The Supreme Court of the United States today struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion for the 7-2 majority, with Justices Breyer and Thomas dissenting.

One can just see the headline now: “Supreme Court Determines Violent Video Games Are Great for Kids!” Or, “Justice Scalia’s Children Must Be Embarrassed by His Utter Disregard for Parents’ Rights.”

Superficially, this appears to be a failure of government to support parents in their quest to protect children. Shouldn’t we applaud governmental restrictions on games that depict violent rape, dismemberment, and sickeningly graphic murder? Shouldn’t the Supreme Court want to help parents protect their children from this satanic drivel?

Well, not really. Scalia wrote that the gaming industry already does assist parents in this regard by providing useful rating systems for games—a system that experts consider far superior to our current movie rating system. The Court argued that states cannot create laws to deny children access to objectionable material.

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This recent decision has been in the making since 1990 when the class action Coleman v. Brown was filed in District Court that found that California “prisoners with serious mental illness do not receive minimal, adequate care.” Then in 2001 Plata v. Brown said “the State (California) conceded that deficiencies in prison medical care violated prisoners’ Eighth Amendment rights and stipulated to a remedial injunction.”

In 2005 when California did not comply with the “remedial injunction” a three-judge court was empowered “to order reductions in the prison population.” All of this is further explained in the recent ninety-one-page U. S. Supreme Court decision that can be found under “Recent Decisions” here and selecting Brown v. Plata.

Reading the text of the decision the court “concluded that it would be possible to reduce the prison population ‘in a manner that preserves public safety and the operation of the criminal justice system.’”

The decision says the state has created “a certain and unacceptable risk of continuing violations of the rights of sick and mentally ill prisoners, with the result that many more will die or needlessly suffer.” Further that, “The constitution does not permit this wrong.”

The court used a statement from the former heads of correctional systems in Washington, Maine, and Pennsylvania, to justify that California prisons are “criminogenic” and a statement from a chief probation officer who testified that “it seems like (the prisons) produce additional criminal behavior”. In that same passage California’s Little Hoover Commission stated, “California communities are burdened with absorbing 123,000 offenders returning from prison, often more dangerous than when they left.”

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Those liberals, reformers, good-government types, New York Times editorial writers and Albany Times Union reporters who were toasting the conviction of long time New York Republican Senate Leader Joe Bruno, will soon have the smile wiped from their elitist faces. Joe Bruno has committed no crime and his exoneration will likely come from the U.S. Supreme Court.

I speak from the point of view of an attorney with a passion for the protections of the law.

In 1770, a rowdy mob of Massachusetts colonists accosted and provoked British soldiers until they responded with lethal force and committed the Boston Massacre.   The soldiers were arrested and placed on trial where their convictions seemed imminent out of sheer populace outrage.  One bold lawyer rose in their defense, John Adams, who in his closing argument reminded the jurors that “the law no passion can disturb.  Tis void of desire and fear, lust and anger . . . it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.”

Today the populace is clamoring at Joe Bruno.  They protested – protested! – His recent defense fund fundraisers, and blogs, abound with smug joy at the Senator’s conviction.  Meanwhile, the facts and flaws of the case have disappeared into the ruckus.   Nary a soul concerns itself with the serious constitutional misgivings of a law that has floundered through the federal circuit courts because no knows what it means.  Consider the helpless inquisition of Judge Jacobs in the Rybicki case, now Chief Judge of the Second Circuit – the same federal circuit hearing the Bruno case:

How can the public be expected to know what the statute means when the judges and prosecutors themselves do not know, or must make it up as they go along?

Or consider Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who says that “it is simply not fair to prosecute someone for a crime that has not been defined until the judicial decision that sends him to jail.”

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The Senate is about to act on the nomination of militant leftist Dawn Johnsen to be the chief of the U.S. government’s elite legal team. But that post is a stepping-stone for top judicial offices, including the Supreme Court itself. That’s likely Barack Obama’s plans for Johnsen, and it’s why she must be stopped now.

Ultra-liberal activist Dawn Johnsen, currently a professor at Indiana University School of Law, is President Obama’s nominee to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). As the OLC chief, Johnsen would shape the legal positions of the Obama administration on every issue. OLC is the elite legal team for the federal government, giving legal advice on every important issue to the attorney general, other department heads in the government, and to the president himself. That’s why the head of OLC is called “the attorney general’s lawyer.”

The problem is that Johnsen is a radical. As the former legal director for the extremist abortion-rights group NARAL, Johnsen argued in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that denying a pregnant woman the right to demand unrestricted abortion is to subject her to slavery, which was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War.

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