Instead, you make fun of other cities' judges.  Or I would, if they didn't do it for me:

E-mails between Yadkin County officials and a judge who was prodding them to build a new jail show that county officials had repeatedly asked the judge to intervene and help quell opposition to the jail’s location.

In November 2007, then-County Manager Eric Williams wrote Superior Court Judge John Craig III and Judge Ed Gregory, the senior resident Superior Court judge for the judicial district that includes Yadkin County. County commissioners voted 3-2 in November 2006 to build a new jail, but one commissioner, Brady Wooten, has continually opposed plans to build the $8.2 million, 150-bed facility about four miles from the courthouse....

That's called "ex parte-ing the judge."  It's unethical in the highest degree for a judge to talk to one side in private, excluding the other side from the discussion.

Then comes the really delightful juxtaposition:

[Judge] Craig mentioned Wooten in a December 2007 e-mail to [former County Commissioner] Phillips.

“I must admit privately that I despise demagoguery and attempts at political tyranny,” Craig wrote. ...

Craig scheduled a hearing last month about the county’s failure to build a jail, telling commissioners he could fine them, remove them from office, or jail them until they agree “to properly carry out the duties of their office and get the jail project underway without further delay.”

His comments alarmed Wooten and Kevin Austin, the county commissioners who had opposed the jail site. They hired attorneys to represent them at county expense. Craig canceled the hearing after commissioners agreed to move forward with plans to build the jail.

“If it hurt their feelings I’m sorry, but they just needed to know how much inherent authority the superior court had,” Craig said.

Failed attempts at political tyranny by elected officials are, it must be agreed, despicable.  Successful assertions of political tyranny by judges are anything but.  Judge Craig, for example, ordered a committee of the County Commission not to meet.

No, really.  I'm not kidding.  The judge prohibited the elected government of the county from meeting in committee.

"They just needed to know how much inherent authority the superior court had."  Inherent authority, of course, is authority the superior court wasn't granted by the state or federal Constitution or by any statute.  (See post 32 and post 261.)  It's power without law, and for a Yadkinville judge to use his illegitimate power to bully and threaten elected officials is the Christmas pageant version of one of the major themes of this blog.

A lot of the dispute, apparently, is that the judge wanted the jail built out of town, like a Wal-Mart, and the town leaders wanted it downtown, like a family-run store.  (Click here for a rather sad little resolution, a tattered flag of a plea for democratic self-rule.) 

The judge, you won't be surprised to learn, got his way.

To change the topic abruptly, the gangster judges of Luzerne County ordered the state-run juvenile facility shut down in exchange for kickbacks from the operator of a private facility.  (See post 389.)  Not sure what reminded me of that.

Apologies for the digression.  Back in Yadkinville,

Yadkin County resident Larry Long said in December that he filed a complaint with the state Judicial Standards Commission about Craig. Long said recently that the commission told him it found no wrongdoing by Craig. The commission wouldn’t confirm this

Even whitewashing a judge has to be done in secrecy.  Otherwise the people those elected officials are representing might get the right idea.

(Conscience requires a link to an explanation for the name of that road.)

Maybe the professor does pronounce it "pow."  I'd advise him to, if he ever goes to spend a year as a guest scholar at a German university.

 Anyway, here's the professor's prediction about next year's State of the Union:

“I’m willing to bet a lot of money there will be no Supreme Court justice at the next State of the Union speech.”

Added Professor Powe, who clerked for Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, “you don’t go to be insulted. I can’t see the Justices wanting to be there and be insulted by the president.”

(Isn't it pathetic that a distinguished white-haired professor, author of several well-received books, would still be known by a one-year internship he served before ever practicing law?)

(And for Douglas, of all justices -- a compulsive liar and self-mythologizer who didn't bother with legal reasoning.  You'd think a person would want to keep that kind of thing quiet.)

Anyway, it'd be wonderful if it works out the way Professor Powe predicts.  I can't think of any better way to demonstrate for the benefit of the entire nation exactly why the justices show up at State of the Union addresses, dressed in their medieval costumes: to express their amour propre. 

And not, needless to say, because they give a shit about the nation or its government.

In the legal world, it is all about them.  In the constitutional law classes Professor Powe teaches, and in his books, it's also all about them.  Within the airless bubble it makes sense to say that telling the Supreme Court it's wrong is nothing but an insult.

