of dark skins might love the rights of freedom,” according to “A Memoir of Dr. James Jackson,” an ancestor. When he died, Tracy left to “my faithful black man Apropos” a home to live in and six pounds a year, and he instructed his children to join “in assisting him to render his life comfortable,” according to his 1789 will.

Patrick Jackson, meanwhile, positioned himself as an “ally” of people of color at Harvard, a classmate told the New York Times, taking classes in Black history and social justice. In his spare time, he served as a director on the Committee on Help for the Advancement of Needy Children Through Education (CHANCE), which worked to help a diverse group of local high school students attend college. Patrick Jackson and Ketanji Brown Jackson did not respond to interview requests.

Patrick Jackson and daughter Leila Jackson listen during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s hearing to be the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Patrick Jackson, shaking hands with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in September, is related to 15 U.S. presidents and half a dozen governors of Massachusetts. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)

Her family welcomed Patrick into their home in Miami, where she grew up; her father, Johnny Brown, was the chief attorney for the county school board and her mother, Ellery Brown, was a school principal. While the Brown family was generally aware of Patrick’s background before the two married, they apparently knew nothing of his ancestors’ long history of enslaving Black people.

“I don’t think it came up at all, nor was it a point of interest or concern,” Calvin Ross, Ketanji Brown Jackson’s uncle and a former Miami Police Department chief, said of Patrick’s family history. “We had two people who loved each other, and that was enough. You can’t rewrite history. It is what it is.”

An interrupted family history

But many of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s relatives have taken great interest in their own family history. A two-page written version of John Greene’s story, “Our Family,” is widely circulated at the family’s large reunions. Greene, as the story goes, was born free and was warned not to disembark from his ship in Charleston, a hub in the slave trade. But because of “‘the independent mindedness’ (stubbornness) which characterizes the family, John went ashore, was captured and sold as an enslaved person to the Sharp Plantation. There he met Ella who was a slave.” After slavery was abolished, John and Ella moved to Georgia, and he helped his three brothers and sister come to America, according to the family story.

 

As with much African American history, documentation of the story is not easy to find. Few enslaved people were able or permitted to write their own history, and early documents generally record their existence as property and rarely include their full names.

“You can find the names, the ages, and it all seems to fit together, but it’s very hard to find that golden record that proves it all true,” Dery, the genealogist, said.

Dery, however, was able to identify several enslaved people she believes are the justice’s ancestors and whose information coincides with the family story. While she was unable to trace a John Greene from Trinidad, she found several people she believes were his descendants linked to a plantation in Randolph County, Ga., owned by John P. Sharp: a “domestic servant” (probably a formerly enslaved person) named Peter Green, and Anderson and Callie Green, who lived two houses away, according to the federal census. All three of those names, with a slightly different spelling of their last name, appear as John’s siblings in “Our Family.”

Ten years later, the 1880 federal census recorded a John and Ella Green in Edison, Ga., where three generations of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s family would come to live. Tax records from the same year list freedmen John, Peter and Henry Green, who the genealogists believe were very likely Jackson’s ancestors.

 

“There’s always some fact that travels along with family lore,” said Lindsay Fulton, NEHGS’s vice president of research and library services, “so the fact that the family knows this story, the family gave us those names, and the names appear in the records we are looking at.”

John Green’s granddaughter Euzera and her husband — Ketanji Brown Jackson’s grandparents — moved the judge’s maternal line from Georgia to Florida in the mid-20th century; she worked as a nurse’s aide and he as a landscaper at the Miami airport. On Euzera’s maternal side, Dery thinks Ketanji Brown Jackson’s great-great-great-grandfather was a man named Henry Merriweather, whom the genealogists believe was enslaved in the mid-1800s by a wealthy plantation owner named Michael Dennis in southwest Georgia.

In November 1865, Dennis wrote a letter to the Freedmen’s Bureau, the government agency established to help recently freed enslaved people, listing the names, ages and physical condition of the people he had formerly enslaved, including a 55-year-old Merriweather, who was described as “unsound.” Dennis also wrote with astonishment that, while he had offered annual work contracts to the more than 100 Black people he had previously enslaved, “this they positively refused to do for any consideration.” He said he hoped the government would help persuade them to sign.

