Judges may have views on which policy approach is better or fairer. But judges are not appointed to make those policy calls. We merely ensure that the Executive Branch acts within the confines of the Constitution and federal statutes.
Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanaugh
Now compare that to Sotomayor:
We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.
This is a Sunday, and I am sleeping in. So I thought I would give you a repost of something that I said more than ten years ago.
Ignorance of the law, the judges and cops are fond of saying, is no excuse. In 1925, this is what a complete copy of all Federal laws looked like:
That one volume represents all of the laws that were passed by Congress in the first 150 years of this country’s existence. That Federal Law library has now expanded immensely.
What was one volume in 1925 expanded to become 22 volumes just 90 years later. That isn’t all, though. There is also the United States Code:
The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves, which include things like rape, murder, or theft. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves, such as owning a machine gun made after 1986, when owning one made in 1985 is perfectly legal.
In 1982, the Justice Department tried to determine the total number of criminal laws. In a project that lasted two years, the Department compiled a list of approximately 3,000 criminal offenses. This effort, headed by Ronald Gainer, a Justice Department official, is considered the most exhaustive attempt to count the number of federal criminal laws. In a Wall Street Journal article about this project, “this effort came as part of a long and ultimately failed campaign to persuade Congress to revise the criminal code, which by the 1980s was scattered among 50 titles and 23,000 pages of federal law.” Or as Mr. Gainer characterized this fruitless project: “[y]ou will have died and [been] resurrected three times,” and still not have an answer to this question.
So you see, even the Justice Department of the US government is not sure of how many laws there are, yet each and every one of us is responsible for knowing every one of them, along with the court cases that modify and define them, upon penalty of prison.
That isn’t all. The laws passed by Congress are just the beginning. There are also several dozen Federal bureaus that have had the power to write laws since 1940. The laws that they write are called regulations, and they are found in the Code of Federal Regulations:
In 2013, the Code of Federal Regulations numbered over 175,000 pages. Only a fraction of those pages involved regulations based on something spelled out in legislation. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.
Then there are all of the court cases that decide what these laws all mean and how they will be applied. Here is a picture of the SCOTUS cases from 1790 to 1956:
Add in all of the cases from your Federal District and Circuit, plus all state and local courts, and you have quite a bit of reading to do.
The result of all of this is that each and every one of us is responsible for reading, understanding and following over 750,000 pages of laws, regulations, and court decisions- with complete understanding. If one were to begin studying these laws at age 12 and you read 50 pages per day, by age 53, you would finally have read all of them. The only problem is that, at the current rate, the government would have added another 500,000 pages of laws, and 28 years of reading to your quest. You would spend 75 years of your life trying to understand the laws that you must obey.
Remember, though: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. If you are spraying insect killer on some ants, and the can label says spray from 6 inches away, but you spray from 8 inches, you are a Federal criminal. If you are buying a gun, and you live in Florida, you had better use the abbreviation of FL as your address, because using the old abbreviation of FLA is a felony and can land you in prison.
Why is this happening? Ayn Rand gives us an insight into this:
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Truer words were never spoken.
Read this guy’s perspective on rights:
Ludwig believes that all rights come from government. That’s patently ridiculous. If I were alone on an island, I would have the right to speech. I could keep and bear arms. The only way that I can lose those rights is if someone takes them from me.
That’s why government morally exists- to keep others from taking your rights. This is why we have a Constitution that lays out the powers of government- what that government CAN do, and what it CAN NEVER do.
Not so in Mr. Ludwig’s world. He believes that, unless there is a government present that tells me I may speak, I simply don’t have the right to do so. That’s fundamentally out of line with the ideas of the Founders of this Nation, whose thoughts on this were based upon the philosophies of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.
This is where the left gets the idea that food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare are human rights. They are not, and they never have been. If I have a human right to any of those things, it follows that I can force someone to provide it to me.
Enter a law forcing someone to pick my cotton, my oranges, build my houses, and perform free healthcare services. Even enacting price controls is a form of slavery, and to claim otherwise is exactly the same thing as saying “if I only put the tip in, it isn’t rape.”
The saddest part of this, is that Mr. Ludwig is an attorney. His college failed him when they failed to teach the basics of the Constitution and its underlying philosophy.
