This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 25, 2016:
The week before he was to give his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last Thursday, Donald Trump phoned the president of Liberty University to tell him that the GOP’s platform called for repeal of the “Johnson Amendment.” Said Jerry Falwell, Jr.:
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, June 29, 2016:
The United States Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, in 2010. Top row (left to right): Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Bottom row (left to right): Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, and Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
One needn’t be reminded of how close the Supreme Court rulings were in McDonald and Heller (both decided 5-4) to appreciate just how tentative the court’s support is of the Second Amendment. Most however are likely to think that the current court’s makeup is essentially a standoff: 4 supporting and 4 opposed.
The ruling handed down on Monday in Voisine et al v. United States should disabuse any such perception. The court’s present position is closer to 6- or 7-1 opposed.
On the surface it’s an obscure case,
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 28, 2016:
Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
On Monday the Supreme Court handed down a ruling, 6-2, that people convicted of domestic abuse can lose their Second Amendment rights to keep and bear arms. The only justice who even seemed to care about that was Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented. Sonia Sotomayor also dissented, for different reasons.
Two Maine residents were convicted under state law — similar to laws in 33 other states — a decade ago of committing domestic violence. When it later turned out that they owned firearms, they were charged
This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, June 22, 2016:
The United States Supreme Court, the highest court in the United States, in 2010.
Supreme Court Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented inUtah v. Strieff, a decision that was announced by the court on Monday. On the surface the decision appeared to allow an unconstitutional expansion of police powers.
In a case dating back to 2006, a narcotics detective in Salt Lake City was watching a suspected drug house. He noticed a man leaving the house and the detective stopped him, demanding to know what he was doing in the house. In the process he demanded his identification, which he forwarded to his dispatcher to run through the police database. When he learned that the man had an outstanding warrant for a traffic violation, the detective, Douglas Fackrell, arrested Edward Strieff, searched him, and found various drug-related paraphernalia.
Strieff moved to suppress the damning evidence, claiming
This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, June 21, 2016:
Sonia Sotomayor, U.S. Supreme Court justice
On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s ruling in Utah v. Strieff that an illegal stop that uncovered evidence of criminal activity excluded that evidence from being used against the defendant.
There was no question that it was an illegal stop. In 2006, a police officer, after surveilling potential drug activity in a private home in Salt Lake City, stopped an individual exiting the house and asked him what he was doing there. He demanded his identification, and when the information was relayed to his police dispatcher, he learned that the defendant, Edward Strieff, had an outstanding warrant for a traffic violation.
That permitted the narcotics detective, Douglas Fackrell, to
This article was first published at the McAlvany Intelligence Advisors on Friday, June 27, 2014:
A bandwagon in the 2009 Great Circus Parade, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It didn’t take long for the decision in California that threw out union rules protecting teachers to galvanize similar efforts in New York. The Partnership for Educational Justice announced its plans to file a similar lawsuit against the same kind of rules extant in New York that so outraged Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu earlier this month when he ruled them unconstitutional.
The Partnership will sue next month to get rid of the same three rules that upset Treu:
This article was first published at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 26, 2014:
Classroom in the Afternoon
Following the widely hailed victory over California’s egregious teacher tenure rules in court earlier this month, another group is bringing suit in New York to challenge similar rules. Called the Partnership for Educational Justice, it has enlisted pro bono efforts from Jay Lefkowitz, a skilled and capable litigator with previous victories against teacher unions under his belt.
The lawsuit will challenge laws that Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu ruled to be unconstitutional in California, namely,
Constitution of the United States of America (Photo credit: The U.S. National Archives)
On Tuesday, April 22, the Supreme Court ruled that Michigan voters who overwhelmingly approved an amendment to their state’s constitution back in 2006 banning affirmative action – called by some as “affirmative discrimination” – were free to do so as there was no part of the federal Constitution that prohibited them from doing so. Its holding was clear:
A ban on affirmative action through a state constitutional amendment is permissible under the Constitution of the United States.
