Categories
election law litigation partisanship

Un-Redistricting Virginia

Gerrymander, Virginia, Circuit Court, voting, elections, democracy

A circuit court has ruled that Virginia’s new voter-passed congressional map, gerrymandered to give Democrats in the state a prohibitive advantage in the next congressional election, is unconstitutional.

Judge Jack Hurley, of the Circuit Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia for the 29th Judicial Circuit, Tazewell County, denied a motion to stay his injunction blocking certification of the election using the new districts. Former Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli reports that once a final order is drafted and entered, “it will be immediately appealed.”

If the rejiggering survives the challenge, it could be the factor that tips the balance in the House of Representatives toward the Democrats next November.

Cuccinelli, who is now national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, had been saying that passage of the gerrymander would not be the last word. In their rush to get the measure to voters and enacted before November 2026, lawmakers ignored sundry constitutional requirements.

The 2024 special session that took up the redistricting measure had been convened to legislate about the budget. “Its governing resolution limited the session’s scope. Expanding it to include a constitutional amendment on redistricting required a two-thirds vote that never occurred.”

Also, says Cuccinelli, the state constitution requires that “an election must intervene between first and second passage” of a proposed constitutional amendment. “Here, first passage occurred during an election cycle — not before an intervening one.”

Among other problems is the constitutional stipulation that “every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.” The proposed map violates this requirement “badly.”

When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and this partisan map must go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Today

A Bach Premiere

Du Hirte Israel, höre (“You Shepherd of Israel, hear”), BWV 104, a church cantata, was performed for the first time in Leipzig 301 years ago on April 23rd, the composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, conducting.

Categories
national politics & policies progress voluntary cooperation

Dream & Achieve More, Not Less

Artemis, moon, space exploration, private enterprise, NASA

The successful Artemis II mission is one answer to what we have been told for way too long, that exploration “beyond known boundaries” is unaffordable and “too risky.”

“We are told not only to consume less but to dream less,” writes John Tillman. “Always the same chorus: lower your expectations. Stop reaching.” SpaceX and Artemis II have interrupted this tune.

And Artemis II has a lot to do with SpaceX, Tillman stresses. It’s NASA, it’s a government program, but one heavily reliant on markets.

NASA deserves credit for managing a complex mission. But 2,700 private companies were involved in providing crucial components.

Lockheed Martin. Made the Orion spacecraft that carried the crew.

Boeing. Made “the massive core stage of the Space Launch System rocket.”

Northrop Grumman. Made rocket boosters and an abort system.

Aerojet Rocketdyne. Made engines and thrusters.

“That’s just the prime contractors. Beneath them sat a supply chain of extraordinary depth.”

There’s more. In the five decades that NASA avoided lunar exploration and colonization, private enterprise had been providing reminder after reminder as to just how much could be accomplished by tapping dispersed knowledge and talents — from feeding the masses to connecting everyone via computer networking — making any lingering timidity or depressive preconception ultra-passé.

“SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches for $67 million, lands its boosters, and flies again within weeks. That’s a nearly twenty-five-fold cost reduction through competition and innovation. When companies bear the risk, they solve problems creatively. When taxpayers bear the risk, you get decades of stagnation.”

That’s how markets and dreams work — when they’re allowed to.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Dostoyevsky

The best definition of man is: a biped, ungrateful. 

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, Vol. 1: 1873-1876, ed. Kenneth Lantz (1994), p. 734.
Categories
Today

A Motto

On April 22, 1864, the United States Congress passed the Coinage Act of 1864 that permitted the inscription In God We Trust be placed on all coins minted as currency.

Categories
Accountability national politics & policies partisanship

The AOC-Schiff Thesis

Congress, AOC, Adam Schiff, Eric Swallwell, controversy

I wonder how many others were amused, as I was last week, to hear Senator Adam Schiff praise members of his party for the ouster of his fellow Californian and Democrat, Rep. Eric Swallwell, from Congress.

The tale, as told on this website on Sunday, is that Swallwell — one of Schiff’s closest colleagues pushing the Russiagate gambit against the first Trump administration — was pressured to resign over the massive amount of complaints against him for sexual harassment and other unwanted sexual advances. There is even an accusation of rape. 

