Internet Scofflaw

Remember when the Department of Homeland Security “categorically denied” that they delayed the arrest of a member of Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) staff until after the election? Official documents now confirm that their denial was a lie:

Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of “significant interest” from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Sen. Robert Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress.

The Homeland Security Department said last month, when The Associated Press first disclosed the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, that AP’s report was “categorically false.”

Under a Republican administration, this would be a scandal of the first order. (If anything like this were ever to happen under a Republican administration.)

(Via Instapundit.)

This is interesting:

A lawsuit recently filed in the United States Court of Claims may shed further light on the corruption of the Obama administration’s “green energy” programs. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of XP Vehicles, Inc. and Limnia, Inc., companies that competed for Department of Energy loans under a Congressionally-authorized program. The owners of XP eventually realized that there was no real competition, and that the whole Department of Energy program was a scam intended to funnel money to Obama and Democratic Party campaign contributors and political allies. They allege in addition that DOE misappropriated proprietary technology that they submitted in connection with their loan applications, and gave that technology to Obama administration cronies.

If the allegations are accurate (and I suspect they are), they are a terrific example of the wastefulness of the government’s efforts to build a green economy. In a free, competitive economy, price signals guide the allocation of resources, achieving what economists call “resource allocative efficiency”, in which the price of every commodity reflects its marginal cost of production. Thus, individual purchasing decisions reflect the actual resource costs of the product.

The government’s efforts (especially under Obama) to alter the allocation of resources to a “greener” set of choices, disrupts that efficient outcome. The entire effort is wasteful, and as this lawsuit seems likely to illustrate, sometimes egregiously so.

The irony is that all this waste is carried out under the banner of “conservation”. That’s right, waste is called conservation. George Orwell would be proud.

With all the talk on the left of monetizing the debt with a platinum coin, apparently no one bothered to look at the law to see if it were actually legal. It’s not. It turns out that the platinum coin provision only allows for two categories of coin (bullion coins and proof coins), neither of which can be used for seigniorage. (Via Volokh.)

The Treasury Department has confirmed this in its belated statement on the matter:

Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit.

(Via Hot Air.)

If Paul Krugman’s Democrats want to monetize the debt, they’re going to have to get the Federal Reserve to play ball.

It’s official: DC’s gun laws apply to some and not others:

Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, . . . OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory . . . or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast. OAG has made this determination, despite the clarity of the violation of this important law. . .

Amazingly, they actually come out and admit that the reason he escaped prosecution is because he was agitating for gun control:

Influencing our judgment in this case, among other things, is our recognition that the intent of the temporary possession and short display of the magazine was to promote the First Amendment purpose of informing an ongoing public debate about firearms policy in the United States, especially while this subject was foremost in the minds of the public following the previously mentioned events in Connecticut and the President’s speech to the nation about them.

ASIDE: Okay, they only actually admit that it was because he was discussing gun control — not advocating it — but can anyone suggest with a straight face that an NRA spokesman who did the same thing could have escaped prosecution?

Remember that malicious intent is not required for magazine possession to be illegal in DC. The very thing is illegal, and that’s precisely how they intend it. Even clearly legal instances are prosecuted in DC. The only known way to escape prosecution is if you’re using on television to promote gun control.

And so the rule of law in America takes another blow.

At this point, I think we can assume that David Gregory and his staff at NBC will not be charged for illegally possessing a “high-capacity” magazine in the District of Columbia. But while the DC prosecutors exercise their discretion to let a high-profile media figure off scot-free, they prosecute the magazine-ban vigorously against ordinary people.

In fact, while Gregory faces no charges despite knowingly breaking the law, they prosecute ordinary people who didn’t even break the law at all. For example:

Mr. Brinkley was booked on two counts of “high capacity” magazine possession (these are ordinary magazines nearly everywhere else in the country) and one count of possessing an unregistered gun.

Despite the evidence Mr. Brinkley had been legally transporting the gun, his attorney Richard Gardiner said the D.C. Office of the Attorney General “wouldn’t drop it.” This is the same office now showing apparent reluctance to charge Mr. Gregory.

Mr. Brinkley refused to take a plea bargain and admit guilt, so the matter went to trial Dec. 4. The judge sided with Mr. Brinkley, saying he had met the burden of proof that he was legally transporting. Mr. Brinkley was found not guilty on all firearms-related charges, including for the “high-capacity” magazines, and he was left with a $50 traffic ticket.

When the law is applied differently to the famous and the ordinary, there is no law.

I’m sure most of my readers already know that NBC’s David Gregory is in hot water for possessing (and displaying on Meet the Press) a 30-round “high-capacity” AR-15 magazine, which is illegal in the District of Columbia. Despite the media’s incredulity over the notion that he might have to answer for this, I fail to see any reason why he and his colleagues should not be prosecuted.

They cannot claim to have made an honest mistake. They asked the DC police for permission and it was denied. The crux of the their defense, as offered by their media defenders, seems to be that it was okay for him to possess that magazine, because he didn’t plan to do anything wrong with it. For example, here’s Greta Van Susteren (via DC Caller):

I will bet my right arm David Gregory is not going to go out and commit some crime with that magazine…or that he intended to flaunt the law. . .

He certainly did flaunt the law; he displayed an illegal magazine on national television! You can’t flaunt any more than that. But never mind that, consider the other point, that David Gregory is not going to commit some crime with the magazine.

This matters not in the slightest. Under DC’s draconian gun laws, possession itself is a crime, regardless of what you plan to do with the thing. And that law is ruthlessly prosecuted, even if the transgression is not only harmless but entirely accidental. The law is prosecuted even when the possession is protected under federal law! It’s complete nonsense to suggest that his benign intent has anything whatsoever to do with it.

And lest we forget, this is how the gun-control advocates (like David Gregory) want it. They don’t want criminal intent to be part of the standard, because nearly everyone looking to own a gun or a magazine in DC has only benign intent. A gun ban that applies only to criminals is no gun ban at all. (Instead, they’ve settled on one that — in practice — applies only to the law-abiding.)

The only reason Gregory and company might not be prosecuted is because they are big-shot journalists. The question to be settled here is whether David Gregory and NBC are above the law.

I’m guessing we will find that the answer is yes. And when we do, Americans’ respect for the law will take yet another hit.

