Partisan Free Politics

I know I usually focus my posts on highlighting abuses of power from, and the overreaching nature of the Federal Government, but this time I am going to switch it up a little, and take a pot shot a little closer to home.

One of my major summer projects this year has been to landscape my mom’s yard, and in the process find places for the fifty or so different trees, shrubs, and perennials that I have accrued over the last seven or eight years.  One of the final touches left in the transformation is the removal of an old, unsightly, gnarled pine tree that my mom has complained about for years.

  Now I knew that many cities in Oregon have regulations over such tree removals, but when I found out the details I was appalled.  In order to remove this single tree, or any tree that has a 10″ diameter within the City of Lake Oswego (measured at breast height or in the case of a tree with multiple trunks like ours 10″ at the base of the split,) you must first fill out a “Tree Removal Application,” a “Tree Removal Questionnaire,”design a mitigation plan, and then grant the city permission to enter the property to inspect the tree and investigate for any signs of previous unlawful removals (5″ trees, dead trees, or trees that may cause a hazard require a smaller fee and a slightly less strenuous process.)  Then you have to file the application, which of course costs $120 plus $10 per tree, mark the trees, post a sign and maintain it for at least a month, during which time “the public” can request a hearing.  The City Manager then has a very wide degree of latitude to deny, or alter the proposal in any way, or mandate that you get a report from a certified, and government licensed of course, arborist.  Section 55.02.094 covers the “Conditions of Approval”:

   1.    The City may impose conditions of approval on any tree cutting permit if the condition is reasonably related to preventing, eliminating or mitigating a negative impact or potential impact on natural features or processes or on the built environment of the neighborhood which is as created or contributed to by the approved tree removal.

    2.    Conditions of approval may include, but are not limited to:

        a.    Cutting a tree or stump flush with the grade instead of grinding or fully removing a stump;

        b.    Requiring modifications in the location, design or intensity of a development or activities on a site or to require or prohibit certain construction methods;

        c.    Requiring vegetation not requiring a tree removal permit to remain in place or be planted.

        d.    Requiring the removal of injurious vegetation (English Ivy) from other trees on the property.

In short the City Manager now has the final say in all your landscaping decisions, I’m just glad I’m not making an addition to the house.

  Beyond just the basic problems inherent when a society doesn’t have established and protected property rights, barriers like these work to drive housing prices up (imagine the hurdles and costs that developers face, which is obviously borne out in the final cost to home buyers,) but that is exactly what Lake Oswego is looking for.  This is a place that in 1844 mandated that all Blacks, free or slave, within the then Oregon Territory be whipped twice a year until they “shall quit the territory” (the punishment was deemed too harsh and “reduced” to forced labor later in the year.)  This was the first state to be admitted to the union with a exclusion law written directly into the State Constitution, a clause that wouldn’t be removed until 1926.  In short, this is a people who have long expressed desires to keep their country the way it is.

  When will people realize that this sort of regulation is the new racism? and classism for that matter…  When governments get this kind of discretionary power they get to choose the winners and the losers.  I for one, would rather see these decisions left up to the people.

  I understand that there may be some trees that the city has an interest in protecting, but shouldn’t it be the burden of the city to prove that the tree is an essential part of the city, and if such a decision is made, shouldn’t the city then pay to preserve the tree?

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Well to be precise, he doesn’t actually carry it himself (to my knowledge,) but he does have a whole city full of armed guards. Shelly Parker, who lives in one of those parts of DC that interns (and Mayors) are generally told not to go in, on the other hand, isn’t allowed to possess one. Ms. Parker isn’t an ex-con, she has no mental disabilities, by all accounts she is an upstanding member of her community, the only thing that precludes her from legally possessing a firearm in her home is that her home is within the District of Columbia, which has an almost complete and total ban of private gun ownership.

Ms. Parker’s concern for her safety is well founded. She and her neighbors had been repeatedly harassed by gang activity in the area and had waged a campaign against it: frequently calling the police, and organizing block meetings. In her zeal to improve her community she had made quite a few enemies among the neighborhoods criminal element, and this only exacerbated the harassment to the point that one particular hoodlum tried to force his way into her door one night screaming “I’ll kill you! I live on this block too.” Yet there isn’t even any sort of measures in DC’s draconian ban to allow Ms. Parker to petition for an exception.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Shelly Parker and five co-plaintiffs have successfully sued the District and Mayor Adrian Fenty in the U. S. Court of Appeals (DC Circuit) which became the first federal appeals court in the US to invalidate a law on second amendment grounds, (in the interest of full disclosure I’ll point out that one of the plaintiffs is a good friend and mentor of mine.) Just today, however, Mayor Fenty has announced that the case is being petitioned to the Supreme Court, which has not reviewed a 2nd Amendment case in almost 70 years, and has never ventured to interpret it.

