To Senator Cruz

(and my readers): 

[UPDATE: I have let this "letter" sit and "age" for a while before I actually send it; and I've now modified it somewhat...well considerably.]

I've decided that I'm going to be much harder-hitting on Ted—something I suspected all along I would have to be—because the  s**thole courts are so badly corrupt (with corrupt and incompetent judges and more evidence accumulating daily), that any lawyer in Congress who hasn't focused on court corruption is either out-to-lunch or part of the corrupt mob.  There is no middle ground.  

I'll address Senator Cruz as "Ted" for a while, because he says many of the correct things that a genuine "typical" conservative would say.  I say "genuine" because I think Ted is basically sincere—as far as that goes for a lawyer-politician who, in addition, is deluded enough to run for prez, the complete no-win job and NOT the place where laws are written and the place that has full control of the lower courts through Article III—but when push comes to shove today's "typical" conservatives will wimp out.  The wimp out because "shove" means, for example, free markets that are much closer to true free markets than the manipulated markets we have.  Today's phony conservatives can't take anything close to the brutality of true free markets.  Given that Ted flew to Cabo to get away from some cold weather—while I made it through three hours of what the rescuers, who pulled me back from death's edge, called the most brutal cold and wind in 50 years in Santa Fe County—I have some perspective from which to criticize Ted.

In addition, because Ted's a lawyer— and therefore part of the anti-conservative lawyer-monopoly (all monopolies are inherently anti-free-market and therefore not conservative, because conservatism strives for minimal intervention, subject to constraints, by government)—Ted does need to get on the ball and clean up the courts; and cleanup is eminently doable.  That is, the courts need an impeacharama/removeapalooza to give the incompetent, lazy judges the boot.  Will this happen in the near future?  Not a chance, with the Senate 2/3 lawyers and the House 1/3.  Will Ted do what it takes?  I'll hold me breath for 4 nanoseconds, twice as long as I have held it for anyone else.

However, the first thing that needs to happen is that Congress (that means you, Ted) needs to modify 28 USC § 371, the judge "senior status" "fake retirement" statute.  If a regular person is tired of working—and has an option—he or she retires.  Almost universally, a pension or any retirement plan (or combined plans) pays less than a person's working salary.  Federal judges get the same salary pre and post-retirement. 

Senior status gives judges a loophole that allows them to escape the power of Article III, which power the wimpy Congress won't use anyway: the final words of the first paragraph of Article III ("Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office").  So even if the Congress, stuffed full of lawyers, had the stones to take on the corrupt judges, the easiest, most realistic path would be to reduce their retirement (continuing) salary-compensation—after a highly-objective evaluation of their corruption and incompetence in office.  

And I am very serious about "highly-objective;" a core feature of this Make America Geeky Again project is to force Congress and the courts into Boolean expressions for the law (with accompanying questionnaires, which are just jury instructions), which defines an objective legal standard.  (And BTW, the vaunted DC Circuit doesn't even know what a legal standard is, e.g. how to get driver license; this is how bad the courts are.)   But § 371 eviscerates objectivity, since judges are "continuing in office" as senior judges—but taking a considerably-reduced workload and still wreaking their havoc, when you really want the corrupt/incompetent judges to leave so as to stem their damage.

If judges actually retired, they would then be subject to "compensation reduction" to account for their depredations: and a reasonable formula would be quite simple.  Of course, the lawyer-judge mob would then pull the "scarce judicial resources" excuse, and say that "the judiciary needs senior status judges in order to handle the caseload."  Congress can streamline the efficiency of courts by at least 1000x, as I have described: the Boolean solution would cut the mumbo-jumbo and set a true objective standard.   But first, you need to take care of this § 371 garbage, Ted.  And if you don't, I could do some damage to you in New Hampshire and Iowa (maybe a lot of damage), which are likely on you agenda.  I could be an anti-candidate to you (i.e. "vote for me instead of Cruz, the phony conservative" even though I wouldn't take that no-win job if it were handed to me; I'm nuts for sure, but not that nuts).  I did very well in the New Hampshire primary, Ted, especially considering I spent only a pico-pittance.

