A memo last week from San Francisco Mayor London Breed made clear that “the City’s contracting processes and policies have not changed and will not change as a result of the Resolution” by the Board of Supervisors branding the National Rifle Association a domestic terrorist group. [Joshua Koehn, San Francisco Chronicle] The resolution had proclaimed that the city should take all reasonable steps to identify and limit business and financial links between its vendors and contractors and the membership organization, but Breed pointed out that the city enacts changes to its law only by ordinance, not by resolution, which means the swaggering language had no effect off the playground. It had been widely predicted that courts would strike down a move by the city to coerce contractors in this way. Earlier here and here.
Archive for October, 2019
Cato Constitution Day video
The video of Cato’s 18th Constitution Day forum, held September 17, is now online, with a line-up of eminent speakers including Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSBlog, Jan Crawford of CBS News, and Judge Thomas Hardiman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who in the annual B. Kenneth Simon Lecture discussed judicial independence and service during good behavior. I moderate the third panel, on Property Rights, Antitrust, and the Census.
“The Golden Rule of Laws”
Court-packing schemes have something in common with passing a municipal resolution to label one’s political adversaries “domestic terrorists”: their proponents, as David Boaz has observed, tend not to ask “What if my opponents had this power?” Eric Turkewitz expands on the idea in a post:
This is as good a time as any to discuss the Golden Rule of Laws. This rule states that when you want to use some legal maneuver to attack “the other side” ask yourself how “the other side” could likewise use it.