Posts Tagged ‘Democrats’

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DeSantis Isn’t Putting Up With Any of Your Blue City “Soft On Shoplifting” Crap

Wednesday, April 10th, 2024

Remember when a whole lot of blue locales legalized shoplifting, either de jure (California) or de facto (a whole bunch of cities that elected Soros-backed prosecutors), and then were shocked, shocked when shoplifting soared?

Ron DeSantis isn’t putting up with that nonsense.

Tuesday Morning Governor Ron DeSantis signed a retail theft bill into law, instituting a severe crackdown on the Sunshine State’s high levels of shoplifting and porch piracy.

“We’re a law and order state. If you do the crime, you do the time,” DeSantis said. He hosted his press conference at a Walgreens in Stuart, telling Floridians they will no longer have to deal with a “Fort Knox” style situation to simply buy toothpaste.

“It’s all under lock and key for basic items. You gotta get a clerk to come and open it and all this stuff just to do basic shopping. That is not something that is good for quality of life,” he said.

HB 549 makes it a third-degree felony to work with five or more people to commit retail theft. Using social media to plan these thefts would be a second-degree felony, and committing a second offense lands offenders a first-degree felony.

The bill follows Florida’s 2022 loss of $5.421 billion in revenue to theft, meaning retailers lost $302.05 in sales per capita. In 2023, destination city Miami ranked in the top 10 areas for the highest rates of retail theft.

The new law also targets porch pirates, or people who steal packages off of other people’s doormats. Stealing someone’s item worth less than $40 is now a first-degree misdemeanor, and doing it again or stealing property worth over $40 becomes a third-degree felony—up to five years in prison.

“Florida has set the blueprint for other states,” Attorney General Ashley Moody said Tuesday, lauding the effort to be “proactive” in fighting crime.

DeSantis has maintained that Florida is the “law and order state”, stressing that this is not the first time he’s signed off on severe penalties for lawbreaking. He passed a comprehensive “Law and Order” legislation package last year, targeting drug-related crimes, human smuggling, child rapists, and sex criminals, and easing the process to sentence offenders to death.

Being soft on crime gets you more crime. This isn’t exactly rocket science. You have to be a Democrat to ignore this most basic of truths.

Texas should look at DeSantis’ crime initiatives, and think about implementing then in places where we’ve fallen behind in keeping people safe, and to keep Soros prosecutors from inflicting higher crime rates on citizens in the name of “reform.”

(Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

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Posted in Crime, Democrats, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors | 7 Comments »

Texas Sues Harris County Over Guaranteed Income

Tuesday, April 9th, 2024

Ken Paxton is suing Harris County over their unconstitutional guaranteed income program.

The State of Texas and Harris County will again duke it out in court, this time over a guaranteed basic income pilot program that would give 1,500 households in the county $500 per month.

Harris County announced the program last year through Harris County Public Health. On Tuesday, the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed suit asking the court to halt its implementation before the April 24 start date.

Attorney General Ken Paxton said of the suit, “This scheme is plainly unconstitutional. Taxpayer money must be spent lawfully and used to advance the public interest, not merely redistributed with no accountability or reasonable expectation of a general benefit. I am suing to stop officials in Harris County from abusing public funds for political gain.”

The OAG’s suit reads, “There is no such thing as free money — especially in Texas. The Texas Constitution expressly prohibits giving away public funds to benefit individuals — a common sense protection to prevent cronyism and ensure that public funds benefit all citizens.”

Central to the state’s argument is that counties, “unlike home-rule cities,” have a substantially more narrow scope of authority. “[T]he legal basis for any action taken must be grounded ultimately in the constitution or statute,” the filing adds.

Both cities and counties are creations of the state, but municipalities have the home-rule provision that grants them a broader array of authority than is granted to counties. The range of that home-rule status is the subject of another suit, this one flowing in the opposite direction, against the Texas Legislature’s new field preemption law passed last year.

The City of Austin just completed the first year of its universal basic income program, allotting 85 families with $1,000 per month.

If there’s any insane, hard left, unconstitutional socialist program idea, there’s a good chance Austin will be in the forefront of pushing for it.

