Tag: lawfare

Justice Department drops absurd Biden-era discrimination lawsuit against SpaceX

9:15 am

As expected, the Justice Department now under Donald Trump’s presidency yesterday filed papers to end the insane Biden-era discrimination lawsuit against SpaceX that demanded it hire refugees and even illegal aliens, even though State Department rules forbid it to do so.

In an unopposed motion filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the Justice Department said it intended to file a notice of dismissal with prejudice, which means prosecutors would not be able to file these charges again.

Of all the lawfare initiated against Musk and SpaceX by the Biden administration, this lawsuit was by far the stupidest and most ridiculous. SpaceX doesn’t discriminate against non-American citizens. If they meet State Department rules and also have the qualifications, it hires them. And has done so. For one federal agency, Justice, to demand that SpaceX violate the rules of another agency, State, proves the lawsuit’s real purpose was harassment only.

That harassment has ended with the arrival of Trump.

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Democrats: You got what you asked for when the Supreme Court ruled presidents have absolute immunity for official actions

3:18 pm

Cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war!

As always, the Democrats have once again demonstrated their utter inability to reflect even slightly on the consequences of their actions.

On July 1, 2024 the Supreme Court, faced with an appeal from Donald Trump that claimed he as president should have immunity from prosecution when his political opponents gain power, ruled that yes, Trump is right, that presidents do have absolute immunity for their “official” actions while in office.

The majority opinion finds that presidents have absolute immunity for core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. This immunity does “not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress,” and unofficial acts taken while in office receive no immunity at all.

The court ruled that President Trump’s conversations with the acting attorney general were core conduct subject to absolute immunity. It also ruled that his conversations with the vice president about the counting of the votes were part of his official duties, thus subject to presumptive, but not absolute, immunity—finding that Judge Chutkan should now assess whether prosecution of these actions intrudes on the authority and functions of the executive branch, and prosecutors will have to rebut the presumption of immunity if so.

Since then Democrat politicians and pundits have been gnashing their teeth in horror, claiming that this ruling now allows presidents to do almost anything once in office, from assassinating their opponents to using the military to arrest and eliminate judges he or she does not like.

The irony here of course escapes the Democrats. First, hasn’t Biden and his Department of Justice and the FBI been doing a milder form of the same abuse of power in their lawfare against Trump and those who worked for him?

Second, this case would never have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place if the Democrats had not started that lawfare campaign. By prosecuting Trump on numerous weak and sometimes utterly bogus charges, it forced the issue to the courts, which was then forced to rule.

The biggest irony of this whole issue is that the Democrats are right. » Read more

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A new lawsuit filed against Elon Musk by former SpaceX employees

10:12 am

Elon Musk, a target for destruction by the left
Elon Musk, a target for destruction

The lawfare won’t stop until morale improves! A new lawsuit has been filed against Elon Musk by eight former SpaceX employees, who now accuse him of sexually harassing them by his sometimes pointed tweets on X, calling those tweets “juvenile, grotesque sexual banter.”

The suit also says Musk’s tweets “had the wholly foreseeable and intentional result of encouraging other employees to engage in similar conduct.”

At SpaceX’s Hawthorne offices, the suit claims, company meetings and employees mimicked Musk’s humor. At meetings, the lawsuit alleges, senior engineers called mechanical parts “chodes” and “schlongs.” A camera that was placed on the bottom of a second-stage Falcon rocket was referred to as the “Upskirt Camera,” and a structure used by astronauts to transfer from SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station was called the “Fun Tunnel,” a euphemism for anal sex.

Read the whole article. The complaints are quite hilarious. These employees need to get a life. This is all silly stuff, hardly worth even two nanoseconds of concern.

Unfortunately, these anti-Musk employees do have a life, and it is a very sad one, consumed wholly with destroying Musk, not accomplishing anything worthwhile on their own. These eight former employees are the same ones who were fired after they published an internal letter in SpaceX calling for others in the company to denounce Musk for his tweets. Following their firing they also instigated a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) suit against Musk, which is presently suspended because SpaceX is claiming the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional, and no further action on the complaint will occur until the courts decide on that claim.

This new lawsuit is simply another example of new harassment of Musk by these former employees.

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FAA and Air Force initiate new environmental impact statements for Starship/Superheavy launchpads in Florida

12:08 pm

We’re here to help you! Really! Late yesterday, in a typical Friday story dump just before the weekend to reduce any notice, the FAA announced it has begun a new environmental impact statement (EIS) of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy launchpad infrastructure being built in Florida, working in parallel with a similar environmental impact statement now being conducted by the Air Force.

