Category Archives: legal news

legal news, local news, State news

Paxton should pay a big price

What do you know about this? It appears that the Texas Republican Party primary race for attorney general is shaping as a fight over the incumbent’s self-inflicted legal difficulties … not to mention the shame he has brought to the high office he occupies.

AG Ken Paxton has it coming to him.

Paxton was elected attorney general in 2014. The very next year he got indicted by a grand jury right here in Collin County on allegations of securities fraud. He continues to await trial in state court. He also has been chastised by the Securities and Exchange Commission; the FBI has launched a probe into complaints from former senior legal assistants at the AG’s office that Paxton has been behaving illegally; then he got that idiotic lawsuit tossed by the Supreme Court in which he sought to overturn the presidential election returns in several other states that voted for Joe Biden.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton facing challenges from all fronts | The Texas Tribune

Three Republicans have filed to run against Paxton: Land Commissioner George P. Bush, former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert. They’re all singing off the same song sheet, which is that Paxton’s legal troubles are enough to get him booted out of office.

I am glad to hear it. Yes, even from Rep. Gohmert, a fellow for whom I have zero respect.

Whatever does the job. Paxton is a joke, an embarrassment, a disgrace.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Yes, try the kid as an adult

It boggles my mind at times why officials have to haggle for a long time about whether to try a juvenile as an adult when he allegedly commits the kind of crime that occurred the other day in Oxford, Mich.

Four people are dead after a high school student opened fire. The student is in custody. Three of the fatal victims dies on the day of the shooting; the fourth one died just today. Many more victims were injured.

I get that the suspect is a juvenile, but damn, the boy is charged with committing a grievous act of violence on other students.

Authorities are keeping him segregated from the adults in jail. I am OK with that. I also am OK with keeping underage convicts who are tried as adults away from the grownups in the slammer.

However, the penalty for a conviction on the crime that this individual is alleged to have committed should be the maximum provided to adults, not to minors. He is accused of committing a heinous act and if he is convicted, he needs to do the time required under the law … as an adult.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Roe v. Wade in trouble?

My gut is rumbling, my trick knee is throbbing and I don’t like the feel of any of it as I ponder what might occur down the road with the U.S. Supreme Court’s pending decision on whether to restrict abortion.

Justices have heard from both sides in a Mississippi case involving a law that bans abortion after 15 weeks or pregnancy. It’s not as strict as Texas’s ban after six weeks, but is way more restrictive than the Roe vs. Wade decision that is at the heart of all this talk.

Roe is the case involving a Texas woman who filed suit in 1973 over abortion. The SCOTUS then issued its landmark ruling that legalized abortion, saying it is protected under the U.S. Constitution’s right of privacy provision.

Roe is being challenged directly and the chatter today suggests that the high court, with its 6 to 3 conservative majority is poised to limit abortion — if not make it illegal.

Oh, brother. No matter what the court decides, I am going to proclaim that it won’t end abortion. Women will continue to get them by any means necessary, which makes a potential ban on the practice so dangerous.

I consider myself to be pro-life, which I don’t believe supersedes my equally held belief that government should not dictate how a woman can manage her body. Could I counsel a woman to get an abortion? Absolutely, categorically and unquestionably no! However, nor do I believe that anyone in government has any right to tell a woman she must carry a baby to full term.

The Texas law makes no exception for a woman impregnated by a rapist or during an incestuous encounter. If there is anything more cruel and inhumane than that, I have trouble determining what that would be.

Well, the SCOTUS justices now are going to keep their own counsel on this matter. I want them to uphold Roe vs. Wade. I do not expect them to do so. If they allow Roe to be dismantled, then my fellow Americans, we’d all better prepare ourselves for many stories of utter misery, pain and heartache as women end their pregnancies through means that can do them irreparable harm.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news, national news

Racial justice: Has it arrived?

One jury verdict does not necessarily signal a trend, although some thinkers and analysts are trying to ascribe a trend to the Georgia jury that convicted three white men of murdering a black man.

The trend that some are asking: Does this verdict signal the arrival of racial justice in America?

