Understanding Arizona

I have often suggested in jest that our law firm motto should be, “Can’t We All Just Not Get Along?”  This has never caught on.

When it comes to society generally, however, getting along would be a good thing, but it requires common ground.  And the first place to start would be a common understanding of the facts of a situation before people begin staking out wildly unhinged positions.

I started thinking about this more lately when I saw that several of my Facebook friends had joined a group called “1,000,000 Against the Racist Anti-Immigrant Law SB 1070 in Arizona!”  Now, these friends are gentle souls, so I wondered about this law, particularly since it has gotten so much bad press lately.  

Well, it turns out this law really should not be controversial at all, since it closely tracks decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent.  And to call it racist is simply wrong, since the law itself contains protections against just that possibility.

Here ‘s the operative provision of the law, boiled down to its essence:

For any lawful contact made by a law enforcement official . . . where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation. Any person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status determined before the person is released. . . A law enforcement official or agency of this state or a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state may not solely consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona constitution.  (For the full text of the law, click here).

So, if a police officer comes into contact with someone and has a reasonable suspicion that the person might be in the country illegally (or if the person is arrested), he can investigate the person’s immigration status.  The law specifically prohibits profiling based solely on race, color, or national origin.

So, exactly how is this racist?

The “reasonable suspicion” closely tracks longstanding U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, beginning most famously with Terry v. Ohio, a 1968 Supreme Court decision.   In Terry, Cleveland Detective Martin McFadden became suspicious after observing John Terry and two others, who appeared to be casing a location for a robbery.  McFadden stopped to investigate and eventually frisked the three men for weapons, finding one on Terry and one other.  Terry was later convicted of carrying a concealed weapon.

In finding the detective’s conduct acceptable under the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, the Supreme Court said:

And in justifying the particular intrusion the police officer must be able to point to specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant that intrusion.  The scheme of the Fourth Amendment becomes meaningful only when it is assured that at some point the conduct of those charged with enforcing the laws can be subjected to the more detached, neutral scrutiny of a judge who must evaluate the reasonableness of a particular search or seizure in light of the particular circumstances.  And in making that assessment it is imperative that the facts be judged against an objective standard: would the facts available to the officer at the moment of the seizure or the search ‘warrant a man of reasonable caution in the belief’ that the action taken was appropriate?  *  *  * And in determining whether the officer acted reasonably in such circumstances, due weight must be given, not to his inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or ‘hunch,’ but to the specific reasonable inferences which he is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his experience. 

Arizona has attempted to enshrine these principles in its new law, requiring police officers to have “reasonable suspicion” that a person may be in the country illegally, and prohibiting the officer from acting solely on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

When people suggest that this law is racist or that Arizona police will be stopping people randomly to see their “papers,” it is clear they have not read the law, don’t understand it, or simply refuse to understand. 

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but no one has a right to be wrong on the facts.  If you want to get along, first educate yourself instead of relying on shorthand descriptions from uneducated, agenda-driven radicals.

Liberals and the Law, or Why Jimmy Carter’s Judges are Killing Us!

What in the world is going on in our nation’s courtrooms? Have our judges lost their minds?

I am not one to fly off the handle, but I see the pattern, and it’s not good. Here are a few examples of the current craziness:

Voter-mania. In 2008, ACORN, in concert with the Ohio Secretary of State (a Democrat) and a federal judge (appointed by Clinton), effected a settlement by which the homeless were permitted to use park benches(!) as their addresses for voter registration purposes. ACORN is being investigated or has been charged with voter fraud in at least 14 states. The U.S. Department of Justice has now ordered that states are not permitted to verify voter citizenship. 

This year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, a well-known asylum, ruled that a Washington state law automatically denying felons the right to vote was racially discriminatory and therefore violated section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.  This conclusion is “due to racial discrimination in the state’s criminal justice system,” the theory being that minorities are disproportionately charged and sentenced, so the felon-can’t-vote law hits them harder than it does white people.   Note that all felons are treated the same — they can’t vote — so this really has nothing to do with the felon-can’t-vote law and everything to do with the notion that the state itself is discriminatory.  The judges in the majority of this 2-1 decision?  Appointed by Jimmy Carter.

Here’s the danger — once you decide that the criminal justice system is inherently discriminatory, then you can’t use criminal background checks for any purpose because the effect of the check will fall disproportionately on minority groups.  Thus, we could not use criminal background checks to screen applicants for jobs in law enforcement, the schools, or anywhere else.  Nice, huh?

Perhaps you think I am exaggerating.  I assure you, GLBLITL does not exaggerate.  As if on cue to prove my point, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and other organizations filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York on April 13 against the Census Bureau for race and national origin discrimination in the hiring of temporary workers.  In Johnson et al. v. Locke, CCR [an organization whose name is the antithesis of its purpose] says that the U.S. Census Bureau’s practice of running job applicants’ names through the FBI criminal records database disproportionately excludes applicants of color and deters them from completing the application process. 

And so it goes.

Stop that Praying!  The most recent example of judicial mischief is the ludicrous decision by Judge Barbara Crabb of the Western District of Wisconsin, finding the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional.  Appointed by — you guessed it — Jimmy Carter, Crabb said in her opinion: 

A determination that the government may not endorse a religious message is not a determination that the message itself is harmful, unimportant or undeserving of dissemination.  Rather, it is part of the effort to carry out the Founders’ plan of preserving religious liberty to the fullest extent possible in a pluralistic society. . . The same law that prohibits the government from declaring a National Day of Prayer also prohibits it from declaring a National Day of Blasphemy. (Citation and internal quotes omitted).

Oh, brother.  Perhaps Judge Crabb cannot conceive of the fact that a “National Day of Blasphemy” would actually dictate content, while a National Day of Prayer does no such thing.  There is no coercion, and the government is not “endorsing a religious message.” 

The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion[.]“  The purpose was to prevent the federal government from imposing a single, national religion on the people.  The National Day of Prayer, adopted in 1952, does no such thing.  Suddenly it’s unconstitutional?

What is it with these judges that they despise our most cherished institutions?  Religion, marriage, the family, the free market, and freedom itself are under an unrelenting attack.  Don’t believe that?  Wait for net neutrality, cap-and-trade, and the full effect of the health care bill.  Already, 50 percent of our citizens pay next to nothing in income taxes (3 percent of the total), and yet they are the biggest consumers of government services and handouts.  The top one percent earnings-wise pay 40 percent of the taxes, and the top five percent of earners — those making over $145,283 — pay 60 percent of the all the federal income tax collected in this country.  

Apparently, the liberals can’t glom onto any actuaries, because one would tell them this path is completely unsustainable and headed toward a major breakdown.  A National Day of Prayer?  We need it now more than ever.

America was founded on a faith in Providence, in God’s mercy, and in the notion that all men are endowed with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  These rights are being slowly but surely strangled and, if we do not reverse course soon, our great Nation will be unrecognizable and lost.