Where have you gone Judge Posner? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you . . .

Remember this? It seems like only yesterday when we had a bloviating child running for office and a boot-licking governor looking for any way out of the governor's mansion he could find . . . Now that dynamic duo is properly addressed as "Mr. President" and "Mr. Vice President." Ahh, the times they are a-changin' (if only we could say it was for the better . . .).

Anyway, I was reminded of that shining moment in time yesterday when I read that Judge Richard Posner would be stepping down from the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. This is a true loss to American Jurisprudence and a loss for our great nation.

For those unfamiliar w/ Judge Posner, he is a highly respected judge who was about as famous as a "judge not on the supreme court" could be. For a long time, Justice Scalia would pick his clerks from Posner's alumni, and Judge Posner is widely considered to have written the book on the idea of contract law as economics.

Anyway, one of Judge Posner's more famous judicial smack downs was at the expense of former Governor Empty Suit Mike Pence. As quoted at Above the Law:

Governor Pence’s administration tried to cut off payments to Exodus Refugee Immigration, Inc., a nonprofit organization that assists refugees, some of them Syrian refugees. The Pence administration cited the possibility that some of these Syrian refugees might be terrorists. But as Judge Posner’s opinion points out:

“[The state’s] brief provides no evidence that Syrian terrorists are posing as refugees or that Syrian refugees have ever committed acts of terrorism in the United States. Indeed, as far as can be determined from public sources, no Syrian refugees have been arrested or prosecuted for terrorist acts or attempts in the United States.”

The policy “is discrimination on the basis of nationality,” Posner concluded in a section that compared Pence’s argument to the argument of a person claiming that it would not be racial discrimination to say that one ‘wants to forbid black people to settle in Indiana not because they’re black but because [the person]’s afraid of them.'”

I can hear the microphone drop from Indianapolis.