Judges take "senior status" under §371 instead of actually retiring, which may make §371 un-Constitutional because it effectively nullifies, to repeat, the important, final words of the first paragraph of Article III ("Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office").   I'm not saying that § 371 is un-Constitutional, but it's analogous to Congress delegating so much power to the executive branch, which is labeled, by conservatives, as un-Constitutional.  There are many ramifications to analyze on the second question.  There's nothing to analyze on §371: that is a giveaway of critical Congressional power, and Congress must modify, if not repeal, it.   

Again, senior status allows federal judges to stay in office until they fall over.  Congress cannot hold senior judges accountable (or would have a real challenge) by going after their retirement salary, which (also to repeat) is the same as their regular salary.  Senior-status judges are assigned a reduced case load—about which they can give even less of a hoot than when they "worked" full time.  But they still have all the power (corruptly and/or incompetently exercised) as do regular judges.   I'm adding data to support this truth as I write this.

Judges keep the same salary in retirement (or in senior status) as they had while working full time, I repeat yet again.  So, senior status is particularly-great loophole for lazy, incompetent, corrupt judges.  They are "still in office" even though they are actually retired; and work only when they want to, which typically means damage people's lives.  Congress is prevented from exercising its Article III compensation-reduction power to account for the judges' bad behavior.  And Congress decides what is bad behavior:  "The great thing about President Donald Trump’s impeachment and trial was that it showed clearly — if you weren’t aware of this already — that Congress decides what is an impeachable offense. And the only thing that impeaches Congress is the lever behind the curtain in the voting booth. Lawyers and professors don’t decide. Courts don’t decide." (Duluth News Tribune, 7/22/20.)  

So long as you do nothing about the failure of the courts and court corruption, Ted, you are a failed senator.  I don't want you to continue to be a failure (but you'd certainly not be alone in this respect).  So I hope you have it in you to see the light here.  I've already registered with the FEC for Liz Warren's seat in 2024.  My strong preference would be for you to see the light about—and turn the spotlight on—the corrupt/incompetent judges, rather my having to run against you in 2024...or make my point in New Hampshire and Iowa, as noted, as anti-matter to your campaign.  Larry Hogan is already on my list, to the extent that he would stand any chance at all.  

The lawyer monopoly is the root cause of every major domestic problem we have, Ted.  It must end.  I believe I would cause a problem for you if I did run against you, Ted.   Maybe a big problem.  Remember, we high-school nerds in the chess club, math lab, math team, astronomy club and such were always solving problems.  Strategizing.

A Google-search (on ted cruz rule of law) shows a ton of results, not surprisingly.  You have rattled off "the rule of law" plenty of times.  My second goal here is to get you to admit, Ted, that the "rule of law" is a myth.  I'm quite sure you know it is.  Any lawyer who had been involved with the courts knows it.  I'll settle, initially, for your admission that the "rule of law" is difficult to find in the courts.  In fact I challenge Ted (and anyone else, especially lawyers) to give an actual, specific definition of the "rule of law."  Hint: the instant answer (the wrong answer) is "that everyone is treated equally under the law."  It's immediately wrong because it defines "the rule of law" by using the word, "law."  You need to define "law" properly before you can define the rule of law.  The answer is in my highly-disorganized blogs (here and here), if you want to look for it; and maybe it's already in this posting, as well.  This is a quiz, Ted.

This letter is addressed secondarily to Senator Grassley too, because the 8th Circuit (appeals court, covering Minnesota, N & S Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas) is one place that needs to be roto-rooted out on the long drain to the street, but there are reasons I don't want to put first on the list at this time (and it's not that Grassley is so old that he might have a coronary if he has too much to deal with).  This entire letter, however, is a test for you, Ted, even though I think you're very much on the mark the great majority of the time (despite the fact that you're a lawyer).  