I know, as in many cases, there will be some disagreement in our community over what, if any, level of gun control is the most expedient, but I think we should all be able to agree that an outright prohibition of firearms on one’s own land, like the one in DC, is going too far. Most legal scholars agree that the case is too clean cut for the Supreme Court to ignore, but there is also reason to believe that legislation (backed by the NRA of all people) will be introduced to preempt the decision and prohibit the 2nd Amendment from getting a hearing in open court.

So what does the PFP community think of this one?

*Any constructive feedback or questions, that you do not wish to include online can be sent to GRuback@msn.com.

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For my next trick I will attempt to combine two discussions into one. For those of you who may not have read, Rudo, Matt and I have been discussing diversity and affirmative action under the guise of my first Supreme Court posting. Mauritania vs. Orange Shirt Guy, Sam’s blogging debut, has also led to some very interesting discussion on gender issues, consumerism, and beauty in general, with the author, as well as Rudo, Stacey and myself (after having been drug unwilling into a discussion on gender issues) having weighed in thus far. The thesis of my second PFP post is that there is one obvious treatment that would help alleviate each of these problems: education. Racism and sexism are two very natural things, in the theoretical sense. It is downright logical to show a greater trust and consideration to those around and more alike you, and xenophobia and differences in gender roles exist in nature throughout all levels of life. Bigotry, discrimination and intolerance are the sources of the injustices we are talking about and these are not products of nature, but products of ignorance.

Now of course we already have a massive education system (in fact, on average we spend more than $10,000/year on each student) so it falls on me to suggest changes that must be made to produce better results.

America has become too dependent on our schools to fulfill all the educational needs of our children. Consider the word itself: educate, from the latin root educare meaning “to rear or to bring up.” This simply does not sound like an activity that gets done in a six-hour school day. Yet in this age of specialization, with so few stay-at-home parents, most parents expect the schools to educate their kids (it is hard to blame them with the money they are spending, give me $20K a year to educate “my two kids” and see what we can do.) Now through trial and error the U.S. Public School system has had its share of successes, and in a few thousand years of pedagogical philosophy we’ve figured out some pretty reliable methods of instructing in reading, math, and the other sciences, but anyone who leaves a child to be wholly educated in this manner is making a grievous mistake.

The most harmful trend in America today is outsourcing. No, I am not talking about those precious telemarketer jobs, I am talking about the outsourcing of parental responsibility. Parents with increasing demands on their time continually cede more of their responsibilities to any bureaucracy willing to take them on, so that we now see contentious debates raging throughout American school systems over topics as essential to a child’s development as sex education and the creation of the Universe. The task of guiding a child through complex answers to the very primordial questions of life: “how did ‘I’,” and “how did ‘we’ get here, and what does that all mean,” have now been relegated to a government bureaucrat whom the child will probably only cursorily know and that for only a fleeting period of their life. This forfeiture of responsibility is only exacerbated by the moral vacuum caused by America’s growing disillusionment with organized religion and moral philosophy, but that is a topic deserving of its own treatise, so I will only mention it here. Indeed the very school system itself inculcates the idea that the government should take the foremost role in providing for a child’s education. A representative from the government ostensibly chooses where, how, what, when, and with whom a child will learn. They go as far as to tell you when you can eat, and they dole out the authority behind the all-precious hall pass. In fact an entire legal doctrine has been setup around the idea that schools act in loco parentis, or in place of a parent.

The first change we must affect in order to improve the state of education in our society is a structural step: put parents back in charge by instituting a tax credit system to put the money at their discretion and thus allow for each child’s education to be best tailored to meet their individual needs. Such a step would allow the people with the most sincere interest in, and the most intimate knowledge of that child to take charge in directing their education. Additionally, ending the government near-monopoly on education and freeing up billions of education dollars would help to usher in a groundswell of innovation and diversity in pedagogical methods. This student-centered approach allows each child to progress at their own pace in every different field, and follow their own inclinations, desires and aptitudes towards a goal of their choosing. Further, it allows any parent, even one that is unable to personally oversee the day-to-day activities, to provide their child with the whole education that they see fit, all without forcing anyone to fund the expression of any idea they might find objectionable, or forcing parents to remain forever vigilant of community school boards. Now you might point out a flaw or two in such a program, and I admit there surely will be at least one child left behind, so I will assure you that I am working on a perfect plan, but implore that we not wait for it, and assert that for every child that slips through the cracks of a market-oriented system there would be hundreds running through the sieve that is public education.

