As our Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar reported earlier, a Berkeley law professor took to the New York Times last week to float a theory on how the Recall of Gavin Newsom could be deemed unconstitutional.
Lo and behold, exactly 30-days before the Special Election date of September 14, two California voters filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court, claiming this very same thing, based on the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.
From Politico:
Two California voters are challenging the legality of the state’s recall system less than a month before the Sept. 14 election, echoing concerns from constitutional scholars as Gov. Gavin Newsom fights for his political life.
A complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California argues that the state’s recall provision violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution by allowing sitting governors to be replaced by candidates who have received fewer votes. The plaintiffs, Rex Julian Beaber and A.W. Clark, want a court order either prohibiting the recall election or adding Newsom’s name to the replacement candidate list. Elections officials have already sent millions of ballots ahead of a state deadline today.
These dunderheads are all incestuous and connected. The Bezerkeley law professor Erwin Chemerinsky is the same professor who Hair Gel used to craft the legislation where California now requires 5-years of tax returns for gubernatorial and presidential candidates in order for them to appear on the ballot in a primary or general election. The same legislation that was fought by then-President Donald J. Trump, the RNC, the CA GOP and California voters. They all prevailed. It is also the same legislation that the affirmative action Secy of State Shirley Weber used to leave Larry Elder’s name off the ballot because of issues she found with his tax returns. Elder and others rightly sued, and his name is now on the ballot.
They are nothing, if not predictable.
The anti-Recall lawsuit is backed by the same professor Newsom used to try to keep presidential candidates off the ballot for not releasing tax returns. That scheme was unanimously rejected by the CA Supreme Court.
— Kevin Kiley (@KevinKileyCA) August 17, 2021
The attorney lodging this ridiculous lawsuit, Stephen Yagman, is also a piece of work. Yagman made his bones filing lawsuits against the police department for police brutality, racial profiling, you name it, he sued for it. Yagman was also popular with the press for quotes and sound bites ala Johnny Cochran. Unlike Cochran, he was a legal gadfly with minimal talent; he was also as dirty as they come.
Yagman was indicted in 2006, and convicted in 2007 of bankruptcy, tax fraud, and money laundering. Yagman bilked other people out of their money (including elderly relatives), then did the bait and switch of not declaring said money and assets on his tax returns, instead burying them under his girlfriend’s name. When Yagman filed for bankruptcy, he lied about all this <*clutch the pearls*>, but was ultimately found out. You screw with big law, it screws you back.
The IRS always wins.
Yagman was convicted to three years of prison time, and was also disbarred. Apparently our justice system and the California Bar Association work well for you if you have the money and the right connections. Yagman not only did not serve prison time, but went on to teach a UCLA class on… wait for it… morality.
The famed civil-rights lawyer convicted of federal tax evasion and bankruptcy fraud has been asked to teach an undergraduate course on law, morality and social justice at a university, his attorney said Wednesday in urging a judge to not impose a prison sentence.
Stephen Yagman, 63, was found guilty of trying to avoid paying more than $100,000 in federal income taxes while living what prosecutors painted as a lavish lifestyle that included Aspen vacations, high-end suits from London, and fine dining.
At Yagman’s sentencing hearing Wednesday, attorney Barry Tarlow said his client should be spared prison because he was in poor health, would be vulnerable to attack and because he could share with aspiring lawyers his considerable civil-rights experience.
“He still has a way to contribute,” Tarlow said.
“There’s a number of professors over there who are interested in having him teach.”
Yagman was reinstated to practice law in May of this year. Guess who fought valiantly for Yagman not to be disbarred the first time, and who worked to get his law license reinstated? None other than our Bezerkeley professor Erwin Chemerinsky.
You truly cannot make this stuff up.
Well into his 80s, Yagman is “contributing” alright. Yagman has rebooted his supposed “civil rights” firm and is now suing the City of Los Angeles for its parking restrictions. The whole civil rights brand is just a front. Behind the scenes, Yagman is obviously another arm of Gavin Newsom and his cronies, there to do his bidding.
Birds of a feather….
Here’s the gist of this frivolous lawsuit:
1. Those who oppose the recall are concerned that they do not get a chance to vote for their choice: “Gavin Newsom”, for the second question on the Special Election Recall ballot. This is the height of nonsensical, because the purpose of a recall is to correct the issue of the person in office by removing him or her. You get rid of the sitting person FIRST, then decide who would do the job better. Having Newsom get a second chance defeats that purpose. Should this Recall election fail, he’ll get his second chance, then a third one in 2022.