Texas’ contention here is that while a home-rule municipality could enact such a program, a county is explicitly precluded by the Texas Constitution.

Article III, Section 52(a) reads: “Except as otherwise provided by this section, the Legislature shall have no power to authorize any county, city, town or other political corporation or subdivision of the State to lend its credit or to grant public money or thing of value in aid of, or to any individual, association or corporation whatsoever, or to become a stockholder in such corporation, association or company.”

The suit adds, “Second, Harris County does not retain public control over the funds. As described above, the payments have ‘no strings attached,’ and the recipients can use the money however they wish.”

The OAG requests a temporary restraining order against the program and, eventually, a permanent injunction against its operation.

Using taxpayer money to pay people for breathing (or existing) is one of the stupidest pieces of socialist bullshit to come down the pike in many a moon. It’s immoral to take money from those who work in order to bribe those who don’t. It’s also a great way to kickback money directly to the hands of leftwing activists, since the grifters claim that they cannot reveal people receiving such payoffs due to “confidentiality.”

Despite the hosannas offered up by the hard left and economic illiterates everywhere to the scheme as a means of helping the poor, the Seattle-Denver Income Maintenance Experiment (SIME/DIME) experiments showed such no-strings-attached checks from the government hurt the recipients, reducing both the desire to work and lowering actual income among the recipients. See Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, pages 150-153 for details.

Any “Guaranteed Income” taking money from taxpayers and paying people not to work is not just unconstitutional, a bad idea and a moral hazard, it’s an avenue for fraud and an insult to anyone who works for a living.

It’s just another in a long line of illegal left wing experiments from Hidalgo’s office, all of which deserve to be crushed like bugs.

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Posted in Austin, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Waste and Fraud, Welfare State | 7 Comments »

Tab Clearing For April 6, 2024

Saturday, April 6th, 2024

A small handful of links that either didn’t make yesterday’s LinkSwarm, or weren’t quite right for it.

  • Why young men have checked out. A rant with a measure of truth:

    I was particularly struck by the phrase “fundamentally unwifeable.” Add “social justice” to “feminism” for the reason. As for “Disney Princess programming,” the Disney Princess thing has been around for over half a century. So why have things gotten so much worse on that front over the last 20 years?

  • On the flipside, here’s a 20-something girl complaining that she can’t afford rent. She apparently deleted the original tweet, but she said her rent had jumped from something like $1,200 a month to $1,600 a month, and she was having trouble affording food. Thanks, Joe Biden! Rent inflation is real, especially in blue cities where regulation prevents new housing being built to meet demand, but if your rent is that much, then you either need to move further out, find roommates to share rent with, or you need to consider moving to a less expensive city entirely.
  • “Opioid Overdoses, Homicide Rates on the Rise in Austin and Travis County.”

    During an Austin City Council meeting on public safety, Austin-Travis County Emergency and Medical Services (EMS) spoke about the rising rates of opioid deaths in the county.

    “Travis County now has twice as many opiate overdose deaths than any other county in Texas, per capita,” said Steven White, acting assistant chief for Austin-Travis County EMS.

    White explained how the opioid crisis began in the community in 2016, “with a severe increase in 2017.”

    White elaborated that in 2018 there were about 30 overdoses per month, and “now we’re averaging about 100 overdoses a month.”

    He went on to show a heat map of where the overdoses are occurring, stating that “opioids do not seem to be contained by geographic barriers or financial barriers.”

    “It really gets into every part of our community and touches every family [and] at some point will be affected by the opioid crisis.”

    White also highlighted that “30 percent of all the opioid users who die of an overdose, at some point had contact with EMS in the previous 12 months before their death, which gives us an intersection point where we’re actually meeting these patients who have the potential to overdose and die.”

    Another statistic he presented is that “patients that receive Narcan in the field by EMS have a 10 percent chance of having a fatal overdose in the next 12 months.”

    This is your city on social justice…

  • Free goats.
  • Random Habitual Linecrosser I’m posting just so I can steal the phrase “Skittle Hair People.”