The ATF has no explanation for how an ATF agent’s gun ended up at the scene of a mass shooting in Mexico. To be clear, this isn’t one of the thousands of guns the ATF trafficked to Mexican drug cartels, this was a gun personally purchased by ATF agent George Gillett. (The purchase also apparently was illegal, as Gillett used a false address.)

At this point I’d like to mock the ATF by suggesting they lose their authority over firearms and instead be placed in charge of some other enforcement they might be competent at, but I can’t think of what that might be. Maybe pet licensing?

(Previous post.)

Despite the fact that it never happens, this seems to keep happening:

A Massachusetts state representative has agreed to plead guilty to civil rights violations and resign from office for his role in submitting false absentee ballot applications and casting invalid ballots in 2009 and 2010, the Justice Department said in a news release Thursday. . . The news release said “one or more government officials” helped Smith intercept the ballots before they were delivered to the voters, but it did not name the officials.

(Via Instapundit.)

How do you get away with pleading guilty without naming your co-conspirators?

POSTSCRIPT: In other recent instances of voter fraud, you have this, this and this.

I’ve often remarked in regard to the Plame-Novak-Armitage affair that it was awfully hard to take the outrage over the leaking of an intelligence officer’s name, coming from the very same people who like to leak (and then print) intelligence’s officers’ names.

Now that we have the Obama administration doing the exact same thing, we’ll see how much outrage we hear from those same quarters.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, here’s another case, from the office of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).

(Previous post.)

A federal judge has ruled that freedom of religion does not extend to the manner in which we conduct business:

Heaton said that while churches and other religious organizations have been granted constitutional protection from the birth-control provisions, “Hobby Lobby and Mardel are not religious organizations.”

“Plaintiffs have not cited, and the court has not found, any case concluding that secular, for-profit corporations such as Hobby Lobby and Mardel have a constitutional right to the free exercise of religion,” the ruling said.

This ruling, which unfortunately does not seem to be out of the mainstream, basically says that freedom of religion applies only to church, and most of our lives are outside its protection.

If it’s not too early for some perspective regarding the horrible shootings in Newtown, John Fund has a very important column on the facts about mass killings. The three main points are these:

1. Despite the impression one gets from the wall-to-wall media coverage, mass killings in the U.S. are not on the rise. In fact, the high point was 1929.
2. The majority of mass shooters are mentally ill (as was the case in Newtown).
3. Nearly all mass shootings take place in gun-free zones. There has been only one exception since 1950.

If we are to contemplate legislative action in the wake of this atrocity, we need to keep these facts firmly in mind.

UPDATE: More on the non-rise in mass shootings.

UPDATE (July 2015): Updated the link.

The Associated Press explains how justice works during a Democratic administration to protect Democratic candidates:

Sen. Robert Menendez employed as an unpaid intern in his Senate office an illegal immigrant who was a registered sex offender, now under arrest by immigration authorities, The Associated Press has learned. The Homeland Security Department instructed federal agents not to arrest him until after Election Day, a U.S. official involved in the case told the AP.

(Emphasis mine.) (Via Instapundit.)

Across the country, states are deciding whether to create exchanges under Obamacare. If they don’t, the federal government will create them. Still it matters a lot whether the exchanges are created by the state or the federal government.

According to the Obamacare statute, the federal government can offer credits and impose taxes and penalties only in states that create exchanges. If those provisions are enforced, Obamacare will be substantially crippled in non-participating states.

Of course, the Obama administration is arguing that those provisions of their own law not be enforced, and the IRS is going ahead under the assumption they will not. Will they get away with it?

UPDATE: I should mention, lest anyone take too much comfort from this, that the Obamacare provisions that will ruin American health care (i.e., community rating and guaranteed issue) are not in jeopardy, as far as I know.

Nakoula Nakoula, the filmmaker who was arrested for making a video critical of Mohammed that the Obama administration falsely blamed for the Benghazi attack, is still in jail. After over a month in fail, he finally gets his day in court, just after the election.

RELATED: Hillary Clinton told the father of Charles Woods (the heroic SEAL who was killed by terrorists in Benghazi when the Obama administration refused to lift a finger to help him) that she would see to it that the filmmaker (!) was punished.

(Previous post.)

Regarding the remarkable fact that judicial nominations have not come up in any debate thus far (and probably will not come up in the foreign policy debate), Glenn Reynolds makes the trenchant observation:

Given the media’s sympathies, you can pretty much assume that if a topic hasn’t come up in the debates, it’s because they think talking about it is bad for Obama.

Indeed, I think there are few areas where the gap between elite and mainstream opinion is wider than the debate between originalism and the “living constitution”.

John Yoo says in a new paper that Obama’s decision (without the consent of Congress) not to enforce immigration law is unconstitutional. I think he’s right.

An Inspector General investigation has found that in 92% of cases, union books are violation of federal disclosure laws. However, the Department of Labor’s audit process, which is supposed to uncover such violations, found only a tiny fraction (16%).

Harry Reid violates Senate rules by using official resources for campaign purposes. But I wouldn’t hold your breath expecting there to be any consequences.

(Via Jim Treacher.)

In 2010, the Mexican drug cartel slaughtered 14 children and wounded 12 more using weapons supplied by the US Government.

(Previous post.)

At the White House’s request, Lockheed Martin has agreed to violate the law and not send out layoff notices. The White House doesn’t want the legally-required notices to go out just days before the election, and has promised to pay any fines that Lockheed incurs from taxpayer money.

Somehow they are getting away with this. America isn’t the place that I thought it was.

If a Democratic president need not follow any law that inconveniences him, that’s all the more reason to elect only Republicans.

UPDATE: Megan McArdle comments. Bottom line:

It seems wrong to put the taxpayers on the hook for what is essentially an Obama campaign expense.

(Previous post.)

The Obama administration doesn’t want layoff notices to go out before the election, whatever the law might say:

The Labor Department issued guidance in July saying it would be “inappropriate” for contractors to issue notices of potential layoffs tied to sequestration cuts. But a few contractors, most notably Lockheed Martin, said they still were considering whether to issue the notices — which would be sent out just days before the November election.

