LinkSwarm For March 29, 2024

March 29th, 2024

Lies trying to hide how bad the Biden Recession sucks continue to unravel, a mini Texas-vs.-California update, Ukraine makes another oil refinery go boom, true depths of human depravity, some Bill Burr and Critical Drinker links, and two tons of Murica. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Dallas Fed manufacturing survey: “It’s A Far Deeper Recession Than Publicized.”

    Against expectations of a small improvement from -11.3 to -10.0, the headline sentiment gauge dropped to -14.4 (the lowest end of analysts’ forecasts).

    Furthermore, the production index, a key measure of state manufacturing conditions, fell five points to -4.1, a reading that suggests a slight decline in output month over month.

    Other measures of manufacturing activity also indicated declines this month.

    The new orders index – a key measure of demand – dropped 17 points to -11.8 after briefly turning positive last month.

    The capacity utilization index edged down five points to -5.7, and the shipments index plunged from 0.1 to -15.4.

    The decline in new orders came alongside a surge in prices as raw materials costs rose to 13-month highs…

    That has the stench of stagflation lathered all over it.

  • Also worse than reported: employment numbers. “Philadelphia Fed Admits US Payrolls Overstated By At Least 800,000.”

    We first have to go back to December 2022, when we reported something shocking: as part of its data analysis of the “more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program”, the Philadelphia Fed found that the BLS had overstated jobs to the tune of 1.1 million! This is what the Philadelphia Fed wrote in its quarterly Early Benchmark Revision of State Payroll Employment report at the time:

    Our estimates incorporate more comprehensive, accurate job estimates released by the BLS as part of its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program to augment the sample data from the BLS’s CES that are issued monthly on a timely basis. All percentage change calculations are expressed as annualized rates. Read more about our methodology. Learn more about interpreting our early benchmark estimates.

    So what did this “more accurate”, “more comprehensive” report find? It found that…

    In the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1,121,500 jobs estimated by the sum of the states; the U.S. CES estimated net growth of 1,047,000 jobs for the period.

    Lots of detailed analysis snipped.

    Putting it all together, we now know – as the Philly Fed reported first – that the labor market is far weaker than conventionally believed. In fact, no less than 800,000 payrolls are “missing” when one uses the far more accurate Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data rather than the BLS’ woefully inaccurate and politically mandated payrolls “data”, and if one looks back the the monthly gains across most of 2023, one gets not 230K jobs added on average every month but rather 130K.

    Of course, none of that paints Bidenomics in a flattering picture, because while one can at least pretend that issuing $1 trillion in debt every 100 days to add 3 million jos per year is somewhat acceptable, learning that that ridiculous amount buys 800,000 jobs less is hardly the endorsement that the White House needs.

  • I think I link a story like this every year: “California Leads Among U.S. States Sending People to Texas in 2022. Florida and New York combined sent fewer people to Texas than California.” Leave any leftwing politics behind when you move…
  • California has a $55 billion deficit. But don’t worry, for the 24-25 fiscal year, it’s a $73 billion deficit.
  • Ukraine hits another Russian oil refinery, this time in Samara.
  • Russian network that ‘paid European politicians’ busted.”

    A Russian-backed “propaganda” network has been broken up for spreading anti-Ukraine stories and paying unnamed European politicians, according to authorities in several countries.

    Investigators claimed it used the popular Voice of Europe website as a vehicle to pay politicians.

    The Czech Republic and Poland said the network aimed to influence European politics.

    Voice of Europe did not respond to the BBC’s request for comment.

    Czech media, citing intelligence sources, reported that politicians from Germany, France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary were paid by Voice of Europe in order to influence upcoming elections for the European Parliament.

    The German newspaper Der Spiegel said the money was either handed over in cash in covert meetings in Prague or through cryptocurrency exchanges.

    Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk is alleged by the Czech Republic to be behind the network.

    Mr Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine soon after the Russian invasion, but later transferred to Russia with about 50 prisoners of war in exchange for 215 Ukrainians.