Unless, that is, it's said by a member of the court.  Chief Justice Rehnquist once published a tally sheet: "Over the past 21 years, for example, the Court has overruled in whole or in part 34 of its previous constitutional decisions."

The Constitution is just over 8,000 words long.  For any group of nine judges to misread it in public 34 times over just 21 years is pretty remarkable.  It's not like they're making snap evidentiary rulings from a trial bench or anything.  They spend months making up their minds. 

And it's not like they have much to make up their minds about.  The nine of them, with their four clerks each, produced just 83 opinions last term.   Divide that by 45 lawyers and you get... lots and lots of time to get it right. 

Should we nonetheless assume, based on Rehnquist's figures, that they totally screwed up at least one and probably two of those cases because the 45 of them, putting their pointy heads together, couldn't figure out what a 8,000-word document says?  Man, talk about pathetic.

Anyway, if it's an insult to say the Supreme Court is wrong about the law (unless you're a justice of the court, in which case it's a typical day of tidying up around the office), it must equally be an insult for the court to say the Congress and President are wrong about the law.  Co-equal, remember?

But then, Justice Kennedy didn't say they were wrong about the law.  He said they were wrong about the reality of the political world in which they spend their working (and in many cases their waking) lives:

[W]e now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

That's not even arguably an opinion on a question of law. It's an opinion about rabbit-punching, eye-gouging politics.

(I don't think it's an opinion on a question of fact, either, to use the jargon.  [In the legal world, there is no third alternative to issues of fact and law.]  It's hardly possible that Kennedy and his co-concurrers, or any sentient being, for that matter, actually hold that opinion.  The words are just something they, or their clerks, plugged into their work product because they thought it made their result seem more plausible.  If they thought other words would have worked better, they would have plugged them in, instead.)

What Professor Powe was saying, and also Justice Alito, I'm pretty sure, is that the Supreme Court gets to insult Congress and the President by telling them just how ignorant they are.  But no tag-backs.

Oh, I'd love it if the justices made a point next year of underscoring just how petulant and childish and self-absorbed they can be!  I hope Professor Powe is right.

The Assembly approved legislation Wednesday that would make it a crime to not report violent attacks...

Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara, the measure's author, said the bill closes a loophole in state law, which previously required people to report a violent crime only if it is being committed against a child younger than 14.

If the Senate passes Nava's measure, witnesses would have to report any rape, murder or violent crime they see, regardless of the age of the victim.

You can read a marked-up version of the bill here and a legislative analysis here.

Arlen Specter, the party-switching Pennsylvania Senator, recently proposed that witness intimidation be made a federal crime, though it seems pretty useless to backstop ineffectual state laws with an identical federal one.

Specter was inspired by a Philadelphia Inquirer series that vividly explained how the criminal justice system works, or rather doesn't work, in real life.

According to the paper, talking about itself in the third person as if it were a professional athlete, "The newspaper reported that criminal cases routinely collapse because of witnesses have been frightened or harmed. Prosecutors, judges and defense attorneys told the newspaper that witness recantations have become the norm in city courtrooms."

Back on the other side of the country, Assemblyman Nava's bill would place the witness squarely between the devil and the deep blue sea, the rock and the hard place, the hammer and the anvil, the... how could I have run out of cliches so quickly? 

Anyway, the witness would have to ask him- or herself, who's more likely to carry out the threat?  The guys in this video?  Or the justice system that can't enforce the various weapons and drug laws they're not just violating but clowning about violating? 

The choice would be even easier if you shared a neighborhood with them.

Nava's bill would use the legal system to threaten witnesses for not trusting the legal system to protect them.  It would inflict harm on them in retaliation for their not believing the system capable of saving them from harm. There's much to recommend the bill, but only for a certain class of connoisseurs.

They're not judges in another sense, too, according to a South Florida Sun-Sentinel (in Miami, even the sun needs a sentinel) article posted by Sonia Ansari over at Our Curious Immigration Laws.  They don't have to follow the law but can just indulge their mood swings:

Of South Florida's 26 immigration judges who saw large numbers of asylum seekers, grant rates ranged from 22 percent to 98 percent.

By way of comparison, here's a chart of the rate at which Bernalillo County (i.e., Albuquerque) Metropolitan Court judges dismissed drunken driving charges in 2006.  The rate varied from 20% to 51%, a mere 31% swing.  Amateurs.  Florida's immigration non-judges had a swing two and a half times that.