I have been testing everyone in Congress because Congress has failed to do its Article III job of "regulating" the Supreme Court's review power ("appellate jurisdiction") over the lower courts; and has thus failed to do what is necessary.  It is necessary to take 100% control of the abominable, failed (lower) federal courts; to specify every detail of how they must work.  Under Art. III, Congress holds all the cards over the lower federal courts.  The reason Congress has failed, of course, is that it is stuffed with lawyers. 

Senator Cruz, I identified Minneapolis as an accident waiting to happen, six weeks before George Floyd's death.  I saw a particularly bad s**thole of a court system, and I wrote, on the public record to Minnesota's top court, about the "military regime" operating there.  On my mind were the bizarre killings in Minnesota, including that of Philando Castile (who should have kept his hands "up-on the wheel" but who should not have been shot, especially into a car with a child in a car seat) and then the Five Dallas Officers [who] Were Killed as Payback, Police Chief Says." 

Senator Cruz, the 1983 Feldman case set the wrecking ball in motion for our Bill of Rights, and that is not an overstatement.  The Feldman case is the root cause of  out-of-control state courts and the five dead officers in Dallas.  For the 40 years since Feldman in 1983, none of the "legal scholars" and "widely respected jurists" (on the Article III ship of polysci-major fools) has seen the obvious language goof on the second page of the Feldman case.  I've pasted my essay that I've submitted to various law reviews and is still (technically) under consideration at Texas-Austin, though I've fully expected to bat a thousand with rejections because the lawyer-monopoly-mob could never admit that 40 years have passed without their seeing the obvious.   The federal 1st Circuit court of appeals has Feldman precisely correct.  The 4th Circuit has a 2016 case that has it quite correct, but some North Carolina court thumb their noses at it. 

The federal court system—with regional circuits operating independently; and with lower courts ignoring higher courts; and with sloppy, incompetent writing on the Supreme Court (1983 Feldman and 2005 Exxon) trickling down—is an abomination.  No actual problem solver—someone who solves real-world problems and doesn't talk his way around them—would become a judge: his or her head would explode with all the inflated nonsense.  (Judge Posner's resignation was an example of someone who couldn't take it anymore.)

George Floyd's death and Minnesota's bizarre, deadly police antics are dominoes that fell in the chain of Feldman destruction.  Congress could have stopped the dominoes during the 40-year Feldman reign of destruction, but Congress has shirked its Article III responsibility to "regulate" the lower courts—the Sup Ct's review power ("appellate jurisdiction")—over the lower courts.  I repeat: Congress is stuffed with lawyers.  My project is Debugging the Constitution.  I may need to make a point for Texans, if you do not.

Congress must be a helicopter parent over its laws, and must police the courts.  There is no "independence of the judiciary" with respect to the lower federal courts and Supreme Court review of them.  Congress holds all the cards over the lower courts, under Article III.  The lower courts are where our Bill of Rights has been crippled; and where due process and property rights are on life support.

I wrote, on the record to the MN supreme court on 4/15/20, that Minneapolis courts were a "military regime" dictated-to by a simpleton judge named Kevin Burke.  The MN appeals court said Burke's dictatorship was just fine.  This Burke had been hanging around Minneapolis courts for 35 years before he retired, and he must have had something on everyone.  There are some really bizarre cases associated with that phony "judge."  

Six weeks after I wrote to the MN top court, Mr. Floyd was dead.  I knew on April 15 that Minneapolis was an accident waiting to happen because I had seen a similar situation where I was falsely arrested.  This all has relevance to you and Texas because those five good Dallas officers were sniped off just days after the Castille shooting in Ramsey County, outside of Minneapolis.  This is part of the huge multiplier effect of court corruption.  Bad cops see judges and lawyers getting away with financial murder, so they know that anything goes.  The retaliation against good cops is on the hands of lawyers, judges, and you in Congress, who do nothing about court corruption.

