A long but informative breakdown of where things stand. The bottom line: The cases are still up in the air, Texas GOP is not directly involved in talks, and February 6 is the last day the case can be resolved and still have an April 3 primary.
Archive for the ‘Supreme Court’ Category
Texas Republican Party on Redistricting Lawsuits State of Play
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012Supreme Court to District Court: No, You Can’t Overturn the Democratic Process to Help Democrats. Not Yours.
Friday, January 20th, 2012OK, they didn’t use quite that language (and I must prepend the usual I Am Not a Lawyer disclaimer). But in issuing the decision (they had previously blocked the District Courts’ maps), the Supremes did say the San Antonio District Court had exceeded its authority in drawing new redistricting maps for Texas for no clear reason, and ordered the District Court to go back to the drawing board and create maps closer to what the legislation passed in the first place:
Because it is unclear whether the District Court for the Western District of Texas followed the appropriate standards in drawing interim maps for the 2012 Texas elections, the orders implementing those maps are vacated,and the cases are remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
Time and time again in this decision, the Supreme Court criticizes the District Court for their approach:
Time in time again, the Supreme Court said to the District Court: “You screwed up. The State government has the responsibility to perform redistricting, and you shouldn’t overturn their work without explicit Voting Rights Acts reason, and you went and did it anyway.”
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred with the opinion, but went even further, declaring that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the section requiring judicial preclearance of voting districts) was unconstitutional:
In my view, Texas’ failure to timely obtain §5 preclearance of its new plans is no obstacle to their implementation, because, as I have previously explained, §5 is unconstitutional…Although Texas’ new plans are being challenged on the grounds that they violate the Federal Constitution and §2 of the Voting Rights Act, they have not yet been found to violate any law. Accordingly, Texas’ duly enacted redistricting plans should govern the upcoming elections. I would therefore vacate the interim orders and remand for the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas to consider appellees’ constitutional and §2 challenges in the ordinary course.
Presumably, a more chastised District Court will come back in short order with a map that more closely resembles what the legislature passed, and not one designed to give Democrats in the court room what they couldn’t achieve at the ballot box.
Supreme Court to District Court on Texas Redistricting Plan: REJECTED!
Saturday, December 10th, 2011The Supreme Court Friday night “blocked a redistricting plan for Texas drawn by a panel of federal judges.”
I’ve got to run off, and the issue is far from settled, but this is good news for the rule of law, and bad news for liberals wanting to abuse the court system to get what they want despite voters rejecting them again and again.
[Edited to add: Crappy, hastily written headline now rewritten to make it clear this was a U.S. Supreme Court stay, not the Texas Supreme Court, which is obviously holds no sway over a U.S. District Court. – LP]
Audio Interview With Ted Cruz: Part 1
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011When I did this video interview with Ted Cruz on July 30, I also did an audio interview with him at the same time using an iPhone App called Recorder Pro. The video interview was done by Cruz’s staff (who have a much better camera than I do), and the resulting video was editing done to a sort of “Best of” piece emphasizing his campaign themes. I actually think the full interview will be more interesting to conservatives, as he goes into more detail about a number of topics, including border control, the budget deficit, and federal commerce clause overreach and the 10th Amendment, including a discussion of Wickard vs. Filburn.
It’s taken a good bit longer to get it the audio up here than I wanted to, mainly because I’ve been pretty busy, but also because it was something of a pain to edit the interview and get it up here. First, I had Recorder Pro record in CAF format, which isn’t particularly widely used, so I needed one program to convert it into a .WAV file, and then another to edit the file (there was about a minute and a half of extraneous setup noise I wanted to spare you). Then, after all that, I found out the resulting audio file was too large post all at once, so I’ve split it into two chunks. The first half of the interview is below as an MP3. I’ll try to put up the second half in the next day or so, assuming I don’t get distracted by shiny objects.
Also, as a bonus, here’s an essay by Ted Cruz and Mario Loyola on Federalism that discusses Wickard vs. Filburn.
Ezell vs. Chicago: An Extremely Lazy Blogger’s Roundup
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011So Ezell vs. Chaicago has been decided, and the three-judge panel basically bitchslapped Chicago into the 21st Century. Basically, Chicago was saying 1.) You have to get firearms training at a licensed firing range to own a gun, and 2.) We don’t need no stinking firing ranges within the city limits, and the court tore them a new asshole for blatantly disregarding DC vs. Heller.
