I have been complaining that none of mainstream Immigration Reform outfits – like NumbersUSA, FAIR, or CIS – nor the allegedly “Conservative” media will take a position on the baleful and threatening Hate Crimes Bill S.909 – despite many of the individuals involved knowing full well it is part of a deliberate attempt to repress the causes they are supposedly in business to advocate. So it is refreshing to note a couple of exceptions.

Hating Hate Crimes Investor’s Business Daily 07/01/2009

is a straightforward and direct condemnation:

This new law won’t reduce hate one bit, but it will limit your rights…Anyone who values the rule of law in America should reject it…in effect, the justice meted out depends on the victim’s status — not on the severity of the crime.

This violates major swaths of the Constitution. It certainly twists the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause beyond recognition. And it likewise impinges on First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and thought. And subjecting those guilty of state crimes to additional federal prosecution is double jeopardy.

(After Attorney General Holder’s disastrous Senate testimony last week, acceptance has broadened that the Bill is intended to create privilege.)

IBD concludes

Equal treatment under the law is a fundamental principle of American jurisprudence. Hate crimes trample this principle by creating a special class of victims.
Congress might mean well, but this is a bad law that will have bad results and only add to our nation’s growing divisions.

Some might be surprised that Investor’s Business Daily would address this subject, but in fact the paper has published some solid political material over the years.

Where are you, Wall Street Journal?

The Cato Institute’s Hate Crime Legislation: A Shocking Disregard for Federalism by David Rittgers July 1 2009 (which incorporates a podcast on the subject) is intellectually more adventurous (if wonkish). It is based on watching last week’s Judiciary Committee hearing (webcast on right). Complaining of Judiciary’s

casual disregard (if not outright hostility) for the principles of limited government and equality under the law.

Rittgers asserts

The bill federalizes violent acts against victims by reason of their actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability….
The federal government would also be authorized to prosecute whenever “the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence.” While this doesn’t violate the letter of the Supreme Court’s Double Jeopardy jurisprudence (the federal and state governments are considered separate sovereigns) it certainly violates its spirit.

Rittgers was particularly appalled, as was I, by the performance of Senator Ben Cardin :

The hearing video shows a complete disregard for limitations on federal power. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) claims that we need a “uniform” law across the states (82 minute mark). This claim…disregards the fact that general police powers belong to the states, not to the federal government.

(Cardin’s performance was chilling. He is apparently the second-generation descendent of immigrants from Russia and clearly thinks things were ordered better in the Old Country. I have not seen anything as ominous since watching Commissar Reich back in January.)

The Rittgers essay deserves credit for repudiating a dangerous assertion popular with the legislation’s boosters:

Don’t expect the application of this legislation to be the rare and exceptional prosecution that Attorney General Holder promises in his testimony. Janet Cohen testified that her upbringing in a racially divided America decades ago justifies passage of this law. She also proposes that prosecutions with the new law will be “wise” on account of Holder’s “brilliance and integrity.”

And to think, we were once a nation of laws, not of men.

History shows this kind of legislation invariably gets more damaging when implemented.

Congratulate David Rittgers.

When I heard that Moira Herbst of Businessweek wrote an article about Norm Matloff, I read it with extreme trepidation. Herbst is a skilled writer and journalist, but she is very much a corporate globalist who supports H-1B and outsourcing. Despite her obvious bias the article wasn’t as bad as I anticipated.

There are a few things in the article that I felt should be commented on.

To some opponents of H-1B visas, Matloff is something of a hero — and in a sense, the intellectual backbone of their movement.[ An Academic’s Labor Helps Fight H-1B Visas, BusinessWeek, June 28, 2009.]

That may be the most profound thing Herbst has ever written (which probably isn’t saying very much!). As far as I know, Norm Matloff is the first one to make the connection between H-1B and age discrimination. I first found out about Matloff many years ago when I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t find good engineering jobs. For many reasons I began to suspect my 40+ age was a factor (in one interview the manager asked me if I would have a problem riding go-karts with “the boys” on Friday). I stumbled into Matloff’s “Debunking” paper and much to my astonishment it read like my autobiography. The stories in that paper have been accused of being anecdotal, but they are the story of my ruined career. They aren’t anecdotal to me!

My journey into the H-1B issue originated from the wealth of information that Matloff provided on age discrimination in the computer/IT professions. (more…)

Traditionally, the New York Times has the world’s worst Letters-to-the-Editor page, filled with credentialed but clueless poohbahs writing in to say how much they agree with the NYT’s soporific editorials, but they were disappointed that the editorial didn’t include some additional argument so dumb that not even the NYT Editorial board would fall for it.

It indicates just how badly the diversitarians got smoked intellectually on Ricci that even the NYT’s Letters-to-the-Editor section (The Firefighters’ Test: Flawed or Fair?) responding to the paper’s editorial denouncing the New Haven test is pretty good.

That Justice Ginsburg’s dissent in Ricci managed to get four out of nine votes points out major flaws in both American intellectual life and in the Supreme Court.

