First Amendment
July 26, 2019 — John Hinderaker
Yesterday, presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign sued Google, alleging that the company wrongly suspended the campaign’s Google Ads account during the critical hours following the first Democratic debate. The Complaint is venued in federal court in central California. Its allegations are explosive. Gabbard accuses Google of trying to sabotage her presidential campaign because she, like Elizabeth Warren, has argued in favor of reining in the tech monopolies, including Google. Here
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July 9, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The Second Circuit has affirmed a district court decision holding that President Trump cannot block his critics on Twitter. Plaintiffs wanted to get Trump’s tweets directly and contended that their inability to view, retweet, and reply to Trump’s tweets limited their ability to participate with other members of the public in the comment threads that appear below the President’s tweets. The court agreed in a 29-page opinion that I have
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June 6, 2019 — Scott Johnson
James Freeman’s June 4 WSJ Best of the Web column is “Democrats vs. Nuns.” In the column he alerts us to this news: “More than two years after Barack Obama left the White House, there’s still no cease-fire in a legal war on women of faith. The non-profit law firm Becket said [on Tuesday] that a group of nuns will once again have to defend their beliefs in a San
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May 25, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The man from Wikileaks — i.e., Julian Assange — is the subject of a superseding indictment charging him with 17 counts under the Espionage Act along with the original count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion. I have embedded a copy of the indictment below. Charlie Savage expresses the institutional interest of the New York Times in the case in his story on the indictment: Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader,
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April 9, 2019 — Scott Johnson
Before the opening statements of the parties this morning Judge Quaintance announced her decision on the First Amendment issue raised by the motion of the Media Coalition challenging her pretrial order from the bench on March 29. I have discussed this order at length in previous installments of this series in which I described it as lawless. Judge Quaintance announced that on further review she was reversing her order. She
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April 7, 2019 — Scott Johnson
The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor continues this week with the completion of jury selection and the attorneys’ opening statements tomorrow. Noor is charged with second and third degree murder and second degree manslaughter in the killing of Justine Ruszczyk (known as Justine Damond) in July 2017. Ms. Ruszczyk had called 911 to seek police intervention in what she feared might be a rape occurring in the
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April 2, 2019 — John Hinderaker
I don’t remember when the phrase “hate speech” came into common use, but for some time now liberals have used it as an implicit attack on the First Amendment. Contrary to all law and logic, they press the view that anything they consider “hate speech” should be suppressed–if necessary, by the government (a government run by liberals, that is). CNN’s Christiane Amanpour engaged in an extreme form of this fallacy
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November 14, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The White House has banned CNN’s Jim Acosta from the White House grounds. It did so after Acosta, during a press conference, refused to stop talking after President Trump had addressed his question, and then refused to hand the microphone back to a young female staff member. The two — Acosta and the staffer — appeared to have a slight physical altercation. CNN sues under the First Amendment, the Fifth
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October 14, 2018 — John Hinderaker
You know that, of course. This story is just a drop of water in the ocean of officially-sanctioned campus leftism. At the University of Minnesota, there is a bridge over the Mississippi River on Washington Avenue. (BTW, it won’t be long before Minnesota Democrats demand that Washington Avenue be given a new name.) University organizations of all types are given space on the bridge to post signs. The college Republicans
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August 17, 2018 — John Hinderaker
Liberals control every newspaper in America, as far as I know, except the Manchester Union Leader. They control CBS, ABC, NBC and every cable network except Fox News. They control what is left of the news magazines, and pretty much every other magazine, too. Only talk radio and the pesky internet lie outside their grasp, so that is where they seek to impose censorship. But they have a problem: the
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March 19, 2018 — Steven Hayward
Attention all Bay Area Power Line readers: As Ed Sullivan used to say, this week I’ve got “a really big show” for you. This Wednesday and Thursday I am executing an Inchon landing behind the lines, with a two-day program starting with a late afternoon (5 pm) lecture on “The Metaphysics of Free Speech” from Harvey Mansfield, Harvard’s most well-known conservative. (Click the link to get location and RSVP information.) Then
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March 1, 2018 — Scott Johnson
This morning we resume our preview of the new issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Thanks to our friends at the Claremont Institute, I read the new issue in galley to select pieces — this week I have five because we featured two yesterday and two today) to be submitted for the consideration of Power Line readers. As always, wanting to do right by the magazine and by our
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February 16, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Our robed masters have really made their presence felt on the lower federal courts in their treatment of President Trump’s three so-called Muslim travel ban orders. The Supreme Court will have the final word and it is in light of the Court’s prospective final word in Trump v. Hawaii that David Rivkin and Lee Casey declared last week in the Wall Street Journal (at least according to the overoptimistic headline)
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January 28, 2018 — John Hinderaker
A bill has been introduced in South Dakota’s legislature that would go a long way toward protecting free speech on university and technical school campuses, while also encouraging intellectual diversity. It is House Bill 1073, and it will get a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee on Friday, February 2, at 10:00. (That is in Pierre, for any of you who are intrepid enough to consider attending.) You can read
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December 10, 2017 — Paul Mirengoff
Listening to the oral argument before the Supreme Court in the wedding cake case, it struck me how artificial the discussion was. Much of it centered on whether and under what circumstances cakes are speech. Bizarre. I don’t blame the advocates or the current Justices for the content of the argument. They must be mindful of Supreme Court precedents whether or not, as a practical matter, they fit this case
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December 7, 2017 — Scott Johnson
The tweet below finds the intersection of two of this week’s big stories. On the one hand, we have the oral argument in the Masterpiece Cake Shop case. (Professor Phillip Muñoz has published an illuminating essay on the deep issues baked into the case.) On the other hand, we have President Trump’s declaration that the United States now recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The infamous Linda Sarsour is
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October 11, 2017 — John Hinderaker
I don’t think we have written about the article by Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University titled “The Case For Colonialism,” which was published in Third World Quarterly. I haven’t read the article, but this is the abstract. It sounds as though the article is in line with my own thinking on the subject. While it certainly had its dark side–e.g., pretty much anything involving Belgium–European colonialism was, on
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