Posted on February
13, 2017
Liberal Under-Standing
Left needs no relevance in court
by
Daniel
Clark
In order to have standing to bring a lawsuit, a
petitioner is supposed to be able to demonstrate that he or she is an injured
party. One cannot bring a suit just
because one dislikes or disagrees with a particular government action. That is, unless one happens to be a liberal.
When Seattle district judge James Robart
issued a temporary restraining order against President Trump’s executive
“travel ban,” he declared that the states of Washington and Minnesota had legal
standing to challenge the policy, because they had “established a likelihood of
irreparable injury” if the order were not granted. How can that be?
“The
Executive Order adversely affects the States’ residents in the areas of
employment, education, business, family relations, and freedom to travel,” Robart explained.
“In addition, the States themselves are harmed by virtue of the damage
that implementation of the Executive Order has inflicted upon the operations
and missions of their public universities and other institutions of higher
learning, as well as to the States’ operations, tax bases and public funds.”
Just try to take any one among this litany of
assertions seriously. How does a 90-day
restriction in migration from certain countries in order to reassess vetting
processes irreparably harm Minnesota businesses? Judge Robart isn’t
interpreting the law here. He’s only
using these states’ frivolous action as a pretext to implement his own policy
in place of the president’s. The only
law to which he remains true is the one that says to never, ever trust a man
who voluntarily wears a bow tie.
Last June, in Whole
Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas
law that imposed health and safety regulations on abortion clinics, on the
basis that these requirements placed an “undue burden” on women seeking
abortions. But wait a minute, when the
Court fabricated a “fundamental constitutional right” to abortion, it was women
who supposedly had that right, not the abortionists. Yet the plaintiff in this case was not a
woman arguing that her rights were being violated; it was a chain of abortion
clinics, demanding to be allowed to operate in squalid, third-world conditions.
Whole Woman’s Health had no rights, real or judicially
concocted, that were imperiled by the Texas law. Nevertheless, the majority on the Court
granted the clinics third-party standing to sue on behalf of the women they
serve, even though those women’s interests did not necessarily coincide with
their own. In fact, the purpose of the
law in question was to protect the women from the clinics, which had been cited
in the past for such violations as using unsterile and rusty equipment, failing
to have qualified nursing staff on site, and illegal dumping of fetal
remains. Whole Women’s Health had no
standing, and was only treated as if it had so that activist, pro-abortion
justices could have yet another opportunity to fight on behalf of their
favorite cause.
Although
we have laws against cruelty to animals, there are no such things as “animal
rights,” nor could animals assert any, even if they had the wherewithal to
try. Yet in the 1998 Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Glickman
case, the District of Columbia circuit court found that activist Marc Jurnove had legal standing, on the basis that he had
suffered “aesthetic injury” from the sight of caged animals.
In 2011, a provincial court in Ecuador allowed liberal
activists to sue on behalf of “nature.”
What’s that got to do with us?
Presumably nothing, until you realize that Stephen Breyer and the other
liberals on our Supreme Court think it appropriate to apply foreign precedent
to American law. If “aesthetic injury”
is all it takes, then every liberal activist from Portland to Poughkeepsie will
be seeking to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming The Lorax.
Don’t waste your time looking for cases in which legal
standing was so generously granted to conservatives, or those whose motives
appear to be apolitical, because standing is yet another mechanism for
enforcing the political double-standard within our judiciary. In their efforts to impose their vision of
society on the nation, liberal judges have eschewed the entire Constitution at
this point. They’re not about to be
stopped by a comparatively minor obstacle like insufficient standing.
Liberal judges see liberal plaintiffs as the Robin to
their Batman, in their ongoing crusade for “social justice.” To them, the most unjust thing in the world would
be for their kind to be held to the same standards as mere citizens like you
and me.
The Shinbone: The
Frontier of the Free Press