But the Friday guidance from the Office of Management and Budget raised the stakes in the dispute, telling contractors that they would be compensated for legal costs if layoffs occur due to contract cancellations under sequestration — but only if the contractors follow the Labor guidance. . .

Senate Republicans, who accused the White House of trying to hide job losses after the first guidance, said Friday that the new OMB statement “puts politics ahead of American workers.”

“The Obama Administration is cynically trying to skirt the WARN Act to keep the American people in the dark about this looming national security and fiscal crisis . . . The president should insist that companies act in accordance with the clearly stated law and move forward with the layoff notices.”

The president follow the law? Not this one.

UPDATE: The WARN Act, explained. (Via Instapundit.)

Oh, this is just great:

Just one day after an Islamic activist attempted to cover over private property in spray paint (and a woman who got in her way), the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York has announced they will amend their rules to prohibit the types of advertisements that offended her.

The New York Times reports the MTA will prohibit any advertisements that it “reasonably foresees would imminently incite or provoke violence or other immediate breach of the peace.” Those “viewpoint” ads that do not meet this criteria will be allowed, so long as a disclaimer is included saying the MTA does not endorse them. . .

Self-proclaimed “proud-liberal Muslim” activist Mona Eltahawy served as the impetus of the ruling after she spray painted a pro-Israel advertisement placed in the New York City subway. . .

If I’m reading this right, the policy literally bans any advertisement that someone might use violence to protest. Do these people think at all about the incentives they are setting? Is the cause of free speech completely orphaned?

POSTSCRIPT: The activist who successfully got the ads banned by spray painting over them proclaimed when she was arrested, “this is what happens in America when you express yourself.” That is called chutzpah.

UPDATE: Fixed the title to be more precise.

Nakoula Nakoula, the producer of the anti-Islam film that was used as a pretext for the Benghazi consulate attack, has been arrested and held without bond. The judge brushed aside his lawyer’s concern that Nakoula would not be safe in the LA jail.

Please let’s not have any nonsense about how this is about a probation violation. If he had produced a film attacking Mormonism, no one would have cared. (Heck, he might have gotten a contract from the Obama super-PAC.) In fact, it’s only because of a federal investigation — that never, ever should have taken place — into the film that we even know who this guy is.

(Previous post.)

The Wall Street Journal reports (as quoted by Red State):

The National Labor Relations Board’s internal watchdog has found the agency’s top lawyer violated its ethics standards by participating in a case involving a company in which he had a financial stake.

The NLRB inspector general, in a report dated Thursday, said an investigation found that Acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon made decisions about how to proceed in a case involving Wal-Mart Stores Inc., in which Mr. Solomon owned more than $15,000 in stock. The case focused on whether the retail company’s social-media policy violated federal labor law.

I’m sure Solomon will receive the same harsh discipline as Kathleen Sebelius.

The Daily Caller uncovers emails that show that the Justice Department regularly colluded with the far-left, Soros outfit Media Matters to fight news stories on the department’s myriad misconduct.

Sometimes the collaboration took the form of rapid response to Media Matters inquiries (conservatives never get anything out of Holder’s DOJ without a Freedom of Information request); sometimes the DOJ actually called Media Matters up.

The Office of Special Counsel has found that Kathleen Sebelius violated the law by using an official event to campaign for Barack Obama:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius violated the Hatch Act in February when she called for re-electing President Obama during an official department appearance, the Office of Special Counsel said Wednesday. The finding could possibly cost Sebelius her job.

Cost Sebelius her job? Good one. The White House quickly announced that the administration holds itself  “to the highest ethical standards” and therefore she will not be disciplined. (I might be making up the word “therefore”.)

The White House apparently thinks that retroactively reclassifying the event from official to political is plenty. That might make sense if they could also retroactively send the government employees who attended the event back to work.

POSTSCRIPT: Sebelius sure is a piece of work.

The career staff of the Department of Justice Voting Section recommended that South Carolina’s voter ID law be cleared, but they were overruled by political appointees.

Furthermore, the DOJ has been stalling the ensuing litigation by filing absurd motions, like objecting to South Carolina submitting its brief in 12-point font instead of 13-point font. I am not making this up. This is presumably an effort to run out the clock until after the election, since the South Carolina law cannot go into effect without the approval of either the DOJ or a court.

If you’re surprised that stimulus money and Obamacare money were illegally used to lobby for liberal policies, you’re not nearly cynical enough.

That’s the ruling of federal judge Reggie Walton:

Citing a “series of emails” between Obama political appointees and career Justice lawyers, Walton writes:

The documents reveal that political appointees within DOJ were conferring about the status and resolution of the New Black Panther Party case in the days preceding the DOJ’s dismissal of claims in that case, which would appear to contradict Assistant Attorney General Perez’s testimony that political leadership was not involved in that decision.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

As I have frequently remarked here, the biggest mystery in the Gunwalker scandal is exactly what the operation was intended to accomplish. It’s the fact that ATF never tried to track any of the guns they were trafficking into Mexico (which rules out any obvious legitimate purpose) that turns Gunwalker from merely a horrible screw-up and cover-up into something more sinister.

Thus, it’s worthwhile to note that the ATF actually did try to track some of the guns. Out of thousands of guns illegally trafficked to Mexican drug cartels, the ATF tracked two of them.

(Previous post.)

A letter to the municipal governments of Boston, Chicago, New York City, Washington, and San Francisco:

I was surprised to learn that your city may have a policy barring persons with certain religious views from engaging in commerce in your city. Naturally, I have no wish to invest in your community and only then find that I am excluded from doing business there because of my religion.

Therefore, I ask that you supply me with a list of all current religious tests that must be satisfied to do business in your city. Please also explain what sorts of business are covered by your policy: is the religious test only for restaurants, or does it apply to other businesses as well? Furthermore, please clarify what percentage of a business must be owned by members of prohibited religions for the exclusion from commerce to apply.

I would also like to know how to go about obtaining an exemption from your city’s religious test, as is apparently possible in Boston.

Finally, can you refer me to any attorneys who specialize in navigating your city’s religious restrictions?

Thank you for your prompt attention.

Can the president unilaterally amend US law, simply by refusing to enforce it? The Constitution gives him no such power. The Constitution (in article 1, section 7) gives the president the power to veto a bill before it becomes law, but once a bill becomes law, the Constitution (in article 2, section 3) gives the president the duty to see it “faithfully executed”.

