September 28, 2020

The "Norms" Of Federal Court Nominations: John Marshall And Marbury v. Madison

September 28, 2020/ Francis Menton

You have probably read over the past several days, maybe 100 times, that President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell are violating the “norms” of Supreme Court appointments by nominating, and planning to confirm, Judge Amy Coney Barrett to fill the current Supreme Court vacancy, with just 38 days remaining before the upcoming presidential election.
If you think there might be something to the theory that “norms” are being violated, you might be interested in the history of the federal court nominations and confirmations of 1801.
Among other things, this history is what led to the famous case of Marbury v. Madison.
Marbury v. Madison, decided in 1803, is likely the most famous of all Supreme Court cases. . . .

September 25, 2020

More Efforts By Democrats To Make The People Poorer

September 25, 2020/ Francis Menton

When did it become a goal of Democrats and “progressives” to make the people poorer?
I seem to remember a time many years ago when fully bi-partisan government policy in the U.S. was universally directed toward making the people wealthier.
Private investment in new businesses was welcomed everywhere, and especially if the investment involved nice clean white collar jobs and no substantial pollution. Also, when governments got involved in regulation of business, the general idea was to keep consumer costs low, for example in the regulation of electricity and transportation prices. You could dispute whether the means selected were the most effective to make the people better off, but whether the measures actually worked or not, at least that was the goal.
Somewhere along the line, something changed. . . .

September 24, 2020

September 24, 2020/ Francis Menton

When you read something, you generally notice the things that the writer explicitly mentions, while you rarely take note of what the writer omits.
So at first it’s easy to skip over the omission, in nearly all reporting about violent crime in the United States, of the information about the race of the perpetrator or suspect.
Still, if you read enough about this subject of violent crime, at some point you just can’t help noticing this universal omission. Indeed, should you once start to look for information on the race of criminals or suspected criminals, you will quickly realize that something weird is going on.
Is it appropriate that this subject of race of perpetrators almost never gets mentioned? . . .

September 22, 2020

September 22, 2020/ Francis Menton

In a post several weeks ago, I discussed a fact that I suspect most readers found astonishing: the U.S. Census up to now has been counting illegal aliens as part of the “population” for purposes of determining representation in Congress.
The occasion for the post was that President Trump had just issued a Memorandum directing the Census Bureau to inform him of how many illegal aliens are included in the count for 2020 that is currently ongoing, so that he could attempt to have those persons excluded from the population base used for congressional apportionment.
Although you might think that it is intuitively obvious that illegal aliens should not get congressional representation, prior to Trump raising the issue there was a reasonable position that there had not been any definitive court decision one way or the other. So the Census Bureau, naturally, had just gone ahead and counted the illegals.
Needless to say, all the usual suspects — led in this case by New York’s Attorney General Letitia James — immediately brought suit to enjoin everything about the President’s Memorandum. . . .

September 19, 2020

September 19, 2020/ Francis Menton

It’s not my way to speak ill of the dead, so let me say a couple of positive things about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

She clearly had a very strong work ethic.
She generally dealt civilly and respectfully with her ideological opponents. In this respect she was the polar opposite of almost all of today’s ideological left. I do not doubt that her long friendship with Justice Scalia was deep and genuine.

Those things said, Justice Ginsburg was not my idea of what a Supreme Court justice should be. Indeed, in many respects, she was the opposite. . . .

September 17, 2020

September 17, 2020/ Francis Menton

In last Saturday’s post, I provided a quote from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy that encapsulated the gist of the scientific method: “[T]heories that are permanently immunized from falsification . . . can no longer be classified as scientific.”
That seems simple enough. Surely we ought to be able to keep track of that one basic precept to distinguish the science from the non-science.
In practice, it turns out to be not so simple at all. To illustrate, let’s consider the latest from the climate apocalypse movement.
For today I’ll put aside the grand foretellings of planet-wide climate doom, and focus instead on just one little question: whether the current wave of wildfires in the West has been caused by human-induced global warming, in turn resulting from the burning of fossil fuels.