Category Archives: Transhuman News

Here is news you probably cant use: a new Texas Law Review analysis by University of Chicago law professor William Baude concludesthat Justice Hugo Black, who served on the Supreme Court from 1937 to 1971, was unconstitutionally appointed.

The relevant text is the Constitutions Article I, Section 6, which says No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been increased during such time.

At the time of his appointment Black was serving as a senator from Alabamaas part of a Congress that had enacted new retirement benefits for Justices, and while his backers argued that the clause did not apply to bar his nomination, Baude concludes that it probably did. One litigant before the high court challenged Blacks right to serve, but the Court chose to sidestep the merits of that claim by ruling against its standing, and the controversydied.

All of this might seem purely academic. At this remove there would be no way to unscramble the legal omelet as to Blacks jurisprudential contributions, even were there a will. (Despite an unpromising start, the Alabaman eventually showed a libertarian streak on many Bill of Rights issues.)

But the issue is not quite so remote as that, because more than a few contemporary commentators have flirted in some cases more than flirted with claims that the makeup of the present Supreme Court is illegitimate.

After the Senate leadership refused to hold hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland, the editorial board of the New York Times repeatedly declared the seat of the late Justice Scalia to have been stolen, and then-Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) said of eventual nominee Neil Gorsuch that hes not there properly.

The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the seat vacated by Justice Anthony Kennedy brought renewed attack, with former Attorney General Eric Holder declaring that the legitimacy of the Supreme Court can justifiably be questioned and other high-profile figures taking a similar line.

Law professor Erwin Chemerinsky raised the ante with this remarkable assertion in The American Prospect: each of the five conservative justices Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh or someone like him (emphasis added) came on to the Court in a manner that lacks legitimacy. Perhaps at some point it will lead to open defiance of the Court.

Other commentators were happy to take up the exciting theme that future Court opinions written by, or decided by the votes of, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and perhaps other Justices might meet with open defiance or resistance from a future Democratic president, from state officials, or from people marching in the streets.

What can the Supreme Court do? Send its tiny police force to storm the White House? wrote Mark Joseph Stern at Slate. Libertarian-minded law professor Ilya Somin, who does not welcome the efforts to de-legitimize the Court or promote defiance of its rulings, nonetheless found them worth taking seriously enough to analyze at length last year.

Baudes research may provide a bit of reassurance in this respect. The challenge to the legitimacy of Blacks seat fizzled in part because it gained little headway with the public, but much more because the Courts other Justices welcomed Black aboard.

Most of the scenarios in which triumphant Democrats in 2021 or 2022 defy Supreme Court rulings are difficult to reconcile with the reality that the Courts liberal Justices have, to all appearances, been entirely content to regard Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as legitimate colleagues, and would, themselves, neither counsel nor welcome defiance of Court rulings. As I wrote last year, "the federal courts are not as polarized and tribal as much of the higher political class and punditry at nomination time."

Baude puts it this way at the conclusion of his article: the real source of constitutional settlement in our system is not always judicial decision, but sometimes sheer practice.

View post:
Disputed Appointments and the Supreme Court's Legitimacy, in 1937 and Today - Cato Institute

Gene Strandberg, Gilpin County. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David, was a founding member of the John Birch Society, a right-fringe group that spouted conspiracy theories about communist subversion plots in the U.S. These two sons would organize and lead the real subversion one generation later.

Fred helped Stalins engineers build 15 oil refineries, establishing Russias oil industry. The American businessman and Nazi sympathizer William Rhodes Davis hired Winkler-Koch Engineering to supply the plans and oversee construction of a huge oil refinery in Hitlers Germany, one of the few in Germany that could produce high octane fuel for fighter planes.

The John Birch Society tried to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren, after SCOTUS desegregated public schools. In 1968 Fred wanted a Birch Society member to run for President on a platform of segregation and the abolition of all income taxes.

In 1966 Charles was an executive and trustee of the Freedom School, founded in 1956 in Larkspur, Colorado by Robert LeFevre, who promoted the abolition of the state. The school opposed anti-poverty programs, Medicare, and forced integration. It taught that robber barons were heroes, taxes were theft, slavery was less evil than a military draft, and the Bill of Rights should consist of only one right, the right to own property.

According to a 1982 Bill Koch deposition, Charles led his brothers David and Bill in an attempt to blackmail his brother Fred out of his share of the family business by threatening to tell their father that Fred was gay, resulting in Freds disinheritance. The plot failed, because Fred wasnt gay, and he wouldnt give in. Exposing his character, Charles gave Fred so little notice of their mothers death that Fred could not get home in time for her funeral.

In 1974 Charles told a group of businessmen, The development of a well-financed cadre of sound proponents of the free enterprise philosophy is the most critical need facing us today. In 1976 the Center for Libertarian Studies was founded with $65,000 from Charles Koch. At a Center conference Charles suggested the movement attract young people because, that was the only group open to a radically different social philosophy. Charles was supported by Leonard Liggio, a libertarian historian with the Kochs Institute for Humane Studies from 1974-1998. He lauded the Nazis youth movement and said libertarians should organize university students to create group identity.

Former Birch Society member George Pearson presented a paper that was adopted for their higher education indoctrination grants. It proposed funding private institutions within universities, where they could influence who would be teaching and what would be taught. Pearson said it would be essential to use ambiguous and misleading names and hide the programs true agenda.

In a 1978 article for Libertarian Review, Charles wrote, Ideas do not spread by themselves; they spread only through people, which means we need a movement. Our movement must destroy the current statist paradigm.