    Czech authorities also named Artyom Marchevsky, alleging he managed the day-to-day business of the website. Both men were sanctioned by Czech authorities.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Abbott says he needs ‘two more votes’ to pass school choice.” Presumably he’ll get those (and then some) in the May runoff.
  • $100M missing from Bay area trust fund management company. A Bay area father who counted on a local non-profit to handle a trust fund designed for his daughter’s long-term care feels duped.” And this is a trust for special needs kids.
  • Another dispatch from the decline of Charm City.

    The radical leftists in control of Baltimore City Hall have plunged the metro area just north of Washington, DC, into apocalyptic levels. We advise readers to entirely avoid the metro area as violent crime spirals out of control.

    Failed social justice reforms, defunding the police, and widespread mistrust of the police have resulted in a skeleton police force that will no longer be able to protect residents in some regions of the city.

    Fox Baltimore reported last Tuesday that only three police officers were on duty for the Southern Police District, which includes more than 61,000 residents.

  • Joe Lieberman, RIP. One of the least reprehensible Democratic senators of the last 30 years or so. But I still remember this:

  • Don’t click on this link unless you want to plumb the depths of human depravity. Noteworthy: “He and his husband.”
  • Flagstaff school board wants to parents to know they’re going to shove social justice down their children’s throats no matter what.
  • “GOP Delegates Adopt Resolutions Criticizing H-E-B CEO Charles Butt for Anti-School Choice Donations.”
  • Republicans file bill to strip money from woke medical schools.
  • Stellantis, AKA The European Monster That Ate Chrysler, just just laid off a whole bunch of white collar workers. Note their mention of focusing on “implementing our EV product offensive.” Oh yeah, they’re boned.
  • Speaking of EV layoffs, Ford is cutting down the staff of their F-150 Lightning plant to one third of what it was. The Lightning is enjoying a double whammy, in that people don’t want EVs, and Ford’s core customers can no longer afford trucks with an average selling price north of $80,000.
  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declares victory over Disney, as the latter has dropped their lawsuit over the the elimination of their special district status.
  • Sean Combs, AKA “Puff Daddy,” AKA “Diddy,” raided by the FBI. “A source close to the investigation told NBC News that the raid was connected to allegations of sex-trafficking and sexual assault and the solicitation and distribution of illegal narcotics and firearms.” “Source close” caveats apply.
  • The federal government is going to allow a shuttered nuclear power plant to be restarted. “The federal government announced that it would provide a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in southwestern Michigan. NJ-based Holtec International acquired the 800-megawatt Palisades plant in 2022 with plans to dismantle it, but with support from the state of Michigan and the Biden administration, the emphasis has shifted to restarting the nuclear power plant by late 2025 instead.” Not wild about the loan part, but restarting America’s nuclear energy growth is long overdue.
  • Used Japanese homes are worthless Not just because of the shrinking population, but because they’re designed to be.
  • Bill Burr answers questions from the Internet.
  • The Critical Drinker is not impressed with the Road House remake. “The Patrick Swayze original wasn’t exactly peak cinema. It was dumb and over-the-top and silly, and I don’t imagine people were exactly crying out for a remake. But damn, man, it’s like Citizen Kane compared to this version.”
  • School tries to ban American flag from truck. Result: Two tons of Murica.
  • Twitch is cracking down on streams that “focus on intimate body parts.” After watching this, I have one question: Where exactly did the lady featured obtain her “automatic butt jiggler?”
  • Feel-good crime aftermath story:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    Did Facebook Run A Man-in-The-Middle Hack Against Competitors?

    March 28th, 2024

    Newly unsealed court documents accuse Facebook of running a man-in-the-middle attack against several competitors.

    At the request of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook officials developed a program called In-App Action Panel (IAAP) that they deployed in 2016 and which was in use through mid-2019, according to the documents, which include internal emails.