Also resigning was a Republican from Texas, Tony Gonzalez, for similar reasons.

Schiff — who claimed to be “sickened” and “aghast” at the accusations and what Swallwell “has done” — followed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in scorning the Republicans for postponing dealing with the Gonzalez problem. He accused the Republicans of not wanting to abandon Gonzalez because they wanted to continue to maintain their majority in the House.

But this works both ways. Sure, Republicans postponed pressuring the ousting of Gonzalez until Democrats likewise agreed to pressure Swallwell to resign. Both parties maintain the previous balance. This is politics. Not great high-mindedness. On either side.

Further, the big issue was Swallwell’s gubernatorial run — contributing to the splitting up of Democratic votes thereby threatening to allow two Republicans to appear on the run-off on Election Day in November in California’s screwy Top Two system. 

Finding an excuse to undermine Swallwell’s run was surely a big part of the magnanimous Democratic effort to remove him from Congress.

“You think you know someone, and it turns out you don’t,” said Schiff about Swallwell. “I didn’t socialize with Eric Swallwell, but I worked with him on the Judiciary Committee — I would never have imagined that he was capable of something like this.”

I think we know quite enough about Schiff and his partisanship, as we do so many in Congress. They are capable of anything.

Meanwhile, the vote to expel Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.) — accused of expropriating FEMA funds to the tune of $5 million — has not exactly proven the AOC-Schiff thesis on swift Democratic self-policing. She’s still in Congress, though a vote may occur tomorrow, we’re told.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine/Nano Banana

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

George Saintsbury

The Law of Nemesis — the law that every extraordinary expansion or satisfaction of heart or brain or will is paid for — paid for inevitably, incommutably, without the possibility of putting off or of transferring the payment — is one of the truths about which no human being with a soul a little above the brute has the slightest doubt.

From Saintsbury’s preface to The Wild Ass’s Skin by Honoré De Balzac (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, Volume Five).
Categories
Today

Rome, VP, Fairs

In history:

April 21, 753 BC, is the traditional date on which Romulus founded Rome.

April 21, AD 1789, John Adams was sworn in as first Vice President of the United States nine days before George Washington was sworn in as President.

In 1962 on this date, the Seattle World’s Fair opened — the first World’s Fair in the United States since World War II. Three years later, to the day, the 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair opened for its second and final season.

Categories
Fourth Amendment rights litigation

The C-word in Surveillance

4th Amendment, search, surveillance, Constitution, cars

Is unconstitutionality like obscenity? — we can’t define it, but know it when we see it.

Take San Jose, California, and its automatic license plate reader system. I might not win an argument explaining how San Jose’s public surveillance relates to the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. But. . . .

That amendment insists that people have a right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,” and that governments may not search and seize property without a warrant “upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

How does one’s public goings-about in cars that are drivable only with a state-mandated license plate amount to something that must not be searched or surveilled? Our driving on roads is all out in the open, after all, not private. 

Maybe we should stress the Fourth’s narrow guideline: warrants must describe the place to be searched, and the persons.

Broad-based tracking flouts that narrow stricture.

But really, I’m biased: mass surveillance is Orwellian. Do we want our government keeping track of us that much?

Especially as in San Jose, where not only can over a thousand police department employees scour the data sans any legal warrant, but the department also shares this resource with over 300 agencies across the state.

Creepy. That’s the word for it.

And that’s the word used by Institute for Justice lawyers who filed a lawsuit against San Jose’s practice.

Jacob Sullum’s article in Reason explains the legal arguments carefully as well as the many ways the information can be weaponized to, for example, retaliate against protesters. 

Information is power, after all. And in the wrong hands . . . creepy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Grok Imagine

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Thought

Lawrence Durrell

A state-imposed metaphysic or religion should be opposed, if necessary at pistol-point. We must fight for variety if we fight at all. The uniform is as dull as a sculptured egg.

From the “Obiter Dicta” attributed to the character Pursewarden, in Lawrence Durrell, Balthazar (1958), p. 245.