I don’t usually check my mom’s Facebook page, because all she usually posts are articles I’ve written (and I know what they say) and cute videos of my adorable nephew Leo (which I get directly from my brother, and by the way, did you know he can now speak English, Italian, and Haitian creole? Enough to express his serious trilingual interest in trucks, doggies, and Barney, anyway). But a random mom-missing impulse prompted me to check it a few minutes ago, and look what I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t! 

As a contributing editor to City Journal, I would like to declare myself officially irritated to the point of irascibility by the fact that the rest of the journalistic world has now discovered what my CJ colleague Heather Mac Donald has been reporting for years – that poverty doesn’t cause crime – and isn’t giving Heather any credit for the discovery.  In a stupid article with the wonderfully stupid headline “Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts,” the stupid New York Times “reported” last week,

“The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.”

In a recent editorial, the New York Times takes it upon itself to fulminate against the conservative excesses of Justices Roberts and Alito for their apparent willingness to cut back the ability of the federal courts to enforce federal rights against state officials.  The current controversy comes out of an internal dispute between two branches of the Virginia state government over the question of whether one set of Virginia officials have respected the federal rights of individuals who suffer from developmental disabilities or mental illnesses.  One Virginia agency refused to turn over papers to another to see whether these federal rights were violated.  The upshot was that the Virginia Agency for Protection & Advocacy ended up suing the Virginia Commissioner for Behavioral Health and Developmental Services in federal court to get the documents. The case is Virginia Office of Protection and Advocacy v. Stewart.

The question was therefore whether an intramural dispute between two state agencies could end up in federal court under, as it were, the heading of Virginia v. Virginia.  The issue involved thus invoked the storied Eleventh Amendment. As drafted, the Eleventh Amendment provides: