Situational liberties

A few months ago, I posted about Slate legal writer Dahlia Lithwick's hysteria-infused take on the freedom of assembly as it applied to protests by what she called "fringe groups" opposed to state-ordered lockdowns. To recap, she argued that the right of "the community" to be free of coronavirus was a compelling state interest that not only justified the prohibition of such protests, however legally and health-consciously executed, but actually necessitated it. She proclaimed -- and I quote -- "And it’s certainly not the case that the federal Constitution protects everything you feel like doing, whenever you feel like doing it."

As if time and shifting political priorities weren't shining a laser in her eyes to blind her to the irony, Lithwick now says, WTF I love the freedom of assembly now.

Despite crowded cities and worked-up mobs, until the late 19^th century, it was widely understood that “street politics” demanded the right to protest, gather, assemble, and shout on busy streets and parks.

Quoting a law review article, Lithwick gives us the crash course on the history of the freedom of assembly she neglected to give in her column on the same topic last spring:

[S]o widely accepted was the fundamental right to gather and protest that it was “included virtually without comment in the First Amendment.” Moreover, “in the first United States Congress a discussion of the proposed Bill of Rights amendment [regarding assembly] was declared beneath the dignity of the members.”

If we're to take Lithwick at her word circa last spring, the only reason one can have for gathering at mass protests during a pandemic would be to inflict harm on the community. But wait, you say, wasn't the freedom of assembly "a vestige of the slaveholder ethos"? Are we not "on the precipice of a moment in which Americans must decide whether the price they are willing to pay for the 'freedom' of armed protesters, those determined to block hospitals, and pundits who want to visit the zoo, is their own health and safety"? After all, last time you checked, a COVID-19 vaccine was still months away at the earliest, right?

Now, we've run away from the precipice and huddled back into the public square, in which we have an absolute right to protest, cough and rub up against each other, etc.

We have, in short, acceded to a regulatory regime that forces protesters to both seek government permission to assemble, and then to be at the mercy of state claims about potential lawlessness, rioting, inconvenience, or traffic, when the government seeks to quell protest. 

Citations to the Magna Carta omitted.

Is Anyone Going On A Real Vacation This Summer?

(Besides professional vacationer StephenG)  For associates at my firm, August is usually the best month ever because partners and clients disappear for weeks on end, and work emails slow to a trickle.

 Not this year! Instead of a spiritual retreat in India, partners are "vacationing" in places horrifyingly close, sometimes within Los Angeles County, in beach houses with full internet access.

So August is a total wash for me. That said, is anybody here actually going somewhere vacation-y?

AG testifies before congress. Meanwhile, Nadler dismisses attempts to burn down Portland fed courthouse as a "myth"

Where to even start.

Attorney General William Barr is testifying before congress today, including about the need for federal law enforcement personnel  to defend a federal courthouse building in Portland, Oregon. You can find his opening statement here.

I assume that most of you have seen the videos of the courthouse siege on Twitter; they are not being broadcast by the mainstream media, which is hewing to the myth that violence by protestors is, well, a myth (to quote Jerry Nadler in an ambush interview yesterday on cellphone video).

Whether you have seen the video of rioters throwing Molotov cocktails and shooting commercial grade fireworks at the at the courthouse or not, Barr's opening remarks on this subject are jarring:

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, violent rioters and anarchists have hijacked legitimate protests to wreak senseless havoc and destruction on innocent victims. The current situation in Portland is a telling example. Every night for the past two months, a mob of hundreds of rioters has laid siege to the federal courthouse and other nearby federal property. The rioters arrive equipped for a fight, armed with powerful slingshots, tasers, sledgehammers, saws, knives, rifles, and explosive devices. Inside the courthouse are a relatively small number of federal law enforcement personnel charged with a defensive mission: to protect the courthouse, home to Article III federal judges, from being overrun and destroyed.

What unfolds nightly around the courthouse cannot reasonably be called a protest; it is, by any objective measure, an assault on the Government of the United States. In recent nights, rioters have barricaded the front door of the courthouse, pried plywood off the windows with crowbars, and thrown commercial-grade fireworks into the building in an apparent attempt to burn it down with federal personnel inside. The rioters have started fires outside the building, and then systematically attacked federal law enforcement officers who attempt to put them out—for example, by pelting the officers with rocks, frozen water bottles, cans of food, and balloons filled with fecal matter. A recent video showed a mob enthusiastically beating a Deputy U.S. Marshal who was trying to protect the courthouse – a property of the United States government funded by this Congress – from further destruction. A number of federal officers have been injured, including one severely burned by a mortar-style firework and three who have suffered serious eye injuries and may be permanently blind.

