I knew without reading it that Anna Diggs-Taylor’s decision striking down the surveillance program would be a poorly written, poorly reasoned, legally and factually unsupported bit of garbage. Did I know this because I’m intimately familiar with the legal issues involved? No. Because I know all (or even any) of the facts? No. Because I’ve been following developments in this case with incredible care and knew we had to win, and that a loss could only be because of fallacious reasoning? No. I knew that the decision was a bad bit of work the moment I read that Diggs-Taylor was a Carter appointee and a die-hard liberal.
I started practicing law when I was still a die-hard (or, at least, unthinking) liberal. I voted the Democratic ticket with fervor, spouted all the PC lines, and knew that conservatives were evil. Didn’t all intelligent, thinking, moral people feel the same way?
A funny thing happened, though, as I went before judges over and over and over again. Without exception — without a single exception — I could count on the fact that the liberals in the Court would rule from the gut, and the few conservatives on the Court would rule on the law. It worked out great if the liberal judge’s gut feelings coincided with my client’s interests, but even then I felt cheated by the outcome. I didn’t win because I was the better lawyer or because facts and law supported my position. Instead, I won because my client’s situation happened to coincide with the judge’s political orientation.
More often than not, though, I lost to these liberal judges when I did defense work. When I represented people and organizations that couldn’t be classified as downtroddgen, I lost cases to judges who said, “I don’t care what the law is; I think there’s something here.” I lost a memorable case, when the law as written completely supported my banking client’s position, because the judge wrote an opinion misquoting that statute so as to thrust a million dollars into the hands of an illegal immigrant who fraudulently signed a bank document. And on and on. I didn’t always lose before these judges on political grounds, but I always lost on non-legal grounds, and that drove me absolutely crazy. I’m willing to lose fair; I can’t stand losing unfair.
And then there were the conservative judges. The ones I laughed at who were mere political hacks, appointed by a friendly Republican governor. Funnily enough, though, while I laughed at their appointments and their politics, I never laughed at their decisions. Whether I won or lost, I could always read through the decision without getting confused, follow the Court’s reasoning, accept the law cited, and either joyously celebrate an honest victory or grudgingly admit an honest defeat.
So, as I said, the moment I read of Diggs-Taylor’s political affiliation, I knew that her decision, whether the ultimate outcome was correct or incorrect, would have been a piece of specious and dishonest reasoning.
By the way, if you want to get past my biases and really understand what went wrong, you could do worse than Bryan Cunnngham’s detailed legal and factual analysis about the decision. And lest you think these attacks on the decision are sour grapes, those on the Left who haven’t completely slipped free of their moorings aren’t that thrilled either. It’s no fun to win by cheating — it’s an unearned victory — and with the decision already being appealed, it means that the decision is infinitely more vulnerable to being reversed on appeal.
Talking to Technorati: Anna Diggs-Taylor, NSA, Judges
So, as I said, the moment I read of Diggs-Taylor’s political affiliation, I knew that her decision, whether the ultimate outcome was correct or incorrect, would have been a piece of specious and dishonest reasoning.
A very good use of deductive logic, Book. In this case, a deductive approach that has seen years of analysis and backup in terms of empirical evidence, but yet it does not depend upon empirical evidence for the conclusion.
Did you know that some of your blog posts aren’t allowing comments?
I didn’t know that. I’ll try to fix it, although I’m not quite sure how to go about that. In any event, a heads up that I’ll be leaving this server soon for a safer and, I think, more permanent solution.
[...] Bookworm Room [...]
Glad to hear that, I’ll stop complaining about this server then! Here’s where I would put a smiley face if I knew how to do it.
Cunningham’s analysis is up to his usual standard as, I suppose, Ms. Diggs-Taylor’s is down to hers.
I suspect she is rather less well-intentioned than he’s willing to suppose – she has a history of activist interference, and tried to take over the U of Michigan discrimination case for herself a few years ago – and probably is not at all “well-meaning,” but okay.
But it’s a glitch. She’s left so many holes she’ll be reflexively overturned as soon as someone with a brain takes a look, and her thoughts on the matter won’t even amount to a footnote.
“It’s so because I say it’s so” (trans. from the Latin) is certainly used often enough to justify judicial idiocy, but I doubt it’ll work in this case.
Cunningham’s analysis is up to his usual standard as, I suppose, Ms. Diggs-Taylor’s is down to hers.
I suspect she is rather less well-intentioned than he’s willing to suppose – she has a history of activist interference, and tried to take over the U of Michigan discrimination case for herself a few years ago – and probably is not at all “well-meaning,” but okay.
But it’s a glitch. She’s left so many holes she’ll be reflexively overturned as soon as someone with a brain takes a look, and her thoughts on the matter won’t even amount to a footnote.
“It’s so because I say it’s so” (trans. from the Latin) is certainly used often enough to justify judicial idiocy and misunderstanding of the law, but I doubt it’ll fly in this case, as her “reasoning’ (if that’s the word) clearly demonstrates she does not understand either the Act or in fact the 4th amendment, and has, in a stunning sweep, managed to misconstrue both.
Sorry about the double post; that’s what sneezing’ll do for you!
It wasn’t a sneeze because if you try to double click on the post to get two comments, word press will deny it with the reasoning that you are duplicating a comment? So the only way you can get two comments is if you click on post, wait, then hit stop, then add something, then hit post again ; )
That takes a little longer than a sneeze in my view.
As for servers, Bookworm, I don’t care where you are. So long as you have a search function that allows me to get at older posts easily, or some other means by which I could use to get at older posts faster. And that I can get access to comments easily, of multiple threads.
The format is not so much of a problem. Oh ya, zhombre, I also couldn’t load the image up that you were talking about that Bookworm linked to. I’ll just use the link I suppose.
It should be lots of fun watching this totally idiotic decision get overturned
.