When Donald Met Susie

Judicial activism in the best California tradition

Federal judge Susan Illston of California’s Northern District slapped a pause order on President Trump’s plans for mass layoffs at federal agencies. According to the judge, Trump may restructure the agencies, but only in “lawful ways” approved by Congress. As Sir Bedevire (Terry Jones) said, who is this who is so wise in the ways of government?

The Stanford Law alum was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1995 but it’s more accurate to call her a Boxer and Feinstein judge after the Democrat senators who recommended her. On the bench and in private practice, Illston handled many high-profile cases.

Voters have a right to wonder how judge Illston would have ruled on President Reagan’s mass firing of the striking air traffic controllers (PATCO) in 1981. That action convinced the Soviet Union that Reagan was not one to back down.

While Illston’s case shakes out, consider the actions of Obama judge Jon Tigar, also based in San Francisco. Convicted murderer Rodney Quine, father of two daughters, claimed in prison that from the age of nine he believed he was really a woman. In 2017, Tigar ordered “reassignment” surgery, paid by taxpayers. Shiloh Heavenly Quine is now inmate WB11 at the Central California Women’s facility.

Judge Tigar

That’s hard to top but recall the case of Bernard Lee Hamilton from 1979. Hamilton abducted Eleanore Buchanan, 24, stabbed her multiple times, beheaded the woman and cut off her hands. A San Diego jury sentenced Hamilton to death but state chief justice Rose Bird ruled that jurors had not been instructed to consider whether Hamilton had intended to kill the woman.

In ten years on the high court, Bird overturned every death sentence that came before her, including Theodore Frank, duly convicted of kidnaping, torturing, raping, and murdering two-year-old Amy Sue Seitz in 1978. Blocking death sentences may have been one of Gov. Jerry Brown’s conditions for appointing Bird in the first place.

As the late David Horowitz explained in Radical Son, Gov. Jerry Brown was a strong supporter of Elaine Brown, the Black Panther who led the Party when co-founder Huey Newton fled to Cuba. In December of 1974, Brown fired Betty Van Patter, the bookkeeper Horowitz recruited for the Oakland Community Learning Center, the Panthers’ school he helped establish. In January of 1975, Van Patter’s body was found in San Francisco Bay. The mother of three had been beaten to death.

The case remains unsolved but there’s no statute of limitations on murder. The FBI could reinvestigate the case with modern forensic tools and conduct new interviews. What did Jerry Brown know, and when did he know it? Californians are well aware of his soft spot for criminals.

By 2018, his last year in office, Brown had pardoned 1,332 inmates, nearly four times more than the previous four governors combined and more than three times as many pardons than Brown granted in his first stint as governor between 1975 and 1983.

In one of his final acts, Gov. Brown signed Senate Bill 1391, which allows anyone under age 16 to commit murder, be tried only in juvenile court, and gain release at age 25. Stay safe everybody.