In simple terms the Supreme Court ruled that
This article first appeared at McAlvany Intelligence Advisor:
In gearing up for the 2014 Senate election in Tennessee, the Tennessee Alliance Tea Party & Liberty Groups announced in its newsletter last week that current Senator Lamar Alexander was ripe for extinction:
Obama (Photo credit: jurvetson)
I’m taking literary license here, writing this on Election Day, so I don’t know if the Annointed One will capture a second term. But this from Katie Pavlich is a good reminder, regardless of who is president. Pavlich, as you may remember, wrote a devastating expose, Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Shameless Cover-Up, about which I did a review.
Here, she posits his reelection, and reminds us of Obama’s promise:
During the second presidential debate of 2012, President Barack Obama said, “What I’m trying to do is get a broader conversation about how we reduce the violence generally. Part of it, is seeing if we can get an assault weapons ban reintroduced.”
Obama is strongly opposed to concealed carry, has supported gun owner licensing and gun registration and voted to ban semi-automatic rifles, handguns and ammunition during his time in the Illinois State Senate. He even voted for the criminal prosecution of those who use a firearm in self-defense. (my emphasis)
She reminds us of the potential for mischief during
In its relentless never-ending quest for more power to track and follow American citizens through their smartphones, the Department of Justice (DoJ) requested last week that Congress give them easier access to location data stored by cellphone service providers.
Jason Weinstein, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, argued that requiring a search warrant to gain such access would “cripple” his department’s efforts to investigate crime and criminals. Said Weinstein,
There is really no fairness and no justice when the law applies differently to different people depending on which courthouse you’re sitting in.
For that reason alone, we think Congress should clarify the legal standard.
In other words, because the laws protecting privacy vary somewhat depending upon where an individual citizen lives, Congress should come along and override them all and provide a federal, looser standard, all in the name of security.
The increasing sophistication of cellphone and communications technology in general allows service providers to track virtually every movement of an individual, day or night, at home or work, in a bar or on a golf course. Malte Spitz, a German politician and privacy advocate, obtained his own
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
Barack Obama (Photo credit: jamesomalley)
On March 30 of last year, President Obama dropped in to greet Sarah Brady, who was meeting with White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. Sarah is the wife of Jim Brady, the former White House Press Secretary under Reagan, who was shot but not killed in an assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981. The Bradys subsequently became strong supporters of gun control. According to Brady, the President brought up the issue of gun control “to fill us in that it was very much on his agenda. [The President said,] ‘I just want you to know that we are working on [additional limits on gun ownership]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar.'”
Thanks to the efforts of freedom advocates such as John Lott, Obama’s efforts to stay under the radar are now glistening in the sunlight. Lott reviewed an unsettling and lengthy list of Obama’s “processes,” starting with the President’s intention to ignore at least 20 parts of the 2012 omnibus spending bill that he signed into law last week. Using the controversial and likely unconstitutional “signing statements,” Obama said, “I have advised Congress that I will not construe these provisions as preventing me from fulfilling my constitutional responsibility…such measures as I shall judge necessary and expedient.” Buried in the 1,200-page bill was a restriction that bars health officials from using taxpayer funds to lobby for gun control. To rub it in, Obama iterated his position: “Our spending decisions shall not be treated as dependent on the approval of congressional committees.” In plain English, the President just told Congress to go jump—he was going to do what he wanted to do, regardless.
Lott noted that Obama’s Interior Department just issued new administrative rules that threatened the use of public lands for recreational shooting. The language of the new regulations reads in part:
Image via Wikipedia
When the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear oral arguments on a Fourth Amendment case decided by the Kentucky Supreme Court (Kentucky v. King), alarm bells went off. Under the Fourth Amendment, as readers are no doubt aware, “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
But what if police pick the wrong house, pound on the door loudly, announce that “This is the police!” and then, smelling pot, break down the door without a warrant and arrest the homeowner for violating local drug laws?
When congressional negotiators agreed to a final version of a transportation bill, it included an amendment to allow Amtrak passengers to take their guns with them—unloaded, locked, and only in their checked baggage.
While only a small skirmish in the long war against the right of citizens to “keep and bear arms” under the Second Amendment, the process by which this amendment was added is worth examining as a microcosm of “representative government” in action.
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