On 5/18/20, I tested the Minneapolis federal courts by filing there (legitimately with my knowing that Feldman would be dragged out), and I put the  appalling Hennepin County (Minneapolis) court record on the federal docket (2020 case 1199, Document 8-1).  Ted, lawyers and judges—polysci-JD's—have next to no familiarity with physics-math-EE nerds.  We have strategized and puzzled-out real problems from the time we took apart lawn mowers to make go-karts and mini-bikes.  Then there's chess club, math lab, math team, and much more.  I may move a chess piece onto the Texas "square," as part of this long-term puzzle against the most powerful—and separately the most corrupt—monopoly in the US: the lawyer mob.  

The Sup Ct came back 22 years after Feldman in Exxon 2005 and—while trying to pin the blame on a lower court—demonstrated that they knew they had blown it, though they didn't focus of their own language-error that is the crux of their mistake.  Even in Exxon, they reused the same bonehead language construct and made it worse at one point.  The extent of the Feldman damage is incalculable in terms of lives ruined and terminated, including in Texas.

As I mentioned, I've submitted this Feldman essay, below (Rooked-no-more by Rooker-Feldman), to a half-dozen law reviews.  Here are four sentences explaining the mistake in Feldman, but it's necessary for you to refer to the diagrams, below (and of course you will pay rapt attention to this letter; however, I will not let go of this, and I guarantee that you and the rest of Congress will confront me and the Feldman problem at some point):   Feldman (and the Rooker case) is confined by its facts to blocking someone — who has lost in a state's highest court (the final, last word from that highest court) — from taking a federal issue (including a Constitutional issue) to a federal trial court (see figures 1 & 2).  The sentence on page 464 of Feldman (beginning with "These provisions") omits the word "high" or "highest" or "supreme" or "top."  This omission erroneously expands the scope of the Feldman decision from the final, last word of a state's top court to the last word from any state court, including lower state courts, while an actual reading of Feldman makes the mistake clear.   A number of federal appeals courts have expanded Feldman on their own to exclude a federal trial court from reviewing any decision (final or non-final) from any state court even after the Exxon 2005 decision.

Those appeals-court judges must be removed, forced to actually retire, hounded-out, whatever non-violent way works.  I'm putting this proper onus on Congress, and I won't quit.  The Feldman decision is a "litmus test" for judges.  The 1st Circuit, as I've noted, has Feldman right.  The 8th Circuit is a disaster.  DC federal courts are now shaping up as a disaster, and the DC Circuit has already proven itself incompetent on RICO.  You need to make this an issue or I'll make it an issue for you.

Feldman negates the 14th Amendment and that crazy little thing called the Civil War.  The fact that so many judges don't see this right away shows why law schools struggle to get physics majors — who boost their metrics from the top — and wind up with polysci majors.  Just Google-search, Feynman it's wrong — and watch the first minute.  At every step in their homework, physics majors check that units agree on each side of an equation, and that critical points (plug-in zero, pi, infinity, typically) agree with physical reality.  If they disagree, "it's wrong."  The Civil War was a critical point in physical reality, donchaknow.  Its negation should have been a big clue that Feldman was wrong.  

I saw this immediately when I first read "Feldman' in a footnote in a 2014 ruling, but I had to do some experiments.  Physics-EE types have to do experiments; it's the way we have been from the time we pushed lawn mowers through thick, wet grass, and they stalled out.  We solve real-world, physical problems on pushing lawn mowers.  Lawyers push words around and avoid reality and contradictions.  Again, Congress is stuffed with lawyers.  This is the principal reason why the US is at great risk of failure.

Any judge who has expanded Feldman from its facts of the final judgment from a state top court (even before the 2005 Exxon case) has negated the 14th Amendment and the blood of the Civil War; the judge must be removed.  Wholesale incompetence due to abject stupidity and ignorance is "bad behavior" in a judge.  I'm going to hold off for a bit naming individual federal judges, for strategic reasons, but Senator Cruz, you need to take up this fight immediately.

