Category: Legal Stuff

Wait, What?

Crime, Legal Stuff, Two-Minute Hate

Okay, this one got my blood boiling:

A Texas man with a prior murder conviction is accused of running a “full-service drug operation” near several schools where authorities say surveillance showed what appeared to be teenagers purchasing narcotics and fentanyl pills disguised to look like ecstasy.

A convicted murderer was out free on the streets?  IN TEXAS?  How the fuck did that come about?  Why hadn’t he been executed, or at least still be behind bars for the rest of his worthless fucking life?

Also relevant:  whose signature is on the petition for release, and whose signature is on the release authorization?  (Yeah, we’ll probably never know that, because if we did, it could easily come about that the signatories would be dragged out of their house and beaten with iron bars and chains.  In any just society, that is.)

Read the whole thing to get the full horror of it.

Range time.

Difficult Issue

Legal Stuff

I’m faced with an uncomfortable dilemma here.

As any fule kno, when it comes to anti-Semitism, I’m with the Semites — lock, stock and barrel (if necessary).  I don’t think I have to prove that to anyone.

I am also steadfastly against the legal practice of attributing mindset and attitude (animus) towards crime:  murdering someone in cold blood is terrible;  whether the murderer shouts “Die, you Jewish bastard!” or “Bye bye, Jew bitch!” while committing the crime is in my mind irrelevant.  There’s no such thing as doubleplusterrible, in other words.  The crime should be sufficiently punished according to its severity.  (In the second example, are we going to add years onto the sentence for both misogyny and anti-Semitism?  Trebleplusterrible?)

Which is why this situation makes me profoundly uneasy:

Federal prosecutors have charged a man from the Bronx with hate crime offenses alleging he assaulted a security guard and a congregant in a racially motivated attack at a Manhattan synagogue last week.
Larry Montes was arrested following the alleged attack at Central Synagogue on Friday and was charged by New York State.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department charged him with two counts of committing hate crimes, each of which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment, and one count of damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury, which carries a maximum 20 years’ imprisonment.

I don’t know whether “damage to religious property resulting in bodily injury” carries a heavier sentence in NYfC than does “damage to [any] property resulting in bodily injury” — I’ll leave that for my Powdered Wig Readers to establish — but it shouldn’t.

Once again, I’m going to restate that my personal inclination is to offer additional protection to, say, synagogues;  but I’m not so sure that it should be legal policy.

But given the above, I am also curious to know whether the murder of a White person by a Black person shouting, “Die, cracker!” is punished with the same severity as that of a White person murdering a Black person while shouting “Die, nigger!”

See where all this leads?

Hence my discomfort with the whole issue.

Quote Of The Day

Legal Stuff, QOTD

From this guy (via Insty):

“There is Chief Justice Roberts, the institutionalist, who strategically guides the Supreme Court by not deciding more than is necessary to decide. Then there is Chief Justice Roberts, the institutionalist, who strategically guides the Supreme Court by deciding more than is necessary to decide. Which Roberts do we get in each case?”

Going by past decisions, we get the Roberts which is most likely to piss off conservatives in that particular case.

Interesting, But Irrelevant

Gummint, Legal Stuff, Rights

Before you read what I say next, you first need to read this article:

The Department of Justice has officially walked away from its appeal in one of the most important Second Amendment cases involving ordinary federal property. That’s a major win, but gun owners should understand the ruling before changing how they carry.

On July 23, 2026, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit dismissed the government’s appeal in Firearms Policy Coalition v. Blanche at the government’s request. Chief Judge Reed O’Connor’s permanent injunction therefore remains in place.

The federal government may not enforce the challenged post office firearm restrictions against the individual plaintiffs or any present or future member of the Firearms Policy Coalition, or the Second Amendment Foundation, when they possess or carry firearms in an “ordinary” United States Post Office or on surrounding postal property covered by the order.

The federal ban hasn’t disappeared for everyone. Every post office isn’t covered, and other laws still matter.

Etc., etc.

Fine, all good stuff, but…I haven’t set foot inside a Post Office building for about five years, so it’s irrelevant to me.

Read more

No Great Loss

Legal Stuff, Rights

So DJT lost his Birthright Citizenship case at the Supremes.

I for one am neither surprised nor even that upset about it.  Here’s why.

I agree that the whole idea is fatally flawed:  that the principle of just being born on U.S. soil makes one an automatic citizen is without equal in just about every other country in the world, where the nationality of one or both parents (if one, usually that of the mother) is the sole determinant of the baby’s citizenship.

And yes, I also know that the 14th Amendment had an entirely different purpose when it was originally passed, and has no proper justification today.  But it’s still a Constitutional Amendment, and said document gives very explicit terms under which an Amendment can be altered or abolished;  and that process has nothing to do with the sitting President.  It remains, quite rightly, the proper preserve of the Congress and of the states, with those pesky two-thirds majorities required at every step of the way.

As such, I’m not comfortable with any POTUS trying to abolish parts of the Constitution by fiat or executive order, for obvious reasons, and that’s why I’m not upset about the Supremes’ decision.  We have enough trouble with tinpot politicians deciding that the Constitution — or the part(s) they don’t agree with, anyway (hello, Second Amendment) — can be bypassed with some local law or regulation, and I’m of the firm belief that these people and/or governments need to have their pee-pees whacked, and hard, every time they try to do that.

If we want to end birthright citizenship, we need to do it the difficult way, the way the Founders intended it.  That may make it impossible — I hope not — but sometimes the principle is just more important than the action.

No Authority

Immigration, Legal Stuff

I’m getting really sick of the judiciary usurping the Constitutional power of the POTUS.  Here’s the latest little tick on the hide of our republic:

A federal judge, appointed by former President Barack Obama, has blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from halting legal immigration and asylum applications from nearly 40 countries deemed “high-risk” by officials.

“Each of the Challenged Policies — the Global Asylum Hold Policy, the Benefits Hold Policy, the Comprehensive Re-Review Policy, and the Country-Specific Factors Policy — are declared unlawful and are hereby VACATED and SET ASIDE,” McConnell wrote in his ruling.

See, I thought that we Americans — and most especially the President — could absolutely decide who and who not to allow into the country.

Needless to say, the aforementioned judge is not only an Obama pustule, but also resident in Rhode Island (as if we needed any more proof of his Leftism).

I’m curious as to what grounds this creep used to classify all those policies as “illegal” — I’m hoping that one of my Powdered Wig Readers will be sufficiently interested to cast an eye on the actual ruling and decipher it for us.

Also just out of curiosity:  how many federal judges has Trump appointed in the past eighteen months?  Because that seems to be the only (legal) way we can overwhelm assholes like this from subverting the Executive.

Note that I’m not advocating this:

… although some might.