James Robertson: Yet Another Federal Judge Gone Wild!
When I got the FNC Alert below in my e-mail box at 4:44 p.m. yesterday, I thought it was a joke. But sure enough, at Fox News at 5 p.m., it was the headline at the top of the page, not yet linked to any stories. I checked the calendar, and it wasn't April Fool's Day.
"Breaking News >> Federal Judge Rules American Paper Money is Unfair to Blind People"
U.S. District Judge James Robertson said the Treasury Department has violated the law, and he ordered the government to come up with ways for the blind to tell bills apart.
Now the first thing that occurred to me was that this will make it easier to counterfeit money. And sure enough, Treasury made the same argument.
Government attorneys argued that forcing the Treasury Department to change the size of the bills or add texture would make it harder to prevent counterfeiting. Robertson was not swayed.
The good judge gave Treasury ten days to begin fixing the problem. How kind of him. I think Treasury would spend the time better, filing its appeal.
"Of the more than 180 countries that issue paper currency, only the United States prints bills that are identical in size and color in all their denominations," Robertson wrote. "More than 100 of the other issuers vary their bills in size according to denomination, and every other issuer includes at least some features that help the visually impaired."
(English translation: "The visually impaired" is pc-speak for the blind.)
So, America is unique. I like that. As for Judge Robertson's implied claim that every nation on Earth has deliberately changed its currency, in order to aid the blind, if you believe that, I have a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge. His claim sounds like a sophistic hook the plaintiffs and the American Council of the Blind came up with, for friendly judges like Robertson to hang their hats on.
Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, I can see changing their bills to accommodate the blind, not to mention in order to appease unappeaseable Moslems who see images of Mohammed everywhere, and sundry currency cultists. But over 80 percent of the world's 200 or so nations would laugh at activists who demanded they change their currency for the blind ... and then shoot them, and laugh some more. We're talking about impoverished countries that are run by dictators, where life is nasty, solitary, brutish, and short ... but we're supposed to believe that the butcher-in-charge hops to, and changes the currency, on the orders of activists and their clients. (We're also talking about countries whose respective currencies are safe from counterfeiters, because they are worthless!)
Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Benin, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Burundi, The Dominican Republic, Djibouti, Dominica, East Timor, Haiti, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, The Central African Republic, Congo I, Congo II, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Fiji, Gabon, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, India, The Ivory Coast, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Liberia, Libya, Lithuania, The Maldives, Moldovo, Morocco, North Korea, Kosovo, Lesotho, Laos, Lebanon, Nigeria, Niger, Namibia, Mali, Chad, San Marino, Somalia, Somaliland, The Sudan, Swaziland, Suriname, Togo, Tanzania, Syria, Tajikistan, Russia, Latvia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Rwanda, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Peru, Red China, Palau (Palau?), Mauritania, Mauritius, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and last but not least, good old Zimbabwe.
How many of the 100 above-named nations -- half of those in the world today -- do you see enduring the expense of changing their currency to accommodate the blind?
This is the world we live in, not the world of Judge Robertson's humanitarian fantasies.
What I think is going on here, is that the plaintiffs and their judge took the odd-sized foreign bills, and assumed that they had been changed to accommodate handicap activists. But if a conscious decision was ever involved, it was for the sake of people who couldn't read -- note that the bills are often in different colors, as well as sizes.
The majority of the world's nations are in the third world, where the majority of the populace is typically illiterate. Citizens of those lands who can see more often than not learn to distinguish currency by its size and color. Thus, the ultimate beneficiaries of Judge Robertson's edict, if it is permitted to stand, would not be blind Americans, but illegal immigrants.
"The fact that each of these features is currently used in other currencies suggests that, at least on the face of things, such accommodations are reasonable," he wrote.
He said the government was violating the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in government programs. The opinion came after a four-year legal fight.
"It's a landmark decision. I believe it will benefit millions of people," said Jeffrey A. Lovitky, attorney for plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
The good judge's claim that the federal government is in violation of the Rehabilitation Act is nonsense on stilts. Money is not a "government program." If James Robertson gets away with redefining money as a government program, oh, the mischief that will ensue.
Additionally, his argument is specious, because foreign currencies were not made the way they are to accommodate the blind (not that that would have any standing in American courts), and changing U.S. currency in such a way, would incur costs that are unreasonable.
For every person the turning upside down of American currency will benefit (I'm not counting the illegal immigrants), it will wreak havoc for the hundred others who will have to pay the cost of printing up trillions of new bills, and then foot the bill for additional billions of dollars in costs due to increased counterfeiting. Not to mention the millions of vending machines whose owners will then be sued by activists and attacked by the media as being guilty of "discrimination." (Will Judge Robertson then claim, 'More than 100 of the other nations mandate that all vending machines take bills varied in size, according to denomination, and every other nation mandates that machines include at least some features that help the visually impaired'? I wouldn't put it past him.) And the owners will buy expensive new machines, whose costs will have to be borne by the 99 percent of customers that will not benefit from them.
The Treasury has spent years and a fortune developing bills that are more difficult to counterfeit, something that Judge James Robertson evidently could care less about.
And it took the distinguished jurist four years to come up with such nonsense! He is truly one of "the best and the brightest." I would like to know what, in Judge Robertson's eyes, would constitute an "unreasonable accommodation." You can bet the duplex it wouldn't involve a demand by one of his favorite minority groups.
In case you think I'm overreacting, some of my readers have engaged in speculations that make my response sound downright benevolent. Colin McCauley asks, "What about this decision making way for the 'Amero'?"
I can just hear someone counter, "But what about justice?!" Yeah, what about it? This isn’t about justice, unless we redefine "justice" so that it means that certain selected groups can turn the world upside for everyone else, at everyone else's expense, while everyone else is disenfranchised.
Mooks like James Robertson talk about "justice," but have contempt for the law, and for any notion of justice worthy of the name. What they have is loyalty to certain groups, enmity towards the rest of us, and a hubristic self-righteousness. Robertson and his ilk in the judiciary, the bar, and among activists and politicians are in a competition to see who can be more "creative" with the law, and thereby incur the greatest possible costs to the American taxpayer, and cause the greatest possible damage to American society.
