Justice Ginsburg’s Inconsistency, the Continuing Pirate Threat and Tax Day Tea Parties
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg defends the use of foreign legal codes in deciding U.S. Supreme Court verdicts.
Somali pirates renew their attacks, seizing four new ships in the last 24 hours.
Small government activists across the country plan anti-tax “Tea Parties” to protest high taxes and government spending.
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1. LEGAL
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg defends the use of foreign legal codes in deciding U.S. Supreme Court verdicts.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Special Projects Counsel Hans Bader on Justice Ginsburg’s inconsistency:
“Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says that American courts should look more to foreign court rulings in interpreting our Constitution. But she herself does so only when it is ideologically convenient. For example, Justice Ginsburg cites foreign court rulings to advocate cutting back on the use of the death penalty… But Justice Ginsburg, and American lawyers, tend to ignore foreign law and world opinion when it calls into question liberal policies in the United States. One classic example is the horror that most countries’ courts have for the American practice of letting virtually unguided civil juries award punitive damages. In most of the world, it is forbidden for a civil court to award punitive damages.”
2. SAFETY
Somali pirates renew their attacks, seizing four new ships in the last 24 hours.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Editorial Director Ivan Osorio on the lesson lawmakers should learn from the threat:
“The celebrations and congratulations over the U.S. Navy’s rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips are well deserved and proper all around. Yet even after the jubilation has quieted down, piracy in the high seas remains a threat to global trade. That’s important for the U.S. Senate to keep in mind when it again considers the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which requires naval vessels dealing with suspected pirates to [send over a boarding party to inquire of the pirates whether they are, in fact, pirates]. Such an approach could only result in wholesale hostage taking. Capt. Phillips’s ordeal has made the danger that would entail. President Obama’s decision to use deadly force was the right one. Neither he nor his predecessors should be constrained in similar situations in the future.”
3. POLITICS
Small government activists across the country plan anti-tax “Tea Parties” to protest high taxes and government spending.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Policy Analyst Michelle Minton on why the protests are necessary:
“The American government seems to be mirroring the 18th century British government; applying discriminatory taxes on businesses, products, and citizens, using appropriated money to prop up preferred companies and failing to protect the freedom of individuals to pursue their own happiness. All the while those in power implicitly and explicitly in some cases attack capitalism, the only system under which individual rights are supreme. It is this attack on free markets and individual rights that citizens must oppose.”
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