Source: https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/walsh-kevin/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 07:46:52+00:00

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In American Association of Political Consultants, Inc. v. FCC, the Fourth Circuit yesterday held unconstitutional an exemption from the federal ban on automated calls to cellphones. This exemption authorized automated calls that relate to the collection of debts owed to or guaranteed by the federal government. In an opinion joined by Judges Keenan and Quattlebaum, Judge King wrote that the exemption was content-based and failed strict scrutiny, but that it could be severed. The result is that the plaintiffs' political calls remain subject to the general ban.
The Fourth Circuit panel seems to have been tripped up in entanglements among standing, substantive constitutional law, and severability. As a matter of standing, the plaintiffs are injured by the ban, not the exemption for federal debt collections. As a matter of substantive constitutional law, the ban and its exemptions form a single unit for purposes of constitutional analysis. The challenge is to a content-based restriction on speech, not to the exemption itself. If this challenge succeeds, there is no work for severability to do in separating the ban from the exemption; the whole unit is unconstitutional. Severability would keep the rest of the TCPA intact, but the content-based ban should fall because of the exemption it contains.
The proviso protecting picketing of schools involved in a labor dispute renders the ban content-based. There is not a first-step consideration of the proviso on its own followed by a second-step severability inquiry.
As authoritatively construed by state courts, this ordinance extended only to fighting words, which are constitutionally unprotected. The ordinance was nevertheless subject to strict scrutiny because of its content discrimination ("on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender") within the otherwise unprotected class. Similarly, a blanket prohibition on robocalls may be perfectly fine on its own, unconstitutional if exemptions from the prohibition render it content-based.
In any event, I'm guessing this is not the last we'll see of this issue. In addition to the plaintiffs in the Fourth Circuit case who are smarting from their Pyrrhic victory, I expect that robocallers in the Fourth Circuit may also be alarmed. "Severance" of the statutory provision making their conduct legal means that their robocalls will be subject to the general ban. That's not how this should have gone. But now that it has, it's going to take some more lawyer and judge time to sort things out.
MOJ at 15: The end of the beginning?
We are fast approaching the fifteenth anniversary of the first post at Mirror of Justice.
It feels very different from the tenth anniversary. Then, there were many anniversary-reflection posts from MOJers old and new. These reflections varied in orientation but were largely hopeful.
Now, I expect there will be fewer. And the hope they have to offer will probably not be for the future of this particular group blog.
Is it time for Mirror of Justice to give up the ghost?
I ask explicitly and publicly in order to provoke honest answers from our contributors.
My answer is yes, for reasons that I aim to elaborate over my next few posts. But perhaps I am wrong.
Not completely inaccurate predictively, I suppose. There have been fewer anniversary posts at 15 than at 10, and they express appropriate uncertainty about the future. But while the posts have been less than confident about the best path forward for this particular blog, they have been more hopeful than I expected about the worth of continuing the undertaking.
I am particularly grateful for the anniversary posts by Greg Sisk and Susan Stabile. Greg writes, "As long as the blogosphere continues, something like the Mirror of Justice is needed. I pray for another fruitful 15 years." Susan "remain[s] convinced of the importance of the enterprise in which we have been engaged for the last fifteen years.
Howard Wasserman's gracious post at PrawfsBlawg was also most welcome."MoJ serves a particular and special message that is not easily replaced," he writes, "and so should continue."
These observations make me think I might have been wrong in my earlier private musings about the practical wisdom of ending this collective project any time soon.
Instead of speculating about the end of MOJ, then, I'll conclude this anniversary-week post with a few thoughts on the blog's beginning.
(1) From today's perspective, the inaugural MOJ post radiates an anticipatory defensiveness of a sort that now seems quaint: "The members of this blog group represent a broad spectrum of Catholic opinion." How nice.
(2) The group members all believe that "faith-based discourse is entirely legitimate in the academy and in the public square, and that religious values need not be bracketed in academic or public conversation." Too bad that needed to be said; perhaps we can better realize now how fragile were the foundations of the consensus position we were challenging even while we were accepting it as obviously legitimate in some way.
(3) "We may differ on how such values should be expressed or considered in those conversations or in public decisionmaking." Probably not as true now, which is all to the good.
Roe will probably be reversed even further than before; the real combat is over Casey.
Like our law of slavery once was, abortion law in the United States today is a function of human positive law -- law that can be made and unmade by human will.
As a judicially constructed constraint on legislated protection of vulnerable human life, Roe v. Wade is particularly pernicious. With the upcoming change in the Supreme Court's composition, Roe probably will and definitely should be overruled even further than it already has been.
Recognition of this new likelihood is compatible with the observation that some of those trying to raise an alarm about "the reversal of Roe v. Wade" are engaged in disingenuous scaremongering. Abortion-friendly legal types have long known how election- and appointment-dependent their hold on abortion law has been, especially with respect to legal protections for life later in pregnancy. And that's where the upcoming judicial action will be.
Although many believe that our constitutional law of abortion is all about Roe v. Wade, they are wrong. Planned Parenthood v. Casey is much more important.
Casey is the 1992 decision in which a majority of the Supreme Court partially overruled Roe while a plurality purported to preserve its "central holding." To accomplish this feat, the plurality developed a new take on stare decisis that Justice Scalia accurately described in dissent as a "keep-what-you-want-and-throwaway-the-rest version."