And then you toss in New York's Immigration (Non-)Judge Margaret McManus, who denied just 9.8% of the petitions presented to her, according to this chart put together by researchers at Syracuse University.

Want to know just how arbitrary and lawless immigration judges can be?  One of them just granted political asylum to a German couple who claimed they were being persecuted by school-attendance laws.  (The story got a lot of ink in the German press last spring when the application was filed, but I don't see any reaction to the ruling yet.)

If even-handed enforcement of democratically-enacted child-welfare laws is political persecution, then what should we call deporting people because a non-judge has an upset stomach?

Back in 2006, the Eleventh Circuit reversed a decision by Immigration (Non-)Judge Bruce Solow (78.2% denial rate) to deny asylum to a Chinese practitioner of Falun Gong, because 

Solow's denial "was based on his own knowledge of Falun Gong, and was not supported by the record."

The Circuit Court's opinion stated that, "The Immigration Judge [found] Zheng's responses to questions regarding the nature of Falun Gong insufficient to show that 'he kn[ew] anything', declaring Zheng's responses to be 'as instructive as opening a fortune cookie' and 'quite off-the-wall.'" ...

Even worse, one of the reasons Judge Solow questioned Zheng's credibility was because he was "sniffling like crazy" during the hearing, even though Zheng had, in Solow's words, practiced Falun Gong because it "fixed him up."

According to the Eleventh Circuit opinion, Solow "commented on Zheng's sniffling twice during the hearing. The second time, he appeared almost hostile about it: 'Still sniffling, huh?... Here, I'll give you a tissue. Yeah. Go ahead, have a nice tissue on the Court. Go ahead.'"

That's from either Frank Houston or Emily Witt, or both, in the Miami New Times news blog from 2006.  The post includes a link to the opinion.

In another case, involving a former cop named Roscoe Campbell from the Bahamas who claimed his life was in danger because he blew the whistle on corrupt ex-colleagues, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed Solow's denial of the asylum petition despite the following:

While it is true that the IJ [more properly, I(N-)J] interrupted Campbell's testimony throughout the hearing, a review of the record indicates the purpose of most [!] of the interruptions was to gain more clarification with regard to his testimony.  The IJ's inappropriate conduct was not limited to Campbell, but was directed toward the government's attorney, too, and, therefore, it does not necessarily show bias against him as much as improper conduct generally.

Oh, if it's just improper conduct generally, that's okay, then.  The Eleventh Circuit added:

While it is true the IJ appeared impatient and annoyed by some of Campbell's responses and made some unnecessary and unprofessional comments at the hearing and in his oral decision, Campbell has not shown that the outcome would have been different in the absence of those comments and interruptions.

How would one show that an outcome would have been different if a judge, or non-judge, had behaved professionally?  Hard to tell if the Eleventh Circuit is being serious in this passage, or when it observes that Campbell's attorney didn't "object[] to the IJ's questions," as if objecting to the judge about the judge's questions in order to obtain a ruling from the judge concerning the judge was an option.

As most of you have probably guessed, the Eleventh Circuit's opinion, while making Solow sound pretty bad, actually downplayed what he'd done.  A complaint Campbell filed with the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility,

described Solow's behavior during the Campbell hearing as "abusive and intemperate." The transcript showed, he said, that the judge had "commandeered" the entire direct examination. Campbell's attorney asked only 13 questions but the judge asked more than 200 "in rapid fire fashion -- each time interrupting Mr. Campbell's answer to the previous question." He continually accused Campbell of lying and made mocking jokes, such as asking Campbell whether he spoke to fictional characters from detective novels, for example Zelda Jones (from a series of books by Sharon Duncan), at the U.S. Embassy.

At the close of evidence, said the complaint, the judge stated, "This is so vague and general you could vomit and I could vomit because I can't, he wants me to become a magician here and grant it merely based on this kind of testimony," and "I think this case, quite frankly, I hate to use the word but I think it stinks. It smells bad because there's no way, this is pie in the sky."

Somehow, I get the impression that he didn't really hate using the word "stinks."

The amazing thing is that, after the passage of years, the Board of Immigration Appeals actually came down on Solow, siding with the abused rather than the abuser.  Campbell will get a new hearing before a new non-judge.

Meanwhile, Solow remains on the non-bench.  He's defending himself on the ground that he has absolute discretion to do anything he wants short of taking bribes.  In other words, that the Department of Justice "has no jurisdiction to investigate immigration judges unless there is an allegation of corruption." 