    The program utilized cyberattacks to intercept information from Snapchat, YouTube, and Amazon. The program then decrypted the information.

    “Facebook’s IAAP Program used nation-state-level hacking technology developed by the company’s Onavo team, in which Facebook paid contractors (including teens) to designate Facebook a trusted ‘root’ certificate authority on their mobile devices, then generated fake digital certificates to redirect secure Snapchat analytics traffic (and later, analytics from YouTube and Amazon) from Snapchat’s servers to Onavo’s; decrypted these analytics and used them for competitive gain, including to inform Facebook’s product strategy; reencrypted them; and sent them up to Snapchat’s servers as though it came straight from Snapchat’s app, with Facebook’s Social Advertising competitor none the wiser,” lawyers said in one of the documents.

    This is a clever attack in several ways. If you can create and get a program/device to accept a false signing certificate, you bypass having to break a company’s encryption altogether. The program trusts your fake certificate and creates a secure connection to your backend, using your encryption, thinking it’s transmitting information back to the targeted company. Also, analytics data doesn’t have to be sent and received in real time, so a significant delay in gather and receive times may not tip off the targeted company to the attack.

    None of this is a walk in the park, but it’s something like ten orders of magnitude easier than breaking the targeted company’s encryption stream on a live session to seamlessly hack it in real time, which is the sort of God-level hacking limited to those with NSA-level computing power, or fictional characters.

    The lawyers, representing plaintiffs in a lawsuit that accuses Facebook of anti-competitive behavior, were describing emails they obtained through discovery.

    In one email, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote that there was a need to receive information about Snapchat but that their traffic was encrypted. “Given how quickly they’re growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them. Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this,” he wrote.

    After Facebook employees started working on figuring it out, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Javier Olivan wrote that the program could pay users to “let us install a really heavy piece of software (that could even do man in the middle, etc.).”

    Man in the middle refers to a type of cyberattack where attackers secretly intercept information.

    More specifically, it’s where a third party successfully inserts itself into the communication stream between two other parties, relaying (and possibly altering) both ends of the communication without either party knowing.

    “We are going to figure out a plan for a lockdown effort during June to bring a step change to our Snapchat visibility. This is an opportunity for our team to shine,” Guy Rosen, founder of Onavo, later wrote. Onavo was started in Israel and bought by Facebook in 2013.

    In a presentation on the program when it was being finalized, it was stated that there would be “’kits” that can be installed on iOS and Android that intercept traffic for specific sub-domains, allowing us to read what would otherwise be encrypted traffic so we can measure in-app usage.”

    Documents and testimony obtained in the case showed the program was launched in June 2016 and continued being used through 2019.

    The program initially targeted Snapchat but was later expanded to Google’s YouTube and Amazon, according to the documents.

    A few quick points:

    1. This is all from Snapchat’s court documents, so you have to put an “allegedly” on all this.
    2. If all the allegations are true, Facebook has just broken all sorts of federal anti-hacking laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act, and probably half a dozen more I haven’t even thought of.
    3. That Zuckerberg himself is (allegedly) directly implicated in deliberately breaking federal law is pretty breathtaking. He could be looking at serious jail time. Or would be, if he weren’t such a big Democratic Party Donor. (We’ll see how much time Sam Bankman-Fried catches today.)
    4. Snapchat is one thing, but targeting fellow tech behemoths Google (which owns YouTube) and Amazon with this sort of attack would seem to be…unwise. (Maybe Google’s forgiveness was covered in the secret deal the two companies allegedly signed with each other.)
    5. The timeframe is important here. Back in 2016-2019, the handling of digital signing certificates was a lot more loosey-goosey than it is now. A whole lot of things have been tightened up. I wouldn’t say it’s impossible to carry out such an attack now, but it would be harder.

