Internet Scofflaw

Bob Owens writes that the DOJ’s Inspector General can’t be trusted to investigate the Gunwalker scandal: Cynthia Schnedar is temporary and inexperienced (having been acting IG just since January), and her office has multiple conflicts of interest.

I would add that we learned last year that the DOJ IG isn’t even statutorily independent, much less practically independent. The former IG pointed out that, unlike most federal IGs, the DOJ IG answers to the Attorney General. He was explaining why he could not investigate the Black Panther scandal without Eric Holder’s approval.

(Previous post.)

The Gunwalker scandal keeps getting worse:

The ABC15 Investigators have linked an additional 43 weapons recovered during a Phoenix traffic stop to the controversial Fast and Furious ATF case.

According to court paperwork, Phoenix Drug Enforcement Administration agents discovered the guns in mid-April. They pulled over a vehicle near 83rd Avenue and Interstate 10, near the Phoenix and Tolleson border.

The Washington Examiner describes the culprits as illegal immigrants, which is accurate, in that four of the five were in the United States illegally, but incidental I think. A better description would be Mexican drug traffickers.

POSTSCRIPT: Kudos to ABC’s Phoenix affiliate for doing some real journalism here. If the authorities ran down the serial numbers too, they didn’t tell anyone of the connection.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

Today brought major developments to the Gunwalker scandal. Kenneth Melson, the acting director of ATF, testified before the Congressional investigation. Melson gave new details on the Department of Justice’s efforts to cover-up the scandal:

Melson provided detailed information and documents to the Office of the Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department. But that information was not given to Congress by then-Acting Deputy Attorney General James Cole. In fact, “Melson was not allowed to communicate to Congress” and “Justice Department officials directed [ATF’s senior leadership] not to respond and took full control of replying to briefing and document requests from Congress.” According to the letter Issa and Grassley sent to Holder, it was “two days after [Melson] told [Cole] about serious issues involving lack of information sharing” that the Wall Street Journal suddenly reported that Melson was about to be ousted by the Obama administration.

Melson also directly contradicted claims made by the Justice Department:

Contrary to the Justice Department’s denials, according to Melson, ATF agents specifically witnessed transfers of weapons from straw purchasers to third parties without taking any further action.

Also, in the second major development, an email came to light showing that knowledge of the Fast and Furious operation went quite high, including Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division Lanny Breuer, and the heads of the FBI and DEA.

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The Democrats have released their minority report on the Gunwalker scandal. They say the lesson of the ATF’s insane project is that we need more gun control in the United States. If we’re going to tighten any gun control laws because of this, how about making it a crime for federal agents to traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels?! Just a thought.

The Democrats’ position that the lesson of Gunwalker is the need for more gun control (rather than, say, that the ATF shouldn’t traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels) certainly won’t do anything to quiet the suspicions of many that the real purpose of the “Fast and Furious” operation was political, to provide a pretext for more gun control.

POSTSCRIPT: They also reiterate the 90% lie (in which gun control advocates claim that 90% of Mexican crime guns come from US gun shops when the real number is less than 8%).

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The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been holding hearings on the ATF’s horrifying Gunwalker scandal, in which the ATF trafficked guns to Mexican gun cartels. The ranking Democrat on the committee wants to change the subject, so he is summoning a bunch of gun control advocates to testify at the committee, presumably to blame gun owners for something.

Wait a second. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), a fierce gun-control advocate, wants to divert the hearing away from the ATF’s activities trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels? It makes you wonder what gun control really means to these people.

Anyway, I see this as likely to backfire. These people will be testifying at a hearing on Gunwalker. Democrats will be happy to solicit their usual sob stories and bogus statistics, but Republicans will make them answer questions on Gunwalker, one of the worst gun-control scandals in American history. Make them explain why we should restrict the right of law-abiding Americans while the administration trafficks guns to Mexican drug cartels.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

Justice Ginsberg is a global warming skeptic.

Gunwalker guns are turning up in US neighborhoods now.

There’s also this interesting fact:

The strategy was supposed to lead ATF officials to drug cartel leaders, but agents admitted they never followed the weapons to see where they went.

I thought the whole point was supposedly to follow the guns. If they didn’t even follow the guns, it’s getting really hard to argue that the operation was carried out in good faith.