God forbid that happen.
2. The lawyers are using the Fourteenth Amendment as their boilerplate, basically allowing the federal constitution to nullify the State’s constitution. More on this later.
3. Their end goal: They know they cannot stop a Recall in process. The ballots were sent out last week and hundreds, if not thousands, have already registered their votes. These clowns would have a bigger pickle on their hands if they attempted to stop the actual Special election. So they’ll settle for being able to write-in Gavin Newsom as a candidate.
How capricious, craven, and sickening these people are.
Let’s talk about one of the plaintiffs.
Rex Julian Beaber is a longtime attorney and a forensic psychologist. He represented Lydia Harris in the Suge Knight/Death Row Records bankruptcy, and former KCBS television anchor Larry Carroll, who was indicted in 1999 for allegedly being involved in a fraudulent investment scheme. The charges were dismissed.
Beaber has done work to style himself as an “expert” not only in certain aspects of the law, but in the area of psychology. He also styles himself as a “semantic scholar” and a “sage advisor“.
The mind boggles.
In true Hollywood fashion, Beaber has IMDB credits for appearing as himself on true crime shows such as World’s Most Evil Killers, and Britain’s Most Evil Killers.
If the cases he has argued for are any indication, Beaber supports, euthanasia, gun control, and likes to go after big corporations without much merit. Around 2003, Beaber filed a federal lawsuit against Mercury Group, which was dismissed due to lack of merit.
Progressives make an art form out of this. As an independent professional who was directly affected by AB5, and a journalist who covered both AB5 and the battle for Prop. 22 (which allowed rideshare drivers to be exempt from AB5), the progressives main tactics were to lie, obfuscate, and misinform. When those didn’t work, it was all about the lawsuits. Even after Prop 22 was voted in by a huge margin of California voters, the unions and their useful idiots and activists pretending to be drivers, filed a lawsuit to overturn the measure.
Thankfully, the California Supreme Court kicked them to the curb. But even now they are pushing for the PRO Act, which would do the same work of AB5 on a national level.
As goes California… You cannot say you were not warned.
What Newsom, Chemerinsky, Beaber, and all these cretins truly hate are people who not only understand their inalienable rights, but those who employ them to make their voices heard and be a pivotal part of the direction of the State. This has not happened for decades, but the California people are awakening and arising, kind of like the Ents in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Newsom is just Saruman with better hair.
To paraphrase Samwise Gamgee in that same movie,
Samwise: Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t.
Because they were holding on to something.Frodo : What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam : That there’s some good in [California], Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
Newsom and his progressive cadre cannot have this, and it is why he’s throwing everything at the wall to try and stop it.
However, it is not just about him. As Van Laar wrote,
In reality, the law professor’s – and the progressive left’s – issue with California’s Constitutionally authorized recall process goes far beyond the potential recall of Gavin Newsom. Since 2018 a rash of rabidly progressive District Attorneys and city council members have been elected in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, and some of them are at grave risk of being recalled. Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon – of whom Chemerinsky is an extremely vocal supporter – is the subject of a recall effort that hasn’t yet qualified for the ballot; however, a poll taken at the end of July shows that if a recall election were held today Gascon would be recalled. At least two newly-elected Los Angeles City Council members are facing recall; they’re going far beyond what they stated in their BLM platforms now that they’re elected and people are fed up. In addition, a second recall petition against radical San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin looks to be headed for qualification.
Which brings us back to Erwin Chemerinsky, Esq. and the Fourteenth Amendment.
This conservative legal blog explains why this Amendment has been a convenient go-to for the progressives:
It seems that most libertarians have adopted the position that the Fourteenth Amendment justifiably enables the federal judiciary to insert itself into state matters that allegedly threaten the guarantees of some (though not all) of the Bill of Rights. I believe this is a dangerous position.
First, relying on the federal government in general or the federal judiciary, in particular, to recognize and validate fundamental rights sets a dangerous precedent. By ceding extraordinary power to the State and its federal judicial arm, libertarians who employ rights-based arguments in support of their policy positions undermine those very positions by suggesting that only the State confers rights by approval. The implication is that the State is the creator and sustainer of rights at its sole and arbitrary discretion. This is not the case and ought not to appear to be the case, lest what we call “rights” become contingent upon political largesse and lobbyist clout. The other problem is that the federal judiciary may create alleged rights (if they were truly rights, they would need recognition, not creation) that subvert the free market: the right to a minimum wage or to other government benefits, for instance.
