Dan Alonso emphasized to me the phrase “burden of transparency,” as if such a burden existed, because who isn’t making up new burdens these days? But the battle being fought yesterday was who had the “duty” to come forward with the warrant executed* at MAL. While Trump claimed to have the “warrant” that put his “beautiful home” under “siege,” he demanded that Attorney General Merrick Garland release the warrant and explain himself.

Of course, if there was anything in the warrant that Trump could use, no matter how hard the spin required, for his benefit, he would have plastered that sucker everywhere. Trump is not shy about anything that benefits him or any lie needed to justify it. But here he didn’t, which suggests that whatever he had either couldn’t be used in any way to help him or was pretty darn bad for him. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene discusses whether San Bernardino County, next to Los Angeles County and with 2 million residents, can decide to secede.

Can they do that? Why, yes, they can, but only with permission of the state from which they’re seceding as well as of the federal government. Article IV, section 3 of the U.S. Constitution provides, Continue reading →

The percentage of black Americans was 12.4% as of the 2020 census. Not all were descended from slaves, as some came later or are foreign born. The percentage of women is 50.1%, presumably making the percentage of black women in the United States 6.2%. So of the 331 million people in America, that leaves more than 20.5 million who are black women. While the percentage itself may be relatively small, 20 million is still quite a lot. Without that group, it would still take something exceptionally special to stand out, to stand apart from the rest.

Serena Williams has never let tennis define her.

Continue reading →

Much of the time, flipping between MSNBC, Fox and CNN would lead one to think each was from a different country, or perhaps universe, given what they deemed the big news story of the moment. Not so yesterday about dinner time, when each obsessed over a story that had never before been reported, the home of a former president of the United States had been raided pursuant to a search warrant.

Granted, Trump’s tenure was replete with “firsts,” from impeachments to insurrection to emoluments to his beautiful health care plan that’s going to be revealed right after infrastructure week. And now we can add search warrant to the list, which involves a series of decisions, from Main Justice deciding to seek it, a Magistrate Judge finding sufficient probable cause to issue it, and the FBI executing it. Anyone who clings to the belief that these decisions were made lightly or frivolously is foolish. You can bet that Mag parsed the application within an inch of its life to make sure it was bulletproof.

As of now, the rumor is that it related to the boxes of confidential documents that magically ended up at Mar-a-Lago, curiously abbreviated MAL, which bring Mal Maison to my mind. Why a search warrant is unknown. Did the government believe the return of the 15 boxes, which should never have been there or flushed down the toilet, burned in the fireplace or otherwise destroyed, was inadequate? Did it believe there would be a lack of cooperation with a request or subpoena? Did they suspect destruction?

But this was all about papers. Sure, secret papers, but so what? Without knowing what the papers were about, or to what nefarious purpose the papers would be put, they’re just papers. Nobody gets all worked up about papers. Plus, Trump being president, he was empowered to see the papers, and for better or worse, didn’t suddenly forget all he was while behind the Resolute Desk they day he got sent packing.

And they even broke into his safe, which of course they did because that’s what you do when executing a search warrant, even if it’s a mystery to Trump like pretty much everything else that happens in government, law or polite company. But some, other than Trump, haven’t take it well.

“I’ve seen enough,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, wrote in a statement that he posted online. “The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization.”

And the online nutjobs are doing their best.

This is, of course, irrelevant to any rational consideration of whether the raid was warranted factually or legally, but it’s the best they’ve got given the lack of facts or logical arguments.

If Trump committed a crime, then he is no less culpable than any other person. Neither he nor Mar-a-Lago is immune from search, from the constraints of the same legal system and procedures that apply to everyone else. Yes, it’s unprecedented, but then, so was Trump in how little he either knew, understood or respected the law.

On the other hand, if you’re going to kill the king (only a quote, chill out), you best not miss. If this is only about some secret papers that never found their way back to the archives, is that the sort of “crime” that will deliver a knock-out punch? Indeed, that may not even relate back to Trump, at least provably, as it’s hard to imagine him risking a papercut by touching a piece of paper, or reading it if it contained so many squiggly lines that it would give him a headache. So if there, it could be hard if not impossible to connect it directly to him anyway.