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Another victory for free speech today as the Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s speech-limiting “clean elections” law. I continue to be amazed that so many people equate cleanliness in elections with controls on how much people can say.

I also continue to be amazed by the Ninth Circuit, the nation’s most reversed court, which somehow managed to blow this case despite a very clear precedent in Davis v. FEC.

I’m surprised at this. You would think they would wait until the scandal was off the front pages before starting to retaliate against the whistleblowers.

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CBS reports:

CBS News has confirmed that ATF Fast and Furious “walked” guns have been linked to the terrorist torture and murder of the brother of a Mexican state attorney general last fall.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

While the ATF was strong-arming gun stores into participating in its crazy scheme to traffic weapons to Mexican drug cartels, it was turning around and illegally leaking the names of those same gun stores to the media as prime sources of guns recovered in Mexico.

The ATF’s betrayal of the gun stores is a petty offense compared to the Gunwalker scandal as a whole, but it does make it that much harder to believe that the operation was conducted in good faith.

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The liberal Center for Public Integrity reports:

Fannie Mae executives bungled their stewardship of the federal government’s massive foreclosure-prevention campaign, creating a bureaucratic muddle characterized by “mismanagement and gross waste of public funds,” according to a whistleblower lawsuit by a former Fannie Mae executive and consultant.

Caroline Herron, a former Fannie vice president who returned to the mortgage giant in 2009 as a high-level consultant, claims that the homeowner-relief effort was marred by delays, missteps and executives preoccupied with their institution’s short-term financial interests.

“It appeared that Fannie Mae officers were focused on maximizing incentive payments available to Fannie Mae under various federal programs – even if this meant wasting taxpayer money and delaying the implementation of high-priority Treasury programs,” she claims in the lawsuit.

Herron alleges that Fannie Mae officials terminated her $200-an-hour consulting work in January because she raised questions about how it was administering the federal government’s push to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP.

By the way, let’s not forget that Fannie Mae got the job through a $400 billion no-bid contract.

GM’s $45 billion tax break violated the law, according to a new law article:

Treasury solved this problem by issuing a series of “Notices” in which it announced that the law did not apply. . . The Treasury had no legal or economic justification for these Notices, which applied to Citigroup and AIG as well as to GM. Nonetheless, the Notices largely escaped public attention, though they had the potential to transfer significant wealth to loyal supporters (the UAW). That it could do so illustrates the risk involved in this manipulation.

The IRS violated the law in 38% of its property seizures. Wow. (Via Instapundit.)

The House has issued a blistering report on the ATF’s Gunwalker scandal. Among the findings is that the Department of Justice repeatedly lied about what had happened. I’ve glanced at the report, and that finding is really unarguable.

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A Gunwalker gun shoots down a Mexican government helicopter.

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Wow:

President Obama’s solicitor general, defending the national health care law on Wednesday, told a federal appeals court that Americans who didn’t like the individual mandate could always avoid it by choosing to earn less money.

I suspect we may well see this replayed in a campaign ad.

(Via Instapundit.)

In the political battle over tort reform, Democrats argue that discouraging frivolous lawsuits creates a chilling effect that also hurts those with legitimate claims. Are they in earnest? Or are they just making a convenient argument to protect the rent-seeking efforts of trial lawyers?

We get a hint at the answer by considering the terms of the auto bailouts:

Vicki Denton died several years ago after the airbag in her 1998 Dodge Caravan minivan failed to deploy during a head-on collision in the Georgia mountains. In 2009, a jury found Chrysler responsible for her death because of a manufacturing defect, awarding her surviving son and other relatives $2.2 million.

The family was near collecting those damages on the eve of Chrysler’s government-brokered bankruptcy. Now, two years removed from a $12.5 billion bailout, Chrysler Group LLC still hasn’t paid the damages, and doesn’t have to.

The reason: The company’s restructuring allowed it to wash away legal responsibility for car-accident victims who had won damages or had pending lawsuits before its bankruptcy filing. The same holds true for General Motors Co., which discarded the liabilities as part of its own $50 billion bailout and restructuring. . .

Among the creditors who suffered most, car-accident victims represent a distinct mold. Unlike banks and bondholders, this group didn’t choose to extend credit to the auto makers. As consumers, they became creditors only after suffering injuries in vehicles they purchased.