“He was acting as though slavery still existed,” said Willie James Watson Sr., Ketanji Brown Jackson’s distant cousin and Merriweather’s great-great-grandson.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, speaking at American University’s law school in May. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)

The genealogists also found a well-documented link to slavery on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s paternal side. Her great-great-great-grandfather was Olmstead Rutherford, who after the Civil War lived with his wife and their seven children in Houston County, Ga., on a 700-acre plantation owned by John H. Rutherford, probably their former enslaver.

In January 1867, Rutherford, who enslaved 65 people before the war, signed a sharecropping contract with 11 people who shared his last name, including “Armstead Rutherford + children + wife Lucy.” Apparently unable to write, Armstead, as his name was sometimes spelled, and the other freedmen signed the document with an X. None of them were to be paid for their labor, instead receiving rations and one-fourth of the crops they cultivated.

“It was just another form of slavery,” Dery said.

Members of the Supreme Court sit for a group photo in October, following the history-making addition of Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, standing at right in the second row. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Olmstead soon registered to vote and signed the Oath of Allegiance to the United States, as was required of citizens in the former Confederacy.

One hundred fifty-five years later, Olmstead’s great-great-great-granddaughter became the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

 

Much of what happened in between remains unknown. The genealogists’ group is hopeful that as information about Ketanji Brown Jackson’s ancestors is made public, more relatives will come forward with details of family history. But as some of Ketanji’s family members see it, they already know the most important part of the story, spelled out on those two sheets of paper handed out at family reunions.

“It is from these roots that the family has grown to its present state,” the Greene family narrative concludes. “The family takes great pride in its contribution to the development of America. The roots of this family grew the food, felled the trees, and labored in all of the great undertakings which forged the great nation of the United States of America.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her husband, Patrick Jackson, walk outside the Supreme Court in September. (Elizabeth Frantz for The Washington Post)

Sally H. Jacobs is a former reporter for The Boston Globe and the author of the forthcoming “Althea, The Life of Tennis Champion Althea Gibson.”

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Crime Racism The Courts The Law

Pittsburgh synagogue mass shooter found guilty in federal death penalty trial.

Guilty.

Robert Bowers was found guilty on Friday (6/16) on all counts in the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue that killed 11 worshippers.

Bowers was convicted on all 63 charges, including 11 counts of hate crimes resulting in death. Bowers offered to plead guilty if the death penalty was taken off the table, but prosecutors turned him down.

The bullet damaged doors of the Tree of Life synagogue building in Pittsburgh, was entered June 1, 2023, as a court exhibit by prosecutors in the federal trial of Robert Bowers.The bullet-damaged doors of the Tree of Life synagogue building in Pittsburgh was entered June 1, 2023, as a court exhibit by prosecutors in the federal trial of Robert Bowers.© U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania via AP

The jury deliberated for less than one day. Jurors will next weigh if Bowers should be sentenced to death.

Bowers stormed the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, gunning down 11 people in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. Bowers allegedly told investigators after his arrest that he wanted to kill Jewish people, according to a criminal complaint.

This undated Pennsylvania Department of Transportation photo shows Robert Bowers.

This undated PennDOTphoto shows Robert Bowers. © Pennsylvania Department of Transportation via AP, FILE

Prosecutors said Bowers, armed with a semi-automatic assault-style rifle and three handguns, moved “methodically” through the synagogue and shot many of his victims at close range.

In opening statements in May, defense attorney Judy Clarke admitted that Bowers was the shooter and said he “shot every person he saw … and injured first responders who came to their rescue.”

A memorial is placed inside the locked doors of the dormant landmark Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood, Oct. 26, 2022.

A memorial is placed inside the locked doors of the dormant landmark Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, Oct. 26, 2022.© Gene J. Puskar/AP
“There will be no question that this was a planned act and that he killed 11 people,” Clarke said, but she asked the jurors to “scrutinize his intent.”

The jury, comprised of 11 women and seven men, included an intensive care nurse, a new father and a veteran.

The penalty phase is set to begin June 26.

The signage on the dormant landmark Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood is framed in spring foliage, Apr. 19, 2023..

The signage on the dormant landmark Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood is framed in spring foliage, Apr. 19, 2023..© Gene J. Puskar/AP

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Back Door Power Grab Corruption Government Overreach Leftist Virtue(!) MSM Politics Reprints from others. The Courts

I don’t want to live in a country where Trump could be held accountable.

Loony left.
USA TODAY Opinion columnist Rex Huppke.