Let’s hold on here. Ahmad Arbery was jogging through a white neighborhood when he was accosted by three men who seemingly though that Arbery, who was black, didn’t belong there. One of the men shot Arbery to death and that individual, Travis McMichael, was convicted of all the charges associated with the killing.

The jury, comprising 11 white people and one black individual, delivered a stern warning to anyone thinking they can hide behind a “self-defense law.”

What about the racial justice question? If it spells the end of verdicts that acquit white people of killing a black person on flimsy evidence, the answer is “no,” we don’t have racial justice. Nor do we have it if a jury acquits a black individual if he kills white victims, such as what occurred in 1995 when a mostly black jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murdering his former wife and her friend.

I am not going to ascribe an abundance of significance to the Georgia jury’s verdict. I welcome it, but let’s wait a long while before we attach any historical significance to what the jury has ruled.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Who killed JFK?

Many mainstream media observers have talked over the past couple of days while commemorating the 58th year since President Kennedy’s murder in Dallas about the right-wing conspiracy theories that permeate our politics to this day.

They have noted the John Birch Society’s brochures printed at the time of JFK’s visit to Dallas that accused the president of surrendering U.S. sovereignty to the United Nations, of appointing “anti-Christians” to government posts. It’s pretty standard right-wing wacko stuff.

Indeed, in the time leading up to the visit to Texas in 1963, there was considerable concern expressed by those close to the president about the perceived threats to him from the far-right wing of political thought.

However, let’s hold on and take a brief look at what happened on that day.

Who killed the president on that glorious Dallas day as he rode in the motorcade through downtown en route to the Dallas Trade Mart where he was to deliver a speech that afternoon?

The cops arrested a card-carrying Marxist named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was seen in the book depository building and captured later at the Texas Theater after he killed a Dallas police officer, J.D. Tippitt.

It seems, to me at least, that the authorities were looking the other way when this loser Oswald managed to change the course of world history with three rifle shots from the sixth floor of the Dallas office structure.

Why don’t the media talk about that tragic twist of fate?

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

SCOTUS to get kicked around?

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Mitch McConnell has demonstrated a clear ability — and a tendency — to play hardball politics whenever the need arises in his own pointed head.

Think about how the Senate Republican leader can manipulate things in the event the GOP takes control of the U.S. Senate after the 2022 midterm election.

Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer might retire from the court. Say, he does so at the end of the current term, which arrives in late June or early July 2022. President Biden has to select a nominee immediately after such a retirement occurs. McConnell well might decide to throw up roadblocks anticipating a GOP takeover of the Senate in November 2022.

What might occur, then, if the GOP wins a Senate majority, seats a new Senate in January 2023 and Biden’s SCOTUS nominee still hasn’t had a hearing, let alone a vote? I’ll tell you what’ll happen. The GOP-led Senate could scuttle a Biden choice and then McConnell could decide to replay the tactic he used in 2016 when Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly. President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the court, but McConnell torpedoed the nomination, refusing to grant Garland a hearing. Why? Because we had an election months away and McConnell said the next president deserved the right to select someone. The next president happened to be Donald J. Trump and, well, you know the rest of it.

This all seems to give a Breyer decision on whether he stays on the court a good bit more of a time urgency. I don’t expect Justice Breyer to act on the wishes of others around him. He is entitled to walk away on his own terms and on his own schedule.

The nation’s highest court, though, does not need or deserve to be kicked around like the political football some in the Senate have made it out to be.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

AG Garland rises to occasion

As I look at and listen to Attorney General Merrick Garland I am filled with an odd sense of fulfillment … and I wonder if he feels something akin to it, too.

In early 2016, President Barack H. Obama nominated Garland to the U.S. Supreme Court to succeed the iconic conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly while vacationing in Texas. Garland had served with distinction on the D.C. Appeals Court, so Obama thought he’d be a good fit for the highest court in the land.

The Republican majority leader in the Senate said “not so fast.” He blocked Garland’s appointment by declaring we were “too close” to a presidential election. Mitch McConnell wanted to wait until the 2016 election concluded. He was hoping the GOP nominee would win. His dream came true with the election of Donald J. Trump, who then selected the first of three justices to the high court.

