Tag Archives: Judge

News

Obamacare struck down as unconstitutional by Florida judge

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Hans Bader again, writing at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

A judge in Florida just declared the health care law known as “Obamacare” unconstitutional, ruling it void in its entirety. Judge Vinson rightly declared the health care law’s individual mandate unconstitutional, since the inactivity of not buying health insurance is not an “economic activity” that Congress has the power to regulate under the Interstate Commerce Clause. (Under the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Morrison (2000), which I helped litigate, only “economic activity” can be regulated under the Commerce Clause, with the possible exception of those non-economic activities that harm instrumentalities of interstate commerce or cross state lines.)

Judge Vinson also rightly declared the law as a whole unconstitutional. The health care law lacks a severability clause. So if a major provision like the individual mandate is unconstitutional — as it indeed was — then the whole law must be struck down.

[…]As I noted earlier in The Washington Examiner, “To justify preserving the rest of the law, the judge” in the earlier Virginia case “cited a 2010 Supreme Court ruling [Free Enterprise Fund v. PCAOB] that invalidated part of a law — but kept the rest of it in force. But that case involved a law passed almost unanimously by Congress, which would have passed it even without the challenged provision. Obamacare is totally different. It was barely passed by a divided Congress, but only as a package. Supporters admitted that the unconstitutional part of it — the insurance mandate — was the law’s heart. Obamacare’s legion of special-interest giveaways that are ‘extraneous to health care’ does not alter that.” In short, Obamacare’s individual mandate is not “volitionally severable,” as case law requires.

The individual mandate provision also was not “functionally” severable from the rest of the law, since the very Congress that passed Obamacare deemed the individual absolutely “essential” to the Act’s overarching goals (as Judge Vinson in Florida correctly noted).

[…]Cato legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, who filed briefs against the law in Virginia, comments on today’s decision here, calling it a “victory for federalism and individual liberty

I also got two more opinions about what this means:

Not sure who to believe. An injunction would have been better.

News

Four radicals left-wingers nominated to federal judgeships

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From Hans Bader at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Here’s one of the nominations:

Radical law professor Goodwin Liu was also renominated. As lawyer Ted Frank noted in the Washington Examiner, Liu once claimed that racial quotas are not merely permitted, but constitutionally “required.”  If confirmed, Liu would sit on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, a sharply-divided federal appeals court with jurisdiction over a whopping one-fifth of the American people. Liu wrongly argued in the past that the Constitution requires some forms of welfare, although he denied supporting such a constitutional right to welfare in his more recent testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when he experienced a politically-convenient confirmation conversion after his nomination became controversial.  Although Liu briefly worked for a law firm, Liu has no experience actually trying cases, despite the fact that judges are supposed to have “substantial courtroom and trial experience” (a fact that did not keep the staunchly liberal ABA, which shares Liu’s ideology, from supporting his nomination despite his lack of this basic qualification).   Liu has claimed that “‘free enterprise, private ownership of property, and limited government” are right-wing concepts and ideological “code words.” Liu is also a big user of politically-correct psychobabble, writing that a judge is supposed to be a “culturally situated interpreter of social meaning” rather than an impartial umpire who interprets the law in accord with its plain meaning or its framers’ intent.

What does the Heritage Foundation say about Goodwin Liu?

Excerpt:

Liu has a strong penchant for redistribution, and it is clear that he believes judges should play a role in it.  In an article titled, “Rethinking Constitutional Welfare Rights,” he lays out his vision for the creation of a constitutional right to welfare.  He desires a “reinvigorated public dialogue” about “our commitments to mutual aid and distributive justice across a broad range of social goods.”  Once this dialogue takes place among policymakers, Liu wants the courts to recognize “a fundamental right to education or housing or medical care…as an interpretation and consolidation of the values we have gradually internalized as a society.”In another article, he stated that “negative rights against government oppression” and “positive rights to government assistance” have “equal constitutional status” because “both are essential to liberty.”