When push came to shove, Democrats protected the labor unions, not accident victims.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Philadelphia police have announced that they are not going to respect the law:

With a shocking altercation between Philadelphia police and a 25-year-old IT worker putting the spotlight back on open-carry gun laws, local authorities are warning gun owners that they will be “inconvenienced” if they carry unconcealed handguns in the city. Lt. Raymond Evers, a spokesman for the city police, told FoxNews.com that gun owners who open carry, which is legal in the city, may be asked to lay on the ground until officers feel safe while they check permits.

This is going to cost Philadelphia a lot of money they don’t have.

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In 2005 the Senate decided to keep judicial filibusters in order in “extraordinary circumstances”. Democrats, by and large, supported the filibuster, and Republicans opposed it, but a few Republicans crossed the aisle to save the maneuver.

As much as the Democrats might have hoped for it, Republicans obviously were not going to disarm unilaterally and concede the filibuster as a maneuver for Democrats only. The GOP wanted to change the rules, but the Democrats won. And if there were ever extraordinary circumstances, this was the time.

Goodwin Liu was an astonishing appointment to the US Court of Appeals:

A legal scholar who has never been a judge and has little experience practicing law, Liu occupies a place on the far left side of the legal spectrum. To take just one example, Republicans are fond of repeating Liu’s assertion that the Constitution guarantees the right to “expanded health insurance, child care, transportation subsidies, job training, and a robust earned income tax credit.”

His testimony against Samuel Alito was so intemperate — not to mention false — that even he admits it was wrong (although he never figured that out until he was facing confirmation himself). Worse, he believes that the Constitution requires liberal policies. Worse still, he is actually willing to proclaim those beliefs openly.

In short, Liu is a politician. As Lindsey Graham said, he should be running for office, not taking a seat on the bench. Now he will have the chance. I hope he loses.

CBS reports:

CBS News has learned that virtually all the top ATF managers in Phoenix involved in the controversial “Fast and Furious” operation have been reassigned and replaced. The shake-up comes in the wake of the gunwalking scandal in which ATF allegedly allowed more than 2500 weapons to hit the streets or “walk.”

Good.

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The Philadelphia police arrested a man and subject him to verbal abuse for legally carrying a firearm. They released him when they found they hadn’t a leg to stand on, but when he posted recordings of the incident they charged him with disorderly conduct:

The Police Department heard about the YouTube clips. A new investigation was launched, and last month the District Attorney’s Office decided to charge Fiorino with reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct because, a spokeswoman said, he refused to cooperate with police.

This is going to cost Philadelphia a lot of money. I hadn’t heard they had money to waste.

POSTSCRIPT: The police also says that their officers weren’t trained in the relevant gun laws. I’m not sure if it’s worse if that’s true or false.

The NLRB is suing the state of Arizona to block a new law that guarantees a secret ballot in union certification elections. To put it more clearly: the Obama administration is suing to deny workers a secret ballot.

A Pajamas Media source within DOJ says that prosecutions of domestic organizations (such as CAIR) that support terrorism have been spiked for political reasons.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE (4/27) : Confirmed.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has lost patience with ATF’s stonewalling over the “gunwalking” scandal. Despite subpoenas, the ATF is refusing to produce the required documents, so Issa is ready begin contempt proceedings.

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Senate Democrats have blocked an effort to forbid the EPA from regulating carbon dioxide.

The battle is not over, in so far as the EPA simply does not have (subscription required), under the law, the authority to do what it is doing. The Clean Air Act is designed to deal with pollution, and sets thresholds for action that are entirely inappropriate for carbon dioxide, which is much more prevalent than pollutants in even the worst polluted air. The EPA recognizes that applying the Clean Air Act’s rules to carbon dioxide would be absurd, but rather than abandoning the effort (as it should), it simply made up its own rules. This is an unconstitutional usurpation of legislative authority.

The Supreme Court has ruled against the EPA on carbon dioxide once already, in Massachusetts v. EPA. It may well do so again. A legislative solution would have been preferable to a judicial one, but unfortunately the Democrats have prevented that. In the meantime, they own the problem.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Department of Justice has completed its legal opinion justifying President Obama’s power to launch his war kinetic military action in Libya without Congressional approval. The opinion is based on two findings (page 10): First, the war serves “sufficiently important national interests” (as if that could ever be found not to be the case). Second, the war isn’t really a “war”.