President Obama knows that his decision not to enforce immigration law is contrary to the law. He explained in March 2011 that:

There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as president.

He reiterated that in July 2011:

THE PRESIDENT: Now, I swore an oath to uphold the laws on the books, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know very well the real pain and heartbreak that deportations cause. . .

Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own.  (Applause.)  And believe me, right now dealing with Congress —

AUDIENCE:  Yes, you can!  Yes, you can!  Yes, you can!  Yes, you can!  Yes, you can!

THE PRESIDENT:  Believe me — believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting.  (Laughter.)  I promise you. Not just on immigration reform.  (Laughter.)  But that’s not how — that’s not how our system works.

AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Change it!

THE PRESIDENT:  That’s not how our democracy functions.  That’s not how our Constitution is written.

But political considerations have since intervened and he has now decided to do it anyway. Obama’s decision to gut President Clinton’s welfare reform law is similar, excepting only that in this case we lack sound bites of him admitting that his action is improper.

As my readers know, immigration is not an issue about which I am passionate. As a matter of policy, I’m not sure that I disagree with Obama’s action. But I’m truly concerned about the precedent this sets. If this policy stands — and I think it probably will — we will have fundamentally altered the American system of government, giving the president what amounts to a retroactive veto over any law that must be implemented by the executive branch.

Democrats, if they could look past the considerations of the next election cycle, ought to be just as concerned about this. As John Yoo points out in his devastating critique of Obama’s move:

President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

In fact, in the long-run this precedent will probably favor Republicans more than Democrats, since the president is much more often a Republican than a Democrat. But it means a terrible blow against the rule of law.

The Daily Caller reports:

Grassley and Issa said that in early 2011, right around the time Grassley first made public the whistleblowers’ allegations about Fast and Furious, Scot Thomasson – then the chief of the ATF’s Public Affairs Division – said, according to an eyewitness account: “We need to get whatever dirt we can on these guys [the whistleblowers] and take them down.”

Thomasson also allegedly said that: “All these whistleblowers have axes to grind. ATF needs to f—k these guys.”

According to Grassley and Issa, when Thomasson was asked about whistleblowers’ allegations that guns were allowed to walk, Thomasson said he “didn’t know and didn’t care.”

Grassley and Issa have given Horowitz until July 6 to answer whether Thomasson was “admonished” for those threats against whistleblowers, how he got his job in the first place and how the DOJ and ATF are going to make sure he doesn’t retaliate against whistleblowers moving forward.

A lot of effort has been devoted to establishing when the Justice Department became aware of Gunwalker. I suppose that’s appropriate since the DOJ has repeatedly lied about that, but it’s also largely beside the point. The DOJ has approved the operation after-the-fact by covering it up, promoting the perpetrators, and punishing whistleblowers.

(Previous post.)

The Daily Caller reports:

A single internal Department of Justice email could be the smoking-gun document in the Operation Fast and Furious scandal — if it turns out to contain what congressional investigators have said it does.

The document would establish that wiretap application documents show senior DOJ officials knew about and approved the gunwalking tactic in Fast and Furious. This is the opposite of what Attorney General Eric Holder and House oversight committee ranking Democratic member Rep. Elijah Cummings have claimed.

It appears that email would also prove senior DOJ officials, likely including Holder himself, knew in March 2011 that a Feb. 4, 2011 letter from the DOJ to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley falsely denied guns were permitted to “walk” into Mexico. The DOJ allowed that false letter to stand for nine more months, only withdrawing it in December 2011.

Also, Holder admitted in Congressional testimony that the document could not be shielded by executive privilege.

(Previous post.)

The conclusion of today’s dissent nails it:

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

The short version of today’s ruling: Obamacare is unconstitutional as written, but as a courtesy, the Chief Justice has rewritten it into a different law that does the same thing and passes muster.

So now it comes down to this:

UPDATE: Here’s the executive director of the DNC’s message to 72% of Americans:

it’s constitutional. Bitches.

As part of the Obama administration’s furious spin of the president’s decision to withhold the documents regarding the Fast and Furious cover-up, Jay Carney dusted off the bogus claim that Gunwalker began during the Bush administration. Pressed on it, he admitted that the operations didn’t, but maintained that the “tactic” did:

As I’ve pointed out here several times before, there is no comparison between Operation Wide Receiver (which Carney is alluding to) and Fast and Furious. There are lots of important differences, but the only one you need to remember is this: The aim of Wide Receiver was to track gun trafficking, in order to stop it. The aim of Fast and Furious was to supply guns to Mexican drug cartels, for reasons the administration has never seen fit to reveal.

But don’t take my word for it, here’s Eric Holder admitting there’s no comparison between the two:

(Previous post.) (Via Moe Lane.)

With the Gunwalker scandal getting prominent media attention for the first time, many people will be hearing about modern America’s worst political scandal for the first time. In light of that, I thought it might be useful to list the key facts:

1. No effort whatsoever was made to track the guns that the ATF trafficked to Mexican drug cartels. In fact, agents who wanted to track the guns were ordered not to.
2. The Justice Department has never explained what Fast and Furious was intended to accomplish. This has led many to assume that it served no legitimate purpose.
3. No one was ever fired or disciplined for Gunwalker. In fact, most of the principals were promoted. On the other hand, agents who blew the whistle on the operation were punished.
4. Justice Department officials have made numerous material false statements to Congressional investigators, some of them under oath.
5. White House officials were informed about gunwalking. The Justice Department in Washington not only was informed, but signed off on it, in writing, in wiretap applications submitted to federal courts. Eric Holder was personally notified in at least five memos; he says he never read them.
6. Neither the operation nor the “tactic” behind it began during the Bush administration. Operation Wide Receiver was completely different: It was conducted with the approval of the Mexican government, agents attempted to track the the weapons, and the operation was terminated when some weapons got away.
7. In addition to refusing to produce documents under subpoena, the White House has also refused to allow officials to testify before Congress.
8. Guns trafficked in the operation have been linked to over 200 murders, including a US Border Patrol agent.

There’s much more, but but those are the key points.

(Previous post.)

President Obama has decided to exert executive privilege over all the documents under subpoena by the House committee investigating the Gunwalker scandal. Eric Holder justifies his withholding of the documents thus:

They were not generated in the course of the conduct of Fast and Furious. Instead, they were created after the investigative tactics at issue in that operation had terminated and in the course of the Department’s deliberative process concerning how to respond to congressional and related media inquiries into that operation.

I believe Holder’s description is accurate. More to the point, the documents under subpoena are not about the original Gunwalker malfeasance, but about the Justice Department’s cover-up. Rep. Issa wants to know who decided to lie to Congress in the DOJ’s February 2011 letter denying that any gunwalking had taken place.

UPDATE: John Hinderaker looks at the case law on executive privilege and finds that Obama’s claim is unlikely to hold up.

By placing these documents under executive privilege, President Obama is essentially saying that lying to Congress is an executive prerogative.

Immigration is not an issue I’m passionate about. To some degree my sympathies are with the open-borders folks. But I’m appalled by his recent announcement that he is going to disregard immigration law and implement his own policy instead. John Yoo gives the new policy a look that is all the more damning for his caution, but I think IBD sums it up well:

The chief executive who swore to faithfully execute the nation’s laws picks those he’ll ignore and makes up others through regulation and executive order. He sees no need for a Congress or Constitution.

The president is not king; he doesn’t get to make the rules by himself. This president (despite having sort of taught constitutional law) doesn’t seem to understand that.

The Washington Times reports:

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday said new documents show that senior Justice Department officials in Washington, despite their previous denials, were given “specific information about reckless tactics” in the botched “Fast and Furious” gunrunning investigation. . .

“The wiretap applications show that immense detail about questionable investigative tactics was available to the senior officials who reviewed and authorized them. The close involvement of these officials
— much greater than previously known —
is shocking,” Mr. Issa wrote.

The wiretap applications are under seal and can’t be made the public, so we have to rely on Issa’s account for now. However, the applications have been forwarded to the minority party, so if he’s misrepresenting them, we will hear about it almost immediately.

But if his description is accurate, it proves that the DOJ was fully informed of Gunwalker and must have acknowledged that awareness to a judge. Andrew McCarthy explains that the wiretap applications must include:

a full and complete statement as to whether or not other investigative procedures have been tried and failed or why they reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried or to be too dangerous.

That, obviously, requires a more-than-superficial analysis of those procedures; gunwalking in this case.

(Previous post.)

The Hill reports:

Two Department of Justice prosecutors have been suspended without pay and a Senate Democrat has scheduled a committee hearing following the release Thursday of a DOJ report that detailed the government’s misconduct in its botched case against the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). . . The report found the attorneys “acted in reckless disregard” for their legal obligations by not disclosing exculpatory evidence to Stevens’s defense lawyers.

Remember, their misconduct changed the outcome of the election, giving Democrats the deciding vote for their stimulus boondoggles and for health care nationalization.

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

The execrable “People’s Rights Amendment” proposed by so-called liberals such as Nancy Pelosi would not literally repeal the First Amendment rights to speech, religion, and the press. It would only repeal those rights for those people who organize their activities as a corporation — which is to say, nearly every church, newspaper, and activist group.

Eugene Volokh takes a look at what would happen to our press if the amendment were to be enacted:

First, any media organization that wants to be free would thus have to give up the benefits of the corporate form, and will have to organized as a partnership. This will make it much harder for those media organizations to raise operating capital, dealing with changes in ownership as partners die or leave, and the like.

Second, those media organizations that choose to organize as a corporation would have huge practical competitive benefits over organizations that choose to organize as partnerships. As a result, the normal competitive process will . . . give corporate-owned large media organizations the overwhelming majority of the market share.

In the end there would be a tiny free press, and nearly the entire media would be corporate. Thus, the government would be free to censor essentially the entire media.

And no one should doubt that it would, given the opportunity. Citizens United, the case the spawned this horrible idea, was specifically a case in which the government wanted to censor a movie for its political content. In arguing the case, the Obama administration specifically claimed also to have the power to ban other media, such as books and pamphlets.

More generally, what’s going on here is an effort to take the next big step toward totalitarianism. Our constitution limits the power of the federal government in two ways: First, there are positive restraints: the doctrine of enumerated powers says the government has only those powers that are explicitly granted to it. Second, there are negative restraints: some powers that are explicitly denied to it.

The framers of the Constitution originally thought that negative restraints were unnecessary given its system of positive restraints. For example, the Constitution didn’t grant the government the power to censor the press, so it couldn’t. However, they ultimately decided to include a set of negative restraints in the Bill of Rights as well.

It’s good that they did, because the positive restraints are now largely obsolete. Since Wickard v. Filburn, the power to regulate interstate commerce has been nearly all-inclusive. If the Supreme Court upholds Obamacare, there will remain no meaningful positive limitation on the government’s power. At the same time, other safeguards such as the separation of powers are breaking down. Even free elections (a flimsy defense for minority rights in any case) are threatened by the Democrats’ insistence on making fraud as easy as possible.

The negative restraints — which the framers considered nearly redundant — are virtually all we have left. So it’s not too surprising to see the totalitarians like Nancy Pelosi beginning to work on undermining them.

Another Durham County district attorney, Durham’s first elected DA since the infamous Mike Nifong, has been removed from office for ethical misconduct.

Once could be just happenstance. I mean, what county doesn’t elect a flagrantly unethical race-baiting DA on occasion? But two in a row? Durham has a problem.

NBC gave President Obama five minutes of free air time to deliver a campaign speech on Jimmy Fallon’s show. Ben Shapiro says that appearance violated the law, and it looks to me like he has it right. There’s no way this is a “bona fide news interview”.

The execrable HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admits that she did not seek any legal advice before issuing her mandate requiring everyone, Catholics included, to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients as part of their health care.

If she had, her lawyer might have told her that the mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Who wants to hear that sort of thing?

(Via the Corner.)

A group of Democrats led by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and including Nancy Pelosi want to amend the Bill of Rights as a reaction against the Citizens United decision.

Their proposed “People’s Rights Amendment” would strip constitutional protections from any group that is organized as a corporation. As Eugene Volokh explains, that includes most churches, newspapers, and nonprofits, so the proposed amendment would eviscerate the freedoms of religion, speech, and the press.

