SOUTHEAST TEXAS RECORD

To the dismay of the RINO establishment in Texas, their campaign to besmirch Paxton has not diminished his popular support.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s ill-informed comments and questions at the recent oral argument in the challenge to the Biden Administration’s COVID vaccination mandate case (National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor) provide a timely reminder that the hyper-elite legal talent on the nation’s High Court is not always what it is cracked up to be.

After two years, the extraordinary government measures—federal, state, and local—taken in response to the COVID pandemic, some of which were supposed to be temporary, have finally begun to abate, along with the fear and panic that inspired them.

Legal scholars continue to explore the frontier of constitutional interpretation, with recent books by Ilan Wurman (The Second Founding; A Debt Against the Living), Kurt Lash (The Fourteenth Amendment and the Privileges and Immunities of American Citizenship; The Reconstruction Amendments), Randy Barnett (The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment; Our Republican Constitution), and many others.

Loudoun County, Virginia, an affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., represents the contentious zeitgeist bedeviling the body politic. As I reported elsewhere last year, the Loudoun County school board has become ground zero in an escalating culture war in which concerned parents oppose leftist indoctrination posing as curriculum.

American history is under siege.

As someone who lived in California and Texas for nearly my entire adult life, I read Kenneth P. Miller’s new book, Texas vs. California (2020), with considerable anticipation.

The news over the past few years has offered little to cheer about, but a recent story reporting an unprecedented 43 percent decline in membership in the Boy Scouts of America from 2019 to 2020—from 1.97 million Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts to 1.12 million—was especially dispiriting.

President Joe Biden has for decades depicted himself as a blue-collar guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and part of his political persona is an appeal to the lunch bucket crowd—working-class voters.

Not surprisingly, two Ivy League administrative law scholars with technocratic expertise defend the discipline on the grounds that “technocratic expertise greatly matters.”

Amidst all the other tribulations visited upon these United States in 2020, we find ourselves—like a frog in the proverbial pot of boiling water—immersed in the suddenly-ubiquitous delusion of wokeness. With startling abruptness, concepts and terminology previously at the periphery of popular culture—“white privilege,” “systemic racism,” “unconscious bias,” and the like—have become household terms. Once seemingly limited to the fever swamp of academia, and even then mainly confined to a few humanities disciplines, the death of George Floyd catapulted the long-simmering (and frequently-ridiculed) rhetoric of wokeness into the headlines. Without warning, fringe organizations like Black Lives Matter unexpectedly became mainstream—complete with corporate sponsorships and celebrity spokesmen.

Perhaps unfairly, most jurists are quickly forgotten when they leave the bench. Some are remembered only in infamy: the “Four Horsemen” who blocked the New Deal early on; Roger Taney for the Dred Scott decision; Harry Blackmun as the unlikely author of Roe v. Wade, and so forth. Justices with a literary flair tend to linger in the public mind, explaining the enduring influence of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Robert Jackson, among a handful of others.

The non-profit National Rifle Association, founded in 1871, describes itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization.” With nearly five million members, the NRA is also one of the nation’s largest and most influential organizations, promoting the safe ownership and use of firearms. Through its affiliated foundation (a tax-exempt entity formed in 1990), political advocacy arm (the Institute for Legislative Action), publications, and programs, the NRA is widely regarded as the leading champion of the rights of gun owners. The NRA’s mission is “preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals to purchase, possess and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” Disclosure: I am a Life Member of the NRA.

When the U.S. Department of Justice—at the direction of Attorney General Bill Barr—announced on May 7 that it was dropping all charges against Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the former National Security Advisor’s years-long legal nightmare finally ended. The nightmare began on January 24, 2017, when hyper-partisan FBI agent Peter Strzok (subsequently fired), acting on the instructions of FBI Director James Comey (subsequently fired), improperly met with the newly-appointed National Security Advisor at the White House—without counsel and on a pretense—to conduct an “ambush” interview lacking any legitimate investigatory predicate. Comey later acknowledged that the FBI took advantage of “chaos” in the early days of the Trump administration by deciding not to coordinate with the White House Counsel or the DOJ before conducting Flynn’s interview.

Failing local newspapers unconvincingly use the Wuhan virus crisis as an excuse to feed at the public trough

On January 1, a law took effect in the union stronghold of California that poses a dire threat to the so-called “gig economy” by drastically restricting the use of independent contractors, upon which many tech companies depend. The law, referred to as AB 5, was apparently directed primarily at transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft, which treat their drivers as contractors instead of employees. AB 5, which was promoted by labor unions wishing to organize the drivers, sought to remove the legal impediment of IC status by effectively banning the use of contractors in California. Instead of forcing Uber and Lyft to capitulate, as intended, the overly-broad law has backfired by also threatening long-established practices in the trucking industry, and even the livelihoods of freelance writers in the Golden State.

Not all experiments will be successful, especially if the premises are unsound

As flattered as I was to attract George Will’s attention—in his 4th of July column, no less—being criticized by a Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist left me somewhat perplexed, for several reasons. Allow me to explain. First, although I have engaged Will directly in the past, he used his nationally-syndicated column to take issue with something I had written in response to someone else—specifically, Ed Erler (a disciple of Harry Jaffa) regarding Robert Bork’s view of the Constitution.

Why shouldn’t law schools be run as trade schools?

Long the liberal redoubt in conservative Texas, the capital city is becoming a statewide model.