No really, that’s exactly their argument:

Turning to the second element of the analysis, we do not believe that anticipated United States operations in Libya amounted to a “war” in the constitutional sense necessitating congressional approval under the Declaration of War Clause. This inquiry, as noted, is highly fact-specific and turns on no single factor. [Scofflaw: yeah, I’ll bet!] See Proposed Bosnia Deployment, 19 Op. O.L.C. at 334 (reaching conclusion based on specific “circumstances”); Haiti Deployment, 18 Op. O.L.C. at 178 (same). Here, considering all the relevant circumstances, we believe applicable historical precedents demonstrate that the limited military operations the President anticipated directing were not a “war” for constitutional purposes.

(Emphasis mine.)

You want to know why the Obama administration is refusing to call this a war? There’s your answer right there. If they called it a war, their own analysis says it would be illegal.

POSTSCRIPT: My personal opinion is that the president has plenary authority as commander-in-chief to carry out brief military actions, and he doesn’t need to make up delicate, bogus, and insulting legal tests. However, he was unwise to use that authority in a situation such as this, where the war kinetic military action is unlikely to be over within 60 days. He was particularly unwise, given his emphatic earlier statements against presidential war-making power. He should have sought Congressional approval, and he would have received it easily.

(Via Beltway Confidential.)

President Obama has reversed policy from 1995, and will withhold military pay if the government shuts down:

When the government was shut down in 1995, military personnel continued to report to work and were paid, but the planning guidance sent to the services and defense agencies says a shutdown this time will be different.

“All military personnel will continue in normal duty status regardless of their affiliation with exempt or non-exempt activities,” says the draft planning guidance that was prepared for the services and defense agencies. “Military personnel will serve without pay until such time as Congress makes appropriated funds available to compensate them for this period of service.”

I’m astonished.

(Via Hot Air.) (Previous post.)

I was just getting ready to write some comments on Tuesday’s supreme court election in Wisconsin, when the result was turned upside down.

I noticed Wednesday morning that Prosser (the Republican) had not picked up as many votes from Waukesha County as I expected. But my estimate was a highly unscientific, back-of-the-envelope calculation, so I didn’t think much of it. Ann Althouse noticed the same thing (and, unlike me, she actually blogged it):

Waukesha is now shown as completely in, but the numbers didn’t change, so I think something may have been misreported. I took the trouble to do a calculation and was going to predict that Prosser would net 40,000 more votes in Waukesha. What happened?

Well, it turns out that something did happen. The Waukesha County clerk failed to record the votes from one city. (She failed to save the database after importing the data.) When the error was discovered during canvassing, Prosser gained 7,582 net votes, demolishing his razor-thin 204-vote deficit.

The clerk emphasized:

This is not a case of extra votes, or extra ballots, being found. This is human error, which I apologize for. . . Which is why the state requires us to conduct a canvass.

Prosser’s new lead is outside the margin that requires an automatic recount, but I suspect we will see a recount nevertheless. I won’t go out on a limb and say that this thing is over, but I think Prosser’s campaign has to be pretty happy with their position.

Democrats and union bosses had been crowing about the Prosser’s apparent defeat as a rebuke to Scott Walker, the Republican governor, and indeed to Republicans nationwide. (This was already foolish, given the narrowness of the margin despite the huge union effort for Kloppenburg, Prosser’s opponent.) Now, well, Mary Katharine Ham puts it best:

Small, state-wide election with vital national implications soon to have no national implications whatsoever.

ASIDE: If you want more schadenfreude, watch this video in which Kloppenburg brushes off the question of whether she should be claiming victory with such a narrow margin.

Now, although the tone will be quite a bit different than it might have been, I still need to remark on why it was so important that Kloppenburg lose this race (and therefore that Prosser win). This photo, taken by Ann Althouse, tells the whole story:

Kloppenburg was campaigning on a promise to overturn Wisconsin’s budget repair bill that was fiercely opposed by public-sector unions. This is absolutely not what a court is supposed to be doing. Under the rule of law, a court is supposed to rule on the law, not pursue a political outcome. Of course, this rule is frequently violated, especially by the left’s judicial activists, but always they at least pretend to take a proper judicial view.

That pretense is valuable. While I would prefer their counterfeit judicial temperament to be real instead, their need to pretend does limit how far they can go in carrying out their political aims. When judicial candidates can come out and promise to rule a particular way in particular controversies, the courts will have become just another political body. We don’t need a third branch of the legislature. We need the rule of law.