These liberals’ basic problem here is a deep misunderstanding of the logic of Citizens United: Contrary to common misunderstanding, the landmark decision did not rule that corporations constitute persons. On the contrary, it ruled that corporations are made up of people. They are groups of people who have chosen to organize their activities using a certain provision of law.

Corporations have no speech rights of their own, but they people who make up the corporation have free speech rights, and those rights are not attenuated merely because they have chosen to organize their activities in a particular way. Thus, any effort to eliminate the rights of corporations really only eliminates the rights of individuals.

The world that these Democrats claim to want is a world in which individuals have rights, but they cannot band together to exercise those rights. Each man exercising his rights must stand alone.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan says her job now is pretty much the same as her old job as Solicitor General.

“Cyberbullying” rules are being used to protect authorities from criticism.

UPDATE: Fixed the missing link.

Even at this late date, the Obama administration is trying to cover-up the Gunwalker scandal. The White House won’t let Congressional investigators take testimony from Kevin O’Reilly, formerly the White House National Security Director for North America. O’Reilly was informed of Fast and Furious, and his testimony could shed light on how high that information went.

O’Reilly wants to testify, but the White House won’t let him:

“[O’Reilly’s] personal attorney indicated that he’s more than willing to talk to the committee, on the record, under oath”” [Rep. Jason] Chaffetz told Kelly during her Friday afternoon broadcast. “It is only the White House and the White House Counsel that is saying they will not make him available.”

Innocent people rarely behave this way.

(Previous post.)

Even Democrats want the Supreme Court to throw out the individual mandate.

President Obama says that it would be “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare:

I am confident 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.

Wow, every single thing in this sentence is false. Clearly, Obama is not confident. The law was not passed by a strong majority (four votes in the House and zero in the Senate). The Congress was not democratically elected (the winning margin in the Senate came from Paul Kirk, who was appointed to the body after Edward Kennedy died — an appointment that required an 11th hour change in the law).

But most absurd is the suggestion that it would be unprecedented for the Supreme Court to strike down a law, even if all those things were true. Judicial review has been part of our system since Marbury v. Madison in 1803 struck down a provision of the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Judiciary Act was adopted in the very first session of the United States Congress. All told, the Supreme Court has struck down 165 laws as unconstitutional.

How could a man who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago say such a thing? Did he never teach Marbury v. Madison? As it turns out, no, he didn’t. Obama taught Constitutional Law III, which covers exclusively the 14th Amendment. So Obama never taught separation of powers or checks and balances, which makes a lot of sense when you consider his actions.

This was too much for the American Bar Association. It was too much for the Democratic apologists at Politifact. And it was too much for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals:

A three-judge panel for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday ordered the Justice Department to explain by Thursday whether the administration believes judges have the power to strike down a federal law.

One justice in particular chided the administration for what he said was being perceived as a “challenge” to judicial authority — referring directly to Obama’s latest comments about the Supreme Court’s review of the health care case.

The Justice Department, of course, had to acknowledge the principle of judicial review, although it laughably asserted that Obama’s remarks were consistent with it.

Obama later tried to walk back his remarks:

He spoke slowly, with long pauses, giving the sense that he was speaking with great thought and precision: “Well, first of all, let me be very specific. Um [pause], we have not seen a court overturn [pause] a [pause] law that was passed [pause] by Congress on [pause] a [pause] economic issue, like health care, that I think most people would clearly consider commerce. A law like that has not been overturned [pause] at least since Lochner, right? So we’re going back to the ’30s, pre-New Deal.”

Again, Obama doesn’t sound much like a constitutional scholar here, or he would have known that Lochner was in 1905, not during the 1930s. But that’s a nitpick. More to the point, it’s complete nonsense. The Supreme Court has struck down provisions from plenty of economic laws since 1905; including Sarbanes-Oxley just two years ago.

More generally, the problem here is that Obama doesn’t understand (or willfully misrepresents) what judicial activism means. In his original remarks, before the walkback, Obama went on to say:

I just remind conservative commentators that for years we have heard the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint. That an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.

No. Judicial activism is when the courts render decisions based on their political preferences, rather than on meaning of the law. It’s not judicial activism whenever the Supreme Court strikes down a law. On the contrary, if the law is unconstitutional, it would be judicial activism to leave it standing.

Unfortunately, progressives tend not to believe (or tend not to care) that the law has any meaning independent of current politics. For example, Obama cautioned the court:

The justices should understand that in the absence of an individual mandate you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can actually get health care.

Again, that’s complete nonsense, but again, that’s beside the point. The point is, this is a policy argument, not a legal argument. Only a judicial activist would even find it relevant.

POSTSCRIPT: Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working. Even Obama’s own allies are saying publicly that his attack on the Supreme Court is ill-considered. And the Supreme Court’s approval rating has risen dramatically since Obama began his attack.

This Patterico post on severability in the context of Obamacare expresses what I’ve thought for a long time. If the courts strike down a law as unconstitutional, then in the absence of any severability provision that says exactly what should remain, the court should strike down the bill in its entirety. Anything else is an arrogation of legislative authority.

Unfortunately, that not what the courts do. Instead, they try to find some constitutional subset of the bill that the Congress might have passed instead. But this is precisely what the courts are not competent to decide: to resolve the political question of what Congress is willing to do.

Firstly, the Supreme Court does not have the necessary insight to answer the question. No one does. Even members of Congress who have legislated for decades cannot predict what Congress will do. But, secondly, even if they did have the insight, legislating is a dynamic process, not a static process. Put in computer science terms, the legislative branch maintains a state, and that state is altered by the legislative process. Allegiances shift, favors change hands, special elections are won and lost. Even if the Court could simulate that process, it certainly could not enact its result.

Instead, the Supreme Court sets itself the task of acting as a secondary legislature, tasked with drawing up, using only the delete key, a new bill that holds together under the Court’s various rules. They have no business doing so.

. . . of course, the part of the government that the Times wants to limit is the Supreme Court.

(Via Ricochet.)

I believe the fashionable term for this is epistemic closure:

That the law is constitutional is best illustrated by the fact that—until recently—the Obama administration expended almost no energy defending it.

