Programming note: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at 3pm North American Eastern (8pm British Summer Time), I hope to be here for our regular midweek Clubland Q&A, taking questions from Mark Steyn Club listeners around the world. Hope you can swing by.
~On Sunday Pope Francis publicly blessed the Easter crowds from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica and privately received the Vice President of the United States to give Mr Vance's children a gift of Kinder Eggs. Yes, really: those Kinder Eggs. The following morning, the Holy Father died at his residence in the Vatican.
If the choice of Easter chocolate was a conscious jest on the part of the Pontiff, it was an excellent one, and a reminder that even in America chest-thumping about liberty will only take you so far. So I thank him for that. Other than his Kinderliness to JD's deprived moppets, on almost all the issues I care about - from free speech to the Falkland Islands, climate change to the Islamisation of Europe - His Holiness was on the other side, and mostly for shallow and meretricious reasons. Given the remorseless decay in the heart of Christendom during these years, his papacy has to be accounted a terrible failure at a time when the Church could least afford it.
~Pope Francis was entitled to his banal views on "open borders", even when expressed from behind the Trump-on-steroids walls of the Vatican. Whether the people are likewise entitled to elect leaders opposed to "open borders" is slightly more doubtful. And, even if you elect them on such a platform, will "democratic" societies permit them to enact it? Over the Easter weekend - in the dead of night - the US Supreme Court nevertheless found time to issue a cease-and-desist to "the government" on the deportation of any and all non-citizens currently being held in the Northern District of Texas "until further order of this court".
If, like many of the rube right, your principal interest in SCOTUS decisions is how the judge cards fall, you'll be interested to know that the cease-and-desist was seven-two. All three Trump appointees - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Amy Phoney Barrett - joined John ("Norms R Us") Roberts and the three lefties in voting to stick it to the executive branch. Alito has issued a blistering dissent with which Thomas concurs. I urge you to read it all. When it counts, the six-three rock-ribbed super-majority shrivels to a mere two-seven. Not coincidentally, they are also the two oldest members of the bench. God preserve them if Amy Phoney Barrett is the future of American jurisprudence.
But never mind the ice-dancing scores. My main point of interest is whether this "legal ruling" is even legal. As Alito puts it:
It is not clear that the Court had jurisdiction.
I'll say. The plaintiff AARP - not the geezer lobby but the initials of some Venezuelan detainee - filed a motion at 12.48pm demanding a status conference and gave the judge until 1.30pm to answer or they'd be off to the Fifth Circuit. I yield to no one in my contempt for the entire American judiciary, but, after thirteen years in the craphole of DC justice, even I have never demanded that the judge respond to me within forty-two minutes. On Good Friday.
So the judge for whatever reason did not respond within forty-two minutes. Sometime later on Good Friday, AARP filed with the Fifth Circuit and again insisted on an immediate ruling. Shortly before midnight, the three judges issued a unanimous decision, scrupulously polite under the circumstances, gently explaining that the United States Court of Appeal for the Fifth Circuit is so-called because it's a court of appeal, and, given that the district court had not issued an order in the case, there was nothing to appeal, and so they had no jurisdiction. For good measure, Judge Ramirez discreetly suggested that next time the appellant might want to give His Honor, oh, an hour, hour-and-a-quarter maybe, because there was no "effective denial of injunctive relief based on the district court's failure to issue the requested ruling within 42 minutes".
Which should have been the end of it, at least until Easter Monday.
Instead, apparently minutes after the Fifth Circuit dismissal, the highest court in the land leapt in with their own "ruling" - although I would be reluctant to dignify it as such: it's really more of a pseudo-royal proclamation. Roberts & Co acted before the Fifth Circuit had pronounced, as their somewhat perfunctory decision reveals:
There is before the Court an application on behalf of a putative class of detainees seeking an injunction against their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. The matter is currently pending before the Fifth Circuit. [EMPHASIS ADDED]
So here's what I don't get. As well I know from my thirteen years of torment with another decade to come in Mann vs Steyn, courts generally have one or other or both of two types of jurisdiction: original and appellate. Most Americans associate the Supreme Court with appellate jurisdiction: they give a yea or nay to things a lower court has already adjudicated. But, in this case, at the time Roberts issued his "order" neither the District Court nor the Court of Appeals had issued anything appealable: The District Court said it no longer had jurisdiction because the plaintiff had flounced off to the Court of Appeals, and the Court of Appeals declined to take the case because a judge neglecting to reply within a 42-minute deadline ordered by the plaintiff doesn't count as a court ruling that can be appealed.