An agency has no jurisdiction to investigate - not adjudge, but investigate - one of its own employees??  The fact that Solow would pursue such a defense might strike some as further proof of his unfitness for office. 

How do people like Solow get appointed in the first place?  The Washington Post answered that question in 2007.  A significant percentage of immigration (Non-)Judges are party loyalists with law degrees who couldn't get approved for real judgeships.

Another significant percentage, doubtless, is composed of dedicated immigration lawyers with the kind of temperament that suits them better for a position behind rather than before the non-bench. 

Solow, I think it's safe to say, doesn't belong in the second group.

Marcia Cole's National Law Journal article adds that "A number of immigration lawyers who have practiced before him for many years insist that is undeserved punishment of a judge who is demanding, compassionate and objective."

But then, if Solow is really as "unprofessional" as the Eleventh Circuit says - meaning nasty,  unreasonable and abusive - and you had to appear in front of him, wouldn't you line up to the be the first to tell the reporter what a gem of a prince of a gentleman and scholar he is?

After all, the very worst judges are the ones most likely to do favors in return to public sycophancy. 

In December Guardian reporter Paul Lewis was stopped and searched while taking pictures of the Gherkin building in London and Grant Smith, an architecture photographer, was apprehended around the corner while photographing Sir Christopher Wren's Christ Church.

Other recent cases include Jeff Overs, a BBC photographer who told the Andrew Marr Show he was stopped under suspicion of terrorism reconnaissance while photographing St Paul's Cathedral, and Andrew White, an amateur photographer questioned by two police community support officers for photographing Christmas lights in Brighton.

Last April two Austrian tourists were forced to delete their shots after being stopped by police in Walthamstow; and Alex Turner, an amateur photographer, was arrested under section 44 after taking images of a fish and chip shop in Kent.

Well, the fish and chip shop, that's understandable.  But the Gherkin Building?  Who'd want to blow that up? 

Tragically, however, the same article 44 stop and search powers are sometimes used to investigator people considerably less suspicious than newspaper photogs.  You can read the act here, starting with paragraph 28, but the Irish Times description gets the idea across:

Under the 2000 Act a senior police officer may issue an authorisation, if he or she considers it “expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism”, permitting any uniformed police officer within a defined geographical area to stop any person and search him or her and anything carried by him or her.

The authorisation must be confirmed by the Secretary of State within 48 hours. A search can be carried out by a constable in an authorised area whether or not he has grounds for suspicion, but may only be “for articles of a kind which could be used in connection with terrorism”.

The police officer may request the individual to remove headgear, footwear, outer clothing and gloves and place his or her hand inside pockets, feel around and inside collars, socks and shoes and search hair. The search takes place in public and failure to submit to it amounts to an offence punishable by imprisonment or a fine or both.

Of course, the officer on the beat's discretion isn't unfettered.  He's supposed to get authorisation (no zeds, please, they're Brits), and that "may be given only if the person giving it considers it expedient for the prevention of acts of terrorism."

Here's a story about how the stop and search powers operate in real life.  First, let's set the scene: "Between 9 and 12 September 2003 there was a Defence Systems and Equipment International Exhibition (“the arms fair”) at the Excel Centre in Docklands, East London, which was the subject of protests and demonstrations."

Okay, so we have an "arms fair" (bet the cakewalk was something else), an organized demo, and a statute authorizing cops to stop and search when "expedient."  Put them together and turn them over to the testosterone-influenced and, as Gary Larson might have said, there was bound to be trouble brewing.

[Kevin] Gillan was riding a bicycle and carrying a rucksack [on his way to the demonstration] when stopped and searched by two police officers. [Pennie] Quinton, a journalist, was stopped and searched by a police officer and ordered to stop filming in spite of the fact that she showed her press cards.

The two brought an action in the European Court of Human Rights, a 7-judge panel of which unanimously sided with them against the English police in an unusually wide-ranging opinion.

So far, nothing too out of the American lawyer's experience.  But then you get to the remedy portion of the opinion:

92.  The applicants submitted that they had felt harassed and intimidated by the police actions and that it would be appropriate for the Court to award compensation of GBP 500 each in respect of non-pecuniary damage.

93.  The Government submitted that, in view of the short duration of the stop and search, no monetary compensation should be awarded.

94.  The Court agrees with the Government that the finding of a violation constitutes sufficient just satisfaction in the circumstances of the present case.