The Casey plurality discarded Roe's trimester framework and acknowledged the permissibility of post-viability abortion prohibitions. In place of Roe, Justices O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter substituted an "undue burden" standard of review for laws limiting pre-viability abortions.
The Justices have sparred over application of Casey's undue burden standard ever since. That is unsurprising given how unstable a legal standard "undue burden" is in the culturally and politically fraught context of abortion law.
The identity of the Justices applying it has been the single variable most predictive of the results this standard delivers. That is exactly why it's no good for the impartial administration of law and needs to go.
The most recent opinion for the Court in this area is Justice Breyer's in Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. By 5-3 vote (Garland's nomination was pending), the Court in Hellerstedt held unconstitutional some Texas health and safety regulations for abortion clinics. If Gorsuch had been on the Court together with any one of the potential nominees on President Trump's short list now, Whole Woman's Health would have come out the other way. The Supreme Court would have affirmed rather than reversed the decision under review. That decision would not have required overruling any more of Roe, just applying the undue burden standard from Casey more like the court of appeals did.
It is impossible to know what abortion-law case the Supreme Court will take up next. But it is reasonable to believe that the case's correct decision may require overruling Roe further than Casey did. If the Court decides to review the constitutionality of a state law prohibiting abortion after twenty weeks, for example, the Court should abandon the line that Casey drew at viability.
This shift would not be avulsive. An unborn baby at twenty weeks gestational age is obviously as much a human being worthy of positive-law protection as one at twenty-four weeks gestational age.
Abortion-friendly activists are understandably uneasy these days. But their real concern should not be Roe's further demise. They should worry, instead, that the pro-life movement will continue to win hearts and minds for the principle of human equality that justifies judicial abandonment of Casey's viability line. And they can now expect the Supreme Court's unjust abortion opinions to erode at the same pace.
Bainbridge's "Thoughts on the Passing of a Friend and Colleague"
[A]s a Catholic, a passing is a wake up call. First, to honor and remember the friend by praying for the repose of their soul. Second, to evaluate my own inner spiritual life and then seek Reconciliation. Third, to commit some act of charity in remembrance of the friend. Fourth, to bear up the living in love and prayer. To reach out to those we have wronged or who have wronged us and be reconciled.
There has been some talk recently about a papal interview with a journalist. One of my favorite such interviews has been organized in God and the World. It is a conversation between then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, and Peter Seewald.
We are used to thinking of suffering as something we try to avoid at all costs. And there is nothing that many societies get more angry about than the Christian idea that one should bear with pain, should endure suffering, should even sometimes give oneself up to it, in order thereby to overcome it. "Suffering," John Paul II believes, "is a part of the mystery of being human." Why is this?
Today what people have in view is eliminating suffering from the world. For the individual, that means avoiding pain and suffering in whatever way. Yet we must also see that it is in this very way the world becomes very hard and very cold. Pain is part of being human. Anyone who really wanted to get rid of suffering would have to get rid of love before everything else, because there can be no love without suffering, because it always demands an element of self-sacrifice, because, given temperamental differences and the drama of situations, it will always bring with it renunciation and pain.
When we know that the way of love---this exodus, this going out of oneself---is the true way by which man becomes human, then we also understand that suffering is the process through which we mature. Anyone who has inwardly accepted suffering becomes more mature and more understanding of others, becomes more human. Anyone who has consistently avoided suffering does not understand other people; he becomes hard and selfish.
Love itself is a passion, something we endure. In love I experience first a happiness, a general feeling of happiness. Yet, on the other hand, I am taken out of my comfortable tranquility and have to let myself be reshaped. If we say that suffering is the inner side of love, we then also understand why it is so important to learn how to suffer---and why, conversely, the avoidance of suffering renders someone unfit to cope with life. He would be left with an existential emptiness, which could then only be combined with bitterness, with rejection, and no longer with any acceptance or progress toward maturity.
What would actually have happened if Christ had not appeared and if he had not died on the tree of the Cross? Would the world long since have come to ruin without him?
That we cannot say. Yet we can say that man would have no access to God. He would then only be able to relate to God in occasional fragmentary attempts. And, in the end, he would not know who or what God actually is.
Something of the light of God shines through in the great religions of the world, of course, and yet they remain a matter of fragments and questions. But if the question about God finds no answer, if the road to him is blocked, if there is no forgiveness, which can only come with the authority of God himself, then human life is nothing but a meaningless experiment. Thus, God himself has parted the clouds at a certain point. He has turned on the light and has shown us the way that is the truth, that makes it possible for us to live, and that is life itself.
"How to keep 'em content in Lent"?
We can't serve dishes made with quick-melting Ched-O-Bit any more, so I'll be running out later today to pick up some tomato soup instead. No need to wait, though to enjoy Amy Welborn's "Gallery of Regrettable Lenten Food."
A taste of the advertising copy: "Is Lent a Problem? 'No!' ... says Chef Ernest Cuony of New York's Fashionable Hotel Barclay. 'You've shown me, Mrs. America, that it's not necessary to sacrifice deliciousness and flavor in order to 'toe the mark' during Lent. As a matter of fact, your pure, wholesome, delicate-flavored WESSON OIL gives--how you say it?--'oomph' to even every-day dishes.'"

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