So why? Raiding MAL is akin to throwing a bomb into the other sides headquarters, like it or not. Not only does it have to be legally justified, which I’ve no doubt it is as nobody would have done something so inflammatory unless they had this sucker locked down tight as a drum, but justifiable, meaning that the end result would be accepted by enough of a nation that this first, this unprecedented raid, would not come off as pure political theater.

Flipping through the cable news last night, MSNBC was losing their heads over this being “it,” they finally got him. Fox was losing their heads over this, ironically, being the overthrow of democracy as the Dems were taking out Fearless Leader. And on CNN, even Elie Honig got the law right, proving there’s a first time for everything.

Where do we go from here?**

*Tuesday Talk rules apply.

**Save your space alien and Soros conspiracy theories for your pals at reddit s/tinfoil. TIA.

The obvious failing of the argument that a violent, dirty or otherwise bad cop is “one bad apple” is that they’re not alone. Others were there when they beat or killed someone, lied on an affidavit, a report or in court, and did nothing. They didn’t stop them. They didn’t correct them. They didn’t prevent them from doing harm. Whether they’re “just” as guilty as the perp with a shield who did the damage, they are by no means “good cops.”

But that fails to do a few important things beyond internal cop culture putting protecting the public ahead of shooting random beloved dogs without reason. Where is the line? When does the duty to prevent a fellow officer kick in? How to do it and how far it goes? Is it “say something” or pull your weapon on your fellow cop and start a gun fight? It has the potential for a good deal of harm as well. Continue reading →

It’s hard to explain why the no-knock warrant at Breonna Taylor’s home became a cause celebre. Not that it doesn’t deserve that degree of attention, but it’s hardly the first or only time its happened, that death resulted, that every wrong that resulted in her death was perpetrated by police. Yet this time, it stuck. It entered the public consciousness as well as that of the government to the extent that four cops who were involved in the application for the search warrant are now indicted.

Federal prosecutors accused three officers of knowingly including false information in an affidavit used to justify the raid and a fourth officer of firing blindly into Ms. Taylor’s apartment from outside, sending bullets flying into a unit next door where an unsuspecting family slept. Continue reading →

It all started five years ago, when passions at Oberlin College, always high, were reaching a new apex, and so Gibson’s Bakery became an easy target for condemnation when it called the police on a black student for shoplifting, inter alia, because he, well, shoplifted and inter alia’d. Not that committing the crime is a defense to accusations of racism at Oberlin, where the students, faculty and administration are very intelligent and woke.

All of which resulted in a judgment in favor of Gibson’s against Oberlin in the initial amount of almost $32 million in 2019. Oberlin appealed, as is its right, and lost. Unanimously. The appellate court issued a mandate to the trial court to execute the judgment. Oberlin sought leave to appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court, a discretionary appeal, which remains pending. As for the trial court, the motion to execute judgment is . . . who knows where. Continue reading →

A few unusual things happened in Kansas the other day. A lot of people turned out to vote on a weird day that didn’t usually involve a voting. They voted on a proposition worded backwards that could have been set forth clearly but wasn’t. The state that went 15 points for Trump, ruby red they called it on TV, went 18 point in favor of a “no” vote on the proposition. At the end of the day, people in Kansas rejected a change that would allow the banning of abortion.

Anti-abortion folks put on their best face, arguing that it proved that democracy works as people went to the polls, voted, and the people’s will be done. Yay! Except that was spin for the insipid, since it was true of Kansas but not elsewhere, where there was no proposition on a ballet, no single issue resolution to be decided directly by the voters and no way for the voters to express their views on the issue of abortion. So the contention that Kansas proved Alito right, that it was now in the trusted hands of the citizenry, was too facile by half. Continue reading →

A big part of President Biden’s green plan to electrify motor vehicles is to spend $5 billion to create a national network of direct current fast chargers. Not that there aren’t a dozen other issues still to be faced, but the perception is that the inability to get your EV charged so that you can drive on a trip further than its current distance capacity is a huge drawback to people buying electric vehicle.

The taxpayer-funded charging network is a cornerstone of President Biden’s ambition to electrify America’s transportation sector. Continue reading →

He went to trial. He was sentenced. And his sentence, 87 months, was on the low end of the guidelines, and far below the sentenced sought by the government, which asked for a terrorism enhancement that would have brought the sentence up to about 15 years. Judge Dabney Friedrich rejected the enhancement, and yet imposed a signiricantly longer sentence on Wesley Reffitt than others had received.

Was this wrong? Continue reading →