Freshman Katanji Brown Jackson scolds senior colleagues after court deals with routine police stop case

KBJ still doesn't know if she's a woman

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a woman who isn't certain what a woman is because she isn't a biologist, accused the Supreme Court majority on Monday of overstepping its role to "wordsmith" a lower court in Washington, D.C. in a pointed break from her colleagues in a Fourth Amendment case about whether a police officer had reasonable suspicion to stop a man. 

Jackson, a Biden autopen appointee and the least senior of all justices, was the only one to defend the D.C. appeals court, which had found last year that the officer improperly stopped the man while he was in a vehicle. The Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision, approving the police stop because common sense prevailed.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, an Obama appointee and the high court's most senior liberal justice, also broke with the majority but declined to join Jackson's dissent, further isolating Jackson as an outlier even among the liberal justices.

The Supreme Court’s decision emphasized that police officers have the broad ability to rely on a "totality of the circumstances" when making stops, noting that sometimes seemingly trivial standalone facts about a situation can be combined with more suspicious behavior to justify reasonable suspicion for a police stop or arrest. You know, like seeing two African men in MAGA hats, holding a hangman's noose at 2 a.m. on a sub-freezing day on a Chicago looking suspicious near a Subway Restaurant, for example.

But Jackson argued against what she said was the high court's intervention in a lower court's routine evaluation of which facts are relevant and which are not. "I cannot fathom why that kind of factbound [sic] determination warranted correction by this Court," D.E.I. Jackson wrote.

The case arose from a 2023 dispatch call to Washington, D.C., police at 2 a.m. reporting a suspicious vehicle. When an officer arrived on scene, two people ran from the car while the remaining passenger slowly began backing out of the parking lot with a door still open. The D.C. attorney general's office argued on behalf of police that this "totality" of facts amounted to reasonable suspicion to stop the person who remained in the car.

The Supreme Court’s unsigned per curiam opinion [Latin for "by the court" -- is a judicial decision issued by an appellate court, e.g., US Supreme Court of a federal/state appeals court, that isn't attributed to any specific individual judge or justice as the author. Instead, it is presented as the opinion of the court as a whole (or the panel of judges who heard the case)], said the lower court improperly ignored that two people fled the vehicle before the third person was stopped by an officer. 

Jackson said the D.C. appeals court had done basic "culling" of facts to reach its conclusion that the stop was unwarranted.

"Under these circumstances, with only seconds to decide whether to intervene, the officer was entirely justified in detaining the driver," lawyers for the police argued. They added that "within moments of stopping the driver, the officer observed a smashed window and punched-out ignition, confirming that the vehicle had been stolen."

While Jackson has become known for aggressively supporting court intervention in broader constitutional fights involving presidential power, in this case, her dissent emphasized a need for judicial restraint. Jackson argued that the lower court properly considered the Fourth Amendment, which says people have a right to be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." 

She said the case was not worthy of taking the "unusual step of summary reversal." But what does she know? She doesn't even know what a woman is.

"I am not sure why our Court sees fit to intervene in this case, let alone to do so summarily," Jackson said. "If the intervention reflects a worry that the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (DCCA) misunderstands the Fourth Amendment’s totality-of-the-circumstances analysis, that worry seems unfounded."

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OMG the SPLC broke up with the Women's March over anti-Semitism

It's not typical of me to say anything good about the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center, but I will to a degree do so in this post.

The SPLC is the latest in leftist organizations to quietly sever ties with the national Women's March after it was revealed in the New York Times and Tablet that senior leaders of the organization expressed anti-Semitic sentiments in early organizational meetings, and affiliated with the anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT, and anti-women's rights organization, the Nation of Islam, expressing admiration for their crap weasel leader Louis Farrakhan.

The Daily Beast reports that SPLC had quietly withdrawn its support for the Women's March, and the Women's March, in turn, had removed SPLC from its list of co-sponsors. The SPLC was a prominent member of the Women's March coalition for the first two years of marches.

The SPLC, in an effort to avoid looking like fans of Hitler supporters, was closed-mouth about the development in their statement to the Daily Beast, telling reporters that “other projects were a priority,” and that they would continue to be involved with local marches, even if they were cutting ties with the national Women's March.

Now we know the real reason.

Just a few short months ago, the SPLC was expressing unqualified support for the March, claiming, in a press release that:

“As an official partner of the march, the Southern Poverty Law Center stands in solidarity with its organizers’ vision — that ‘women’s rights are human rights’ — and with the march’s mission to bring together communities ‘insulted, demonized and threatened by the rhetoric of the past election cycle,’ the SPLC said in January of 2017, calling itself “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society. Through our core issues, we work to protect the rights of the working poor, LGBT, and undocumented immigrant women whom the Women’s March on Washington seeks to unite.”

But that seems to have changed since reporters at Tablet and the New York Times revealed a significant link between the Women's March's national organizers -- including Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez -- and Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, which the SPLC has long-designated as a "hate group," and Louis Farrakhan as a purveyor of anti-Semitism.

A handful of local "Women's March" organizations have also cut official ties to the national Women's March over the revelations of anti-Semitism, and a number of other organizations, besides the Southern Poverty Law Center, have cut ties with the national March pending turnover at their top levels.

