Archive for July, 2007

So we were sit­ting around our apart­ment in Waco, TX., circa 1993. Tay­lor was read­ing by the win­dow, I was work­ing on my Mac Clas­sic at the table, Joel was watch­ing tele­vi­sion, Alan was gone. A cat was meow­ing loudly out­side, very loudly, we could all hear it. That went on for a few min­utes until Tay­lor got fed up and got up to scare the cat away. He opened the back door of the apart­ment and freaked the cat out. The cat darted away from our door and out into the street where it was imme­di­ately squished by a truck.

The truck dri­ver stopped. “Was that your cat?”

Tay­lor replied, “No.”

The dri­ver nod­ded and started dri­ving again, leav­ing the squished cat in the street. We all went out­side to look at the flat cat and then called our friends to tell them what just hap­pened. Patrick, Josh and Willie were amazed by the story and how quickly it all happened.

Later I went with Patrick’s girl­friend Kim to find the Branch David­ian com­pound. The com­pound was out­side of town, not in Waco as so many news­cast­ers said. It was get­ting dark and you could see the spot­lights that the FBI was using from miles away. We started dri­ving, just fol­low­ing the lights. We never found exactly how to get to the com­pound, as the ranch was on sev­eral back coun­try roads, but we had fun just dri­ving around and look­ing for it.

Kim dropped me off at our apart­ment, and as I stepped up to the front door I noticed some­thing in the door­way. There, with string tied around its two front paws and taped up to the inside of the door­way so it stood up, was the dead cat. It’s squished lit­tle body no longer bleed­ing, there was a scrawled sign read­ing “YOU KILLED ME” in red ink made up to look like blood.

I stepped over the cat and went inside, find­ing Joel and Tay­lor. I showed them the cat and we knew imme­di­ately who’d done this — Patrick, Josh and Willie.

Joel and Tay­lor car­ried the cat out to the garbage, then we called Patrick, Josh and Willie. They feigned inno­cence of the whole mat­ter at first, but after hardly any inter­ro­ga­tion they fessed up and said that they had done it. They’d thought it would be funny for us to leave our apart­ment the next morn­ing on our ways to class and see the tiny crushed cat sit­ting there in our path.

It was about at that moment that we heard some bang­ing around out at the garbage. We opened the door, while still on the phone, and peeked out at the garbage. There, dump­ing bot­tles and cans into the garbage, were 3 men in a truck. They con­tin­ued to dump their trash until some­one sneezed or some­thing and they heard us. The 3 of them jumped into the truck and took off, very quickly. It was kind of strange, we thought.

And then we remem­bered the cat. We walked out to the garbage and, yes, the cat was gone. They’d taken a squished dead cat.

Prob­a­bly going to use it in some satanic rit­ual or some­thing, but the sickos had taken the dead cat.

In all mat­ters con­sti­tu­tional, the Supreme Court rules on the laws of the land. As of now, Chief Jus­tice John Roberts pre­sides over a court con­sist­ing of him­self, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Gins­burg, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. It was under John Jay¹ that the first sub­stan­tial case was decided by the Court.

In 1792, Alexan­der Chisholm of South Car­olina, the execu­tor of the estate of Robert Far­quhar, attempted to sue the state of Geor­gia in the Supreme Court over pay­ments due them for goods that Far­quhar had sup­plied Geor­gia dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. In 1793, U.S. Attor­ney Gen­eral Edmund Ran­dolph argued the case for the plain­tiff before the Court in “Chisholm v. Geor­gia”. Geor­gia refused to appear, claim­ing that as a “sov­er­eign,” a state did not have to appear in court to hear a suit against it to which it did not consent.

The Court, in a 4–1 deci­sion, found in favor of the plain­tiff, with Chief Jus­tice Jay con­cur­ring with Jus­tices Blair, Wil­son, and Cush­ing², with Jus­tice James Iredell dis­sent­ing.³ The Court argued that Arti­cle 3, Sec­tion 2 of the Con­sti­tu­tion abro­gated the States’ sov­er­eign immu­nity and granted fed­eral courts the affir­ma­tive power to hear dis­putes between pri­vate cit­i­zens and States.

In 1795, largely as a result of the Chisolm deci­sion, the Eleventh Amend­ment was rat­i­fied, which removed fed­eral juris­dic­tion in cases where cit­i­zens of one state or for­eign coun­tries attempt to sue another state. How­ever, cit­i­zens of one state or for­eign coun­tries can still use the Fed­eral courts if the state con­sents to be sued or if Con­gress, pur­suant to a valid exer­cise of Four­teenth Amend­ment reme­dial pow­ers, abro­gates the states’ immu­nity from suit.⁴

1. Jay was nom­i­nated in 1789 by Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton as the first Chief Jus­tice of the United States. He presided over the court until 1795 and was instru­men­tal in estab­lish­ing the inter­nal pro­ce­dures of the Supreme Court and set­ting legal prece­dents. [↩]
2. That would be John Blair, James Wil­son and William Cush­ing. [↩]
3. The Court has fluc­tu­ated in mem­ber­ship size over the course of the his­tory of the United States. The Judi­ciary Act of 1789 set the size orig­i­nally at 6, but it was as high as 10 in 1863. With the Cir­cuit Judges Act of 1869, the num­ber of Jus­tices was again set at nine (the Chief Jus­tice and eight Asso­ciate Jus­tices), where it has remained ever since. [↩]
4. The facts for this piece come from Ask Yahoo! and Oyez! The U.S. Supreme Court Media site. [↩]