From Rex Huppke, USA TODAY,  also reprinted on MSN.com

[* It is clear from the word choices, UPPER CASE WORDS, and quotation marks that this person’s article is saying the opposite of what he claims to be for or against. He is mocking at least half the country. — TPR]

Now that my favorite president, Donald Trump, is facing a 37-count indictment from the feds, I join with my brothers and sisters in MAGA, and with all sensible Republicans, in saying this: I’m not sure I want to live in a country where a former president can wave around classified documents he’s not supposed to have and say, “This is secret information. Look at this,” and then be held accountable for his actions.

I mean, what kind of country have we become? One in which federal prosecutors can take “evidence” before a “grand jury,” and that grand jury can “vote to indict” a former president for 37 alleged “crimes”?  Look at all the other people out there in America, including Democrats like Hillary Clinton and President Joe Biden, who HAVEN’T been indicted for crimes on the flimsy excuse that there is no “evidence” they did crimes. THAT’S TOTALLY UNFAIR!

It’s like Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote in a tweet Friday: “These charges are unprecedented and it’s a sad day for our country, especially in light of what clearly appears to be a two-tiered justice system where some are selectively prosecuted, and others are not.”

TWO TIERS! One tier in which President Trump keeps getting indicted via both state and federal justice systems and another in which the people I don’t like keep getting not indicted via all the things Fox News tells me they did wrong.

It’s like America has become a banana republic, as long as you do as I’ve done and refuse to look up the definition of “banana republic.”

Sure, they’ll tell you that the indictment came via a special counsel investigation, and that the federal special counsel statute keeps such investigations walled off from political influence.

But that’s complete nonsense, unless we’re talking about special counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr while Trump was president and tasked with investigating the NEFARIOUS LEFT-WING CRIMES committed in the Trump-Russia probe. Durham was above reproach, and the fact that The New York Times reported he “charged no high-level F.B.I. or intelligence official with a crime and acknowledged in a footnote that Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign did nothing prosecutable, either” is something I will ignore.

This is a WITCH HUNT, and I believe that because Trump said so!

Current special counsel Jack Smith, on the other hand – he’s bad news. I know this because Trump has said repeatedly that Smith’s investigation is a witch hunt, and I’ve never known Trump to lie about anything.

Keep in mind, in 2016, Trump said: “I’m going to enforce all laws concerning the protection of classified information. No one will be above the law.”

So after he said that, you expect me to believe he didn’t protect classified information? Just because, according to the indictment, there’s a recording of him holding a classified document in his office at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and saying to two staff members and an interviewer: “See, as president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

You call that “damning evidence.” I call it, “What about Hunter Biden’s laptop?”

Putting Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden in prison? Now THAT makes sense!

Now I can already hear all the libs out there whining and saying that if it were Biden or Hillary or Hunter getting indicted, I wouldn’t be saying a word about two tiers of justice or the weaponization of the Department of Justice or anything like that.

Well, those whiners would be right, but the difference is I believe Biden and Hillary and Hunter are all guilty and should be locked up for life, whereas with Trump, I believe he is great and innocent and the best president America has ever known.

It’s like this: If Hillary got indicted for murder, I would say, “Yes, she is absolutely a murderer. Lock her up.”

But if in some outrageous scenario President Trump were indicted for murder just because he told a bunch of people that he did a murder, I would say: “HOW DARE YOU CHARGE THIS MAN WITH MURDER WHEN OTHERS IN THE U.S. HAVE NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH MURDER! THERE ARE CLEARLY TWO TIERS OF JUSTICE, ONE IN WHICH MY FAVORITE PRESIDENT, WHO SAID HE MURDERED SOMEONE, IS CHARGED WITH MURDER AND ONE IN WHICH PEOPLE WHO HAVEN’T MURDERED ARE NOT CHARGED WITH MURDER!”

And that, my liberal friends, makes perfect sense to me and my MAGA companions. So watch out. The Trump Train’s a comin’.

[* I have not done any editing for grammar errors. This snide, self-important turkey is representative of the amount and level of pandering being done on behalf of the Leftist regime. –TPR]

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Back Door Power Grab Corruption Economy How sick is this? Leftist Virtue(!) Medicine Privacy Reprints from others. The Courts The Law

National Digital ID System: It is Already Here — And You thought Real ID was Bad!