Proving that the courts are a partisan mess, a Federal Judge has just ruled that Trump’s use of the National Guard was a violation of Posse Comitatus. Where was all of this judicial activism 4 years ago?
Justice Jackson, in a recent dissent, complained that SCOTUS is favoring only rich litigants. That’s especially ironic, considering that she has received $3 million for writing her autobiography. Does anyone really think that the publisher will sell enough copies to pay that? Of course not, this is how payoffs are done:
An investor wants to pay off a high-ranking political figure. They make a deal that, on its face, looks like a legitimate business deal. That’s how the Cattle Futures market worked for the Clintons, it’s how the paintings for Hunter Biden sold for so much, it’s how Chelsea Clinton was being paid $300,000 a year by NBC while she was still in college, and how she had a net worth of $30 million before she was 40 years old.
Both parties are corrupt. They are stealing us blind.
I just finished reading the book Blowback: The Untold Story of the FBI and the Oklahoma City Bombing. The book is filled with documented links between the FBI, the CIA, Secret Service, and the ATF. The entire story of the OKC bombing is filled with witnesses who committed suicide in front of malfunctioning video cameras, witnesses disappearing so completely that their SSN was deleted, missing documents, and other odd “coincidences” that it seems almost incredible.
There is missing video, supposedly hidden because it is classified, of multiple people exiting the Ryder truck just before the bomb went off. Body parts that don’t match any DNA of any known victim. Mystery fingerprints that couldn’t be matched to any known suspect. A second Ryder truck. FBI agents seen trying to use radio direction finders in the OKC area in the lead up to the explosion- the author alleges that they had a tracking device on the truck, but couldn’t locate it.
The names that are part of the investigation come up again and again- Larry Potts, Merrick Garland, and other familiar names. At least 6 witnesses either disappeared or were killed. There were explosives experts in town on mysterious orders, including Air Force EOD, but the logbooks are unexpectedly missing. At least one alleged CIA operative fled to Germany. It’s hinted in the book that the Southern Poverty Law center is an FBI front operation for hiding the sources of illegally obtained evidence and intelligence.
After reading it, I am firmly convinced that McVeigh was up to his ears in this bombing. However, I also think that there were numerous other players, and some of those players were government assets. If even half of this book is true, the OKC bombing is proof that the Federal Intelligence community has been pulling the strings of all sorts of lone wolf attacks.
As I read the book, I thought about the mysterious ties to the Vegas shooting, COVID, Antifa, the 2020 election, and the Epstein “suicide.” It’s enough to make you question everything and begin to feel paranoid.
The book could stand to be better organized, and you almost need to take notes in order to follow all of the details, and this makes it a long, difficult read. There are enough ties and names that are named that it is difficult to follow and connect the dots. Even with that, this is a story that would read like a cheap novel with an implausible plot if it weren’t for the events that have happened since 2019, and I still recommend reading this book.
The disclaimer: I don’t advertise, and receive nothing for my reviews or articles. I don’t think that I ever will. I have no relationship with any products, companies, or vendors that I review here, other than being a customer. If I ever *DO* have a financial interest, I will disclose it. Otherwise, I pay what you would pay. No discounts or other incentives here. I only post these things because I think that my readers would be interested.
There is a case in NY that is important, where the U.S. Northern District Court ruled in Higbie v. James that New York’s concealed carry laws are violating the Second Amendment rights of nonresidents by making it nearly impossible for nonresidents to obtain a concealed carry license. It was sponsored by Gun Owners of America.
The plaintiffs in this case argued that they each have firearms licenses which permit them to bear arms in public in their respective states “and across most of the country.” They also claimed that New York does not permit them to carry their firearms while they are in New York solely because they are not residents or employees of the State. They argued that New York’s licensing scheme is an extreme outlier among the states because at least 27 states do not even require a permit to carry a concealed firearm in public, while the vast majority that do require permits will issue permits to out-of-state residents. The US District Court agreed, and struck down NY’s complicated and overly onerous regulations as being unconstitutionally designed to deny nonresidents their constitutional rights under the Second Amendment. The court ruled that state lawmakers can not restrict concealed carry licenses to maintaining residency, property ownership, or business interests in the state.