Garland by then had gone back to work on the D.C. bench. Then came another nomination from another president, Joe Biden, who wanted Garland to become attorney general. The Senate, now in Democratic hands, approved his nomination and Garland is now standing his post at DOJ.

He is doing, in my view, the kind of stellar job of enforcing the law one would expect of him, given his credentials as a fair-minded jurist.

Yes, I saw the GOP stiffing of his nomination to the SCOTUS as a tragic event. McConnell demonstrated the kind of arrogance I frankly didn’t think was possible.

What’s more, I shudder to think what could happen after the 2022 midterm election and the GOP resumes control of the Senate. What might occur if another vacancy occurs on the SCOTUS, say, in early 2023. Would the Senate stiff the current president as it did the earlier one, citing the same specious reasoning for disallowing a nomination to go forward as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution?

I fear that would be the case.

Meanwhile, AG Merrick Garland is doing his job at Justice with supreme skill. It is just as many of us knew he would do.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

DOJ weighs in with indictment of Bannon

If we were waiting for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to announce his intention on how he would handle a contempt of Congress citation for a key adviser to Donald J. Trump, well … we need not keep waiting.

A federal grand jury answered it for us when it indicted Steve Bannon on a charge of contempt of Congress.

That means without question that the DOJ takes Congress’s subpoena of Trump administration advisers and aides seriously enough to indict them on federal felony charges.

We have just witnessed a serious warning shot to others who will follow Bannon’s lead in refusing to appear before a House select committee that is looking into the 1/6 events and the riot incited by Trump.

Garland said the Justice Department remains committed to following the law, which he said has occurred with the grand jury indictment of Steve Bannon.

Will the former POTUS adviser plead guilty to avoid a trial? Or will he go all the way? I don’t know how he intends to defend himself. He cannot possibly claim to operate under presidential executive privilege authority; courts have ruled already that Trump no longer possesses that authority. President Biden won’t grant it, either.

We now will get to watch whether the Department of Justice has the muscle to go the distance with this matter. Let’s hope it flexes its muscle accordingly.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Abortion = heartburn

There’s no denying the fact that abortion as a political issue gives me serious angst that borders on heartburn.

The U.S. Supreme Court eventually is set to rule on whether Texas highly restrictive anti-abortion law passes constitutional muster. The smart money says the court, with its 6 to 3 conservative majority, is likely to say that the state can ban abortions at any period after the sixth week of pregnancy.

I believe the court would make a grievous mistake if that’s the ruling it delivers.

Does that make me “pro-abortion?” No. Let me rephrase that: Hell no. It doesn’t nothing of the sort. I consider myself to be pro-life. Why? Because I cannot — and never would — counsel a woman to get an abortion were she to ask for my counsel on that matter. Nor can I sanction government to mandate that a woman cannot make that choice herself after counseling with her partner, her faith leader, her deity, her conscience.

That decision is a woman’s alone! Period. End of discussion.

The court well could rule that the 1973 Roe v. Wade landmark decision — another case emanating out of Texas — is no longer “the law of the land,” or is “settled law.” Earlier SCOTUS decisions have upheld Roe v. Wade. This one well could upset that legal precedent.

It would be a mistake.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

legal news

Elections do have consequences

Well, folks. We are going to find out in due course — possibly soon — just how consequential presidential elections always have been.

The issue at hand is abortion and whether the Texas strict anti-abortion law will withstand judicial review. I happen to believe the law is unconstitutional, that it runs counter to what we long have thought was “settled law.” That the Roe v. Wade decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 had been settled, that women had a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

Oh, but wait. The issue is likely to end up in front of the SCOTUS again. Here is where the election issue comes in.

The 45th POTUS nominated three justices on the court. He was able to cement the conservative majority. The court is now lined up with six conservatives and three liberals. The conservatives, with — with Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch on board — well might decide that the Texas law is OK after all.

A federal judge in Texas, Robert Pittman — appointed by President Barack Obama — has declared the Texas law to be unconstitutional. It’s headed already to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which well could reverse Judge Pittman’s 100-page ruling. You can count on the Justice Department to take this matter up on the judicial ladder.

Hmm. Do you think Pittman’s ruling will hold up? Neither do I.

We need to ponder this when the time comes to ponder the next presidential election.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com