The only question is when, not if…

Reposted from Who is Robert Malone on substack (with comment by TPR.)

Robert W Malone MD, MS Jun 5, 2023

The National Digital Health ID is being implemented by the Federal Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Most US Citizens have no idea it is being implemented.
The National Digital Health ID system is in direct conflict with the US Constitution Bill of Rights.

Please carefully review the following slides. An essay on this subject will be forthcoming shortly From Dr. Malone.

First Real ID, now THIS. How soon until they institute a SOCIAL CREDIT SCORE? Welcome to the Peoples’s Republic of Sino-America — TPR

Categories
Corruption Just my own thoughts Opinion Politics The Courts The Law Uncategorized

Why Trump shouldn’t be charged. And if he is, he walks.

Winning is so much fun.

Why Trump shouldn’t be charged. And if he is, he walks. Pence who didn’t have the power to declassify wasn’t charged. Biden will not be charged, so Trump who had the power (and did) declassify should not be charged. And that phony obstruction charge? If Trump declassified the documents, he was correct in saying he had no classified documents.

“The minute the president speaks about it to someone, he has the ability to declassify anything at any time without any process.” As long as it’s before the fact and several people were witness to the President doing just that.

Parlatore said that even if the report is true that there is a tape where Trump acknowledges the existence of a classified document in his possession connected to Iran and that it reveals the former president knew the material was classified and that he was not permitted to share it, prosecuting Trump might not be the best decision “because there are all of these other problems. Classification is not binding on the jury. You have to actually take these documents, show them to the jury, and then prove to them that it constitutes national defense information.” Former Trump attorney said.

 

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Links from other news sources. Reprints from others. The Courts

Supreme Court preview: Major decisions still to come.

Waiting for a decision. eight Amendment.
Supreme Court preview: Major decisions still to come

Zach Schonfeld, The Hill

Updated: 

(The Hill) – The Supreme Court’s decision season is in full swing.

The justices in the coming weeks will hand down major rulings on student debt relief, affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act, with opinions in 30 remaining cases expected to be released by June 30.

Here’s a preview of the major decisions.

Student Debt Relief

The fate of President Biden’s student debt relief plan rests with the justices, who are weighing two separate challenges: one from six Republican-led states, the other from two individual borrowers.

At stake is whether more than 40 million Americans will receive debt relief — as well as a major Biden campaign promise.

The plan, currently on hold, would cancel up to $20,000 in loans for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for other borrowers, if the individual’s income is less than $125,000. The income limit is doubled for married couples.

The conservative-majority court during February’s oral argument cast doubt that the administration had the authority to unilaterally cancel hundreds of billions of dollars worth of student debt.

It’s possible, however, that the court throws out the challenges without reaching the merits. Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett during oral argument joined the court’s three liberals in fiercely questioning the challengers on whether they had legal standing to sue in the first place.

Affirmative Action

Decades of affirmative action programs in college admissions may soon be coming to an end.

The Supreme Court is considering challenges to the admissions policies of both Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The rulings will have nationwide impacts.

The justices are explicitly being asked to overturn a landmark 2003 decision that allowed race to be considered as one of many factors in college admissions.

Affirmative action survived another challenge before the justices in 2016, but the addition of former President Trump’s appointees in the years since has turned the court to the right.

It makes the twin cases now before the justices the greatest threat yet to affirmative action programs; at oral argument, the court signaled skepticism about upholding race-conscious admissions policies.

Voting Rights Act

The justices are poised to decide when states must draw minority-majority districts as the court resolves a dispute involving Alabama’s congressional map.

The opinion could further narrow the Voting Rights Act, a decade after the court disallowed another provision — which controlled which state and local governments were subject to federal preclearance before changing their voting laws — due to being unconstitutional.

In Alabama, state Republicans are asking the justices to reverse a lower ruling that found their map violated Section 2 of the law, which remains in effect.

Alabama’s map includes one majority-Black congressional district out of seven total, despite the group accounting for 27 percent of the state’s population. A three-judge panel ruled the map violated Section 2 by impermissibly packing Black voters into one district and spreading them out throughout others.

The GOP-led state argues their design was race-neutral, and that following the opposing arguments would prioritize race above traditional redistricting principles.

In a 5-4 vote last year, the court temporarily reinstated Alabama’s map as it took up the case. Several conservative justices seemed open to raising the legal bar for Voting Rights Act map challenges, but even if Alabama comes out victorious, it’s unclear exactly how broadly the court will rule.

