Wrong Bumbling Idiocy

Wrong Bumbling Idiocy
Your Complaining About The Wrong Bumbling Idiocy

As of May 31, 2022 due to a California Appellate Court overruling a lower court’s legal decision, Four species of bumblebees – the Crotch’s bumblebee, the Franklin’s bumblebee, the Suckley’s cuckoo bumblebee and the Western bumblebee – are now eligible to officially become endangered species under the California Endangered Species Act (CESA). This means that the California Fish and Game Commission will now have a certain amount jurisdiction over those 4 species of bumblebee and their protection. Assuming, of course, that this decision isn’t overturned by a higher court.

Bombus crotchiiBombus franklini

The Poor Beleaguered Fish In Question

So yeah, for now and possibly for some time, bees are legally fish. And yeah, a lot of people are seriously lampooning the CA Appellate Court’s obvious and rank stupidity is declaring them so. But… all the complaints, insults, and jokes are misplaced. The bumbling idiocy happened way back in 1970.

The California Endangered Species Act was designed to protect “native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant.” But, in 1970 when the law was actually written the definition of “fish” was written as, “a wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.” While it is patently obvious to anyone who can read for comprehension that “invertebrate” was meant to be limited to marine and aquatic ones, e.g., corals, sponges, and sea urchins, that’s not what was written into law.

Although the term fish is colloquially and commonly understood to refer to aquatic species, the term of art employed by the Legislature in the definition of fish in section 45 is not so limited.

Associate Justice Ronald B. Robie

The important part of the portion of the ruling shown above is Term of Art. And in the legal field those terms have specific, explicit meanings, not implied ones. Purposivism will, far more often than not, fall before Textualism in the Courts.

In this case, the statutory definition of fish states it means a “wild fish, mollusk, crustacean, invertebrate, amphibian, or part, spawn, or ovum of any of those animals.” The statute may have an implicit limitation to marine and aquatic creatures, but the legislators didn’t state that explicitly, meaning no such limitation actually exists.

Frankly, if judicial error happened, it was by the lower court that ruled that bees aren’t per the term of art in play fish. So, if anyone should be lampooned, it should be the Legislature, who wrote a piss-poor law using hasty language and without thought of potential use case scenarios.

Nor, I choose to add, is this the first time the fishiness of a species has come into legal debate. One need only turn to the 1818 Maurice v. Judd case in NYC, where the court ruled that, statutorily speaking, whales were fish.

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The Elephant In The Room

Elephant In The RoomThe “Trump Administration” announced Thursday, November 16, 2017 that it has lifted an Obama-era ban on importing sport-hunted trophies of elephants from Zimbabwe and Zambia. As to be expected, the Liberals and Progressives, along with each and every opportunistic Democrat looking towards the 2018 elections went into acute paroxysms of their madness, ranting that President Trump did this because his sons like to “sport hunt.”

But the elephant in the room (pun intended) is the big pile of facts that contradict the Leftists’ narrative – not that their sort would ever allow facts to trump (again, pun intended) narrative and subjective experience.

President Trump was not involved with- or likely cognizant of the US Fish & Wildlife Service’s International Affairs department’s decision to end the Obama Era ban on the importation of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia, just as Obama was not involved with their 2015 decision to enact that ban in the first place. The ban put in place in 2015 was was done by the USFWS because they determined that Zimbabwe could not adequately by both US and CITES standards prove it could implement laws to protect elephants. In 2018 the USFWS determined that these two countries had now reached compliance. In both cases these decisions were made by career employees of the USFWS without any direction from the White House.

The ban and it’s lifting were also both specifically targeted at Zimbabwe and Zambia. Importing elephant trophies from legal sport hunts in South Africa and Namibia were and are still allowed. Conversely, such imports from Tanzania were also banned in 2014 and remain so to this day. At no time relevant to this situation has the US government ever had a total moratorium on sport-hunted elephant trophies, nor does it now have a totally open policy towards it.

Also note that this isn’t a wholesale slaughter of the elephants. Zimbabwe has an estimated 82,300 elephants and Zambia has 21,700. As, under CITES export quotas Zimbabwe can only allow 500 trophy hunt exports per year and Zambia only 80, we’re speaking of 0.6% and 0.3% of their respective herds per annum. How many the US government allows imported – 2 animals per hunter per year – is separate from- and irrelevant to these figures.

Yep. That’s one, big elephant in the room. One that’s going to be hard to ignore, though the anti-Trump crowd will manage to do so.

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