Should the unwashed occupy the federal bench?
A public defender is about to join the Supreme Court
The Friday Letter / No. 482 / March 4, 2022
Any thinking conservative who doesn't want public defenders appointed to the federal bench likely has never needed a public defender. Just ask the poor schlubs wasting away in the D.C. Jail, denied bail for trespassing and other flimsy charges stemming from the mischief inside the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, 2021. For most, their fate rests in the hands of public defenders, the lowest paid and least powerful in the legal pecking order.
Should we allow graduates of public law schools to run trials and rule on the constitutionality of legislation and lower-court rulings, or should membership continue to be limited to Harvard and Yale graduates, with an occasional throw-in from schools of lesser pedigree?
The question is important, because almost all federal criminal defendants are convicted. More than 90 percent plead guilty rather risk the crushing power of the federal government and its unlimited resources. And yet the federal judiciary from the circuit appeals courts to SCOTUS are practically absent of influence of judges who once represented mostly indigent defendants.
The political prisoners of Jan. 6 aren't trust fund Democrat agitators with women's studies degrees from Swarthmore. Most are working class blokes who lack sophistication, connections, and money. The right to a fair and speedy trial doesn't apply to these enemies of the state. They sit without their constitutional rights while the only homicide on that day – by Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd – goes without punishment or even serious investigation.
Here is how I described a courtroom scene in Road Dog, my book about serial killer Glen Rogers:
Each morning handcuffed defendants are paraded in for hearings and pleadings, a dozen or more in each court. Accused murderers, rapists, drug salesmen and a scattering of women and budding apprentices line up along the wall on benches or in the jury box. Fresh-faced but harried young public defenders work their way down the line practicing law assembly line-style, furiously taking notes on yellow pads, assessing the chances of clients they've never met, quickly advising some to take a deal and be on with it. (“I can get you a year in state prison. It's probably the best you'll get.”) People constantly scurry in and out of the courtroom. Across the bar, the gallery is filled with family, non-jailed defendants and their lawyers, and everybody is talking, while teams of prosecutors and defense counsel huddle near the bench, negotiating. The judge looks on in befuddled amusement.*
The 6th Amendment
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
The 6th Amendment is not some goofy Warren Court interpretation of constitutional law. It's in the Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.
So what is the big deal about Biden's appointment of Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was a public defender for about three years, to the Supreme Court?
It depends on which side of the fence one sits. Senate elitists – including some Republicans – won't admit that they want to maintain judicial purity. She meets most of the tests: Harvard Law, clerk for Justice Breyer, she's female, and she's black. But that public defender thing, well, that's like inviting the Cable Guy to a State dinner. Otherwise, she has a very sparse judicial record, having joined the D.C. Court of Appeals just last year.
Judge Jackson once questioned the constitutionality of severe social controls on sex offenders who had served their sentences. Things like requiring registration, preventing them from living within so many feet of a school, she wrote, are inconsistent with what we require of other ex-offenders. She can expect blowback on that in her confirmation hearings.
Serious people can have honest disagreements on that one. Does she have a point? Maybe. More troubling is her ruling against executive privilege, first invoked by George Washington to protect the president's confidential conversations with aides. As a D.C. District Court judge, Jackson ruled that White House Counsel Don McGahn must comply with a House committee subpoena and reveal details of a private conversation he had with President Trump. That is a disqualifying position.
Quoted in a story at Breitbart, Sen. Lindsey Graham said “the radical left won” with Jackson's nomination. He may have been referring, Sean Moran writes, to “rumors that the far-left 'dark money' group Arabella Advisors has been pushing Jackson, funded by ultra-left activists like George Soros.”
Still, Graham has said he will vote to confirm anyone Biden nominates, as will liberal Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins. Romney is a maybe.
Jackson is certain to be confirmed. But the legacy she will be stuck with cannot be erased: Biden's public acknowledgment that she was nominated because of her race – her skin color. As George Washington University Law Prof. Jonathan Turley, a Democrat, has noted, had Biden never mentioned Jackson's race but instead touted her as the most qualified legal mind – even with her thin judicial history – she would have been unassailable as an affirmative action appointment. This label will never go away.
In the news. . .
Thank you, Mother Biden. Here is some helpful advice from the nannies at your federal government. Pay attention, as it may save your life if Vlad lobs the big one. Says a government website called ready.gov, when entering a bomb shelter, “Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them.”