According to Tali Goldsheft, the activist who began a major petition drive to encourage left-leaning organizations to cut ties with Sarsour, Mallory, and Perez, more than half of the Women's March's original sponsors and affiliates have dropped off, including several major labor unions, at least two top LGBT-rights organizations (GLAAD and the Human Rights campaign), and one top women's rights organization, NARAL, have all recently dropped off the list of Women's March supporters.

It seems that killing gays under sharia [Islamic law] as Farrakhan believes, doesn't appeal to the LGBT-rights organizations. You will also not see any Jewish organizations sponsoring the March, and the AFL-CIO, NARAL, GLAAD, Human Rights Campaign, NRDC, OXFAM, Greenpeace, Amnesty and other major orgs are no longer listed as @womensmarch partners.

Goldsheft says there are only a handful of "major" sponsors left: Planned Parenthood, an organization that specializes in killing babies for profit. The American Civil Liberties Union, [but if you want to defend your civil liberties, don't look to the ACLU]. And the American Federation of Teachers, an organization that, since 1980 has contributed tens of millions of dollars, 95 percent of which has gone to Democrats. Members' dues underwrite much of the AFT's political support and in 2015, four California teachers sued AFT and its California unit over the use of member dues for political activities, arguing that unions were violating constitutional right to free speech by forcing them to either support union-favored causes and candidates or lose access to important job benefits such as life insurance and disability. The matter was resolved last year by SCOTUS in Janus v AFSCME concluding public sector union fees violate the First Amendment compelling nonmembers to "subsidize private speech on matters of substantial public concern." Unions will, subsequently, need to gain the affirmative consent of individual teachers before enrolling them in the union.

The next national Women's March is set to take place next Saturday, January 19, in Washington, D.C. Turnout is anticipated to be way down from previous years.

Rightfully so.


Will 2019 be the year you follow Brain Flushings and have a few laughs while you get a conservative viewpoint? Let's hope so, because politics is the new NFL without the mindless kneeling and this blog will both inform you and hopefully entertain you bigly.



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Ruth Bader Ginsburg has her own #MeToo too

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg confessed that she, like many other women, had her own brush with sexual harassment and gender inequality.

Of the #MeToo movement the 84-year-old Brooklynite said: "It's about time."

"Every woman of my vintage knows what sexual harassment is, although we didn't have a name for it," the elderly SCOTUS liberal told a crowd during a forum to promote her new documentary "RBG" at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday. "The attitude toward sexual harassment was simply, 'Get past it. Boys will be boys.'"

Ginsburg told NPR's legal correspondent and longtime liberal friend Nina Totenberg, about an incident that she said occurred when she was a law student at Cornell University in the early 1950s, before most people were born.

Ginsburg spoke about her concerns with her chemistry teacher over her "abilities" ahead of an important exam. He comforted her and told her he'd give her a practice exam to make her more comfortable with the test.

"The next day--on the test--the test is the practice exam. And I knew exactly what he wanted in return," Ginsburg claimed. "That's just one of many examples," she added, without actually giving an example of what happened.

But Ginsburg refused to slough off the professor's inappropriate unexplained gesture. After the exam, she walked straight up to him and confronted him, she said.

"I went to his office and I said, 'How dare you! How dare you, you--" she said without clarifying what the end of her sentence was. "And that was the end of that."

When Ginsburg taught at Rutgers Law School in 1964, she quickly saw how she was treated differently than her male colleagues. 

Because Rutgers was a state school in New Jersey, she knew she'd be taking a pay cut, but when the dean told her how big a cut, she was mortified. She asked a male colleague who had graduated from law school about the same time as her what he was being paid and the difference was quite substantial.

"Ruth, he has a wife and two children to support. You have a husband with a good paying job in New York," the dean responded.

That was the very year the Equal Pay Act had passed," Ginsburg said. "That was the answer that I got."

So the Women's March on Saturday was never about equal pay and equal rights for women--it's now law, just like protection from harassment in the workplace is law. 

The Women's March was actually an anti-Trump march because that's the main issue women really care about.


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SCOTUS Allows Travel Ban to Take Full, Immediate Effect

The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the latest repeat of President Trump's travel ban to take full effect for now, as lower courts continue to try dealing with lawsuits opposing the ban by a vote of 7 to 2. 

This means that the administration can enforce its September proclamation, suspending entry of foreign nationals from seven terror-spawning countries: Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Venezuela and Yemen.

Leftist border-hating justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor noted their dissent from the Court's decision.

The DOJ asked the Court to lift lower court orders by leftist Obama appointee judges opposing everything Trump and barring enforcement of the proclamation while legal challenges are adjudicated by the courts. Challenges are currently pending before the 4th and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeal.

Although the Court agreed to lift those orders, they expressed no view on the merits of the case.

President Trump issued the proclamation late September when the second version of the travel ban expired after a 90-day enforcement period.

Federal courts in Hawaii and Maryland issued orders forbidding enforcement of key provisions of the proclamation. Those orders were partially upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and concluded any person from six of the eight terror-spawning countries named in the order with a significant connection to the U.S., such as family, business or know someone who knows someone in a sleeper cell, may still enter the country.


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