Largely absent from these scenes of destruction are even superficial attempts by the rioters to connect their actions to George Floyd’s death or any legitimate call for reform. Nor could such brazen acts of lawlessness plausibly be justified by a concern that police officers in Minnesota or elsewhere defied the law.

Remarkably, the response from many in the media and local elected offices to this organized assault has been to blame the federal government. To state what should be obvious, peaceful protesters do not throw explosives into federal courthouses, tear down plywood with crowbars, or launch fecal matter at federal officers. Such acts are in fact federal crimes under statutes enacted by this Congress.

I find it utterly astounding that even in the context of a bitter presidential election contest the Attorney General of the United States has to justify before congress his decision to deploy a relatively small contingent of federal law enforcement officers to a federal courthouse to keep "protesters" from removing plywood protection and throwing destructive devices into the building with the clear intention to burn it down. 

Is this not self-evident, or am I missing something?

What good are, for instance, our civil rights statutes without a federal courthouse in which to seek their enforcement? 

When these lefties wish to file another lawsuit against Trump where do they intend to venue it? CHOP court?

Grand Master Jay, Fill Stucking Around

The ironically named "Not F_cking Around Coalition" was in Louisville, KY on Saturday, with redundant "demands" for charges in the Breonna Taylor case. The leader of the group, who has styled himself "Grand Master Jay," insisted that all of his followers bring real firearms, and that they all be loaded. The reason for this was his ostensible concern that the weapons would be needed for the group's defense.

Likely doomed from the get-go, the chief cognitive defect in the coalition's clever formulation was the difficulty they might have in intimidating people with their heavily-armed presence once the entire general public understood they could only use the weapons defensively. This, alone, was enough to practically guarantee a brush-off by the Kentucky Attorney General, whose easiest course of action was to simply ignore them.

However, the coalition forces, not satisfied with the inherent impotence of their original, simple-minded plan, decided to shoot for (so to speak) an even greater level of comical absurdity. By around 1:00 PM, they had achieved this through playing with their weapons until three members of the group were wounded by accidental discharges and had to be hospitalized.

Grand Master Jay had apparently forgotten to address any requirement that members joining the event should actually know how to use the loaded weapons they were required to bring. The consequent, on-site experimentation unfortunately went very poorly, and seriously undermined the group's representation that they are "not f_cking around." Recognizing the limitations of the assemblage of limited intellects he had brought together for his glorious cause, Grand Master Jay's only word on the incident was, "it happens." (Nothing to see here, move on).

After the triple-shooting and hospitalizations, the group reduced its demands from commencement of criminal charges to commencement of charges or transparency. The members of the group will now be happy if Kentucky's Attorney General will simply agree to share all steps of the investigation with people who can't manage to march without shooting each other.

Despite a few reports of occasional tittering from the general vicinity of the Attorney General's Office, no formal statement has issued in response to the demands.

To maintain the pressure of their armed protest, Grand Master Jay may next need to turn to a tried and true tactic such as having coalition members hold their breath until their faces turn blue. Also, to regain a measure of credibility with the group's name, he might want to shift to something like "The Barneys," in honor of the coalition's apparent firearms safety mascot, Barney Fife.

https://nypost.com/2020/07/26/nfac-members-hurt-by-friendly-fire-during-louisville-protest/

The Tax Man Cometh

My thought from the day of the incident has been that the former officer who put away George Floyd will probably be convicted of some variant of homicide, and do some serious time in the pokey. Of course, nothing is ever completely certain. Nothing, that is, except for death and taxes.

It would seem that some enterprising investigators may have remembered the lesson of Al Capone, to wit, when you really want to put someone away for life plus cancer, send in the tax auditors. They did. Now, Chauvin and the Mrs. (who seemly waited overlong to dump him) are looking at enough felony tax charges to stack on another four and a half decades of state time. Notably, a key feature of tax cases is their document-intensive nature. If the documents show the income existed, and the returns don't show that it was reported for taxation, the defendant is pretty much at the end of the road at that point.

As Al Capone himself cogently demonstrated, if you're going to engage in conduct that pisses off the government, you really need to have paid your taxes.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/derek-chauvin-officer-accused-killing-george-floyd-charged/story?id=71941032

Good news, bad news kind of thing.