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Uncategorized | 12 Comments »

    Conflict Of Interest: You’re Soaking In It

    Thursday, April 4th, 2024

    Remember when the court system at least pretended to be objective? Remember a few months ago when liberals claimed that Clarence Thomas’ wife knowing conservative activists meant he had to recuse himself from everything?

    Here in the real here and now, huge conflict of interest problems with the lawfare cases being waged against President Trump are being deliberately ignored in the headlong rush to convict Trump of something, anything, for any reason before November.

    “Lara Merchan, the wife of the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” case in Manhattan, once worked for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the massive $350 million civil fraud case against the former president, with the revelation reviving claims of bias and calls for the judge’s recusal.”

    Records reviewed by The Epoch Times show that Ms. Merchan worked for 21 years as a Special Assistant to the AG in New York, including three years under Ms. James. She changed jobs over two years ago.

    Ms. James is a Democrat who fixated on President Trump as she campaigned for New York attorney general, calling him a “con man” and vowing to shine a “bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.”

    She began investigating the former president soon after taking office, eventually suing him for allegedly misleading banks and others about the value of his assets.

    Ms. James eventually won the case on Feb. 16, with New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordering President Trump and Trump Organization executives to pay $350 million in damages, and barring the former president from doing business in the state for three years.

    Judge Juan Merchan is presiding over a separate criminal trial involving President Trump in New York, in which the former president is accused of falsifying business records in order to conceal a $130,000 “hush money” payoff to an adult performer to stay quiet about their alleged affair.

    But wait! Lara is not the only member of the Merchan family with a conflict of interest in the case.

    The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of Authentic Campaigns, a Chicago-based progressive political consulting firm whose top clients include Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and the Senate Majority PAC, a major party fundraiser.

    Authentic Campaigns, and thus the judge’s daughter, is actively making money from this sham attack against President Trump, rendering Judge Merchan conflicted out,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told The Post, adding that evidence of bias is even clearer now than it was in August when Merchan rejected Trump’s first recusal motion.

    “The judge should do the right thing and immediately recuse himself in order to show the American people that the Democrats have not destroyed our justice system completely … him continuing to be involved in this Crooked Joe Biden-directed Witch Hunt is a complete violation of applicable rules, regulations and ethics.”

    Evidently the family that TDSes together, stays together.

    It’s conflicts of interest all the way down…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections | 6 Comments »

    Biden Admin Tries To Infect Chip Makers With DEI

    Wednesday, April 3rd, 2024

    I’ve already said repeatedly that semiconductor subsidies are the wrong solution for the wrong problem. However, this piece by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson shows the CHIPS Act was far more poisonous than I thought.

    DEI — the identity-obsessed dogma that goes by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — has now trained Google’s new AI to refuse to draw white people. What’s even more alarming is that it’s also infected the supply chain that makes the chips powering everything from AI to missiles, endangering national security.

    The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.

    Actually, Samsung opened it’s first Austin fab in 2007. The fab that was delayed was their second fab in Taylor.

    This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.

    Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.

    The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”

    The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

    The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.

    Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.

    That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.

    Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.

    Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.

    Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.

    To be fair, Intel has had fabs in Israel since since 1996, and Tower Semiconductor has had fabs in Israel since the 1980s. Poland, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a fab.

    In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America. Intel must know the coming grants are election-year stunts — mere statements of intent that will not be followed up. Even after due diligence and final agreements, the funds will only be released in dribs and drabs as recipients prove they’re jumping through the appropriate hoops.

    So in the name of embedding the racist poison of social justice, the CHIPS Act, ostensibly designed to increase America’s share of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, is actually driving new fab construction out of America.

    Heck of a Job, Brandon.

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    Posted in Austin, Budget, Democrats, Global Warming, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | 5 Comments »

    The Social Justice War To Replace Christianity

    Sunday, March 31st, 2024

    Happy Easter!

    You might think that on Christianity’s most holy day, a president running for reelection in a majority Christian nation would go out of his way to avoid antagonizing Christians.

    You’d be wrong.

    The Biden Administration has declared today, Easter Sunday, as a “Transgender Day of Visibility.”