American Indian adoptions

The Supreme Court may soon prompt a major shift in how foster care placements and adoptions are handled for thousands of American Indian children.

The justices are hearing a constitutional challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), which Congress enacted in 1978 to combat the common practice of separating Native children from their family and tribe.

The ICWA imposes minimum standards for removing Native children and establishes default preferences for their adoption and foster care placements.

Several couples that sought to adopt or foster Native children are suing over the law, contending it institutes racial classifications that violate the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

They are joined by Texas and a parent whose Native biological child was adopted by one of the couples. The parties further argue that Congress exceeded its authority in enacting the law.

Several tribes and the Biden administration defended the ICWA before the justices, insisting the law’s references to “Indian child” and tribes are political-based distinctions, not race-based ones.

LGBTQ protections

First came the cake baker. Now comes the website designer

Various wedding vendors who oppose same-sex marriage and say their products amount to pure speech have challenged public accommodation laws that require them to provide equal services regardless of a customer’s sexual orientation.

Taking up a challenge to Colorado’s law, the high court may put its thumb on the scale this term.

In 2018, the court avoided weighing in on the hot-button issue by resolving cake shop owner Jack Phillips’s challenge to Colorado’s law on narrow grounds.

A few miles away from Phillips’s shop, website designer Lorie Smith wants to create wedding websites. But Colorado’s law would require Smith to offer those services to same-sex couples.

She’s asked the justices to decide the question they never reached five years ago. At oral argument, the court’s conservatives signaled support for Smith.

Independent State Legislature Theory

An appeal from North Carolina Republican state lawmakers may upend legal challenges to congressional maps and other federal election rules. It could also be a dud.

The case involves the so-called “independent state legislature” theory, which contends that the Constitution gives state legislatures near-total authority to regulate federal elections, removing all other state-level bodies from the process.

Following that argument would prevent state courts and state constitutions from hearing claims such as partisan gerrymandering in congressional redistricting.

Last year, Democratic-majority North Carolina Supreme Court struck down the state’s Republican-drawn congressional map. It prompted the state lawmakers to appeal to the nation’s highest court and argue that the state court had no authority, urging the justices to adopt the theory.

The justices appeared to search for a middle path during oral argument in December. But now, they might not need to reach the merits at all.

After Republicans regained control of the North Carolina Supreme Court in the midterms, the new majority granted a rare rehearing of the case and overturned the earlier decision.

The justices in Washington have since questioned whether they still have authority to move ahead, since they are hearing an appeal of a ruling that effectively no longer exists.

Dismissing the case could also punt the issue to the 2024 election cycle.

Categories
Leftist Virtue(!) Media Woke Racism The Courts WOKE

This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. DEI-ers are bracing for a crisis.

This article appears in the June/July 2023 issue of Fortune with the headline, “The end of affirmative action?”https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=3JgZEG_0mfat9pt00

**Fortune Magazine is a woke-promoting organization. Notice the blatant propaganda in their choice of the picture above**
Somewhere along the way, “Diversity and Inclusion” added “Equity” — which is the left’s code word for “preferential treatment” — TPR

Why diversity advocates see a Supreme Court case on college admissions as a looming crisis for corporate America.

It may seem like a harsh assessment of human nature, but people don’t generally do the right thing simply because it’s the right thing to do, says Natalie Gillard, who has worked in diversity, equity, and inclusion for over a decade. That’s why laws and mandates exist.

And that’s why Gillard has been anxiously watching the Supreme Court. While the ruling had not come down when this issue went to press, court watchers say the conservative majority is very likely to strike down or severely restrict race-based college admissions programs in June. Many fear that prohibiting the use of race as a factor in college admissions will unleash a legal dismantling of over half a century’s worth of laws and rulings aimed at remedying the systemic inequities racial minorities face in the U.S.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in October in the case brought by Students for Fair Admissions, an organization founded by the anti-affirmative-action legal activist Edward Blum, against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, accusing the institutions of discriminating against Asian American and white applicants.

While this decision on affirmative action will most directly affect higher education admissions, legal analysts say it could open the floodgates to upending diversity initiatives in other areas, including the corporate landscape.