The second, and more challenging change that we must affect in our society in order to improve the state of education is a cultural and moral one, but as I suggested I will leave the full elucidation of this idea for another treatise. However, it may be alleged that I am really skirting the issue, as this second part is the more integral to answering the concerns of racism and sexism that we were discussing, and so I will provide a brief example to this point: Previously we talked about the virtues of diversity in an educational environment. As I said before I do believe that my time in Atlanta and my schooling in a primarily African-American school has benefited my development as a person, but I must stress that this benefit did not derive from our coincidental presence, and it certainly didn’t come from those endless reports on famous athletes and musicians every February, but instead it came from something as simple as our mutual respectful discourse, which never would have occured if I, or they, had been subjected to role models to fill our heads with ignorance and misinformation beforehand. An education is only as good as the virtues behind it.

Thanks again to all, for the inspiring debate, I look forward to its continuance, after I have had a chance to sleep…

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So for anyone who was too busy making a living last week to dig through the rush of important decisions coming from the Roberts Court, I figured I would pull out a couple especially interesting cases to start the 1st Annual PFP High Court Low Post. This is my first attempt to cover the Supreme Court, although the Great Divide Ranch’s court is one of the highest courts in the land, so I have some experience to fall back on… Luckily for me the boyish charms of Chief Justice Roberts are easy on the eyes, and Justice Thomas has promised to be gentle with the questioning this term…

I’ll start with the good news:

FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life (5-4, with Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy and Alito beating out Ginsburg, Souter, Stephens, and Breyer, a breakdown that will soon look familiar.): The conservative majority got one right in this case, ruling that provisions of the McCain-Feingold legislation violated the first amendment rights of the nation’s biggest cheese-eating abortion-haters organization, thus strengthening the position of political advocates, and people who generally like free speech. Just about everyone got in on the decision writing here, Justice Scalia actually worked in a quote from an unidentified Moroccan cartoonist, and Justice Souter wrote more in dissent than even I have the patience to wade through. How the four ‘liberal’ members of the court saw fit to impinge free speech, political speech nonetheless, I’m not sure I understand, but if it takes as much BSing as Souter spit out then I’m pretty sure the reasoning is faulty.  In short, the controlling opinion struck down a provision of McCain-Feingold that prohibited advocates from running commercials about issues within two months of the election, and we can count that one as a win for freedom of speech (unfortunately it had some big losses still to come too.)

Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. (5-4, with the same lineup as FEC and a ton of other cases.) This case surrounded a pair of abyssmal “diversity” plans that only a bloated bureaucracy in a bloated city could come up with. Fortunately for fans of discrimination, America has lots of bloated cities and even more bloated bureaucracies… So we ended up with two, a plan in Seattle that categorized students as either white or nonwhite, and one in Jefferson County, Kentucky that labeled students black or other. Roberts and those steely O’Toolesque blue eyes lived up to everything we had been promised of him in writing the opinion, delivering the kinds of lines that make young girls weep, or would if any young girls ever read Supreme Court opinions… “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” You just know all the girls want him, and all the guys want to be him…

Now on to the bad news, and there was so much I can only hit the lowlights, the 3 most startling recent decisions that are destroying America:

#3: Hein v. Freedom of Religion Foundation Inc. (FRFI) (and yes you guessed it 5-4) Now this is a real doozy of a case with all the excitement of a Tonya Harding MMA match, but suffers because much of the spunk is couched in terms like Establishment Clause and the standing doctrine. The opinion also suffers because I guess Roberts was too busy writing the FEC opinion and he handed this one off to his backup Justice Alito. Now if you are a mother looking to marry off your daughter then you can probably overlook the receding hairline and the pervasive slime, but he just doesn’t do it for me… However, this opinion is particularly juicy for those in our community who love pure evil, and find sadistic pleasures in disastrous portent. Alito actually denies the FRFI standing because, now brace yourself, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (or NAMBLA,) whose actions promoting religion were called into question by the petitioners, was created by Executive Order and not Congressional action. Thereby skirting that dirty little “Congress shall make no law” problem. Alito, with a bluntness that would make Machiavelli blush, completely dismisses the obvious problem that the entirety of the Executive Office’s funding is appropriated BY CONGRESS.