    The White House on Friday announced “transgender day of visibility” for March 31, which this year falls on Easter Sunday.

    “NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” President Biden wrote in a Friday statement. “I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.”

    Since its inception, the Biden administration has made LGBT activism a cornerstone of its policy priorities. Biden boasted in his statement that he appointed transgender leaders to his administration and ended the ban on transgender Americans serving openly in the military.

    In the past, some of Biden’s transgender inclusivity events at the White House have backfired.
    A transgender influencer was banned from the White House on Tuesday for posing topless at President Biden’s Pride celebration over the weekend.

    Rose Montoya, who exposed his bare prosthetic breasts to the camera and onlookers at the official event, violated basic standards of decency and social manners, a spokesperson for the White House told the New York Post.

    Children of the National Guard are also barred from sending in religious Easter egg designs for the 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” art event at the White House, Fox News reported Friday. The White House hosts many Easter traditions, including the military family art initiative and the annual Easter Egg Roll.

    Easter egg submissions “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements,” according to the flyer.

    You wouldn’t want Christian symbolism in an Easter celebration, now would you?

    I’m surprised the Gay Mafia isn’t already suing Masterpiece Cakeshop to make them a cake depicting a crucified Easter Bunny.

    Transexist dogma demands that you agree that 2+2=5. To note the biological reality that human beings with XX chromosomes are female, and XY chromosomes are male, and that no amount of cosmetic surgery can ever change that, is commit a heresy against the new church of social justice.

    Transesxist dogma is so unpopular that they’re even rejecting it in New York City, but the Biden Administration still insists on forcing it down America’s throats.

    Even in an election year.

    Even on Easter Sunday.

    The brazenness of dedicating Easter Sunday to transexual activism should convince you that the hard left is actively hostile to Christianity. They view it as a competing source of moral legitimacy that thwarts their will-to-power desire of a complete transformation of American society.

    More specifically, they want to use social pressure and government coercion to remake Christianity itself in their own image, to make it compliant and subservient to a state they control, just as in Communist China.

    People who dedicate their lives to the Risen Christ rather than utopian schemes to remake society are a threat to the left’s plans for total top-to-bottom social control, just like vast numbers of armed citizens are.

    Plan accordingly.

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    Posted in Democrats, Social Justice Warriors | 10 Comments »

    Oregon Declares War On Family Farms

    Saturday, March 30th, 2024

    The radical left-wing anti-farm green agenda isn’t just trying to destroy agriculture in foreign locales like The Netherlands, it’s also happening in Oregon.

  • “The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease and desist letters to farms.” (By “market gardens” he means small farms that only supply produce locally.)
  • “They’re using satellite technology to find their victims and then send them these letters, and say you can’t operate, and they’re doing it in the name of water conservation.”
  • “Oregon’s government and dairy industry [have joined] forces against small farmers.”
  • “There are two different laws that they’re using.”
  • “They’ve redefined what a CAFO is.” CAFO stands for “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.” According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, a CAFO is where “over 1,000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year. An animal unit is the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of “live” animal weight.[1] A thousand animal units equates to 700 dairy cows, 1,000 meat cows, 2,500 pigs weighing more than 55 pounds (25 kg), 10,000 pigs weighing under 55 pounds, 10,000 sheep, 55,000 turkeys, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg laying hens or pullets.”
  • Oregon seems to have redefined that. “This applies to people who have chicken houses, who have goat farms, basically anybody who has a barn or a facility that has a gravel or concrete floor.”
  • “What’s happening in Oregon, and why the small dairies have filed a lawsuit against the state…it doesn’t matter the size of the operation, you could have two milking cows.”
  • “Sarah King, who owns Godspeed Hollow Farm in Newberg, Oregon, has a pickup station that’s just 100 ft in length. She has an 11 acre property, and keeps things pretty simple. She has three milking cows. [Because] she has that milking stand, the state of Oregon said you are a CAFO, and because you are considered a CAFO, they require you to put in this infrastructure improvement which would cost her $100,000,”
  • “We’re requiring this massive infrastructure upgrade for you to continue to operate your facilities to protect our ground water from your two cows standing on a milking stand.”
  • Even if you have a gravel floor in a chicken coop, Oregon wants to come after you. “They have redefined CAFOs. This is going to impact nearly everybody.”
  • “This law is being enforced in the state of Oregon. It has already shut down some farms.”
  • There is an injunction on the definition of the law until it can be heard in court.
  • “You would think that they were going after raw milk, that always seems to be the case with a lot of these things, but this is actually going after anybody. Egg producers, anybody who has chickens that go up in a chicken house at night that may have a concrete floor.”
  • You have to go through a permitting process, and a lot of what they’re requiring is just simply too much for the small farmer. So that’s rule number one.”
  • “The second rule: In the state of Oregon, if you are using water, even groundwater, the only water that you can legally harvest and use without a permit is actually rainwater. They consider all water in the ground a resource of the public. Even if you have a private well on your property, that belongs to the people of Oregon.”