The good news is that you won $10M in the lottery. The bad news is that you are under arrest for murder.

One clue was the dead 23 year old the maid found in your hotel room.

On the bright side, you're never going to run out of Twinkie and corn chips money for the prison commissary.

Fox News has the sordid story.  

ABA and the Annual Meeting Fiasco Yet to Come

Rawles shat this bobblefooze out on the ABA Journal online sometime back, and I have been slow in commenting, due to the press of actual business.

I will say this, it is always better to have kind of a "Reader's Digest version" than to actually suffer through one of Rawles' podcasts (or anything that she tries to write). I learned the value of condensed literature in my youth, as it was a useful tool to get through critical content much more rapidly than my contemporaries. I especially enjoyed "The Musketeer," and "The Wife of Henry VIII."

Anyway, I will give you the shortened and more accurate version of "what to expect from the all-virtual 2020 ABA Annual Meeting." First, it will be an absolute debacle, on top of which, ABA will be out all of the normal meeting fees and other revenues it usually realizes from the annual drunken party. Second, some recently-installed, chazzfok ABA sock-puppet will make some bullshit announcement about how the fiasco was an unqualified success. This will fairly stand on a par with Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery's characterization of Operation Market-Garden as a success.

If you enjoy suffering, or just have some extra time on your hands, a link to the full-length Rawles version is below.

https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/asked-and-answered-podcast-bonus-episode-130

McCloskeys Mightily Motivate Multiple Missouri Morons

The linked story is only, perhaps, the latest stroke in a seemingly endless tale of moronity that refuses to drag itself away to die in some dark corner.

The whole thing began with the McCloskeys, proper morons in their own right. Stalwart BLM supporters in normal times (i.e., when the mob is in someone else's gated community), the McCloskeys came unhinged when protesters appeared on the private street in front of their own residence.

Heedless of how many of the crowd were or might be armed with firearms of their own, the McCloskeys went outside and stood in front of their mansion, with no cover, pointing their firearms at members of the crowd. (It later developed that the popgun so energetically flourished by the plump, little lady in stripes was actually inoperable). The fact that these two, "Progressive" fuzzlenutzes are even still above ground is cogent proof that Heaven affords special providence to fools, drunks and (apparently) the McCloskeys. I'm going to say if they copped to the charges for some bullshit,"public service" fine, they would still be way ahead of where they probably should be. Morons.

Then, Kim Gardner. Obviously no secret that we're not talking the sharpest tool in the shed there. She feels duty-bound to protect the "first amendment rights" of the protesters against the predations of the gun-waving McCloskeys. Apparently nobody told her that "first amendment rights" generally lie against the government, and don't include special rights to trespass on private property. Also, there is no indication the McCloskeys did anything to prevent the protesters from protesting, or even that the McCloskeys proposed any content-based limitations on the protesters' speech. The moron may have a "brandishing weapons" charge that is viable under Missouri law, but nothing here is about the first amendment. Moron.

Before long, like any good dumpster fire, this thing had attracted every bum on the block. The Missouri Attorney General, the Missouri Governor, Donald Trump, a gaggle of law professors debating the "castle doctrine," and now, 67 current and former prosecutors who have nothing better to do.

When will it be over? Is it possible that the showboating and media frenzy will continue all the way through an actual jury trial? Is there nothing that can save a moronity-weary public?? Creezus, Jucking Feist. The warp engines won't take much more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/22/67-current-former-prosecutors-defend-st-louis-prosecutor-attacks-mccloskey-gun-case/

Privileged Whites Oppress Dawit Kelete With Criminal Charges

Some may have seen the footage in which the white Jaguar, flat hauling it up an exit ramp onto I-5, collided with two protesters, hurling them a considerable distance into the air, after which, they crashed down onto the pavement. The "non-binary" Summer Taylor, whose pronouns of choice were "they" and "them," was killed, and fellow protester Diaz Love remains hospitalized.

Protesters immediately vowed that such Trumpian, white nationalist, violence would not dissuade them from staying the course. However, almost before their lines were delivered, the preferred narrative began to collapse. Much as the media tried to avoid any mention of the point, the first film footage of the allegedly murderous driver, Dawit Kelete, soon spilled the fact that he is black.

Did Dawit Kelete mistake the protesters for white supremacists? Was he just offended by their performative virtue-signalling? Or, did he perhaps hate Summer Taylor for being a "non-binary" who used the pronouns "they" and "them"?