Law review essays aren't expected to be written in the standard, useless law-review "form."  Form is emphasized by lawyers in order to obscure the lack of substance or, in the case of Feldman decision, obviously-wrong substance that has crippled our Bill of Rights and gutted due process and property rights.  I've also been baiting the law schools with my style, clearly.  

I've fully-expected turndowns from the law reviews.  I would have been shocked if my essay had been accepted because the Feldman catastrophe — when the public understands it — will destroy whatever credibility the lawyers and court system have; and that credibility should be next to none, anyway.  

I confess that I did have a tiny notion that Texas-Austin would bite, given that Texas has a good degree of orientation towards the Constitution.  They haven't responded yet, and I sent the following nudge a month or two ago: "My expectation that a law review would publish ironclad documentation that the lawyer monopoly is full of dolts who can't see a huge, obvious mistake over 40 years was zero.  I had a near infinitesimal amount of hope that Texas — as a tough, independent-minded state — might be different from other law reviews.  Oh well....."

So I've decided to send this to you, Senator Cruz, and your staff.  I have no expectations about anything in this project: to rid the country of the Dues Process lawyer monopoly and its court corruption.  Only that I'm not going to give up on it.  I call myself, "the crazy cripple pissing on himself in a corner of the internet," though my bladder and other functions are very healthy, despite the lacerated lumbar-sacral spinal nerve roots noted in my surgical reports.   So far, though, my track record of success in my project, by valid technical measures, has been...let's just say very good.  Right up there with my bladder function.  

One final thing before my Feldman essay follows, below.  Your personal trip to Cancun was a really bad decision (your family, not so much, but San Diego would have been better).  It reflects the wimpiness of the lawyer, royal class, who are accorded equal-protection-violating privileges in the courts; who don't have to face real-world problems...and find real solutions to them—solutions that work not just for the royal class:  "John..I am starting my forty eighth year in emergency services..I do not know if you are a spiritual person; but if there is any validation of guardian angels it would have to be your crash.  So many things were not in your favor.  The night of the 15th, was the darkest, coldest night (wind chill) I can remember in Santa Fe County...Your Angel had to have protected you during  that long off road Ambulance journey...All of this in brutal extreme cold weather. I remember talking with other firefighters while we were changing my tire and freezing our behinds off, how you were able to survive receiving a direct hit from those freezing winds for as long as you did. I think there is only one reason." Chief Martin Vigil.   

Engineering is about finding efficient solutions.  

Summary.  The 1983 Feldman case contains a glaring one-word omission (here, called a syntax error) that has crippled our Bill of Rights and has essentially destroyed due process and property rights.  Twenty-two years after this seed for catastrophe, the Supreme Court, in Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp., 544 US 280 (2005), showed (but did not admit) its mistake — nor did the opinion point to the omission, the root cause of its blunder — and it pinned the blame on other courts.  Further, the Supreme Court did not even recognize the syntax (omission) error itself and kept repeating it!

Rooked-no-more by Rooker-Feldman

Orwell’s 1984 sneaked in early with the 1983 Feldman1 case.  The gross and obvious error — which has flown under the radar and has simply been accepted as an edict from the Ministry of Truth, with cascading abominations for 40 years, crippling our Bill of Rights — of the Feldman principle is shown by the following diagrams.

DC’s highest court (higher of its two-level court system) is encapsulated in the diagram’s note: “DC Top = Appeal.” The scope of 28 USC §12571 defines the scope of

the case. The §1257 scope coincides with Feldman’s factual scope (final decision from DC’s highest court) and also coincides with Rooker’s factual scope (final decision from Indiana’s highest court).  No lower courts are included in the scope, and nothing but the top court’s final decision is included.

The word-inflation, pumping the creation of the imposing "Rooker-Feldman doctrine," has been a principal culprit in keeping the source of Feldman’s havoc suppressed and immune from simple syntax analysis and correction.