    We’ll see if the whole thing jumps from litigation land to the feds actually going after Facebook, but at a time when Facebook is being sued by all manner of plaintiffs (including Texas and other state attorney generals) over privacy violations and anti-competitive practices, the Snapchat revelations could certainly provide more fuel for the fire…

    Watch A Certain YouTube Video? Google Just Turned All Your Personal Info Over To The Feds

    March 27th, 2024

    Chalk up another win for conspiracy theorists:

  • “If you watch certain YouTube videos, investigators demanded your data from Google.”
  • “Investigators have approached Google and said ‘We want to know who watched certain videos, give that information up.’ So as Chase [DiBenedetto] writes, if you’ve ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to put you on some kind of watch list, your concern may be more than warranted.”
  • “Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity of YouTube accounts and IP addresses that watched certain YouTube videos, which was part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.”
  • It turns out the feds had sent a link to this video to a single “suspected cryptocurrency launderer,” but was able to get a warrant for personal details on everyone who watched it.
  • Also, it wasn’t some sort of illegal video, either. They were “public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software. Forbes says the videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated the case.” But the government now has their personal data. And the past five years has shown that if the deep state gets your data, they won’t hesitate to abuse it to advance their interests.
  • Google says they “push back” against overbroad demands. But given how woke Google has become, how hard do you think they’re going to push aback against data demands targeting the right?
  • “This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets.”
  • “It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying, and it’s happening every day.”
  • “When you’re on the internet, your actions are being tracked by all kinds of entities.”
  • “The scary part is they’ve got this information on you to begin with, but we’ve known that for a while.”
  • “Your car is snitching on you, and so on so is your smartphone, and now so is Google, on occasion.”
  • “‘We want the information on tens of thousands of people,’ and suddenly you realize ‘OK, this is an extremely broad search. Couldn’t you narrow it a little better than that?'”
  • Asking for such information in a search warrant is an overly-broad abuse of power and violation of privacy rights, and also suggests sloppy investigative technique on the part of the feds.

    Here’s hoping the courts quash such requests in he future.

    Paxton Settles His Criminal Case

    March 26th, 2024

    After nine long years, seven years after the corresponding federal charges were thrown out, the case against Texas Attorney general Ken Paxton has ended with a whimper.

    A trial set to begin in Harris County District Court on April 15 has been canceled after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton obtained a pretrial agreement with special prosecutors to drop nine-year-old felony securities charges against him in exchange for meeting several conditions.

    Paxton was indicted in 2015 on three felony counts relating to state securities fraud – with the allegation that he did not disclose a financial ownership interest in a company that he solicited others to invest in, in addition to not being a registered investment advisor when doing so.

    A plethora of legal issues have resulted in the case lingering for years before finally being set for trial, including battles over the payment of the special prosecutors handling the charges and motions regarding what judicial venue should ultimately host the case.

    But after the Court of Criminal Appeals cleared the way last year for the venue to be set in Harris County, the trial date was finally set and all sides appeared ready to move forward.

    That was until Tuesday, when after a meeting at the Harris County Courthouse attorneys for Paxton, along with the special prosecutors handling the case, announced a pretrial diversion agreement had been reached, in which the charges would be dropped once Paxton meets several terms.

    Under the deal, Paxton must undergo 100 hours of community service in Collin County, take 15 hours of continuing legal education in ethics, and pay restitution of up to $300,000.

    $300,000 is a considerable chunk of change, but I doubt it’s going to cramp the style of someone who practiced corporate law for a quarter of a century before being elected Attorney General.

    But serving 100 hours of community service for three accused felonies is like getting a murder charge pled down to a traffic ticket. I sincerely doubt the plea will tarnish Paxton’s reputation among the voting public.

    In truth the Texas voting public’s judgment on Paxton has already been rendered after he was reelected by a healthy margin in 2022 and acquitted in his impeachment trial.

    This was the best shot Democrats had to end Paxton’s career and it didn’t amount to a hill of beans. He shows every sign of being around for Democrats to hate for a long, long time.

    Japan Ends Negative Interest Rates

    March 25th, 2024

    The Bank of Japan just ended 8 years of negative interest rates.