So Roberts and his robed regents appear to be acting as a "court of original jurisdiction" - or, as I would say after my own half-dozen trial judges in DC - the "trial court".
Which is odd. So odd that for once I'm driven to wave that US Constitution you constitution fetishists are always boring on about. Article Three states:
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction...
That's "Ministers" in the diplomatic not the "cabinet-minister" sense. So it would seem, with due allowance for the higher wankery of the American courthouse, simple enough: no state or foreign diplomat is a party to the case, so on what basis does Roberts assert his dead-of-night jurisdiction?
I always liked A P Herbert's formulation of what Americans call "unclean hands":
A dirty dog will not have justice by the court.
Alas, in Washington, the dirty dog is Chief Justice.
Still, if I had known any individual could go straight to Roberts as original trial-judge, I'd have taken Mann vs Steyn there way back in 2012. Or does this belatedly discovered "original jurisdiction" apply only to MS-13 gangbangers?
~In the early hours of Easter Monday, at almost the exact moment of the Pope's decease, St Mary's parish church in Derrybeg on the west coast of Ireland burned to the ground: a terrible conflagration, but merely the latest in a Christendom in which such losses have become routine. To be sure, whether it was accident or arson has yet to be determined. Nevertheless, on Sunday the church was full for Easter; on Monday, like the Holy Father, it was gone.
To give it its Oirish name (which a lot of the locals speak), Teach Phobail Mhuire is one of the few Catholic churches in the auld sod with which I'm familiar - from a brief visit half-a-lifetime back in connection with a radio feature on Tim Healy, a Derrybeg boy who went on to become a somewhat turbulent MP at Westminster, a King's Counsel and eventually the first Governor-General of the Irish Free State (as listeners to our Hundred Years Ago Show may recall). Mr Healy had been involved in a famous incident at St Mary's in 1889. Not until I motored into town a century later did I realise the Healy-era church had gone and been replaced by a 1970s edifice which, by the standards of the era, I would account less dispiriting than most.
The "famous incident" of 1889 arose from the order of the Resident Magistrate to arrest Canon James McFadden, the so-called "Fighting Priest of Gweedore". William Martin, district inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary, was dispatched to lead the operation himself, and determined to arrest McFadden immediately after Mass, when he knew he'd be on the premises. Seeing the cleric emerging from the service, Inspector Martin drew his sword and approached. The departing congregants, confronted by an armed policeman appearing to charge a priest in his vestments and holding the chalice bearing the Eucharist, were sufficiently outraged to jump the RIC man and beat him to the ground, whereupon, in the words of one of their defence counsel, "rooting up the palings from the priest's garden, they battered in Martin's skull".
That lawyer was Tim Healy. Whatever one's view of the incident, Healy's defence of priest and parishioners at the subsequent murder trial was inspired. He reminded the court that, under the law, it was "high treason" (and thus punishable by death) to attack a judge in his robes. Mr Healy then remarked that many of "the Donegal peasantry" felt the same about attacking a priest in his robes. Judge Gibson was visibly affected by counsel's analogy, and the Crown threw in the towel on hopes of hanging the men and offered a plea deal.
Well, it was all a long time ago, and it's not clear whether Donegal still has any inhabitants Mr Healy would dignify as "peasantry": Ireland is now one of the five wealthiest nations on earth. That's in GDP per capita - which of course doesn't always penetrate to the remoter parts of the proletariat, as it certainly does not in Erin. Yet, as our old friend John McGuirk notes over at Gript, however Ireland may change, the language of Irish nationalism doesn't:
In no other European country, for example, are asylum accommodation centres routinely referred to as 'plantation centres'.
That's a conscious evocation of the "plantation" of Ulster in order to remind today's Irish nationalists that they're about to be re-dispossessed - this time not by Scots but by Somalis. I'm not unsympathetic to that general line, and have observed for years that, for those who obsess on relations between Protestants and Catholics, don't worry - because in the future it'll all be Sunni and Shia. In Derrybeg, the new "plantation" of their town and county was protested by residents just six months ago.
But is that mere culturally appropriative blarney to coat the incoming tide of Islamic green in the shamrock-hued sentimentalism of yesteryear? I haven't thought of Derrybeg and the long-ago events at that church for many decades. Mr McGuirk is quite correct that Irish nationalism has mostly been top-down by a self-selecting elite, but there are other moments when in the middle of nowhere the "peasantry" are provoked and something raw and visceral erupts in all its unloveliness. Does that Ireland still exist? And what, in Derrybeg and beyond, would provoke it today?
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