  • “This is a rule that went into place back in 2021, and then it has slowly rolled out to the point where market gardeners with a half acre of land are now receiving cease and desist orders saying you can’t water your gardens. Figure out another way to do it.”
  • The law says you can use up to 5,000 gallons a day, but market gardeners are proably only using 1,000 gallons a day. “You would think that they’re saying you’re a commercial business, because if you are growing food for yourself [But] There’s a lady has been growing food and selling it to neighbors. It’s been her primary income source and they shut her down.”
  • “Christina Del Campo um has just over a half acre. She grows blueberries, local vegetables, things like that. Her farm is called Oak Song Farm near Eugene. She’s operated there for 7 years and she recently received received a letter from the regional office of the Oregon Water Resources Department. It was a notification that the farm couldn’t irrigate its commercial crops without a water right.”
  • “They shut her down because, according to the Oregon Water Resources Department, the exemption for commercial use does not include irrigation of land.”
  • “Basically, the state of Oregon is coming in now and they’re they’re putting things on people’s wells to measure the amount of water. It’s very invasive.”
  • “Supposedly Oregon had these rules in place since 1909. They just keep changing them.”
  • “They’ve sent out letters not just to this one farmer, but multiple small farms, market garden farms, saying you can’t water your crops anymore.”
  • “This is actually a war on small farms.”
  • “We’ve seen this happening over and over and over again, where we’re seeing them utilize water rights [protection] to shut down farms across our country.”
  • “If you look at the number of farms that we’ve lost since 2000, it’s staggering. We’ve gone from 2,100,000 farms in 2000 down to 1,850,000 farms at the end of last year.”
  • “You’ve seen a lot of these cases where they’ve gone in and they’ve just shut off farms to water rights to an entire valley at a time.”
  • “We’re seeing them take control over people’s wells putting meters on people’s wells, shutting down small farms.”
  • “Everybody should have the right to farm fresh food. Oregon is basically taking that right away from every Oregon citizen by taking away the rights of the small farmers to operate their businesses in the name of some laws that were originally put in place to protect groundwater from much larger scale operations.”

    • If there isn’t some sort of sinister agenda behind these new regulatory pushes, destroying small farms certainly gives a pretty good impression of a sinister agenda. And no points for guessing which political party enjoys uncontested control of Oregon. Remember when Democrats claimed to be looking out for family farms? Doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Someone should ask Willie Nelson about all this…

    Texas has a Right to Farm statute that should (theoretically) prevent such abuses here.

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    Posted in Democrats, Regulation, Texas, video | 7 Comments »

    Is Trump Picking Up Black Voters?

    Thursday, March 21st, 2024

    All polls indicate that the answer is yes. The question is how many.

    CBS News correspondent Nikole Killion interview Azad Ahmad and his girlfriend Alexandra, both of whom voted for Obama in 2012, but both of whom are voting for Trump this year.

  • Alexandra: “My views on certain things have changed.”
  • Alexandra: “Being in a pattern of doing the same thing that I’ve been doing because it’s kind of like second nature. When you go in in a poll, you hit Democrat. Something has to happen. I mean, it’s just so expensive to survive, and we’re planning on having kids. I don’t want to live in a stressful environment, trying to rub two pennies together to try to make it.”
  • Azad: “Post-Obama, I decided that the [Democratic] party just wasn’t suitable to the goals that I had.”
  • Another black voter: “I think president Trump was a bad people’s person, but a great leader. He put our economy in a booming state. He provided a permanent funding for all HBCU.”