    Indeed, this is the first interest rate hike for Japan in 17 years.

    According to Keynesian economics, Japan should have experienced an economic boom from all that monetary stimulus. It did not. Prices were stagnant. Wages were stagnant. GDP growth was anemic.

    Japan spent more than 1.2 quadrillion yen in deficit spending trying to boost its economy, and all they have to show for it is a debt that’s over 200% of its GDP.

    Yet deficit spending remains the preferred policy solution of just about every damn country in the world.

    Back in the dim mists of time (i.e., the 1980s), Japan Inc. was going to take over the world. That didn’t happen either. Instead, the Japanese bubble, based in huge measure on wildly unsustainable real estate valuations (“At the peak of the bubble economy, Tokyo real estate could sell for as much as US$139,000 per square foot, which was nearly 350 times as much as equivalent space in Manhattan. By that reckoning, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was worth as much as the entire US state of California.”) popped. There then followed three decades of economic stagnation.

    Many will point out that Japan’s shrinking demographics make it an economic outlier, but a whole lot of Western nations aren’t too far behind.

    You can’t deficit spend your way to prosperity, and attempts to do so end in disaster.

    WNBA Hates Breakout Player Because She’s Straight And White

    March 24th, 2024

    Remember the WNBA? The women’s basketball league the NBA started to draw more women into watching basketball? In its inaugural season, the WNBA finals drew 2.85 million viewers, when the Houston Comets won the first of their four championships.

    It’s never reached those heights again, and the Comets folded in 2008. There was a mild uptick to 728,000 viewers last year.

    So you’d think the league would welcome an exciting, highly skilled new breakout player.

    You’d be wrong.

  • “For almost three decades the WNBA has been a laughing stock and disgrace of a professional sports league that only survives due to NBA subsidies.”
  • “A possible turning point for this sad existence of a league has arrived in the form of a basketball messiah.”
  • “Caitlin Clark, the greatest and most popular female college basketball player of all time, has announced she’ll be joining the WNBA this upcoming season, and some think she can do for the WNBA what Larry, Magic or Jordan did for the NBA.” I think she can make it more popular, but I sincerely doubt she can produce the same boost that trio gave to the NBA’s fortunes.
  • “The WNBA’s players don’t want Caitlin Clark to succeed.”
  • “The WNBA is made up primarily of players who’ve been infected with the false ideas of modern feminism, which heavily focuses on issues related to race, sexuality, gender identity and participating in the oppression Olympics.” I would say “Get woke, go broke,” but the WNBA was already broke without NBA subsidies.
  • “The players that have been infected with this ideology don’t want Clark to be the face of the league and will do everything in their power to stop it from happening.”
  • “The first problem Clark will face is that she will be a straight player in a primarily LGBT dominated league, which some of you may think is nonsense and won’t have any effect.”
  • “But don’t take it from me, take it from former WNBA champion and number three overall draft pick Candace Wiggins, who claimed that 98% of the league is gay and that the toxic environment within the the league affected her as a straight woman and made her retire early.”
  • “From her first moment in the league, she was targeted and harassed because she was straight and a nationally popular figure, and that many of the other players were jealous and consistently tried to hurt her.”
  • “After Wiggins came out with these comments, the media didn’t support her. Instead they tried to tear down and diminish her.”
  • “If you look at viewership numbers since the start of the league, you’ll see viewership is still down tremendously. But the league and the media will still try to create a positive narrative by saying things like how this year’s finals had the highest viewership for a game three in 18 years, without mentioning it was still over 200,000 viewers short of the game three 18 years ago, and one of the teams that played in that game [doesn’t] even exist anymore.”
  • “Even worse for Caitlin Clark is that, unlike Wiggins, in the minds of those who participate in the oppression Olympics, Clark bears the ultimate sin of being white.”
  • “We’ve already seen this be a problem for other WNBA Stars. For example Sabrina Ionescu. She’s of course the player who took Steph Curry to the wire in the Three-Point Contest, which was probably the most exciting thing of that dumpster fire of an All-Star weekend.”
  • “Like Clark, Sabrina was a dominant college player who won awards and consistently pulled in higher attendance numbers for her college game than the average WNBA game, yet ever since she’s been in the league she’s faced criticism from players and the media because she’s white.”
  • “With an Emmy-nominated sportscaster [Chris Williamson] straight up saying the reason people aren’t rocking with Sabrina is because she leans into her white privilege and benefits from her whiteness and doesn’t use it to uplift and amplify her black co-workers voices in the WNBA.”
  • Plus the usual accusations of racism for putting her on the NBA2K24 cover. (Which is, I think, a special WNBA edition available only at Gamestop? I don’t play sports video games, so I have no idea how these various editions work.)
  • “This past year, Sabrina was ranked six by the fans and media among guards for All-Star voting, but was ranked 19th by the players.”
  • “Articles have already started to emerge which claim Clark’s whiteness is the reason she has been elevated to superstar status instead of, you know, the fact that she’s actually a legit college superstar who’s scoring points at a level not seen since Pistol Pete and bringing in more fans to the women’s game than ever before.” This is hyperbole. Though quite impressive, Clark’s 27.8 points per game in NCAA Division 1 doesn’t come close to Pete Maravich’s insane 44.5 points per game, and Chris Clemons averaged 30 points a game 2018-19.
  • “Those in and around the league subscribe to beliefs that simply don’t allow them to build the WNBA around Caitlin Clark, but rather instead actually urge them to tear her down.”
  • Is the commenter (TooLazyToHoop) overselling Clark? Maybe. I’m hardly an expert on the WNBA or women’s college basketball. (Although, since I could, in fact, name five past WNBA players with a gun to my head, I probably do know more than 99% of the American public.) But the video shows Clark does have a very sweet 3-point stroke.