And Gillard and her colleagues in DEI are bracing for a crisis. Gillard created Factuality, a 90-minute interactive game and “crash course” in structural inequality that has been used as an employee-training tool at companies such as Google, Nike, and American Express, as well as at Yale University, among others. Factuality has seen an uptick in demand in recent years, but Gillard is under no illusions about why companies hire her: “I really feel that there are people who participate in these programs and initiatives because it’s required and mandatory,” she tells Fortune, “and that with this decision they’re just emboldened to stop.”

Last year the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, which eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, had a transformative cultural and legal effect—leading to a cascade of states passing near-total abortion bans and restrictions on reproductive rights. The affirmative action ruling may not be as far-reaching, but it is a bellwether for a shift in the conversation about race and racism broadly, says Richard Leong, a senior strategist at Collective, a DEI consultancy headquartered in Brooklyn.

“I think it really begins to throw into jeopardy whether or not we can continue to use race and ethnicity as a demographic identifier,” Leong says, adding, “The DEI industry as it is today is already under fire.”

Indeed, DEI initiatives at public universities have been challenged in Florida and Texas this year. Corporate DEI programs have been the target of rage and ridicule in op-eds from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal. And amid a wave of layoffs, many tech companies are rolling back their diversity pledges, cutting DEI roles at disproportionate rates.

Gillard says she has already seen the effects in her business: She used to collaborate often with companies and organizations in Texas and Florida, she tells Fortune, but she no longer works in those states because organizations are unsure about what they can and cannot do, and fearful of causing controversy.

“I’m concerned the decision will only further curtail our efforts,” Gillard says. “After this you’ll really be able to identify who has always been on board and who never really was.”

A ripple effect

Legal experts say that if the Supreme Court decision goes as expected, it could have a ripple effect on corporate diversity programs. The decision could “augur where the court might go with respect to certain programs for private employers,” says Kevin Cloutier, a partner in the law firm Sheppard Mullin’s labor and employment and business trial practice groups. The courts may rule to strike down affirmative action programs for federal contractors, or be more receptive to reverse discrimination claims against private companies

The most direct impact of the Supreme Court prohibiting race-based admissions decisions is that universities will very likely become less diverse over time—as has happened in public university systems in states where affirmative action is already banned. If so, companies will be left with a more homogenous talent pool to recruit from.

And there are likely to be knock-on effects for companies, says Camille Bryant, an attorney and member of the labor and employment practice group at McGlinchey Stafford. It may be harder to live up to the ESG commitments that companies have made to investors, for example. And less diverse workforces may turn off customers, who increasingly expect brands to be inclusive. More homogenous workplaces are also less appealing to millennial and Gen Z workers, who have high expectations of workforce diversity.

“After this you’ll really be able to identify who has always been on board and who never really was.”

Natalie Gillard, creator, Factuality

Less diverse talent pipelines could have a substantial effect on outcomes at some organizations. A recent study found, for example, that a higher prevalence of Black doctors led to lower mortality rates among Black residents in those counties. But with less diverse medical programs, hospitals will likely employ fewer Black doctors, negatively impacting patient care.

Backlash to the backlash

The Supreme Court case comes at a critical time for the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It has been three years since the murder of George Floyd brought about a reckoning on racism in the summer of 2020, and many Black and brown workers remain skeptical of their companies’ lip service to the ideals of diversity, dismissing them as “performative allyship.”

“DEI is a journey, not a destination,” says Ericka Brownlee-Keller, DEI head at a renewable energy company. “It really depends on the fabric and culture of the company you’re in.”

BlackRock is one company that decided to take a hard look at its own record, and the results were revealing. In March 2022, the asset management firm hired a third-party law firm to audit the progress it had and hadn’t made on its multiyear racial equity plans, launched in 2021. The audit found that BlackRock was adhering to the letter of its diversity goals—increasing Black and Latinx hires by 30% and improving representation at senior levels—but was failing in some respects when it comes to the spirit of those goals. It has struggled, for example, to retain its Black and brown employees.

BlackRock is also an early case study of a trend DEI professionals say is growing, and the Supreme Court decision could accelerate: backlash to perceived “wokeness.”

21%

Percentage of companies that have a senior role fully dedicated to DEI. Source: Paradigm’s State of Data-Driven DEO, 2022

In April, the conservative group America First Legal (founded by former Trump administration official Stephen Miller) said it had filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requesting a civil rights investigation into whether the BlackRock Founders Scholarship, an internship for minority students, discriminates against students who don’t qualify as minorities.

