This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Sunday, November 13, 2016:
On Friday Donald Trump posted an expanded version of his position on the Second Amendment, including his position on concealed carry permits. Earlier his vision statement “Constitution and Second Amendment” said simply that he would “defend the rights of law-abiding gun owners [including the] national right to carry [which] should be legal in all 50 states.” His expanded vision statement added this:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 15, 2015:
Within days of learning that Kansas Governor Sam Brownback signed into law the state’s Second Amendment Protection Act (SAPA), then-Attorney General Eric holder sought to put the upstart governor and his insignificant state in their place: SAPA was null and void. Federal officials would continue to operate in Kansas in spite of the new law, and if one of them were arrested, there would be trouble!
Wrote Holder:
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, June 15, 2015:
U.S. District Court Judge Julie Robinson punted last week on the Brady Campaign’s lawsuit against Kansas’ Second Amendment Protection Act by declaring that the Brady Campaign lacked standing to bring the suit in the first place. She wrote:
At this time, Brady Campaign has not alleged an actual or imminent injury that is fairly traceable to the enforcement of the Act [that would therefore] be addressable by a favorable decision by this Court.
Brady Campaign, therefore, lacks … standing to mount a constitutional challenge to the [state’s] Second Amendment Protection Act.
This allowed Judge Robinson to avoid considering all the various “issues” raised by Brady: “The Court therefore need not reach the other issues raised in Defendants’ motion to dismiss.”
What “other issues”? For starters is the law’s declaration that “any act, treaty, order, rule or regulation by the government of the United States which violates the Second Amendment of the United States is null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas.”
The article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, December 24, 2014:
Thanks to the Humane Watch team, it is now known what the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) is doing with its members’ contributions: just one percent goes to support those pet shelters. Local humane societies, despite having a similar name, are not affiliated with HSUS at all, leaving it free to invest in its extreme animal rights agenda.
After reviewing its 2013 tax return, Humane Watch learned the following:
This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, December 23, 2014:
It didn’t take long for the unintended consequences of the passage of Proposition 2 in California in 2008 to show up in the marketplace as well as the courtroom.
Although the elimination of “basket cages” to house hens on egg farms in California was not to be fully implemented until January 1, 2015, the consequences were already evident in 2010. The California legislature passed an ordinance requiring that all eggs sold in California come from farms where “egg-laying hens … be confined only in ways that allow [them] to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely.”
This was part of the “animal rights” agenda already in place in the European Union that established the “Five Freedoms for Farm Animals” originally proposed by animal rights groups in the United Kingdom in 1965 and implemented by the EU in 1999.
As William Jasper noted in a recent article for The New American on this issue, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) now reflects the animal rights agenda and was a major force behind the push to pass California’s Proposition 2.
This article first appeared at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, October 8, 2014:
After losing an appeal before a three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals in Sissel v. US Department of Health and Human Services, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) filed a petition for a full rehearing — called “en banc” — on Monday. Sissel claims that the Origination Clause — Article 1, Section 7 of the U.S. Constitution — was violated at the very birth of ObamaCare (also called ACA, the Affordable Care Act), and since the Supreme Court ruled in NFIB v. Sibelius that the ObamaCare fines are not penalties but taxes, ObamaCare itself must be ruled unconstitutional.
Nearly 100 lawsuits challenging ObamaCare have been filed since it was passed back in March 2010, but only five now present serious threats to its legal existence, the Sissel case being the one with the most teeth. It was originally brought by
On Friday, March 22nd, a proposal to allow states to tax internet sales passed the Senate overwhelmingly, 75-24. 26 Republicans joined Democrats in passing the non-binding resolution. The proposal was designed to
President Obama, commenting on the judicial review being undertaken by the Supreme Court on his premier signature legislation, ObamaCare, challenged the court to uphold his law or be considered “activists” legislating from the bench. Said the President:
Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. I guess I would remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is the biggest problem on the bench is judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. For an unelected group of people to somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law is a good example of that, and I’m pretty sure this court will recognize that and not take that step.
This isn’t the first time the President has directed barbs at the Supreme Court. During his State of the Union address two years ago he looked down on the Justices seated below him and said their recent decision on Citizens United opened the “floodgates” to unlimited independent election spending.
This time the President’s use of the words “unprecedented,” “extraordinary” and “unelected” elicited howls of protest from observers such as Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who responded that “It would be nice living in a fantasy world where every law you like is constitutional and every Supreme Court decision you don’t like is ‘activist.’ ” Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) joined in, saying he was “disappointed” by the President’s warning:
It is not unprecedented at all for the Supreme Court to declare a law unconstitutional; they do that on a regular basis, so it’s not unprecedented at all.
What is unprecedented is…the president of the United States trying to intimidate the Supreme Court.
Even the Wall Street Journal excoriated the President over his remarks, chiding him that he “needs a remedial course in judicial review.” How could the President, allegedly a constitutional scholar and professor at the University of Chicago and president of the Harvard Law Review, not remember the pivotal case, Marbury v. Madison, decided 209 years ago and considered as perhaps the singular landmark case in the history of law? That case helped define the constitutional boundaries between the Executive and Judicial branches of the fledgling republic and was the first time in Western history that a court invalidated a law by declaring it to be unconstitutional. As noted by the Journal:
In Marbury in 1803, Chief Justice John Marshall laid down the doctrine of judicial review. In the 209 years since, the Supreme Court has invalidated part or all of countless laws on grounds that they violated the Constitution. All of those laws were passed by a “democratically elected” legislature of some kind, either Congress or in one of the states. And no doubt many of them were passed by “strong” majorities.