Why would Obama want judges like these? Probably so that he can pass un-Constitutional legislation like Obamacare, that forces healthy people to buy medical insurance for things like abortions. He wants people who are pro-life to be forced to buy medical insurance for things that are completely voluntary, because he wants to appease his buddies at Planned Parenthood – they make money off of every abortion. The only thing in his way is that pesky Constitution.

 

 

Commentary

Judge blames husband for his wife’s decision to murder their children

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This case was not a small, obscure case. This was actually a huge to-do in Canada. I waited for Barbara Kay to write about it in the National Post, because she is my favorite Canadian writer. She just defends men, and I really really like that.

Excerpt:

He just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Judge Alfred Stong, I mean, who presided over the Elaine Campione murder trial. Two days ago the jury brought in a decision of first-degree murder and a 25-year sentence against Elaine Campione, who freely confessed to drowning her two little girls in a bathtub, and who freely stated in a videotape that her motivation was hatred for, and revenge against her husband Leo.

The trial was over, But Judge Stong added comments after the verdict announcement suggesting that if had the power to overturn the jury’s verdict, he would. He said, “It is more than disconcerting to think that if Campione had not been so abused, so used and discarded as a person, her two daughters could still be alive…” Judge Stong was determined that even if it is Campione that gets locked up, Canadians would know that the real villain, morally speaking, is Leo Campione, the father of the dead girls (even though his alleged abusiveness was entirely based on his wife’s allegations and never proved), and it is actually the “discarded” Elaine Campione who is the victim.

Judge Stong felt such personal animus against the grieving father that he wanted to deny Mr. Campione and his parents their opportunity to read a victim-impact statement, standard practice even with mandatory- sentencing cases. He only relented under strong pressure from the prosecutor, who reminded the judge that the murdered girls had been “an extremely important part of [Mr. Campione’s] life.”

The judge’s attitude is shameful. But what can you expect from someone who has been trained – literally, judges take structured learning programs steeped in feminist myths and misandric conspiracy theories – that women are never abusive or violent unless they have been driven to it by an abusive male. Judge Stong just could not get it into his head – he alluded to the “unimaginable facts of this case” – that a woman could kill her children without a motivation involving a controlling male that somehow drove her to the act.

Why did it not occur to the judge to blame the CAS? The CAS was well aware of Elaine Campione’s quixotic and alarming history. They knew that Campione had exhibited many signs of psychosis, that she had been hospitalized in psychiatric wards, believed people were out to kill her and kidnap her children, and exhibiting such bizarre and/or negligent behaviours toward her girls that mother-substitutes, including her own mother, had to be constantly parachuted into her household if it was to function at all.

Yet the CAS decided the mother was the “safe parent.” Mr. Campione fought like a tiger and indebted himself trying to wrest control of the children from a woman he knew to be unstable and a potential risk to them, but nobody listened to him. Why? Because everyone licenced to deal with family issues on behalf of the state – social service agencies, police, lawyers and judges – are trained in the same mythology about women as Judge Stong was. They are all singing from the same hymn book: trust the woman, suspect the man, even when the evidence screams not to.

Let a man raise his hand once to a woman (or not, but simply be accused of doing so), and he will be whisked out of his children’s lives for a year at least. You can be sure that if the father of these children had exhibited one-hundredth of the myriad clues to Elaine Campione’s potential risk to her children’s safety, the CAS would have eaten him for breakfast.

The “system” didn’t fail Elaine Campione. The system failed those two little girls by enabling a woman’s psychosis at the expense of her children. There is nothing “unimaginable” in this case at all. It has all happened before.

Indeed. It happens all the time. Women murder their husbands and then plead that they were abused, with no evidence of abuse and no charges pressed at any point in the past. They spend a few months in therapy and then they are back on the street, perhaps with full custody of their children, (who swore in court there was no abuse committed by the father).

I feel so strange when I read Barbara Kay. Everyone else is always trying to shift the blame off of women and onto men, but not Barbara Kay. She must have had a lot of brothers and and a good father and made good decisions about boyfriends. Too bad there is only one Barbara Kay.