The EIS will be the second environmental review involving SpaceX’s plans to use LC-39A for Starship launches. NASA completed an environmental assessment (EA) in 2019 of the company’s plans at the time to build launch infrastructure at LC-39A for Starship, finding it would have no significant impact. At the time SpaceX was planning up to 24 Starship launches from that pad annually. A new EIS, the FAA concluded, is needed because of changes in the design of Starship and its operations since the 2019 assessment.

The FAA claims a new assessment is needed because SpaceX is now planning as many as 44 launches. The Air Force has not said why its new assessment is needed. That EIS, which began in March, covers a launchpad previously used by the Saturn-1B and Delta-4 rockets from 1964 to 2022, another pad use by the Air Force’s Titan rocket from 1965 to 2005, as well as a new pad, dubbed SLC-50.

LC-39A meanwhile has been used for launches since the 1960s. The Saturn-5, the space shuttle, and the Falcon 9 all launched from this pad.

The dishonest absurdity of these impact statements can not be overstated. There is zero reason to do new assessments. All the pads have been in use for decades, with all kinds of rockets, some comparable to Superheavy/Starship. The environment and the wildlife refuge at Cape Canaveral have both thrived.

Moreover, to force completely new impact statements because the design and plans for Superheavy/Starship have changed somewhat (but not fundamentally) is even more stupid. This is a new rocket, being developed day-by-day and launch-by-launch. Will the FAA and the Air Force require new EIS’s every time SpaceX changes anything? It seems so.

This is clearly lawfare against Elon Musk and SpaceX by the White House and the administration state. It doesn’t like Musk, and it is now searching at all times for ways to block or damage him.

I confidently predict that neither statement will be completed by the end of 2025. Based on the timeline of most EIS’s, which when politics are involved are almost always slowed by the legal action of activists, the earliest either will be approved will be mid-2026, though likely later.

What is not clear is whether the FAA and Air Force will stop all work while this red tape is being unwound. If so, then the first operational launches of Superheavy and Starship cannot happen out of Cape Canaveral until well into 2027, which means NASA entire Artemis program will be seriously delayed. My previous prediction that the first manned lunar landing can’t happen before 2030 is becoming increasingly too conservative.

And remember this: If Joe Biden and the Democrats remain in power after November, all bets are off. At that point they are certain to ramp up the lawfare against those they see as political enemies, even if their targets are doing great things for the nation and the American people.

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African lawfare to take control of space

12:57 pm

Modern academia: Marching with Lenin!
Modern African academia, proudly marching with Lenin!

It appears that a growing cadre of African lawyers are working within international organizations such as the UN and the International Astronautical Union (IAU) to use the Outer Space Treaty as a wedge to take control of space, wresting it from the hands of private commerical companies.

I make this assessment based upon a long article about this new lawfare published today in Wired, describing the training and political goals of a number of young African layers in the field of international space law.

[S]ome players in the global south are gearing up for the orbital future not just by scrambling to launch satellites, but by building up skills in outer space law—the evolving area of international jurisprudence that introduced the “province of all mankind” concept in the first place.

Though the Outer Space Treaty is still the cornerstone of space law, other international agreements have built up around it over the years—and more still are desperately needed to regulate today’s realities in space. “This is an area of rulemaking where they’re just setting up the rules for the future, so you need to have a perspective now,” explains Timiebi Aganaba, a British-Canadian-Nigerian professor at Arizona State University who has been instrumental in driving African interest in space law. “If the system gets built without you—if you come in later—people will start quoting laws to you.”

In 2011, Aganaba helped organize the first teams of African law students to enter something called the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition. The global tournament, named after an architect of the Outer Space Treaty, uses fictional court cases to train young lawyers how to think through the plausible conflicts that could soon arise beyond the atmosphere—and it is far and away the most important professional conduit into the field of space law. Students who make it to the final round of the competition argue their cases before actual judges from the International Court of Justice—the world’s highest forum for legal disputes between countries. And since 2011, teams from Africa have become a force in the competition. In 2018, South Africa’s University of Pretoria won the international championship.

If Aganaba’s name rings a bell to my readers, it is no surprise. » Read more

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Another lawsuit filed against SpaceX

9:35 am

They’re coming for you next: In what appears to be another example of lawfare by the left against Elon Musk, a female engineer has filed a lawsuit against SpaceX, claiming it discriminated against her in pay.

The lawsuit is absurd, based on the suit itself.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court by SpaceX engineer Ashley Foltz, who says she was hired at a salary of $92,000, even though men with similar or less experience were offered as much as $115,000. According to her LinkedIn, Ashley was hired in September 2022 as a propulsion engineer. She did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

According to the complaint, Foltz learned about the salary discrepancies when a new California law went into effect requiring employers to include pay scale in their job postings. The salary range for her job was $95,000 to $115,000, so SpaceX gave her a raise — but only to the lowest end of the band.