The obvious error was this: 

"These provisions [including 28 USC §1257] make the judgments of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, like the judgments of state [HIGH] courts, directly reviewable in this Court." (Feldman at 464 [bold-caps emphasis supplied to annotation; bold emphasis of the comparator “like the”].)

This statement was a comparison of equally-ranking entities: the top court in DC compared with the top court in each of the 50 states — collectively “state courts.”  

This set of “state courts” (a subset of all state courts) excluded lower state-courts (see Fig. 2) because, obviously, comparing the top court in DC with lower state courts is squarely contradicted by the (bold-emphasized) “like the” comparator.  The inclusion of all state courts would immediately create faulty comparisons of entities at different levels of court-hierarchy.  The missing qualifier, HIGH, is in unmistakable bold caps because its absence is the source of our crippled1 Bill of Rights.  

DC’s top court is not “like” the lower state courts; and neither are the states’ top courts like their lower courts or like the lower courts of other states.  Again, these are hierarchies where coordinate comparisons are drawn horizontally.  Feldman’s facts address the DC-entity’s top court, not a lower court.  DC’s top court is grouped, by §1257, with state top-courts.  This cannot be repeated often enough because it  has been missed for 40 years.  This horizontal correspondence among hierarchies is obvious.  Feldman’s syntactic error is obvious if one bother’s to read the case.  Feldman has been erroneously and mechanically cited to reject legitimate §1983 complaints (principally against state trial courts) filed in federal court.

Had the Feldman court meant to include lower state courts, it would have written something like: “the judgments of DC’s non-federal courts, like the judgments of state courts.”  But the intended comparison in Feldman extends the DC-court facts in Feldman — limited to the top court in DC — horizontally in accordance with court hierarchies, to only the top courts of the states.  

The scope of §1257, limited to the top courts of the non-federal system, further confirms that lower courts are excluded from the Feldman principle.  (This cannot be overemphasized because this wrong Feldman barrier has left litigant’s, whose rights have been trampled by state-court judges, out in the cold; with only a futile set of appeals after trial-court final judgment, through the state-court “review” system; and then a snowballs’ chance of review in the Supreme Court.)

Figure 2 shows the accurate Feldman principle, which excludes (red lines) the lower courts.  The Feldman omission of HIGH erroneously turned the vertical connections green and wrongly extended the scope of Feldman down the hierarchies to the lower courts of DC and the states.  When cast in the plural form — “state court judgments” — that form refers to judgments coming from the high courts of the states, as shown by the horizontal green line.  That plural does not include lower state-courts.  The omission of “high” erroneously expanded the Feldman bar down the hierarchies of all state courts.  This must be repeated until it is corrected. 

The scope of Feldman (confined to a final judgment from a state’s, or DC’s, highest court) is circumscribed in the case’s first sentence: 

"We must decide in this case what authority the United States District Court for the District of Columbia [federal trial court, Ft] and the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [federal appeals court, Fa] have to review decisions of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals [highest court in DC, included by §1257 the set of the top courts of the states, St].”  (Feldman at 463.)

The variables Ft, Fa, St are shown in Fig. 1.  

These are the facts limiting Feldman’s scope to a state’s top court.  Similarly, Rooker v. Fidelity Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413 (1923) concerned a final decision of the Indiana Supreme Court.  The cases do not include — and therefore do not address — a litigant jumping from a lower state-court to federal court, so as to make a federal-question challenge to a state judge’s ruling.  That is a legitimate jump.  