This is not what we call a logical argument.

It’s clear from the last three days that the defenders of Obamacare never actually bothered to devote any thought to legal arguments in defense of Obamacare. They really did believe it was self-evident. I don’t know whether to be relieved or appalled that they actually believed their own nonsense.

More here.

In December 2009, the idea that the Constitution limits the power of the federal government was scoffworthy to Nancy Pelosi:

CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?

Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”

CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes I am.”

Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandated that individual Americans buy health insurance as not a “serious question.”

“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

After oral arguments before the Supreme Court, everyone understands now; it was and is a serious question. It’s just that the Democrats are not a serious party.

It turns out that hating the government isn’t a crime after all! Who knew? (Evidently not the Obama administration!) More on the case here.

(Via Instapundit.)

During the Bush administration, the Justice Department prosecuted a Republican operative for making illegal robocalls. (Robocalls are required to state who they are from and provide a callback number.) Will the Obama Justice Department prosecute the Democratic operatives responsible for making illegal robocalls attacking Rush Limbaugh?

Answer: Unlikely. Eric Holder’s Justice Department has made it clear that it will never enforce the law against the interests of the Democratic Party. If they will drop the voter intimidation case against the Black Panthers after the case was already won, they certainly won’t bring charges for this.

UPDATE: Uh oh: The White House affirms that it still has confidence in Verrilli.

The Supreme Court seems to believe that the individual mandate is not a tax. So unless they adopt the notion that it is simultaneously a tax and not a tax, that’s one defense of Obamacare dispensed with.

The agents who ran the Gunwalker debacle were even stupider that we previously were aware:

The prime suspect in the botched gun trafficking investigation known as “Fast and Furious” — Manuel Acosta — was taken into custody and might have been stopped from trafficking weapons to Mexico’s killer drug cartel early on. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) let him go, according to new documents obtained by CBS News.

He was supposed to cooperate with the ATF, but — as anyone with an ounce of sense would predict — he disappeared as soon as he was released:

Instead of pursuing charges, Agent MacAllister asked Acosta if he’d be willing to cooperate with federal agents. He agreed and was released. Apparently, the promised cooperation never materialized. The report notes that 17 days after Acosta was let loose, he still had “not initiated any contact with Special Agent MacAllister.”

And here’s the best part:

Before releasing Acosta, MacAllister wrote her contact information on a $10 bill at Acosta’s request, gave it to him, then warned him “not to participate in any illegal activity unless under her direction.”

That’s just awesome: (1) they warn a criminal — as they release him — to stop committing crimes, (2) but they say they might need to direct him to commit some more crimes.

(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)

Jon Corzine, former Democratic senator and then governor of New Jersey, personally directed the theft of $200 million to cover MF Global’s debts:

Jon S. Corzine, MF Global Holding Ltd. (MFGLQ)’s chief executive officer, gave “direct instructions” to transfer $200 million from a customer fund account to meet an overdraft in a brokerage account with JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), according to a memo written by congressional investigators.

Edith O’Brien, a treasurer for the firm, said in an e-mail quoted in the memo that the transfer was “Per JC’s direct instructions,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by Bloomberg News. The e-mail, dated Oct. 28, was sent three days before the company collapsed, the memo says.

That explains $200 million of the missing $1.2 billion. Meanwhile, when last we heard, Corzine is still fundraising for Barack Obama.

(Via Jammie Wearing Fools.)

The Supreme Court has issued an important decision in Sackett v. EPA. Justice Alito explains the issue:

The position taken in this case by the Federal Government—a position that the Court now squarely rejects—would have put the property rights of ordinary Americans entirely at the mercy of Environmental Protection Agency(EPA) employees.

The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear. Any piece of land that is wet at least part of the year is in danger of being classified by EPA employees as wetlands covered by the Act, and according to the Federal Government, if property owners begin to construct a home on a lot that the agency thinks possesses the requisite wetness, the property owners are at the agency’s mercy. The EPA may issue a compliance order demanding that the owners cease construction, engage in expensive remedial measures, and abandon any use of the property. If the owners do not do the EPA’s bidding, they may be fined up to $75,000 per day ($37,500 for violating the Act and another $37,500 for violating the compliance order). And if the owners want their day in court to show that their lot does not include covered wetlands, well, as a practical matter, that is just too bad. Until the EPA sues them, they are blocked from access to the courts, and the EPA may wait as long as it wants before deciding to sue. By that time, the potential fines may easily have reached the millions. In a nation that values due process, not to mention private property, such treatment is unthinkable.

In short: When the Sacketts claimed that their property was not a wetland (and they have a strong argument on the merits), the EPA refused to give them a hearing, and also refused to sue them, and tried to deny them access to the courts on the pretense that their decision wasn’t final yet.

Just to be clear, this administration — which thinks that every terrorist picked up on the battlefield in Afghanistan deserves his day in court — thinks that property owners should have no access to the courts when the EPA prohibits them from using their property. (And yes: the Solicitor General’s office submitted the government brief, so that was literally the Obama administration’s position.)

The Supreme Court didn’t buy it, and ruled 9-0 against the administration.

POSTSCRIPT: This is the second time this year already in which the administration has taken an outrageous position and received a 9-0 rebuke from the Court. In January the administration failed to convince the Court that that the government should be able to dictate ministers to churches.

A federal court in Washington state has ruled that Washington’s law that requires all pharmacists to dispense the drug Plan B (an abortifacient) violates the First Amendment.

Existing case law says that a law that burdens religious freedom can still be constitutional, but only if it is generally applicable and neutral to religion (or if it satisfies strict scrutiny, which almost nothing does). It’s not so in this case:

The court determined that the regulations are not neutral for purposes of deference under Employment Division v. Smith. Rather, they “are riddled with exemptions for secular conduct, but contain no such exemptions for identical religiously-motivated conduct” and thus amount to an “impermissible religious gerrymander.”

Likewise, the regulations are not “generally applicable” but rather “have been selectively enforced, in two ways”: First, the rule that pharmacies timely deliver all lawful medications has been enforced only against the plaintiff pharmacy and only for failure to deliver plan B. Second, the rules haven’t been enforced against the state’s numerous Catholic-affiliated pharmacies, which also refuse to stock or dispense Plan B.

Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem want the FCC to force Rush Limbaugh off the air. Gloria Allred goes further, she wants him prosecuted!

POSTSCRIPT: In case you’re curious. Yes, both Fonda and Steinem have appeared on Bill Maher.

Something has gone terribly wrong with California’s legal system if its courts have occasion to hold a trial to determine whether the major pro tem of Compton is “really” Latino or not. That’s a proceeding that would make sense in apartheid South Africa, not in America.

(Via Instapundit.)

A Daily Caller investigation has found that (unsurprisingly, given what’s happened) the Obama administration and LightSquared are as thick as thieves. A few highlights:

• “Before Barack Obama became president, he was personally an investor in SkyTerra [which became LightSquared].”
• “[White House personnel director Don] Gips’ personal financial disclosure forms show he had between $250,000 and $500,000 of his personal finances invested in SkyTerra via stock options.”
• “It’s unclear what specifically Gips and [incoming FCC director Julius] Genachowski were discussing at that White House meeting; but shortly after that meeting SkyTerra named two members of Obama’s White House transition team to senior leadership positions at the company.”
• “Not too long after those Obama-tied hires, lawyers for Falcone’s Harbinger fired off an email that may suggest FCC coordination to approve the sale of SkyTerra to Harbinger outside of what is procedurally acceptable. . . Harbinger’s lawyers seemed to know a month ahead of time that the FCC would approve their proposal.”

The Daily Caller also found that the FCC drove LightSquared’s competition GlobalStar out of business with adverse regulatory decisions. Worse, those adverse decisions came in circumstances nearly identical to ones in which LightSquared received favorable decisions.

POSTSCRIPT: Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Aviation explains why LightSquared’s network would be so damaging to the GPS system. Of particular interest is page 4, which explains why GPS receivers can’t simply filter out interference. (Via Instapundit.)

(Previous post.)

The Chicago Tribune reports:

A Cook County judge today ruled the state’s controversial eavesdropping law unconstitutional. The law makes it a felony offense to make audio recordings of police officers without their consent even when they’re performing their public duties.

Judge Stanley Sacks, who is assigned to the Criminal Courts Building, found the eavesdropping law unconstitutional because it potentially criminalizes “wholly innocent conduct.”

I don’t see any good-faith justification for the law in the first place.

(Via Instapundit.)

Three stories from the past week on the Democrats’ use of the tax machine to attack their political opponents:

• Politico reports that Democrats are threatening companies that if they contribute to Republican campaigns they will be punished in the tax code. (Via Hot Air.)
• The ACLJ is reporting that the IRS has ordered dozens of Tea Party organizations to produce extensive information on their membership, which has been illegal since 1958.
• A federal court has refused to dismiss Z Street’s charge that the IRS “tied its application for tax-exempt status to whether the group’s positions on Israel are ‘contradictory to those of the Administration.'”

Democrats have abandoned our country’s long-standing dedication to the rule of law, and the tax machine is a major battlefront in their effort to undermine it.

Fox News reports:

A Louisiana church was ordered to stop giving away free water along Mardi Gras parade routes because they did not have the proper permits. . .

[Pastor Matt] Tipton said volunteers from his church were handing out free coffee and free bottles of water at two locations along a Mardi Gras parade route when they were stopped by Jefferson Parish officials. The church volunteers were cited for failing to secure an occupational license and for failure to register for a sales tax. . .

The [Jefferson Parish] sheriff’s department said there was “no validity to their complaint whatever their complaint may be.”

(Emphasis mine.)

When you dismiss a complaint without even knowing what it is, it’s possible you aren’t really engaging with the issue.

Since LightSquared is probably not going to be allowed to crash passenger planes and break the GPS system, it is developing a new business plan based on lawsuits (subscription required). LightSquared would demand either compensation for regulators’ failure to approve their system, or a new piece of spectrum to replace the one they own.

All of which takes some chutzpah, since their entire business plan was based on undercutting their competition by using a cheap piece of spectrum (that wasn’t intended for communication systems) and relying on political connections to get their misuse of the spectrum approved.

(Previous post.)

David Rivkin and Ed Whelan make a convincing case that President Obama’s contraception mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act:

The 1993 law restored the same protections of religious freedom that had been understood to exist [before Employment Division v. Smith]. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act states that the federal government may “substantially burden” a person’s “exercise of religion” only if it demonstrates that application of the burden to the person “is in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest” and “is the least restrictive means of furthering” that interest.

The law also provides that any later statutory override of its protections must be explicit. But there is nothing in the ObamaCare legislation that explicitly or even implicitly overrides the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The birth-control mandate proposed by Health and Human Services is thus illegal.

(Via Hot Air.)

By the way, the RFRA passed the House unanimously, passed the Senate 97-3, and was signed by Bill Clinton.

This exchange undercuts the Obama administration’s argument that the Obamacare mandate is a tax, not a penalty. Nicely done, Rep. Garrett (R-NJ).

I’m late in reporting this, but a Federal court has upheld the ATF’s new policy requiring gun stores in southwestern states to report sales of more than one semi-automatic rifles.

This is unfortunate on multiple levels. First, it’s a bad policy. Second, even setting aside the Second Amendment, it’s troubling on separation-of-powers grounds that the executive branch can invent new burdens on gun ownership without the consent of Congress. Finally, it’s very troubling that the ATF operated a massive criminal enterprise at least in part to support its case for this policy and is being rewarded for its malfeasance.

(Previous post.)

A Justice Department lawyer takes the Fifth rather than testify in Congress’s Gunwalker inquiry.

(Previous post.)

An audit of the Department of Health and Human Services found $10 billion in discrepancies. But let’s be fair; HHS’s mandate is correcting Catholic theology, not accounting. . .

Unchastened by its 9-0 rebuke by the Supreme Court in its effort to gain the power to dictate to churches who their ministers will be, the Obama administration has turned its attention on Army chaplains. The administration prohibited Catholic chaplains in the Army from reading a pastoral letter from the Catholic Church to their congregations. (The letter opposed the Obama administration’s order that Catholic hospitals dispense contraceptives.) The administration also edited the letter before allowing it to be distributed in printed form.

Let’s please not have any more nonsense about this administration’s respect for civil liberties.