Is Kelete's motivation even of consequence? As I believe I have already mentioned, Dawit Kelete is black. His life matters. His right to operate his Jaguar luxury automobile on public roadways also matters. If Mr. Kelete was inclined to operate his Jaguar automobile on the I-5 highway, where a bunch of privileged, silly, white people happened to be playing in the street, how is he in any way at fault?

Indeed, the honor of being separated from this life by the impact of Mr. Kelete's Jaguar may even have extirpated Summer Taylor's white privilege and ethnic birth guilt, potentially so qualifying Summer Taylor for admission to "Non-binary," White Ally Heaven. It may have been the only thing that actually could have. If they were proper white allies, Summer Taylor's surviving companions would get down on their prayer bones and beg Dawit Kelete to serve them similarly. At the very least, they need to be protesting for his immediate release and for a prompt end to all this tom-foolery about charging him with crimes. Nobody is ever going to take the lot of them even half-seriously if they can't maintain the most basic focus on their mission.

https://komonews.com/news/local/dawit-kelete-accused-driver-pleads-not-guilty-in-death-of-i-5-protester

Really fucked up

CNN)On his website, Roy Den Hollander described himself as an "anti-feminist" lawyer who defended "men's rights." His personal writings and life's work reveal a toxic stew of sexist and racist bigotry.

He had unsuccessfully filed lawsuits against bars and night clubs offering "ladies' nights," claiming they violate the 14th Amendment, and he filed suits against the federal government, challenging the constitutionality of its Violence Against Women Act -- the "Female Fraud Act," as he referred to it -- and against Columbia University, for its Women's Studies program. 

Federal authorities on Monday said Den Hollander is suspected of shooting the husband and son of US District Judge Esther Salas at her North Brunswick, New Jersey.

The FBI called Den Hollander the "primary subject," and said he is dead. Two law enforcement sources told CNN that the suspect died of what is believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The attorney penned lengthy documents filled with bigoted and sexist content on his website. One document, which he called a "Cyclopedia," is 152 pages of anti-feminist musings.

In the so-called "Evolutionarily Correct Cyclopedia," Den Hollander made chilling remarks about "solutions" to what he called "Political Commies" and feminists.

"Things begin to change when individual men start taking out those specific persons responsible for destroying their lives before committing suicide," he wrote.

Den Hollander argued one case before Salas, according to federal court records: a lawsuit where he represented a woman and her daughter as they sought to register for the military's selective service. In the case, Den Hollander's clients claimed the draft was unconstitutional because it barred women from registering. 

The case, like at least one other in the federal court system, raised intricate legal questions about the treatment of women in the military.

Salas sided against a part of Den Hollander's arguments last spring, but also agreed with some of his claims and allowed the lawsuit to continue on. 

The attorney exited the case in June 2019, handing it over to a team of lawyers at the large New York-based law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

Den Hollander said he "would not be able to see the case through" because he was terminally ill, Nick Gravante, Boies Schiller's managing partner, told CNN on Monday. 

Den Hollander had called Gravante out of the blue last year, asking the larger firm to take over the case before Salas.

On his website, Den Hollander wrote an autobiographical document in which he personally disparaged Salas in racist and sexist terms. 

While speaking about Salas, he claimed he often ran into trouble with female judges of Latin American descent, claiming they were "driven by an inferiority complex." 

He attacked Salas' professional record and associations, and at one point, appeared to push a white nationalist belief that organizations are "trying to convince America that whites, especially white males, were barbarians, and all those of a darker skin complexion were victims."

Amid the ladies' night lawsuit, filed in 2007, Den Hollander was featured in reports in The New York Times and The New Yorker and made a guest appearance on Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."

"The feminists have taken control over every institution in this country -- they want to take control over men," he told the Times in 2011 after the Supreme Court declined to take up his ladies' night lawsuit. "I'm going to fight them to my last dollar, last breath." 

The New Yorker profile in particular focused on a night at a club with him in which he railed against "feminazis," spoke of his attraction to "black and Latin chicks, and Asian chicks" and held forth on his tactics for picking up women.

In 2017, he unsuccessfully sued multiple media outlets, including CNN, accusing them of disseminating "false and misleading news reports" about Donald Trump's candidacy for president. The case was dismissed.

Den Hollander graduated from George Washington University Law School in 1985 and then worked as an attorney in the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, his online resume says.

From 1986 to 1989, he worked as an associate at the prestigious legal firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and he has since primarily worked as a private attorney in New York, according to his resume and court filings.