Posts Tagged ‘Supreme Court’

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Supreme Court to District Court: No, You Can’t Overturn the Democratic Process to Help Democrats. Not Yours.

Friday, January 20th, 2012

OK, 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:

  • “To the extent the District Court exceeded its mission to draw interim maps that do not violate the Constitution or the Voting Rights Act, and substituted its own concept of ‘the collective public good’ for the Texas Legislature’s determination of which policies serve ‘the interests of the citizens of Texas,’ the court erred.”
  • “Because the District Court here had the benefit of a recently enacted plan to assist it, the court had neither the need nor the license to cast aside that vital aid.”
  • “Some specific aspects of the District Court’s plans seem to pay adequate attention to the State’s policies, others do not, and the propriety of still others is unclear.”
  • “The District Court also erred in refusing to split voting precincts (called “voter tabulation districts” in Texas) in drawing the interim plans.”
  • “The District Court also appears to have unnecessarily ignored the State’s plans in drawing certain individual districts.”
  • “The court’s approach in drawing other districts was unclear.”

    • 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.

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    Posted in Austin, Supreme Court, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Supreme Court to District Court on Texas Redistricting Plan: REJECTED!

    Saturday, December 10th, 2011

    The 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]

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    Posted in Democrats, Supreme Court, Texas | 2 Comments »

    Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to Judge Kevin Fine: No, You Can’t Magically Rule the Death Penalty Unconstitutional

    Wednesday, January 12th, 2011

    The 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.

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    Posted in Crime, Supreme Court, Texas | No Comments »

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