Mickey Kaus put it this way, when we all thought Kloppenburg had probably won:

There is also the minor issue of whether opponents of the anti-union law have a case. Or does everyone agree that doesn’t matter anymore?

Fortunately, it looks like that still does matter. For now.

(Via Althouse.)

UPDATE: The vice-chair of the Waukesha Democratic Party stands by the new totals.

UPDATE: Apparently Prosser had already taken a narrow lead in canvassing before the Waukesha correction.

If you’re wondering what the “gunwalking” scandal is about, National Review has a good summary. (Briefly: the ATF facilitated illegal gun sales to Mexican gangsters, as part of a harebrained scheme to see where the guns ended up. One of the guns was used to kill a US Border Patrol agent.)

UPDATE: Clarified some of the nomenclature.

(Previous post.)

If you are of retirement age and want to keep your current insurance rather than going on Medicare, you are out of luck. Enrolling in Medicare is now mandatory. More precisely, a federal judge has approved a government policy that penalizes persons who decline Medicare by revoking their Social Security. The ruling hinged on a highly dubious interpretation of “entitled” to mean “obligated”.

The Obama administration has limited Miranda protection for terrorism suspects:

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades. . .

The Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

The new rules were issued last December, but not made public.

Yet another civil rights triumph from the administration that wants to search laptops without a warrant, sample the DNA of every suspect arrested, and track US citizens via their cell phones (without a warrant), that investigated political opponents posing no threat to public safety, and that planned to limit our rights to petition our government. (Those last two policies were reversed after they came to light.)

(Via Professor Bainbridge.)

A federal judge in Kansas has struck down a tax increase in the Shawnee Mission School District. A victory for individual rights? Not in this case.

The reason the tax hike was struck down had nothing to do with protecting the taxpayer. The tax hike was struck down because it would make that district’s schools too good:

U.S. District Judge John W. Lungstrum dismissed the case on the grounds that the cap was a crucial and integral part of the state’s complex formula for distributing education funds in a manner meant to ensure that wealthy school districts don’t pull far ahead of poorer districts.

If you want to cap public-school spending to protect the taxpayer, I could get behind that. But capping public-school spending to keep schools from becoming better than others is simply perverse.

Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is complaining that the ATF is stonewalling a Senate investigation into the ATF’s gun-running activities (yes, the ATF is engaged in gun-running), and their involvement in the murder of a Border Patrol agent. I don’t think this scandal is going away; subpoenas are presumably next.

(Via Instapundit.)

Some Washington State Democrats are calling for an amendment to the US Constitution that would declare that corporations are not persons and are entitled to not of the protections of persons. They are targeting the Citizens United decision, but, as Eugene Volokh points out, they haven’t thought through the ramifications of their proposal: Media corporations would lose the right to a free press, non-profits (e.g., the ACLU) would lose their right to free speech, the government could take corporate property without compensation, the police could search the premises or wiretap the phones of any corporation without a warrant, etc.

In addition to that, these fools continue to misunderstand what the Citizens United ruling actually said. (Probably they are getting their information from the legacy media.) They decry the notion that corporations are persons, but the ruling never said that corporations are persons. On the contrary, the ruling found that corporations are made up of persons who have chosen to organize their efforts as a corporation. Restricting the speech of a corporation means restricting the speech of those persons who make up the corporation.

The average liberal would understand the danger of allowing the government to search the desks in a corporate office without a warrant, but somehow they fail to see the same danger in suppressing their speech.

The White House is asking Judge Vinson, the federal judge in Florida that struck down Obamacare, to order states to obey it nonetheless. I read an analysis somewhere (can’t find it now, sorry) that suggested that Vinson’s decision contained some pretty strong hints that he would not issue such an order. But even that aside, isn’t it pretty unusual for a judge to order the winning party to do what the losing party wants?

I think we have to see this as a political decision. Rather than waiting for an appeals court to hear the case, the White House has decided it wants a confrontation with this judge, right now.

UPDATE: This isn’t the same analysis, but it mentions many of the same things.