Some of what’s wrong with the Supreme Court is structural. Justices used to drop dead of heart attacks before they aged too far into mental decline. By this point, lots of people have heard about the best solution: replace lifetime tenure with single 18 year terms, with the President getting to select two justices for each election he wins.

What nobody knows, as far as I know, is how to get there from here. How do you work out which Justice gets forced into retirement first to make room for new blood? This could be very hard to work out in a bipartisan manner. (If you have any technical suggestions for how the transition should be managed, please put them in the comments.)

Now that the Democrats have complete power in Congress and the White House, however, they can just go ahead an make this reform on their own. I can’t imagine they would, though.

A more subtle defect in the Supreme Court is the lack of adult supervision. We still have the obsolete system of ailing Justices such as 76-year-old Ginsburg (cancer surgery in February) and extremely elderly Justices (Stevens is a ridiculous 89) being assisted solely by clerks who are largely in their late 20s: the senile being aided by the puerile.

Consider the futility of relying on clerks for a complicated topic like testing in the Ricci case. Do you think Justice Ginsburg’s clerks were told the truth about testing when they were in law school? I don’t care what your LSAT score is, to understand the reality behind Ricci, you have to do a lot of self-education and you have to learn about how the world really works. And that takes time. I moved to Chicago at age 23, and from then on I heard a lot about fireman and policeman testing, but it took me until my mid-30s to develop a mature understanding of the subject that wasn’t just based on idealistic assumptions about how things should work. And I’m still figuring out things about fireman testing that make me say, like Huxley reading The Origin of Species, “How stupid of me not to have thought of that.”

Occasionally, we see Justices instead hiring grown-up clerks with some experience of life (Justice Thomas recently hired a clerk who had already made partner at her law firm), but the salary is only around $65,000. (Supreme Court clerks get big signing bonuses from the private law firms that hire them when their year is up, but still …)

What we need is a modest budget (say, $3 million per year across the 9 Justices) to allow each member of the Supreme Court to hire a mature Chief of Staff to manage the clerks, with, say, a three year term.

On Sunday I considered the curious spectacle of Senator Charles Schumer of New York talking tough about illegal immigration, and even denouncing MSM efforts to euphemize it: Schumer makes Nice: Meaning What?.

I concluded that, especially considering Schumer’s mendacious performance at the Hate Crime Bill hearings late last week the man continues to be a deadly threat to the historic American Nation: and that this wheedling reflects the fact that the Treason Lobby apparently lacks the votes at present to ram through Amnesty.

Thanks DK for pointing out that our old friend Steven Steinlight has also contemplated the “new” Schumer, opting for a Western motif:
The New Sheriff in Town Center for Immigration Studies June 25 2009

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, is point man for President Obama on immigration, riding herd on the Big Push for “comprehensive immigration reform.”… In an embarrassingly transparent effort to pander to his opponents – those of us that believe in the rule of law, giving preference to Americans in the job market as the nation hemorrhages 400,000 jobs a month, and such unfashionable things as national borders – Chuck is doing a Buffalo Bill rodeo show demonstrating his commitment to toughness in general and tough law enforcement in particular. He wants to be seen as the new sheriff in town, and as one tough hombre.

Steinlight isn’t buying:

But Sheriff Chuck: What about past illegal immigration (to the tune of 11-12 million, with some 7 million holding jobs unemployed Americans could use) or present illegal immigration? You and I both know the entire purpose of this Buffalo Bill show about future enforcement is gulling us into legalizing them.

So Steinlight has a good idea:

I don’t know if Chuck’s new diction …is the product of a mini-course on method acting (if you want to persuade those rednecks, act like one!) or whether he’s infiltrating our ranks by cleverly aping our speech patterns. Am I the only one who thinks it might be a good idea to take this guy to the Lieutenant, in the tradition of World War II movies, and test him by asking if he knows who won the 1939 World Series?

Nice job, Steven Steinlight. (His July 1st blog Siren Songs and the New York Times is also amusing: reporting the fact that the Times was the only MSM outlet to report last week’s White House Immigration meeting as extremely encouraging for the Treason Lobby:

Its wildly optimistic assessment of what transpired at the June 25 White House meeting …is not so much contrarian as it is weirdly unique…are we dealing with a delusional mentality or a Machiavellian one?… publishing something so palpably self-deluding simultaneously suggests the sirens’ transformational work is well-advanced.)

Look, Sailer, why do you keep saying that we should keep in mind that Pearl Harbor got us into World War II? Lots of other countries got into World War II without Pearl Harbor happening to them. And even if Pearl Harbor never happened to us, we probably would have gotten into World War II eventually anyway. Therefore, you should shut up, and nobody should ever mention Pearl Harbor again.

Or:

C’mon, Sailer, why are you so evil as to mention the Wall Street Crash of 1929 when discussing the Great Depression? Lots of other countries were involved in the Great Depression. And even if there hadn’t been a Wall Street Crash in 1929, the U.S. probably would have suffered in a Great Depression sooner or later anyway. Thus, logically, anybody who mentions the Wall Street Crash of 1929 should be hounded out of polite society.