In 1980 they tried through election, with David Koch as the Libertarian candidate for Vice-President. The platform called for the abolition of: the Federal Election Commission and all campaign finance laws; Medicare, Medicaid and all other government health care programs; Social Security; all income taxes and corporate taxes; the Securities and Exchange Commission; the Environmental Protection Agency; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Central Intelligence Agency; the Food and Drug Administration, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; minimum wage laws; child labor laws; seat belt laws; public schools and all welfare programs for the poor. The parallel with ALEC and the current Republican goals is not coincidental.

Even arch-conservative William F. Buckley called their views anarcho-totalitarianism. They got only 1% of the vote, so they decided infiltrating universities, establishing think tanks, and co-opting the Republican Party was a better way to destroy the prevalent statist paradigm.

In the 1980s their disciple Richard Fink wrote The Structure of Social Change, which Fink described as a three-phase takeover of American politics. Phase 1 is an investment in academia, where the ideas to achieve their goals would be born.

Phase 2 is the establishment of think tanks to turn the ideas into palatable policies.

Phase 3 is forming front groups (promoted as grassroots), to influence officeholders to enact the policies.

If the Kochs were truly free market libertarians, they would have opposed the government bailout during the financial collapse, which the House of Representatives did reject. After the stock market dropped 777 points in one day, the Kochs and their think tank, Americans for Prosperity, scrapped ideology in favor of money. Two days later a list of conservative groups now supporting the bailout was shown to Republican legislators. The Senate soon passed TARP with overwhelming bipartisan support.

By 2009 Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Thomas were speakers at the Koch donor summits, which are secretive to the point of paranoia. Attendees are told to destroy all document copies, not to post any related information online, and to keep notes and materials secure. Names of guests and agendas are kept secret, sign up is done through Koch staff, not resort staff, name tags are required, all electronic devices are confiscated before sessions, and white-noise emitting loudspeakers are placed facing outward to defeat any eavesdropping attempts. One would think they had something to hide. Sources include politico.com January 2016, the New Yorker August 30, 2010, and prwatch.org January, 2016

Next time: secret money

(Originally published in the December 5, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)

More:
Meet the Kochs - The Mountain -Ear

Im not one of those people who consider billboards a blight on the landscape, and as will become clear in a moment, this isnt actually a column about billboards. At least not entirely.

So, lets talk about why Mount Pleasant and Charleston County need to hold firm against a local companys requests to digitize six old-fashioned billboards in the town and replace a digital billboard near the county landfill in West Ashley with a smaller but much more visible one.

The conversation begins as most questions of public policy in South Carolina do at the Statehouse.

The year is 2006, Mark Sanford is governor, and the General Assembly has just passed the S.C. Landowner and Advertising Protection and Property Valuation Act, declaring that local governments may require the removal of billboards only if the ordinance requires the payment of just compensation to the sign owners.

The bill masqueraded as part of the regulatory takings movement, which is built on the idea that the U.S. Constitutions prohibition on taking private property for public use without just compensation should apply to regulations that limit the use of property.

Since the courts dont usually buy that reading, libertarians support laws that require payments when a state says people cant erode the neighbors property by erecting a new seawall. Or a county says people cant give children an education they dont need by opening a strip club next to an elementary school. Or a city tries to prevent flooding by limiting how much fill dirt a builder can use to elevate property.

But this bill wasnt a libertarian effort to rein in regulatory takings. It was just the opposite: an attempt to pick winners and losers. And it was so extreme that even our most libertarian governor ever couldnt swallow it.

The bill, Mr. Sanford wrote in his veto message, put billboard owners in a position superior to homeowners, farmers and other businesses. It did this in two ways.

First, it required owners whose billboards were forced down to be paid as if the signs were real estate, which increases in value, even though billboards are taxed like personal property, which decreases in value. When the government actually takes the property of homeowners, farmers and other businesses, through eminent domain, the payment is based on the valuation system on which its taxed.

Second, when government actually takes your land, you get paid what its worth. Billboard owners would get paid based on the amount of money their signs would generate over years or even decades to come. Thats like saying if the government makes a food truck move to a new location, it has to pay the owner all the money she would have made from the food truck staying in its old location for the next 10 or 20 years.

The Legislature quickly overrode Mr. Sanfords veto, and the bill became law, making it extraordinarily expensive to remove billboards.

Since the cost is based on the potential revenue a particular billboard could generate, it costs far more to remove a luminous electronic sign that changes several times a minute than an old-fashioned one-message-a-month billboard. So no rational local government would ever deliberately allow a digital billboard within its jurisdiction.

It might seem ironic, poetically just in fact, that in its overwrought attempt to please the billboard industry, the Legislature passed a law that encourages cities and counties to do everything they can to prevent new billboards or new billboard technology, in order to avoid getting stuck with them for eternity. In fact, its a predictable result of what seems at times like the Legislatures single-minded fixation on asserting itself as the only real power in the state of South Carolina.

This fixation means keeping the states executive branch divided among seven statewide elected officials, and keeping two-thirds of the government beyond the governors control. It means keeping the courts on a short leash. It means limiting the ability of cities and counties to raise taxes and constantly dreaming up new things to tell them they cant do. Or must do. Like paying to remove billboards something the Legislature does not require of the state Transportation Department or other state agencies. Since, even though the governor ostensibly controls a few of them, everybody knows that state agencies all work at the bidding of the Legislature.

It also means South Carolinians get stuck with one-size-fits-all government that caters to the special-interest groups with the best lobbyists in Columbia, while ordinary citizens are back home lobbying their local governments for changes those governments arent allowed to make. Because theres only room for one power in this state, and its located on the second floor of the Statehouse.

Cindi Ross Scoppe is an editorial writer for The Post and Courier. Contact her at cscoppe@postandcourier.com or follow her on Facebook or Twitter @cindiscoppe.

View original post here:
Scoppe: How SC law made it crazy for cities, counties to give any ground to billboards - Charleston Post Courier