UPDATE: Here it is:

Also, it should be noted that a few commentators have considered the failure of the anti-Obamacare forces to obtain an injunction against the act as some kind of victory. It really isn’t. Instead the court reasoned that a judgment declaring the law to be unconstitutional is sufficient relief to the plaintiffs because “there is a long-standing presumption that officials of the Executive Branch will adhere to the law as declared by the court. As a result, the declaratory judgment is the functional equivalent of an injunction.” (internal quotation marks removed.) In other words, he felt that the Federal Government would try to obey the law without the court formally ordering its obedience. But believe you me, if the Obama administration ignores this ruling, the court can and certainly will revisit the matter and issue an injunction.

Last weekend, the Department of Homeland Security seized 84,000 domains, and replaced those sites with a banner asserting that they were trafficking in child pornography. All but ten of them (at most) were innocent. None of the owners had the opportunity to fight the action, nor were any of them even notified it would happen.

Homeland Security is unembarrassed.

(Via Instapundit.)

The left went crazy over the Bush-era Terrorist Surveillance Program, in which we eavesdropped on foreign terrorists’ communications without a warrant. I’ll be interested to see what the left thinks of this:

The Obama administration’s Justice Department has asserted that the FBI can obtain telephone records of international calls made from the U.S. without any formal legal process or court oversight, according to a document obtained by McClatchy.

We’ll find out who really cares about this sort of thing, and who just found it a convenient club with which to attack the Bush administration.

(Via Instapundit.)

A small victory for the rule of law and a small defeat for our lawless government: A federal court has sanctioned the Obama administration after it flagrantly ignored a court ruling against its drilling moratorium:

The Obama Administration acted in contempt by continuing its deepwater-drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down, a New Orleans judge ruled.

Interior Department regulators acted with “determined disregard” by lifting and reinstituting a series of policy changes that restricted offshore drilling, following the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, U.S. District Judge, Martin Feldman of New Orleans ruled yesterday.

“Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” Feldman said in the ruling.

“Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt,” Feldman said.

(Via Patterico.)

The federal judge in Florida hearing the 26-state lawsuit against health care nationalization has found it unconstitutional. Importantly, he found that individual mandate was not separable and threw out the entire law.

Obviously, this is just one step in a long legal battle, but it deals a body blow against the presumption that this law will survive.

UPDATE: Some analysis linked here.

An appeals court has ruled that he is not a Chicago resident.

But I predict it will not matter; Rahm will be the next mayor of Chicago. This is Chicago we’re talking about. Does anyone really think that the machine will allow itself to be denied, just because of what the law says?

UPDATE: Like I said.

The Obama administration is discovering the Unitary Executive theory:

Turning to how terror suspects are tried, Holder said he still believes the “decision as to how people get prosecuted, where they get prosecuted, is an executive branch function. Even if those suspects are being held now at Guantanamo Bay. Holder said Congress should not be interfering with that.

“It’s — from my perspective — a constitutional issue,” he said.

This was bound to happen as soon as a Democrat was in office. Not that anyone will admit changing their position; objection to the unitary executive theory was always based on misstating what it is. The actual theory, which says that the Constitution vests the executive power solely in the president, can’t really be argued, since the Constitution reads:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

Those who attacked the unitary executive theory made it out to be something it never was: the idea that the president somehow holds the legislative and judicial powers as well.

UPDATE: It’s not completely clear from the article, but it appears that Holder is alluding to Congress’s legislation barring the transfer of any prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the United States. That’s interesting, because Holder is actually going beyond the real unitary executive theory to something close to its liberal parody: he is claiming for the executive branch powers that belong to the legislative branch.

The processes of the criminal justice system and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (which include “where” and “how” people are prosecuted) are established by law — that is, by the legislative branch. But Holder seems to be claiming the authority to establish those processes for the executive branch.

Oh my. Julian Assange (the founder of WikiLeaks) is upset that sensitive government documents are leaking that make him look bad.

The US Commission on Civil Rights’s report on the Black Panther scandal, blasting the Department of Justice, is here.

This is only the beginning. The DOJ refused to allow its employees to testify before the commission, despite subpoenas. When Republicans take over the House of Representatives in January, they will doubtless begin a Congressional investigation. The DOJ won’t ignore Congressional subpoenas as easily.

(Previous post.)

Breaking news.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, public support for Obamacare hits a new low in the ABC News/Washington Post poll.

This is a big deal; if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional, the whole Obamacare edifice comes down with it. That’s unless they change their legal theory, which does not seem beyond the realm of possibility, but even if they do, they’ve made their case harder.

