Yogi Bear would hate this! Picnic baskets are just chumming the waters. I bet this was an in-tents conversation!

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Florida man stands his ground:

A Dunedin man will not face charges after he fired 30 rounds from his AR-15 rifle at his pool cleaner whom he mistook for an intruder earlier this month, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced on Monday. . . .

Bradley Hocevar, 57, yelled at the supposed intruder to go away. Gualtieri said footage from the pool deck shows Polek went to get a flashlight from his truck while Bradley Hocevar yelled, making it likely Polek didn’t hear him.

When Polek returned to the pool deck, he used the flashlight to fill out paperwork, then turned toward the house to place the paperwork by the door. When Bradley Hocevar saw the flashlight moving toward the house, he opened fire.

The audio from the 911 call reveals Bradley Hocevar fired two rounds through the sliding glass door. Polek ran away after the first two rounds, but the Hocevars could not see because the blinds were closed and they were taking cover behind their couch.

Wouldn’t that sliding glass door shatter? My experience with a BB gun in Ann Arbor approximately 52 years ago would say “yes.”

The 911 dispatcher on the phone and Jana Hocevar repeatedly pleaded with Bradley Hocevar to put down the rifle and stop firing. But 47 seconds after the first two rounds, Bradley Hocevar fired a few more rounds. Finally, about 25 seconds later, Bradley Hocevar unloaded his AR-15′s magazine — meaning he fired 30 rounds in about 90 seconds, Gualtieri said.

Polek sustained minor injuries from shrapnel and flying glass, but was not hit directly by the bullets.

Gualtieri said Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law protects Bradley Hocevar’s right to fire on someone he believed posed a threat to him and his wife.

I just don’t have the energy to look up whether Florida’s Randomly Discharge Your Automatic Weapon if You Feel Frightened law includes some sort of reasonableness requirement.

The post The armed citizen: A continuing series appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Qu’est-ce que c’est?

In a week when parts of the state are getting triple-digit temperatures and weather officials urge Texans to stay cool and hydrated, Gov. Greg Abbott gave final approval to a law that will eliminate local rules mandating water breaks for construction workers.

House Bill 2127 was passed by the Texas Legislature during this year’s regular legislative session. Abbott signed it Tuesday. It will go into effect on Sept. 1.

Supporters of the law have said it will eliminate a patchwork of local ordinances across the state that bog down businesses. The law’s scope is broad but ordinances that establish minimum breaks in the workplace are one of the explicit targets. The law will nullify ordinances enacted by Austin in 2010 and Dallas in 2015 that established 10-minute breaks every four hours so that construction workers can drink water and protect themselves from the sun. It also prevents other cities from passing such rules in the future. San Antonio has been considering a similar ordinance.

Texas is the state where the most workers die from high temperatures, government data shows. At least 42 workers died in Texas between 2011 and 2021 from environmental heat exposure, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers’ unions claim this data doesn’t fully reflect the magnitude of the problem because heat-related deaths are often recorded under a different primary cause of injury.

Having passed laws forcing women to carry pregnancies to term, pro-life [extreme sic] Republicans are now pivoting to, er, “let them eat heatstroke.”

Speaking of Abbott, he’s lucky DeSantis became a media darling among reporters who got tired of hearing about COVID, because among absolutely brutal competition there may not be a more monstrous person currently serving as a governor in 2023:

Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have expanded vote-by-mail access for people with disabilities — specifically people who are blind or paralyzed and need assistance marking their ballot.

Advocates say Abbott’s veto of House Bill 3159 is a blow for voters with disabilities who have for years called for the Legislature to grant them a way to mark their mail-in ballots without having to rely on anyone else.

Co-authored by state Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, and state Rep. John H. Bucy III, D-Austin, the bill would have allowed voters who need help casting a ballot, such as people who are visually impaired or are paralyzed, to do so “privately and securely” by requesting an electronic ballot and using a computer to mark their choices. The bill still would have required those voters to print out, sign and return their ballots by mail.

I won’t try to top this punchline:

Chief Ironyside https://t.co/BoWE4aKgdD

— Jason Isbell (@JasonIsbell) June 22, 2023

The post Checking in on the American pro-life movement appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

The latest takeover of the administrative state led by Sam Alito was so lacking in any basis in the relevant statute that he lost Brett Kavanaugh, but kept ReaSOnAbLE, mODERATe REAcTionAry John Roberts, so he got his five votes:

On Thursday, the Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the nation’s wetlands by rewriting a statute the court does not like to mean something it does not mean. The court’s decision Sackett v. EPA is one of the court’s most egregious betrayals of textualism in memory. Put simply: The Clean Water Act protects wetlands that are “adjacent” to larger bodies of water. Five justices, however, do not think the federal government should be able to stop landowners from destroying wetlands on their property. To close this gap between what the majority wants and what the statute says, the majority crossed through the word “adjacent” and replaced it with a new test that’s designed to give landowners maximum latitude to fill in, build upon, or otherwise obliterate some of the most valuable ecosystems on earth.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the court is remarkably brazen about this approach—so brazen that Justice Brett Kavanaugh (of all people!) authored a sharp opinion accusing him of failing to “stick to the text.” Alito began with a long history of the Supreme Court’s struggles to identify the “outer boundaries” of the Clean Water Act, as if to explain why the time had come for the court to give up wrestling with the text and just impose whatever standard it prefers. The law expressly protects “waters of the United States” (like rivers and lakes) as well as “wetlands adjacent” to these waters. Congress added the wetlands provision in 1977 to codify the EPA’s definition of “adjacent,” which also happens to be the actual definition: “bordering, contiguous, or neighboring.” Under that interpretation—the one Congress adopted—wetlands that neighbor a larger body of water remain protected, even if they aren’t directly connected.

Why did Congress make that choice? Because wetlands provide immense environmental benefits: They filter and purify water draining into nearby streams, rivers, and lakes. They slow down runoff into these larger bodies. And they serve as vital flood control. In other words, the Clean Water Act has to protect “adjacent” wetlands to serve its overarching goal of safeguarding the broader “waters of the United States” from pollution.

Too bad, Alito wrote: We don’t like the definition that Congress used. It could lead to “crushing” fines for landowners and interfere with “mundane” activities like “moving dirt.” It interferes with “traditional state authority.” And it could give the EPA “truly staggering” regulatory authority. Five justices on the Supreme Court think all of that is very bad. So they declared that, instead of applying the statute’s words, the court would impose a different standard: Only wetlands with “a continuous surface connection” to larger bodies of water merit protection under the Clean Water Act.

This definition—which, it just can’t be stressed enough, appears nowhere in the law—is a crushing defeat for wetlands and their protectors. These ecosystems, as Kavanaugh pointed out, are frequently separated from larger bodies of water by “man-made dikes or barriers” as well as “natural river berms, beach dunes, or the like.” Such wetlands “play an important role in protecting neighboring and downstream waters,” which is why Congress included them in the statute. But under the majority’s new test, they are stripped of federal protection.

As Kagan explains in her concurrence-in-judgment-only, the majority’s move in gutting the very clear statutory authority given to the EPA by Congress is to create an ad hoc “exceedingly clear” standard that in its essence is designed to prevent Congress from making any policy choice a majority of the Supreme Court doesn’t like:

Republican complaints about federal judges “legislating from the bench” were, as with virtually all conservatiove discourse in the US, pure projection. And bad faith statutory interpretation like this and Brnovich is a particularly pernicious and anti-democratic problem, because it leaves Congress with essentially no outs. It’s very, very, very bad.

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