    And now Bill Burr’s quite relevant WNBA rant:

  • “Nobody in the WNBA got Covid.”
  • “We gave you a fucking league! None of you showed up! Where are all the feminists? None of you went to the fucking games. You failed them, not me.”
  • “Women failed the WNBA.”
  • “Meanwhile, the Kardashians are making billions. Those Real Housewives shows are making money hand over fist. That’s what women are watching.”
  • “The money listens.”
  • Cruel, fair and true…

    Video Roundup Of Ridiculously Large Guns

    March 23rd, 2024

    It’s been a while since we did a “just for fun” video roundup of ridiculously large caliber guns. So here it is!

    First up: Scott of Kentucky Ballastics shoots the TII .500 Bushwacker. Given Scott’s previous critical failure with other .50 ammo, you can bet that he’s put on a lot of personal protective gear for this shoot.

  • “Let’s ride the lightening!”
  • A much bigger blast than the S&W .500 Magnum.
  • 2410 fps.
  • It makes it all the way through one ballistic gel block and into a second.
  • Both the S&W .500 Magnum and the .500 Bushwacker absolutely obliterate 6 pound cans of food, and eventually the collateral damage destroys the folding table.
  • If that wasn’t big enough, he also fires a punt gun against a gun safe. The safe doesn’t fare well.

    Finally, to end with the most ridiculous, here’s someone firing a singles-shot 20mm Vulcan:

    Good luck fitting that in your gun safe…

    Is Trump Picking Up Black Voters?

    March 21st, 2024

    All polls indicate that the answer is yes. The question is how many.

    CBS News correspondent Nikole Killion interview Azad Ahmad and his girlfriend Alexandra, both of whom voted for Obama in 2012, but both of whom are voting for Trump this year.