Figure 1 has question marks for the jump from a state appellate court (and from a state top court prior to final judgment) to federal district court.  Feldman does not preclude that jump.  However, the most common jump (and what is probably uniformly and erroneously rejected without an actual analysis of Feldman) is from the state trial court.  So the jumps from higher up the state hierarchy are left as an open question here, simply to focus on the depredations of our civil rights wrought by state trial judges — especially so, with forty years of the erroneous Feldman bar having given state judges a false license to wreak whatever civil-rights havoc they choose on litigants.  (In short, Feldman does not bar jumping from a state appellate court or highest court; but that should not shift focus here from the most common Feldman error: blocking the jump from a state trial court)

The bolded annotations (in the block quote of Feldman 463, above) reduce and clarify the verbose, obscured definitions down to the immediately-identifiable courts, as illustrated in the diagram.1  Regardless of one’s view of the clarity or turbidity of the court-definitions, they were the setup for the coup de grâce to the Constitution on page 464 of Feldman, which has wrongly disabled federal courts from vindicating a litigant’s rights infringed by state-court judges; and has allowed state courts to run increasingly out-of-control over the decades since Feldman.

This is the crux of the Feldman error.  The bolded-caps emphasize the omission of the word “high” (or highest or supreme or top).  This omission was the syntactic culprit.  This omission has been unthinkingly repeated for 40 years with only one explicit exception I can find:

The Rooker-Feldman doctrine interprets 28 U. S. C. § 1257 as ordinarily barring direct review in the lower federal courts of a decision reached by the HIGHEST state court, for such authority is vested solely in this Court (citations).

(Asarco Inc. v. Kadish, 490 US 605, 622 (1989) [bold caps emphasis supplied]) 

Other cases2  (see fn/6) implicitly confirm the erroneousness of the Feldman omission.  

In Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Industries Corp., 544 US 280 (2005), the Supreme Court showed (but did not admit) its mistake, and pinned the blame on: "...the Third Circuit [that] misperceived the narrow ground occupied by Rooker-Feldman." There was no misperception of Feldman’s omission of the word, “high.”  The “misperception” was in not reading the case, and just mechanically reciting the erroneous phrase.  As shown above, the Feldman court’s glaring omission of “high” expanded the narrow scope, properly confined to state high courts, consonant with the case-facts and §1257.  

Feldman’s omission of “high” weaponized that sentence to give false license to federal courts to lighten their dockets; to dismiss a litigant’s legitimate filing of a §1983 claim against a state trial judge; and to negate the Fourteenth Amendment.  

And there is additional confirmation of Feldman’s havoc of negating the Fourteenth Amendment (in particular, the blood spilled during the Civil War): "The prohibitions of the Fourteenth Amendment are ... restrictions of State power [on the] ... executive, legislative, or judicial" (ex parte Virginia, 100 US 339, 346 (1880); and with Mitchum v. Foster, 407 US 225, 240 (1972) adding emphatic italics to “or judicial”).  In ex parte Virginia, a state judge was jailed by a federal judge for failing to enforce a federal law.  The state judge’s habeas corpus petition was denied — a rather definitive statement that a litigant can indeed utilize §1983 against a state judge’s acts that raise a federal question.  Feldman and its cited cases skip over the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment and address only Congressional acts of the 18th century.  It’s no surprise, then, that Feldman has led to state courts flouting litigants’ civil rights.

Conclusion

A bedrock legal principle is that any legal principle inferred from a case cannot have applicability beyond the facts necessary to resolve the case.  The straightforward analysis above should begin (and hope springs eternal) the silencing of the recitation chorus of those — federal judges in particular, if such silence is possible even in the face of incontrovertible evidence — who cannot explain the Feldman principle in their own words…because they do not understand it and because it’s wrong.  

The correct statement of the Feldman principle (encapsulated in the Boolean expression shown in Fig. 1) is: if a litigant has not received final judgment from the highest court in a state,3 then he or she may file a §1983 claim in federal district court against any and all state judges up the chain, seeking to reverse their alleged Constitutional (always capitalized) and/or federal violations.  This principle operated in ex parte Virginia, 100 US 339 (1880), as quoted above.  No case has reversed it, and no case can reverse it because it articulated the essence of the Fourteenth Amendment: to enforce he Bill of Rights on state governments – executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

An alternative image of the true, correct, and accurate Feldman prohibition is to a litigant’s jumping to federal court after final judgment from a state’s highest court — not from just any state court.  The Feldman court’s syntactic error was its erroneous  phrasing (intoned mantra-like by subsequent courts with no exploration or understanding of its erroneous origin) that included the assumption that everyone would understand that “the judgments of state courts” (or “state court judgments”) applied only to the set of high courts of the states.  