The decision specifically ruled that “Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 is unconstitutional to the extent it purports to enlarge the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court beyond that permitted by the Constitution. Congress cannot pass laws that are contrary to the Constitution, and it is the role of the Judicial system to interpret what the Constitution permits.” [Emphasis added.] In writing the unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshal said, “The government of the United States has been emphatically termed a government of laws and not of men…”
Judge Andrew Napolitano made much the same point in this Fox News commentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUF2tacTbfY
Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul also weighed in on the matter by reminding his readers that not only should the Supreme Court
The pressure of the continuing countdown to Monday, March 26, when the Supreme Court takes on the challenge to ObamaCare, has forced legal advisors to the White House to change their strategy in hopes of successfully rebuffing it and preserving the Obama administration’s key legislative victory signed into law in March, 2010.
It’s all about the mandate and whether it can be sustained by claiming justification for it under a generous reading of the Commerce Clause (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3) in the Constitution. Without that mandate, the administration claims that the rest of the law would necessarily fail due to its excessive costs. The Congressional Budget Office just reported that those costs would be double what the Obama administration touted in its cram-down of the law two years ago. And another CBO study said that, if implemented, millions of citizens—between 3 million and 20 million—would actually lose their present coverage, while public polls continue to show declining support for the whole idea of the federal government’s virtual takeover of the country’s health delivery system.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll taken in January showed that most of those polled think that ObamaCare, if implemented, will cost jobs, hurt the economy, and cost more than projected. Last week’s poll from the same source showed that two-thirds of those polled “say the U.S. Supreme Court should throw out either the individual mandate…or the law in its entirety.” According to the pollsters, “[T]he law has never earned majority support in ABC/Post polls—and this update…finds a strong sense its critics are dominating the debate. Seventy percent of Americans report hearing mainly negative things about the law…”
Another measure of the intensity surrounding the pending Supreme Court hearings (a record six hours are scheduled over three days next week) is the number of “amicus” or “friend of the court” briefs that have been submitted by parties who are interested in influencing the outcome of a lawsuit but who are not parties to it. Reuters reported that 136 briefs have been filed with the court (a stack about two feet high), a third more than
The rule states:
A bill or joint resolution may not be introduced unless the sponsor submitted…a statement citing as specifically as possible the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact the bill or joint resolution.
The rule was scoffed at by critics who said it would have no measurable impact on bills being presented for consideration by members of the House. Attorney Sandy Levinson, for example, observed sardonically, “No lawyer takes this seriously. As any lawyer would know, it is not hard to come up with a constitutional justification for
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Although the “Hide/Seek” exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution opened on October 30th, it didn’t start generating national outrage until CNS News published a lengthy and detailed review on Monday. In that review, astonishing and outrageous videos, paintings, photographs and montages by gay and lesbian artists were displayed, including “an ant-covered Jesus, male genitals, naked brothers kissing, men in chains, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, and a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show’s catalog as ‘homoerotic.’ ”
The historian and co-curator of the exhibit David Ward tried to explain away the reasons behind the exhibit:
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Law professor Robert Natelson wrote that because Congress has stretched its definition of “commerce” so far beyond that originally intended by the founders, “it is up to the people to recall the federal government to its constitutional limits.” Known as the “Commerce power,” Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution says that “the Congress shall have Power…to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states.”
And up until 1937, that power had been relatively tightly construed to mean what the Founders intended: to regulate trade—the buying and selling across state lines. By using false arguments, however, the Supreme Court during Roosevelt’s New Deal ruled in general that Congress was free to “control manufacturing, wages, agriculture, crime, mining, land use, firearm possession, and a [wide] range of other activities.”
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When Matthew Josephson wrote The Robber Barons in 1934, he tipped his hand as to his personal prejudice against the capitalists of the late 19th century:
Besides the young men who marched to [the Battle of] Bull Run, there were other young men of 1861 whose instinctive sense of history proved to be unerring. Loving not the paths of glory they slunk away quickly, bent upon business of their own. They were warlike enough and pitiless yet never risked their skin: they fought without military rules or codes of honor or any tactics or weapons familiar to men: they were the strange, new mercenary soldiers of economic life.
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The recent article in Politico.com by Charles Postel hinting at “dark forces” influencing the Tea Party is another in a recent and growing series of unsuccessful attacks on The John Birch Society. Rachel Maddow’s attacks on the JBS were exposed when she issued falsehoods and innuendos last December, and Karl Rove gave the back of his hand to the Society in a recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal.
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U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who has earned a “Freedom Index” rating of 90 percent in the current Congress to date, has introduced a bill in the House to repeal ObamaCare. In her press release, Bachmann reminded her constituents that “the government already owns or controls about one-third of U.S. economic activity through the takeover of General Motors, the bankruptcy reorganizations of Chrysler, the partial ownership of two of the country’s largest banks in Bank of America and Citigroup, and the seizure of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as AIG. Taken all together, [with ObamaCare] we’re looking at half of the American economy in the grip of the federal government.” Bachmann said that it “will do nothing to spur economic growth … [but] will serve only as an obstacle to actual recovery and smother the spirit of innovation and freedoms that made this country great.”
Her bill is simplicity itself:
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In responding to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) incredulous “Are you serious?” about the constitutionality of Obamacare, many have written persuasively that the healthcare law is in fact unconstitutional.
Michelle Morin in her blog reminded her readers that Article 1, Section 8 limits the federal government to specific and enumerated powers, with all other unenumerated powers being left to the states or to the people. Michael Boldin of the Tenth Amendment Center analyzed the purpose of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as limitations and restrictions on the power of the federal government. He concludes his analysis with these words:
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