  • Alexandra: “My views on certain things have changed.”
  • Alexandra: “Being in a pattern of doing the same thing that I’ve been doing because it’s kind of like second nature. When you go in in a poll, you hit Democrat. Something has to happen. I mean, it’s just so expensive to survive, and we’re planning on having kids. I don’t want to live in a stressful environment, trying to rub two pennies together to try to make it.”
  • Azad: “Post-Obama, I decided that the [Democratic] party just wasn’t suitable to the goals that I had.”
  • Another black voter: “I think president Trump was a bad people’s person, but a great leader. He put our economy in a booming state. He provided a permanent funding for all HBCU.”
  • Despite salting her interviewees with Democrats reciting talking points, a lot of real frustration with Biden and the Democratic Party seeps through.

    I notice, however, that everyone she interviewed was college educated. It woud be interesting to poll blacks worker blue collar jobs. I suspect the support for Trump would be even higher…

    (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)

    Supreme Court: Yes, Texas Can Deport Illegal Aliens. 5th Circuit: Psych!

    March 20th, 2024

    Here I was all ready to with what I wanted to write about, only to have the judicial system throw me a curve. Yesterday, it looked like the Supreme Court was finally giving Texas the green light to deport illegal aliens.

    The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted its freeze of a Texas immigration law which allows state and local law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants and empowers state judges to deport them.

    The Court’s six conservative justices dismissed the Biden administration’s emergency appeal, allowing the law to remain in effect while the issue is adjudicated by lower courts. The majority did not explain its reasoning, as is typical, but Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, issued a concurring opinion explaining that Texas should be allowed to enforce its law until a lower court definitively strikes it down.

    “If a decision does not issue soon,” Barrett wrote, “the applicants may return to this court.”

    On X Tuesday, Texas Governor Abbott acknowledged that litigation over the law will continue in lower courts.

    “BREAKING: In a 6-3 decision SCOTUS allows Texas to begin enforcing SB4 that allows the arrest of illegal immigrants,” he wrote. “We still have to have hearings in the 5th circuit federal court of appeals. But this is clearly a positive development.”

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the ruling on X.

    “HUGE WIN: Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court,” he said. “Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court.”

    In court papers, Paxton said the Texas law does not undermine federal law but complements it regarding immigration enforcement, which the federal government is supposed to be fulfilling. The Biden administration for many months has been flouting federal immigration law by paroling illegal immigrants into the U.S. instead of detaining them.

    The Constitution “recognizes that Texas has the sovereign right to defend itself from violent transnational cartels that flood the state with fentanyl, weapons, and all manner of brutality,” Paxton said in filings, according to NBC News.

    Texas is “the nation’s first-line defense against transnational violence and has been forced to deal with the deadly consequences of the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the border,” he added.

    Chalk one up for controlling the borders and the rule of law, right?

    Fifth circuit: Not so fast!

    A procedural victory for Texas allowing the state to enforce its new border security law while the Biden administration’s battle against the measure continues to work its way through the courts was short-lived.

    While the U.S. Supreme Court moved to allow the law to go into effect on Tuesday afternoon, hours later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put the law on hold yet again.

    Senate Bill 4, which was set to go into effect earlier this month, creates a state crime for entering the country illegally, paving the way for state law enforcement to arrest illegal aliens.

    After the federal government challenged the measure in a lawsuit, U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra blocked the law from going into effect. It has since been sent to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

    In the meantime, a procedural fight had taken place over whether the state could enforce the law awaiting final judgment in the case.

    In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied the Biden administration’s request to halt enforcement of the law, allowing Texas to begin enforcement immediately.

    At the time, Attorney General Ken Paxton called the decision a “huge win” for Texas.

    “Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court. Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court,” said Paxton.

    That victory was short-lived, as late Tuesday night the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals placed another stay on the law from being enforced.

    Frustrating, but it underscores the difficulty the Supreme Court faces, namely: How do you reign in an executive branch hellbent on ignoring clear laws on securing the border against illegal aliens that instead actual aids and abets illegal aliens breaking those same laws?

    What mechanisms can the Supreme Court use to reign in a rogue executive without causing a constitutional crisis?

    The Fifth Circuit had a hearing scheduled this morning on the issue but evidently haven’t issued a ruling. I’ll try to update this if it does…