The next paragraphs, it must be said, go on to award attorney's fees in the equivalent of $50,000, roughly a year and a half of the U.K.'s average annual salary.

In America the same net result would be considered, all in all, a victory for the government.

My Examiner.com column, written for a general audience, explains with as temperate language as I could muster the basic point of yesterday's ruling: some things are too important to be left to democracy.  They must instead be entrusted to our tribal elders, the Council of Wise People.

The Forbidden City in the middle of our public square is engaged in annexing surrounding territory with all the aggressive zeal of a Sun Belt city of the 1970s.  The Supreme Court has now declared that democratic  elections, being essential to our democracy, cannot be allowed to slip into the control of the people acting democratically through their elected representatives.

Instead, elections, being essential to our democracy of more than 300 million people, may only be regulated by any five of a select group of nine federal government workers.

But while you'd have to be exceptionally naive to believe it's coincidence that five Reagan and Bush  appointees should have issued such an opinion during the Obama Administration, I also don't think it's necessarily true they were primarily concerned with the political well-being of anti-reform candidates of their own party.

I think it more likely they were primarily concerned about themselves.  They wanted to make sure their political views carry the day.  Justice Kennedy tipped his hand when he wrote that a prior, marginally more rational opinion of Court

is undermined by experience since its announcement. Political speech is so ingrained in our culture that speakers find ways to circumvent campaign finance laws.

Because restrictions are ineffectual (not least because enforcement efforts are paralyzed by the Supreme Court's random interventions) therefore they're unconstitutional. Because corruption and dishonesty are widespread, therefore it's unconstitutional to attempt to make them less widespread.

This pretty explicitly equates "unconstitutional" with "not a good way of approaching the problem, in my opinion."  For Kennedy, ol' number 3, granted massive power over our government solely on account of his blandness, I think those terms have become interchangeable.

Although Gawande didn't use the kind of recklessly intemperate language one might expect from, for instance, a blogger, I know for a fact that at least one reader came away from his article believing the explanation was that McAllen's medical establishment was comprehensively corrupt.

It may not have been only the medical establishment.  From today's McAllen Monitor:

Thousands of criminal cases in one of Hidalgo County’s misdemeanor courts were called into question Wednesday with the arrest of two of its employees on bribery charges.

Daniel Vega, the court coordinator in County Court-at-law No. 5, and his assistant Javier Mireles were caught on video offering to dismiss a case in exchange for a $4,000 payment, Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño said.

And while their arrests are tied to one specific payment that came from an undercover investigator, authorities believe similar behavior may have been going on for years, affecting hundreds of criminal defendants.

“I don’t believe that this was their first time at bat,” the sheriff said.

Four thousand for a misdemeanor??

But exactly how the pair allegedly engineered the dismissal of the case in question remained unclear Wednesday afternoon. Charging documents — including the probable cause affidavits filed for both their arrests — were sealed to protect the ongoing investigation, [District Attorney Rene] Guerra said. ...

All filings pertaining to the bribery scheme will likely remain barred from public review for the considerable future, said Guerra.

“To be honest, I want to seal them for as long as possible,” he said. “I want to protect the investigation right now.”

Investigating corruption in secrecy seems to be a new Texas tradition.  El Paso as spent five years with a political corruption investigation carefully hidden from the voters. 

One of the accused in the El Paso case is a former Texas district court judge, the wider-than-he-is-tall Manuel Barraza, who was indicted just three months after taking the bench, apparently based on his alleged pre-swearing-in plans to work out a private and mutually-beneficial deal with an alleged drug dealer.

We'll be hearing more about El Paso in coming months.  (Or will we?)  But in the meantime, see if you notice any consistent threads running through the headlines of the most-viewed stories on the El Paso Times website for the past 12 hours:

# Man accused in wife's killing was from El Paso
# Kidnapper testifies Texan was killed in Mexico
# Man allegedly runs former wife off road
# Mexican prison brawl leaves 23 dead
# Student sex case against former Andress coach dismissed
# 3 alleged gang members charged in death of Texas man
# Three teenagers charged in Adam Espinoza murder
# No decisions yet for Marmolejo
# Deaths may be murder-suicide
# Barraza trial: Sheriff's detective initiated investigation of ousted...

Man, I tell you, El Paso belongs in New Mexico, which is where it was administratively lodged for the first couple of centuries of its existence.

"You are a practicing Catholic?"

"No."

