The tit-for-tat messaging has become a ubiquitous tool of divisive politics. They did it to us so we’re going to do it to them and see how they like it. Hah! Sure, it’s infantile and invokes the logical fallacy of tu quoque, but it plays well with the perpetually outraged. It’s one thing to use this weapon for disputes that don’t involve constitutional rights, and another thing entirely to do what Tennessee is trying to do, trade off the right to vote with the right to keep and bear arms.

Tennessee, which imposes notoriously demanding requirements on residents with felony records seeking restoration of their voting rights, recently added a new wrinkle: Before supplicants who have not managed to obtain a pardon are allowed to vote again, they have to successfully seek restoration of their gun rights, a task that is complicated by the interaction between state and federal law. Given the difficulty of obtaining relief from the federal gun ban for people convicted of crimes punishable by more than a year of incarceration, this requirement would be prohibitive in practice.

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Not to question the wisdom of imposing a sentence of 100 hours of community service to be used telling people about the dangers of demon weed, plus two years probation, but by any measure, it was a remarkably lenient sentence for stabbing a man to death. And, not to speculate, had the killer been a man and the victim been a woman, it has all the makings of another Brock Turner case.

And the rationale for such leniency was a second hit on a bong.

Spejcher testified that she asked him for a hit from the bong. He prepared it for her and she inhaled. All she felt, she told the court, was ‘burning and coughing’. Continue reading →

My old buddy and fellow curmudgeon, Mark Herrmann, ponders whether there is any tactical benefit to the antics on display at the two current civil trials against Donald Trump. This is not the way most clients behave, or are instructed to behave by their lawyers, if they have any desire to obtain the best possible outcome.

Lawyers know that judges matter, so lawyers handle judges with kid gloves. Lawyers laugh at judges’ jokes. Lawyers tell their witnesses to obey the judge’s instructions: “Don’t fight with the judge. Do whatever the judge says. If the judge asks you a question, don’t evade; answer it directly. The jury will be watching; you cannot win a fight with the judge.” Continue reading →

The holding was that state legislatures had the authority to punish and remove “faithless electors,” the people who were putatively “elected” to the electoral college to fulfill the will of the people of a state by casting their ballot for the candidate chosen by their state’s voters. In 2016, there was a push to get electors to be something other than conduits for the voters, but to vote for the “right” candidate.

The cases that led to the decision involved electors in 2016 who had voted contrary to their pledge. Recognizing that Hillary Clinton, the winner of the popular vote, would not be elected president, these electors worked to rally enough Republican and Democratic electors to vote for a Republican candidate other than Donald Trump, thus throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Continue reading →

The medical profession has not been immune from criticism about its treatment of patients based on race. Not being a physician, I have no personal knowledge of whether this is accurate. None of the physicians with whom I’m friends tell me they see it, but the stats suggest that medical outcomes differ significantly by race, so it’s hard to believe that judgment calls don’t play some role. And not a good role.

As a result, medical schools have emphasized DEI, some to the point of it being more important than medical knowledge and skills, which isn’t likely to do any patient, regardless of race, much good. If your doc respectfully uses your pronouns as you suffer with pain, no one is saved. And that metamorphosis is now coming to hospitals, like Milford Regional Medical Center in Massachusetts, which has established a policy of refusing to treat patients whose tone offends them. Continue reading →

Even though there are some monumental pressing problems facing American society at large, and Congress in particular, there is nothing wrong with any individual congressman proposing a law that addresses his personal peccadillo. After all, there is really never a good time to raise some truly petty issue, so now is as good as any. So who can blame California Rep. Ted Lieu for proposing the Glue Trap Prohibition Act of 2024 (“GTPA”) now, as wars are being fought, government is facing imminent shutdown and student debt is being shifted from borrowers to taxpayers?

But that doesn’t make it a good law. It doesn’t even make it a law within Congress’ ambit. It is one weird law, prohibiting both the sale and use of glue traps. If you somehow avoided your three felonies a day, this could swiftly up the ante. Continue reading →

Prefatory Note: the following are stories I made up out of whole cloth, just like last week. Again, the names and places have been changed to protect the innocent and anyone else I think doesn’t need a good cancelling.

THREE

The twins’ mother drops them off at 10 am before the shit hit the fan.

“They’re your problem for the rest of the week,” she said with a smile as she pushed them into my house with their miniature suitcases before riding off in a Camaro with her current boy toy, Todd. Continue reading →

You can take issue with some particular examples used by David Books, as readers did in the comments because Brooks made the grievous error of mentioning health care and Trump, thus invoking the activists for single payer health care and anti-deplorables, but his point was about the cost of bureaucracy on people’s now-crushed souls.

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.” Continue reading →

The concept made sense back in 1984, when the Supreme Court held in Chevron v. Nat. Res. Def. Council, that courts should defer to the expertise of administrative agencies in their reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws. After all, Congress was enacting broad laws affecting highly technical aspects of industries and required a good deal of latitude on the part of agencies to use a level of knowledge and experience that judges didn’t possess and addressed the constant if routine application of law to changing circumstances. Continue reading →

I’ll be going south to Wilmington, North Carolina, for Dr. SJ’s mother’s funeral, the last of either of our parents to survive. Be back on Thursday. No need for condolences. Thanks.