Incidents like that are why DEI professionals Fortune spoke with don’t believe it’s overblown to see the looming Supreme Court decision as a time bomb. They’ve kept tabs on the responses to the court overturning Roe v. Wade last year, and watched as state legislators quickly moved to severely restrict or ban abortions in the wake of the decision. They’ve braced themselves as anti-LGBTQ cultural narratives have gathered steam in recent years, leading to new state laws restricting access to gender-affirming care and accommodations. And they’ve watched as bans have throttled discussion of sexual orientation and Black history in schools.

“What we’re seeing is in a lot of ways a backlash to us being able to have made so much progress,” says Brownlee-Keller. “We often talk about ‘When’s the other shoe gonna drop?’ A lot of this is people’s fears being realized.”

Some argue that diversity initiatives won’t completely crumble on the heels of the Supreme Court’s decision, that the field has come too far and the people doing the work are too committed. “This might hinder the progress we’ve made in DEI, but I think we’ll find other avenues,” Brownlee-Keller says. “People in these roles are resilient.”

Strategize now

Many DEI professionals are coming up with lists of actions for employers to consider, no matter how the Supreme Court rules. The first is to review DEI programs and ensure the company has a robust and evidence-based case for these initiatives, says Evelyn Carter, a social psychologist and president of the diversity and inclusion consulting firm Paradigm.

For example, a company may discover that the promotion pipeline for Black leaders falls off at a specific ranking, based on 10 years of company data. If the company determines that it has failed to support this talent for promotions, it might implement a program to address the problem. Using data to explain these moves helps ensure that company initiatives are not “misconstrued as things that are being done because Black folks or folks of color are deficient,” says Carter, “but rather recognizing it as what it is: righting systemic inequities.” It could also help ensure that the program would survive a legal challenge.

It’s crucial, too, for companies to diligently vet public statements related to diversity initiatives. For example, in today’s climate, making public promises that a company’s board will be 25% female could create a legal vulnerability, Bryant, the McGlinchey Stafford lawyer, says. “Sometimes messages that are very well intended can get an organization in hot water if it’s not necessarily done and crafted in the right way.”

75%

Percentage of employees who don’t think their organization’s racial equity policies are genuine. Source: Catalyst Survey, 2022

That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.

“There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ” Developing internal FAQs to respond to questions or complaints from employees will help managers and human resources teams avoid being caught off guard if and when such a controversy erupts.

Creating new pathways for diverse recruitment will also be key, and might include doubling down on partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and other minority institutions and on sponsorship and mentorship programs, as well as more actively developing the pipeline for diverse talent.

“This is the time to help your DEI team.”

Evelyn Carter, president, Paradigm

Most important, company leaders should ask what their DEI teams need. These often small and under-resourced teams may soon have to respond to an influx of reverse discrimination claims and handle a slew of complex internal and external communications. That might involve training managers to see and address bias and harassment and training HR to understand how discrimination impacts employee performance.

Employees may also have to navigate more internal strife, microaggressions, and harassment, so companies might consider increasing access to mental health resources such as therapy services and warmlines for employees—free, confidential lines where employees can seek guidance, support or a listening ear.

“That’s a lot. So this is the time to help your DEI team,” Carter says. “Ask your team what they need, and then deliver on it.”

 

Categories
Corruption Links from other news sources. The Courts

Race Baiters and White Progressives complain about Thomas and Roberts. What about Sotomayor?

Took thre million from a book publisher who had cases before the court.

Race Baiters and White Progressives complain about Thomas and Roberts. What about Sotomayor? Recently we’ve been hearing about Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas. Especially about Thomas having a rich friend. A friend who hasn’t had any cases before the court. But what about one of the race baiting Justices?

Sotomayor did not recuse herself when her publisher had cases before the court. But look what I found. In 2013, Sotomayor voted in a decision on whether the court should hear a case against the publisher called Aaron Greenspan v. Random House. Now-retired Justice Stephen Breyer, who had received money from the book publisher, recused himself in that case.

What say you?

Joe Scarborough responds to the latest Clarence Thomas non-scandal by saying “imagine what would happen if it were Justice Sotomayor” and “everybody at this table would be shocked and outrage and had be critical if this were a liberal justice” Who wants to tell him? pic.twitter.com/EsBrzPF8uL

— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) May 4, 2023