Even more dramatically, the ruling makes explicit parallels between first Amendment and Second Amendment restrictions, which the Brady Bunch and their liberal Democratic co-conspirators have been denying for years.
I think any decision where the gun-grabber ordinance in question is actually derided in the decision as “thumbing of the municipal nose at the Supreme Court” has to count as a pretty overwhelming victory for the Second Amendment.
If I were a hardcore gun blogger, I’d read the entire judgment, quote chunks from it and offer closely reasoned, pithy insights.
If I were a semi-hardcore gun blogger, I’d skim the decision and offer some quick insights.
However, because I’m feeling very lazy tonight, I’m merely going to link to the writeup over at Snowflakes in Hell, since Sebastian has provided a far better, and more insightful, post than I could on the subject.
As a bonus, in the post just below that, he tears into Rahm’s ridiculous shooting range ordinance, another blatant attempt to deprive Chicago residents of their Second Amendment via absurd regulations, such as:
Requires that range operators inspect every gun brought into the range for safety, and that the caliber is appropriate for an indoor range. You must have a range master for every three shooting patrons. That range master must be on duty at all times. [Even by the standards of Chicago union featherbedding this is outrageous.] Ranges may only sell ammo for use onsite, and must ensure no one leaves the range with unauthorized ammo.
Et Freaking cetera. “Rahm’s ordinance is basically a joke, and an insult. I can’t imagine anyone would even try to operate a range under these ridiculous standards, and I suspect that’s the whole idea.”
Read the whole thing, on both posts.
Tea Party Calls for Obama to be Sent “Back to the Fields,” Tortured, and Lynched Along with his Wife
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011And by “Tea Party” I mean “liberal protesters,” and by “Obama” I mean Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But the rest is accurate.
Sure, these are just random far-left yahoos. But does anyone doubt that if the headline were true, those lone nuts would be cited on national news broadcasts as definitive evidence of “Tea Party’s racism”?
(Hat tip: Hot Air via Instapundit)
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to Judge Kevin Fine: No, You Can’t Magically Rule the Death Penalty Unconstitutional
Wednesday, January 12th, 2011The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (the highest criminal court in Texas, as the Texas Supreme Court does not handle criminal cases) told State District Judge Kevin Fine, in essence, cut it out. One key factor in the ruling is that the named defendant, accused murderer John Edward Green, hasn’t even gone to trial yet, much less been convicted and given the death penalty.
Judge Fine (presumably no relation to Larry) was all set to hold hearings on the constitutionality of Texas application of the death penalty before the ruling told him not even to bother. This was after he had just gone ahead and declared the death penalty unconstitutional in March, only to reverse himself a week later.
Though a Democrat, Fine sounds like an interesting and sympathetic fellow: A heavily-tattooed recovering cocaine addict elected to Houston’s “drug court” in 2008. He seems like the sort of person you would want to wish well. But a compelling life-story doesn’t get you a pass on blatant judicial activism. The Constitution itself makes repeated reference to the fact that no United States citizen can be deprived of life “without due process of law,” which says that they can be deprived of life with due process of law; otherwise the Constitution would merely that that they could not be deprived of life, period. The death penalty was legal in every state after the Constitution was ratified, and the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the basic constitutionality of the death penalty in every related case it has heard since Gregg vs. Georgia in 1976.
Certainly the issue of the death penalty is troubling, as there are few fates worse than being unjustly executed by the state. However, trial by jury is probably the least corrupt of America’s democratic institutions, and the criminal appeals process is far more heavily weighted toward letting the guilty go free than executing the innocent. Moreover, application of the death penalty would rank pretty far down the list of innocent people killed by the federal government; indeed, I feel confident in stating that fewer innocent men and women have been executed by the death penalty than were killed by the ATF under the Clinton Administration. And when you examine the details of cases that anti-death penalty crusaders say prove that innocent people have been executed, you find out that those same people frequently lie, and in many cases the accused was as guilty as sin. I don’t think there’s any question that the number of murders committed by ex-cons foolishly released or paroled exceeds people executed who were not guilty of the crimes for which they were executed by several orders of magnitude.
If men were angels we would need no laws. The death penalty should only be applied judiciously, but it is constitutional, and should be applied.
Kelo Followup
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009Remember how the Kelo vs. New London decision let the government take land for the benefit of private government? Well, Pfizer is closing down the facility on the site they seized the land for.
(Hat tip to Fark.)