This will require serious multi-tasking. We are already burdened with defunding the police and battling climate change and white supremacy while churning out driver's licenses and voter registration cards for future Democrat voters, also known as illegal aliens. It will take more than a Tiger Mom to juggle all these responsibilities.
We expect that people who are incinerated by a nuclear bomb may have trouble breathing.
Our nomination for the Subtle Hint of the Year Award goes to Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations. He offers some advice to Vladimir Putin on how to achieve a lifestyle makeover. Suggesting that Vlad's putting the Russian nuke arsenal on high alert is really a signal that he is ready to die, Sergiy said this in a U.N. speech: “If he wants to kill himself, he doesn’t need to use a nuclear arsenal. He has to do what the guy in Berlin did in a bunker in May 1945.”
Your tax dollars at work. Northwest Missouri State University is celebrating “Womynx History Month,” explaining in a tweet that the term “womynx” encourages inclusivity. The school was quickly roasted on social media. “This is what people go into debt to learn?” a female asked at a TikTok account. The Fox News story quotes this explanation from a feminist website:
“Generally, womxn is used by people who consider themselves progressive, and are well-intentioned – if not sometimes misguided – in their inclusivity. Womyn, on the other hand, has become an anti-trans term used by radical ‘feminists’ who incorrectly believe that trans inclusivity invalidates their plight. Their view of gender (that gender = genitals at birth) is reductive and harmful.”
If you understand this, our comments section still has plenty of space.
Another failed career comes to an end. In Houston, a loser who had been harassing neighbors in the late evening decided to enter a home without asking the homeowner's permission. He was greeted with a bullet to the neck and ran away seeking medical help. Unfortunately for him, he ran out of breath shortly thereafter, saving local taxpayers the cost of a trial. – from a story at KTRK-TV.
Quotes for today
“If you are spending your time during a global pandemic renaming schools instead of opening them, please find another party. It’s imperative for normie Dems to separate themselves from these toxic positions. They don’t work anywhere but on Twitter.” – Democrat strategist Lis Smith on voters growing tired of the far Left's antics, reported at the Washington Times
“The lights are on, but no-one's home.” – Clay Travis, watching a masked Joe Biden shuffle alone across the White House lawn
“The best way for senators to oppose her is to make her strength – her success in mastering the heights of conventional legal success – her weakness. She comes from the same progressive elite that has ruined this country from 1900 on, and she should be made to defend this anti-democratic cabal. Her race is irrelevant; her membership in the administrative state elite is all-important.” – Ken Masugi, profiling Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson at American Greatness
“Speaking of the best and the brightest, our foreign policy mandarins must have felt like it was Christmas Day when a senile dementia patient became president. Finally! No meddling politicians to get in the way of our beautifully designed plans worked out at the Council on Foreign Relations. Although Joseph R. Biden is technically, in a strictly legal sense, 'president,' it’s progressives running his domestic policy, and think-tank geniuses running his foreign policy.” – Anti-Trump opinionator Ann Coulter on the beginning of World War III, at Breitbart. Do we detect buyer's remorse?
Election fraud update
The special counsel investigating irregularities in Wisconsin's 2020 presidential election found that 91 nursing homes in five counties had voter turn-outs of 95 to 100 percent – a statistical improbability. Nationwide, the turnout was 67 percent. See more in this story by Just the News.
Recommended reading
“The court needs to throw a wet blanket on this outrageous lawsuit. A piece by former 43 speechwriter Ned Ryan on the need to rein in the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, at American Greatness.
“These 3 ingredients for a social credit system are already here.” Interview with David Sacks, the founding COO of PayPal, at The Blaze.
“Senate Republicans Trash Rick Scott For Telling Voters How He’ll Work For Them,” on how Scott is filling the leadership void left by a paranoid Mitch McConnell, by Rachel Bovard at The Federalist.
*Road Dog, by Stephen M. Combs and John Eckberg, p. 186. Federal Point Publishing, 2003. Revised and expanded as O.J. Simpson & Glen Rogers: The Juice, Road Dog, and Murder on Bundy Drive. Kindle Editions, 2018.
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A reader was quick to fire an email this morning asking for clarity on the Ketanji Brown Jackson piece. What's your point in that last paragraph? The point is that Jackson could have been remembered as the first public defender to sit on SCOTUS, and Biden as the first president to appoint one. Instead, she will be remembered not for bringing actual, meaningful diversity to the Court, but for meeting a racial quota test whose purpose was to help her appointer score political points.