    • Despite salting her interviewees with Democrats reciting talking points, a lot of real frustration with Biden and the Democratic Party seeps through.

    I notice, however, that everyone she interviewed was college educated. It woud be interesting to poll blacks worker blue collar jobs. I suspect the support for Trump would be even higher…

    (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)

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    Posted in Budget, Crime, Elections, Jihad, Media Watch, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors | 5 Comments »

    Supreme Court: Yes, Texas Can Deport Illegal Aliens. 5th Circuit: Psych!

    Wednesday, March 20th, 2024

    Here I was all ready to with what I wanted to write about, only to have the judicial system throw me a curve. Yesterday, it looked like the Supreme Court was finally giving Texas the green light to deport illegal aliens.

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted its freeze of a Texas immigration law which allows state and local law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants and empowers state judges to deport them.

    The Court’s six conservative justices dismissed the Biden administration’s emergency appeal, allowing the law to remain in effect while the issue is adjudicated by lower courts. The majority did not explain its reasoning, as is typical, but Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, issued a concurring opinion explaining that Texas should be allowed to enforce its law until a lower court definitively strikes it down.

    “If a decision does not issue soon,” Barrett wrote, “the applicants may return to this court.”

    On X Tuesday, Texas Governor Abbott acknowledged that litigation over the law will continue in lower courts.

    “BREAKING: In a 6-3 decision SCOTUS allows Texas to begin enforcing SB4 that allows the arrest of illegal immigrants,” he wrote. “We still have to have hearings in the 5th circuit federal court of appeals. But this is clearly a positive development.”

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the ruling on X.

    “HUGE WIN: Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court,” he said. “Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court.”

    In court papers, Paxton said the Texas law does not undermine federal law but complements it regarding immigration enforcement, which the federal government is supposed to be fulfilling. The Biden administration for many months has been flouting federal immigration law by paroling illegal immigrants into the U.S. instead of detaining them.

    The Constitution “recognizes that Texas has the sovereign right to defend itself from violent transnational cartels that flood the state with fentanyl, weapons, and all manner of brutality,” Paxton said in filings, according to NBC News.

    Texas is “the nation’s first-line defense against transnational violence and has been forced to deal with the deadly consequences of the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the border,” he added.

    Chalk one up for controlling the borders and the rule of law, right?

    Fifth circuit: Not so fast!

    A procedural victory for Texas allowing the state to enforce its new border security law while the Biden administration’s battle against the measure continues to work its way through the courts was short-lived.

    While the U.S. Supreme Court moved to allow the law to go into effect on Tuesday afternoon, hours later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put the law on hold yet again.

    Senate Bill 4, which was set to go into effect earlier this month, creates a state crime for entering the country illegally, paving the way for state law enforcement to arrest illegal aliens.

    After the federal government challenged the measure in a lawsuit, U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra blocked the law from going into effect. It has since been sent to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    In the meantime, a procedural fight had taken place over whether the state could enforce the law awaiting final judgment in the case.

    In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied the Biden administration’s request to halt enforcement of the law, allowing Texas to begin enforcement immediately.

    At the time, Attorney General Ken Paxton called the decision a “huge win” for Texas.

    “Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court. Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court,” said Paxton.

    That victory was short-lived, as late Tuesday night the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals placed another stay on the law from being enforced.

    Frustrating, but it underscores the difficulty the Supreme Court faces, namely: How do you reign in an executive branch hellbent on ignoring clear laws on securing the border against illegal aliens that instead actual aids and abets illegal aliens breaking those same laws?

    What mechanisms can the Supreme Court use to reign in a rogue executive without causing a constitutional crisis?

    The Fifth Circuit had a hearing scheduled this morning on the issue but evidently haven’t issued a ruling. I’ll try to update this if it does…

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    Posted in Border Control, Democrats, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Texas | 10 Comments »

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