"But Catholic?"

Rogas made a gesture that signified: like everyone else.  And in fact he did believe that all men everywhere were a little bit Catholic.

"Of course, like everyone else," the President interpreted him correctly.  Assuming the posture of a priest at catechism: "Let us take, well, the Mass, the mystery of transubstantiation, the bread and the wine that become the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ.  The priest may even be unworthy in his personal life, in his thoughts.  But the fact that he has been ordained means that at each celebration of the Mass the mystery is completed.  Never, I say never, can it happen that the transubstantiation not take place.  And so it is with a judge when he celebrates the law: justice cannot not be revealed, not transubstantiated, not completed.  A judge may torment himself, wear himself out, tell himself, 'You are unworthy; you are full of meanness, burdened by passions, confused in your ideas, liable to every weakness and every error'--but in the moment he celebrates the law, he is so no longer.  And much less so afterward.  Can you imagine a priest who, after celebrating Mass, says to himself, 'Who knows if the transubstantiation took place this time, too?'  There's no doubt; it did take place.  Most assuredly.  I would even say inevitably. Think of that priest who was seized by doubt and who, at the moment of the consecreation, discovered blood on his vestments.  I can say this: no judgment has ever bloodied my hands, has ever stained my robes..."

Without meaning to, Rogas made a sound much like a groan.  The President looked at him with disgust.  And as in a fireworks display, when everything seems to be over, in the stunned silence and darkness one more luminous, elaborate, and thunderous rocket explodes, [President] Riches said, "Naturally, I am not a Catholic.  Naturally, I am not even a Christian."

"Naturally," Rogas echoed.  And indeed he was not surprised.

The President was diappointed and irritated, like someone who has just performed a magic turn only to have a child jump up and say he has understood the trick.  With a note of hysteria, he proclaimed, "Judicial error does not exist."

(As translated by Adrienne Foulke.  The Italian title is Il contesto.  Max von Sydow played President Riches in the 1976 film adaptation Excellent Cadavers - a title that has since been reused.)

If you haven't read Sciascia, start with The Day of the Owl.

But that's the difference between you and I and judicial standards boards:

When the [Pennsylvania] state Judicial Conduct Board received an anonymous eight-page complaint in 2006 about alleged wrongdoing by a Luzerne County judge, it reportedly deferred conducting an investigation because there was an ongoing outside criminal probe of the judge.

That judge, Michael T. Conahan, and another, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., were charged last year by federal authorities with taking $2.8 million in kickbacks to send juveniles to for-profit detention centers in what has become known as the "kids-for-cash" scandal.

This month, the board reaffirmed its discretion to defer with newly adopted operating procedures...

Paul H. Titus, a lawyer retained by the board, said yesterday that "there are very practical reasons for the board deferring to prosecutors." Titus said the board does not have the resources to conduct criminal investigations, especially for something like the Luzerne County probe, which involved federal prosecutors, the FBI, and the IRS over three years.

Of course no "deferring" of any kind was going on.  No one was suggesting the board should conduct criminal investigations, just as no one suggested the FBI should investigate violations of the Pennsylvania Code of Judicial Conduct. 

The board's explanation for its inaction was gibberish.  I sympathize with Mr. Titus, though.  State judicial standards boards exist to preserve "public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary."  A coherent explanation would have defeated that purpose.

But wait!  There are many more sewers left to be explored in the Scranton Wilkes-Barre area:

A northeast Pennsylvania judge who took over a capital murder case from another judge who pleaded guilty to corruption charges has been accused of pushing his wife down and choking her.

Perry County Senior Judge C. Joseph Rehkamp has been charged with simple assault and harassment.

State police say Rehkamp and his wife were arguing Saturday night at their home in Plymouth Township when another person broke them up. Police say Rehkamp fled.

You can see Judge Rehkamp's official photo at the Citizens' Voice website.  It could pass a mug shot but for the wood paneling background with the obligatory flag.  The paper describes the circumstances of the unpleasantness with the circumspection of the libel-shy:

The argument turned physical, and police said Rehkamp pushed the victim down, slamming her into a chair, then placed both hands on her neck and began choking her until a third party interrupted. Rehkamp then fled the scene.

The argument turned physical, mind you.  That's better than a person becoming violent. 

I think we can accept as a given that Judge Rehkamp will skate, unless he's made some particularly ill-advised choices about his personal enemies.