#2: Wilkie v. Robbins, (7-2, or 9-0 depending on how you want to look at it, Ginsburg and Stephens dissented to parts of the Souter decision. In the end, I tend to see it as Government 2, US Property Owners 0.) Harvey Frank Robbins, or ‘the rich SOB from Alabama’ if you worked for the BLM in the late 90s, owns the High Island Ranch which spans 40 miles of the great state of Wyoming. In March of 1994, the ranch’s previous owner had signed an easement with the government giving them the right to use and maintain South Fork Owl Creek Road within his property, but Robbins was never informed of this easement and the BLM “failed to record it,” so when Robbins took control of the land it was, by Wyoming law, legally free of the easement. One guy at the BLM offices that actually does work caught the error, and called Robbins and demanded a new easement to replace the now defunct one. Robbins refused to grant it outright but indicated a willingness to negotiate. But the BLM reply was a succinct “the government does not negotiate” and what followed could either be characterized as a systematic campaign of harrassment, or the kind of racketeering that only an entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force can pull off. Not surprisingly, Robbins sought RICO charges, and asserted his 5th amendment rights. Also not surprisingly, the Court rejected Robbins’ claims, and so did the American people. As Tim Sandefur, an acquaintance of mine, explains at the Pacific Legal Foundation blog (http://eminentdomain.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/06/robbins-and-ret.html) “The bottom line after the Robbins case is this: federal agents have virtually unlimited power to abuse their otherwise legitimate powers to harass property owners in order to demand that they hand over their land to the government… In this way, Robbins may prove ultimately to be worse than Kelo [v. New London.]” Shudders… Fortunately Justices Ginsburg and Souter found their true liberal streak in their dissent and realized the problem of “death by a thousand cuts.”

… and now the #1 most startling decision that is ruining America: Morse v. Frederick (5-4, duh.) This is the once comical “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case, which has now resulted in a much less comical nightmare ruling that threatens the very foundation of our education system and portends disaster future the future decisions of a Roberts Court.

For those of you who haven’t heard the case details in brief: In 2002, as the Olympic Torch Relay worked its way through Juneau, Alaska, it passed by Juneau-Douglas High School, which allowed students and staff to watch the event. Just outside of school grounds, on a public sidewalk, but within easy view of the school, 18 year-old high school senior Joseph Frederick showed up late to school and together with friends (predominantly JDHS students) unfurled a 14′ banner that read “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS”. The school’s principal, one Deborah Morse, demanded that the student take down the banner, but when Frederick refused, the banner was confiscated and he was suspended, and the Roberts Court is all cool with that.

Apparently, because the school has policies that say drugs are bad, it can legally censor speech that could possibly be conceived as promoting them. Following that logic, given recent prohibitions against ANY physical contact between students (hugs, high fives, handshakes, etc.) in some US public schools, and the rogue actions of school boards like the one in Dover, PA, we could conceivably see a “HUGS 4 DARWIN” case in the near future… I can’t wait. Seriously, we need to rein in our school boards folks, or better yet get a move on to a free market for education!

Justice Thomas filed a concurring opinion which contains the worst of the Roberts Court first full term:

In my view, the history of public education suggests that the First Amendment , as originally understood, does not protect student speech in public schools. Although colonial schools were exclusively private, public education proliferated in the early 1800’s. By the time the States ratified the Fourteenth Amendment , public schools had become relatively common. If students in public schools were originally understood as having free-speech rights, one would have expected 19th-century public schools to have respected those rights and courts to have enforced them. They did not. (emphasis added)

Thomas, a black man, acquiesces to the actions of the 19th century courts… yes the same courts that gave us “separate but equal.” He also reinforces his point with a 1915 case in which the Court upheld the legitimacy of a student’s punishment for a speech about fire hazards in a school building. C’mon, he’s making stare decisis look like stare dictis here… bdum bum…

Well I’ve always found the way to follow a dud joke, is a Clarence Thomas quote. This one criticizes the way the Roberts Court is heading better than anyone could from the outside:

“Today, the Court creates another exception. In doing so, we continue to distance ourselves from Tinker, but we neither overrule it nor offer an explanation of when it operates and when it does not. I am afraid that our jurisprudence now says that students have a right to speak in schools except when they don’t—a standard continuously developed through litigation against local schools and their administrators. In my view, petitioners could prevail for a much simpler reason: As originally understood, the Constitution does not afford students a right to free speech in public schools. (emphasis added)

Also, http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/index.html is the link to a great database of Supreme Court happenings, which is one thing that is currently absent from this site.

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