In Radley Balko’s latest piece on recording the police and other government officials, I was dismayed to learn that the Fraternal Order of Police supports arresting citizens who record the police:

Jim Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, says he sees no problem with arresting people who photograph or record on-duty cops. Pasco says his main concern is that activists will tamper with videos or use clips out of context to make police officers look bad. . .

Pasco, the head of the Fraternal Order of Police, says cases where video contradicts police testimony are rare. “You have 960,000 police officers in this country and millions of contacts between those officers and citizens,” he says. “I’ll bet you can’t name 10 incidents where a citizen video has shown a police officer to have lied on a police report.” . . .

“Letting people record police officers is an extreme and intrusive response to a problem that’s so rare it might as well not exist,” Pasco insists. “It would be like saying we should do away with DNA evidence because there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that it could be wrong. At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures.”

Put some faith and trust in our authority figures? Hell no. And this sort of attitude just makes that trust even less likely.

Oh, this sort of thing makes that trust less likely still:

This is not the first time a police camera in Prince George’s County has malfunctioned at a critical time. In 2007 Andrea McCarren, an investigative reporter for the D.C. TV station WJLA, was pulled over by seven Prince George’s County police cars as she and a cameraman followed a county official in pursuit of a story about misuse of public funds. In a subsequent lawsuit, McCarren claimed police roughed her up during the stop, causing a dislocated shoulder and torn rotator cuff. McCarren won a settlement, but she was never able to obtain video of the incident. Prince George’s County officials say all seven dashboard cameras in the police cruisers coincidentally malfunctioned.

All seven dashboard cameras coincidentally malfunctioned?! That’s just insulting.

Some thoughts from Aaron Worthing. My thoughts from earlier this year are here.

Wired reports that federal agencies have been using credit card systems and other electronic systems to track the movements and activities of Americans in real-time, without obtaining warrants.

A few years ago, the press was outraged because we were eavesdropping on foreign terrorists who occasionally spoke to Americans. This is something entirely different. Here, agencies are tracking the movements of Americans on US soil. But, with a Democratic president in charge, I expect the press’s reaction to be muted, if there is any at all.

(Via Instapundit.)

Z Street, a pro-Israel non-profit organization, alleges the IRS is delaying its tax-exempt status and may reject it for taking a pro-Israel position. According to the complaint:

The plaintiff in this case, Z STREET, is a nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public about the facts relating to the Middle East, and that relate to the existence of Israel as a Jewish State, and Israel’s right to refuse to negotiate with, make concessions to, or appease terrorists. The case is brought because, through its corporate counsel, Z STREET was informed explicitly by an IRS Agent on July 19, 2010, that approval of Z STREET’s application for tax-exempt status has been at least delayed, and may be denied because of a special IRS policy in place regarding organizations in any way connected with Israel, and further that the applications of many such Israel-related organizations have been assigned to “a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.”

(Emphasis mine.)

If the allegations are true (and they are detailed and specific), this is a shocking, unconstitutional overreach, even for this administration.

(Via Pajamas Media.)

Judicial Watch has uncovered a smoking gun that proves that Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez was (at the very least) wrong when he testified that no political appointees were involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation charges against the Black Panthers:

COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Was there any political leadership involved in the decision not to pursue this particular case any further than it was?

ASST. ATTY. GEN. PEREZ: No. The decisions were made by Loretta King in consultation with Steve Rosenbaum, who is the Acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, Judicial Watch obtained emails showing that Thomas Perrelli (the Associate Attorney General, which is the DOJ’s 3rd-ranking official and obviously a political appointee) discussed the matter at length with Sam Hirsch (one of Perrelli’s deputies, and other political appointee).

The exchange begins:

From: Hirsch, Sam
Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2009 9:12 PM
To: Perrelli, Thomas J.
Subject: Fw: New Black Panther Party Update

Tom,

I need to discuss this with you tomorrow morning. I’ll send you another email on this shortly.

If you want to discuss it this evening, please let me know which number to call and when.

The exchange contains two-and-a-half pages of redacted material and ends “Thanks. Sorry you had to stay so late.”

Thomas Perrelli is Thomas Perez’s immediate boss.

Perez must be called to account for his inaccurate sworn testimony, and with the new Congress, I expect he will be. If Perez wants to claim that he knew nothing of his boss’s involvement in the case, let him do so.

(Via Big Government.) (Previous post.)