The writer mentions Chemerinsky and other attorneys who make it their life’s goal to use the Fourteenth Amendment to strengthen the statists’ policies of Medicare-for-all, free tuition, name-your-taxpayer-funded-government-freebie, with the sole focus of eroding federalism.
In Chemerinsky’s own words, “history shows that the academic scholarship of one generation can shape the constitutional doctrines in the next…. Contemporary scholarship will have future effects, and among them can be directing the Court towards finding a constitutional right to basic subsistence.” These men have sought to establish a scholarly precedent that could be used against libertarians who champion the very constitutional jurisprudence that would enable progressive and statist ideas such as a fundamental right to subsistence to take effect. These men would use the Fourteenth Amendment to force the states to provide food, clothing, shelter, and a minimum wage to all adults within the several states.
Sounds exactly like the kind of people Newsom loves to rub shoulders with and use towards his goal of absolute progressive power. This Recall is bringing those fever dreams to a screeching halt, so he’s hoping his corrupt friends in academia and law will give him a leg up.
According to The Center Square, this same lawsuit challenge was lodged in 2003 by then-Governor Gray Davis to fend off his recall, and it failed. Spectacularly.
But Vikram David Amar, dean and Iwan Foundation professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, and Evan Caminker, former dean, and currently the Branch Rickey Collegiate professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, argue the opposite.
They maintain that Chemerinsky and Edlin “are wrong on both counts: we see no voting inequality concern of constitutional magnitude here, and the argument they advance was indeed raised (by the incumbent Governor), refuted, and rejected during the Gray Davis recall contest. Indeed, one of us (Amar) made both of these points more than 15 years ago, first in online academic commentary in the months leading up to the Davis recall event, and then again (ironically enough) in the pages of the California Law Review not long thereafter.”
As I said above, they are nothing, if not predictable. They use the same tactics and attempt to put a new spin on them. They assume that people won’t remember, and for the people of California, they are not far off the mark. The fact that the 2003 Recall of Gray Davis was in essence, a national media circus thanks to the presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the ballot, helped to ensure it was well documented. Newsom, Pelosi, and their media allies would have their work cut out for them to memory hole it, though they have undoubtedly tried.
They add that the fatal flaw of the constitutional argument against the recall “is their unarticulated and undefended characterization of the two parts of the recall ballot as constituting a single election in which voters are being asked whom, out of the entire field of wannabe governors including Gavin Newsom, they prefer. Yet the recall vote is no such thing. It is two separate voter decisions – that simply (and for efficiency’s sake) are being conducted by means of a single ballot.”
The court is unlikely to favor the plaintiffs in light of a 2003 California Supreme Court ruling, Amar and Caminker argue.
The California Supreme Court is always a hard call. However, the hope is that they will uphold precedent and the California Constitution.
In 2003, Davis sued, arguing that the recall violated the Fourteenth Amendment. He asked the California Supreme Court to rule, among other things, to be allowed to be listed as a candidate on the second question of the ballot. His arguments included the same equal protection arguments as Chemerinsky’s and Edlin’s.
The California Supreme Court denied Davis’ request.
Amar and Caminker believe the court will reject the lawsuit for the reasons they stated above.
But what is also at play is energizing the Cult of the Perpetually Clueless and the progressives who are not much at activism, but can be easily led around by the nose. They are like Pavlov’s dog: any time they hear the words “lawsuit” and “voter suppression” you can guarantee they’ll be on board and ready to take orders. It’s also about further activating their base.
One Twitter follower made this astute observation:
Always cute watching the party which screams “voter suppression” try to overturn elections
— 🌤 (@RecallingNewsom) August 17, 2021
Or stop it in its tracks by demoralizing the Recall proponents. That is also an end-goal. There is another gubernatorial debate happening Tuesday evening in Sacramento, and yet another one on Thursday in San Francisco. People who support the Recall and plan to vote are still weighing their options, and despite what you hear about polling, who they say is ahead is really not. If this latest attack by Newsom and his cadre of corrupt actors can succeed in their voter suppression tactics, and stop people from voting because, “what’s the use?!”, then all this legal chicanery will have worked out better than they planned.
Chemerinsky, Beaber, the whole lot are dangerous people whose sole purpose is to gum up the works of republicanism, and destroy government of, for, and by the people.
Don’t let them.
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