Oh, and the big murder case Rehkamp was slated to preside over?  It had to do with a husband accused of killing his wife.  And even that story has an angle that shines yet more light on the spectacularly dysfunctional court system of northeastern Pennsylvania, according to newspaper stories posted over at Family Court Crisis.

Food, Inc. is better known as agitprop about food, but I think the "inc." part of the title has still-broader significance.  Among other things, the film describes the gigantic increase in food poisoning in America since the 1960s, an increase that has happened gradually enough that outbreaks and "meat recalls" no longer strike us as unusual.

When I was a kid, way back in the last century, I loved the (non-alcoholic) eggnog my mother made, with the shake of cinnamon on the froth.  Nowadays she'd be arrested for child abuse after my second trip to the ER with samonella poisoning.

Food poisoning is efficient, and not just in the sense documented by Food, Inc.: because the massive concentrations of livestock and raw food utilized by factory farming present wonderful opportunities for pathogens to thrive.

It's also efficient in the sense that it shifts the burden of ensuring food safety from the producer to the consumer.  Economic efficiency of the type first idealized and then fetishized by our judges (see post 414) is why we've gotten so used to reading food safety tips.  As the big four meatpackers consolidated their hold over the market, they were able to externalize a significant portion of the cost of food safety. 

The last pathogens will always be the hardest to eradicate, and the big meatpackers, like the big vegetable and fruit growers, have assigned that job to us.  They've deliberately - efficiently - made themselves less good at producing safe food.  Mediocrity is the only rational strategy, once one's market dominance is secure.

Food, Inc. depicts chicken farmers under the thumb of the big poultry packing companies.  And that's the half-hidden theme running through the series of four posts that started with post 413 and ends with this one.

Antitrust law was never about economics, as the arrogantly ignorant professor-judges claimed and may actually have believed.  (See post 414.)  Still less was it about economics as understood by lawyers and judges who couldn't work their way through an 8th grade algebra book with the help of a tutor.  Antitrust is all about power.

Market power, obviously, but also political power, as the Washington scenes of Food, Inc. make clear.  Unfortunately, that's the least interesting sequence of the movie, because it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know.

Attempting to regulate the meatpacking industry is as difficult as attempting to regulate financial markets (see post 415) for the same reason: because market concentration produces vast wealth, and vast wealth buys political influence.

The vast concentration of wealth was facilitated by our judges when they jumped on the fad of refusing to enforce antitrust law, relying on the studiedly unworldly theory that market concentration benefits consumers.  (See post 414.) 

The political clout of the big-asseted corporations was immeasurably helped by the Supreme Court's refusal to allow the American people to maintain democratic control over their own election laws, based on the justices' epically fatuous theory that because money talks, it's speech. 

The Supreme Court almost always rules in favor of itself.  Its members predictably vote for the result that concentrates the maximum power in themselves, in the federal courts, and in the judiciary generally (in order of priority).

Shooting down executive branch attempts to enforce laws against market concentration and manipulation, like shooting down legislative branch attempts to control corruption in elections, makes the judiciary more powerful directly, in a bwana-and-lion way. 

But it also has that effect indirectly, by weakening the other branches.  The Supreme Court benefits from a weakened Congress, as Stuart Taylor, Jr. points out.  De-legitimizing democracy is useful for those who would prefer what Taylor calls "judicial despotism." 

"Politics," "economics" and "law" aren't separate categories of life.  Their separation exists only in the abstract.  In the concrete they're all just ways of controlling the lives of ordinary people.  Saying that monopolistic and market-dominating corporations have political influence over Congress, a point made in Food, Inc., is only another way of saying that they have more power than individual members of Congress.

"Too big to fail" is just a modern term for the concentration of power in the hands of actors with no responsibility to the people whose lives they alter.  It's an acknowledgment that we're privatizing - "outsourcing" might be a better term - the right of self-government.

In a democratic nation, the opposite of "government" isn't freedom, regardless of what the bumper sticker says.  The opposite of democratic government is non-democratic government.  When economic power is so concentrated that economic actors exercise power over Congress, they have become part of our government: their actions govern the way we live our lives.

By manipulating the law to concentrate political power in their own hands, judges have succeeded in concentrating both economic and political power in the private organizations that control the details of our daily lives.

If we took our judicial system as seriously as it deserves, it wouldn't occur to anyone to question judges' responsibility for the planned mediocrity and increasingly-privatized government that has come to envelop the nation like Beijing air.