In other words, Foltz didn’t negotiate a good salary when she was hired, and when the California law revealed how low it was, SpaceX immediately raised her salary to the bottom end of its pay scale, indicating also its opinion of her work. I suspect a full review of the salaries the company pays will reveal that women get a wide range of payment, depending on their worth. SpaceX certainly doesn’t discriminate against women, since its CEO is a woman and over the years women engineers have led many major projects.

The lawfare from the left against Elon Musk, one of the most successful Americans in decades, is becoming quite obvious. Besides this private suit, another group of environmentalists are suing SpaceX and the FAA to block future launches from Boca Chica. The Biden administration meanwhile is using numerous agencies to gang up on Musk: the Justice Department is suing it for not illegally hiring illegal immigrants, the FAA and Fish & Wildlife are blocking its Superheavy/Starship test launches, the EEOC is suing Tesla while Justice and the SEC investigate it, and the FTC and SEC are investigating Musk’s purchase of Twitter.

If you still think this full court press of government action is an accident, or entirely innocent, then you are naive beyond belief. Musk is now considered an opponent of the left, and so the left is going after him, and abusing the power of government to do it. It doesn’t care that Musk has produced tens of thousands of new jobs, revolutionized several major industries, and brought wealth to places that were previously poverty-stricken. To the left, the only thing that matters is its hold on power. Threaten that, and it will do whatever it can to destroy you, even if it means people will be starving in the street.

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Biden’s Justice Department sues SpaceX

9:51 am

The corrupt and very partisan Justice Department of the Biden administration today sued SpaceX for discriminating against refugees and illegal immigrants because it restricts hiring to “U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents.”

The lawsuit states SpaceX “failed to fairly consider” and “refused to hire” the asylees and refugees who ended up applying anyway. It also alleges that SpaceX “wrongly claimed” that the US’s export control laws allowed it to only hire US citizens and lawful residents. Additionally, the DOJ claims SpaceX hired “only” US citizens and green card holders from September 2018 to September 2020.

“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, says in a statement.

Justice is demanding compensation and back pay for anyone “deterred or denied employment”, as well as civil penalties.

This suit is utter garbage and puts SpaceX between a rock and a hard place. I guarantee if SpaceX had hired any illegal or refugee who was not yet a legal citizen, Biden’s State Department would have immediately sued it for violating other laws relating to ITAR (the export control laws mentioned) which try to prevent the theft of technology by foreign powers.

The Biden administration considers Elon Musk an opponent, and since it is now moving to indict and even imprison all political opposition, it is no surprise it is beginning to use lawfare against him. As I have written repeatedly, it has almost certainly pressured the FAA to slow walk any launch license approvals for SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy. This lawsuit today simply provides further evidence that my prediction will be right that the next orbital test flight of that rocket will be delayed months.

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Where to get legal help if you have been illegally blacklisted

4:39 pm

Today’s blacklist column is a follow-up of an earlier column from August 2022, when I provided a detailed list of the various legal non-profit firms that now take on cases to defend the blacklisted. The number of such firms has grown, and I decided it was time to provide a new more complete list.

These non-profit law firms are all dedicated to fighting the left’s shameless effort to illegally and immorally blacklist, blackball, censor, and destroy its opposition, and have been increasingly successfully in winning their cases. The list, though obviously not all inclusive, describes what appear to be the most active and successful non-profit law firms presently winning first amendment cases nationwide. (Note too that the ACLU is not on the list, as that organization a long time ago abandoned its foundational goal of protecting free speech and has instead become an agent acting to increase the left’s power over ordinary citizens.)

In choosing among these law firms, make sure you review their entire website and the many cases they are handling. Some firms might be less appropriate for your situation, and it is necessary on your part to do the due diligence to figure this out.
» Read more

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Some victories against modern leftist oppression

2:15 pm

Increasingly, the overbearing and sometimes violent effort by the left to squelch dissenting views is being met by legal action, and increasingly it appears that legal action is producing positive results. In just the last few days, we have just a few examples:

The last story is especially interesting. The city councillors of Charlottesville are being sued for their decision to remove two Confederate statues. The judge ruled that these councillors could be personally liable should they lose the case, especially because their action appears to directly violate a state law.

In the nine-page letter, Moore says that he thinks the council “was acting beyond its authority” and that it was not a “legitimate” legislative activity when the council voted to remove the statues, in contravention with a state law that prohibits the disturbance or removal of war memorials.

The left has for decades been able to violate laws like this with impunity. All of the cases above are examples of that kind of nonchalance to the law and to the truth. In the past no one would challenge them on their acts, and they would get away with it. It appears now that the right is beginning to finally push back, and with some success.

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