The tyrants of NY government attempted to make the argument that their licensing measures were not entirely prohibitive for non-residential applicants, saying certain guidelines allowed for those who owned habitable property or a business stake in the state to apply for such a license. In essence, they claimed that, because they allowed one nonresident to have a permit, this excused violating the rights of the rest of them. In essence, they are relying on the “token negro” defense. The court rightly called them out on this.
Look, this case will have no direct impact upon the reality of CCW for nonresidents in New York. We all know that, because those ass clowns will simply find another way to violate the rights of US citizens while bleating loudly about the rights of illegal immigrants to take a dump on New York city streets. Even those residents who have permits nominally have to have criminal background checks, a mental health professional sign off on the permit, and multiple references.
The reality is that New York’s scheme is all about who you know and political payoffs when deciding who gets a permit. I know someone who has a New York carry permit. He also has a state police license plate, which starts with 1SP. He began telling me that the state police union had a series of special plates made, and they are only available through Hamilton county in New York. He claimed that this plate was given to “friends” of the police union, and the lower the number was that followed the 1SP, the more important you were to the cops. He said that this plate routinely gets him out of traffic and parking tickets. Not because he paid for it, nor did he jump through hoops. It’s because he knows someone, or as he puts it, “I’ve got a guy.”
This sounded like a lload of BS to me, so I activated my Google skills. What I found was that handing out special plate numbers is a common practice in New York. and I quote:
To some recipients, special license plates issued by the Saratoga County clerk are a symbol of county pride. For others, they are an inherited treasure passed on by a family member or loved one.
For many who have them — a list that ranges from county workers to state Supreme Court judges — an unwritten rule is that a lower number may indicate a special driver.
Indeed, an examination of the recipients of the special plates, which carry an “SP” prefix, shows they are coveted by a select group of government employees and elected officials, including judges, prosecutors, town supervisors, attorneys and political party leaders. The spouses and children of those people are also among those, estimated to be in the hundreds, who have the plates.
Now the SP prefix goes to Saratoga County. The 1SP prefix, which I can find little about, belongs to the State Police. This is how things are done there, from Concealed Weapons Permits to License plates, corruption and special favors rule the day.
They claim it is for “county pride” but I am sure there are not that many people who believe that. This is a way of announcing to the police that you are politically well connected and should receive special treatment.
The real impact of the Higbie case is that the noose is closing. The era of violating people’s rights to bear arms is closing through the courts. That doesn’t mean the fight os over. Evil, corruption, and man’s quest for power to rule others never ceases. That’s why the fight can’t either.
Donate to the GOA or the FPC. They are doing the work of patriots.
The left is running around saying that it is illegal for ICE to arrest people unless they have a warrant. The idiots are injecting themselves into the situation by confronting police and demanding to “see the warrant.”
Stop being morons.
This woman is upset that the FHP arrested an illegal who was driving with no license, no insurance, and unregistered tags. She feels that the cops should have just given him a ticket and let him go.
I saw this situation many times, back when I was a fire paramedic. This is what they do- The scam here is that an illegal buys a van with a valid plate from someone who is legal. They leave the tags on the vehicle, because they can’t get new tags or insurance without a valid license. They use the vehicle until it either gets impounded or in an accident. The driver they hit is left holding the bag, unless they have uninsured motorist coverage.
When they get in an accident, they give the fake name. They get a ticket for canceled tags, for the accident, for no insurance and for no driver’s license. The tickets require a court appearance. They don’t show up for the hearing, and an arrest warrant is issued, but they already have a new identity and vehicle. They are never seen again.
I know, because I saw plenty of people fall victim to that scam. It also happened to me once: July 4, 2002. I was rear ended by an illegal, he had no insurance, and he never showed up to court. The new bumper for my truck cost me $1000 that I had to pay myself. That’s why I still carry uninsured motorist coverage to this day.
She is literally defending a criminal.
Cop takes cover behind a woman. I applaud shooting the robber, but any man (especially a cop) who takes cover behind women and children is a pussy.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had to say this. Remember the time cops in South Florida hid behind cars filled with soccer moms?
EDIT: Comments here have crossed the line and are generating more heat than light. With that, comments on this post are now closed.