Why did the Feldman court make this assumption (a syntactic error that it should not have made)?  Because it was clear that the facts of Feldman and the scope of §1257 constrain any holding from Feldman to state high-courts only.  Of course it is true that Feldman cannot apply outside of top courts.  But making such an assumption is hardly the way to write law, which is supposed to draw an unmistakable bright line.   This is why Congress must include diagrams and Boolean expressions with legislation, as foreign as that will seem to lawyers and the other non-engineers in Congress.

FN/1  A word omission is an issue of syntax (the arrangement of words for meaning) in the sense that, viewed mathematically, an arrangement words is a permutation of them.  If the fully-general set of permutations is viewed as choosing among the N words, taken N at a time; plus N taken N-1 at a time, etc. — then this general set of arrangements includes arrangements with one or more omitted words.

FN/2  District of Columbia Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983)

FN/3  “Final judgments or decrees rendered by the  highest court of a State in which a decision could be had… ;” “the term “highest court of a State” includes the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.”  Section 1257(b) established the equivalence (procedurally) between DC’s highest court and the highest court in any state.  In this essay, these top courts are referred to interchangeably and without distinction: simply as “a state’s highest (or high or top) court.”

FN/4  Feldman crippled our Bill of Rights because, at least in theory, a federal judge is not subject to the bonded cronyism of state judges (or at least not as much).  The same principle is embodied in diversity jurisdiction, so suspicion of state-judge cronyism is not some “conspiracy theory;” it is enshrined in Article III, Section 2, Clause 1, the clause setting forth diversity jurisdiction.

FN/5  It is easy to accept that “bar-admission matters” (first sentence of Feldman) should not confine the scope of the case, but the lack of objective criteria for picking what facts to ignore and what facts to use as constraints on a case’s scope is a significant “objectivity” problem for using case opinions to define “law.”  But this overarching problem is not on the table here.

FN/6  The following cases (with “this Court” — the Supreme Court — language) implicitly make clear that the Supreme Court is reviewing the judgment of a state’s top court (because the Supreme Court cannot review a lower state-court judgment): “over state-court judgments, which Congress has reserved to this Court” (Exxon at 292); “Review of such judgments may be had only in this Court” (Lance v. Dennis, 546 US 459, 463 (2006); “vests authority to review a state court's judgment solely in this Court” (Skinner v. Switzer, 562 US 521, 1297 (2011)); “federal appellate review of judgments rendered by state courts can only occur in this Court” (Pennzoil Co. v. Texaco Inc., 481 US 1, 24 (1987) Marshall J concurring); “appellate jurisdiction over state-court judgments, which Congress has reserved to this Court” (Verizon Md. Inc. v. Public Serv. Comm'n of Md., 535 US 635, 644 (2002), fn/4).  A state trial-court decision cannot be “appealed to this [the Supreme] Court;” so the “appealed to this Court” language is inapplicable to state trial (and appellate) courts. Yet federal district courts have been rejecting legitimate §1983 cases for decades and continue to do so, allowing state judges to get away with anything —telegraphing to bad cops (who watch for such clues) that they can get away with anything, including a knee on the neck or whatever strikes their fancy.

 FN/7  The textual “logic” behind the requirement that a litigant must appeal a final decision from a state’s top court to the Supreme Court — given §1257’s permissive “may” — has no basis, despite the Supreme Court’s conclusion otherwise; but that issue is not considered here and is inconsequential when compared with Feldman’s huge syntactical error on page 464.  This is the “probable” remaining flaw noted in Fig. 1.