Law
June 20, 2018 — Scott Johnson
An overwhelming wealth of story lines emerges from the IG report on the Clinton email “investigation,” as I call it, released this past Thursday. I posted it via Scrbid here. Andrew McCarthy pointed out before the election in 2016 and repeatedly since (perhaps most recently here), the fix was in from the beginning. The fix was in because Obama was in on the wrongdoing and he was the head of
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June 18, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The leftist hate cult known as the Southern Poverty Law Center has settled defamation claims by two of the SPLC’s many victims. The Quilliam press release datelined Montgomery announces: MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA — The Southern Poverty Law Center, Inc. has apologized to Quilliam and its founder Maajid Nawaz for wrongly naming them in its controversial Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists. In a public statement, the SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, explained that
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June 17, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
John wrote here about the class action lawsuit that accuses Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions. The plaintiffs have moved for summary judgment, arguing that they should prevail based on facts not genuinely in dispute. One fact not genuinely in dispute is that Harvard’s own researchers found statistical evidence that the University’s undergraduate application process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In 2013, the Harvard Office of Institutional Research found that Asian-Americans
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June 16, 2018 — Scott Johnson
The three “Minnesota men” who were convicted after a three-week trial in federal court in Minneapolis appealed their convictions to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. I covered the trial every day on Power Line and following the convictions in the Weekly Standard article “‘Minnesota men’ on trial.” The Eighth Circuit heard oral argument in the appeals this past Thursday morning before a three-judge panel including
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June 11, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Supreme Court issued a decision today in Husted v. A. Phillip Randolph Institute, a case involving Ohio’s voter list maintenance policies. By a 5-4 vote, the Court upheld Ohio’s policy of removing ineligible and outdated voters from it rolls. The majority concluded that the practice under challenge – which cancels the registration of voters who do not go to the polls and who don’t respond to a notice –
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June 2, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Someone has leaked a confidential 20-page letter that President Trump’s legal team sent to Robert Mueller in January of this year. Not cool. The letter responded to Mueller’s request that Trump agree to be questioned about allegations that he committed obstruction of justice. Trump’s team advised Mueller that the president would not agree to an interview. However, the lawyers said they would be willing to provide written answers to questions
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May 25, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Washington Post reports on a suit in federal court alleging that policies instituted by the District of Columbia government to attract younger, more affluent professionals to poor, African-American neighborhoods discriminate against poor and working-class Blacks who have lived there for generations. The city stands accused of breaking up “close-knit” black communities. The policies challenged were undertaken pursuant to D.C.’s “New Communities” program, initiated to turn aging public housing complexes
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May 24, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, a Clinton appointee, ruled that President Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking certain followers because of the views they expressed. Judge Buchwald found Trump’s blocking to be “viewpoint discrimination,” which it is, and held that Trump is not exempt from constitutional obligations to refrain from such conduct. Then came the obligatory incantation: “No government official — including the President — is above the law.”
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May 14, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Today the Supreme Court ruled that a federal law barring states from legalizing sports betting violates the “anti-commandeering doctrine.” That doctrine is part of the Supreme Court’s federalism jurisprudence. It holds that the federal government cannot “commandeer” the states to enforce federal laws or policies. The decision was 7-2 on the core constitutional question of whether the federal law in question — the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA)
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May 11, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Did Politico’s Evan Mandery set out to expose the authoritarian nature of the American left in this article called “What Happened to Alan Dershowitz”? I’m not sure. Regardless, he has done a good job of it. Here are the key passages: Over this storied career, Dershowitz’s public persona has remained more or less unchanged: loud, provocative, brilliant and principled, if also relentlessly self-promoting. And, until recently, his positions have been
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May 11, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal has produced much hand-wringing from its supporters. Some of the angst is understandable. Former administration officials and many in the foreign policy establishment thought the deal was our best option for dealing with the threat of Iran developing nuclear weapons. I don’t agree, but acknowledge that the path Trump has chosen carries considerable risks (as, of course, did Obama’s). However, one
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May 9, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
As President Trump seriously contemplated ending U.S. participation in the Iran nuclear deal, John Kerry, the deal’s main architect, reportedly met multiple times with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and French President Emmanuel Macron. Did Kerry thereby violate the Logan Act? That Act provides: Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly
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May 5, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
Tim Ellis was a young partner at the law firm I started with when I left the government in the early 1980s. I worked with him briefly on a pro bono matter. The matter wasn’t active long enough for me really to get to know Ellis, but there was no doubting his inquisitiveness, thoroughness, doggedness, and strong sense of justice. I don’t think Ellis would have won any popularity contests
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May 4, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Senior United States District Judge T.S. Ellis III has been assigned one of the pending criminal cases — the one transferred to the Eastern District of Virginia — brought by the Special Counsel against Paul Manafort. In a hearing on the motion brought by Manafort to dismiss the charges as beyond the authority of the Special Counsel, Judge Ellis unloaded. As James Freeman puts it in his Best of the
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April 29, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Minneapolis’s Star Tribune dominates news coverage in the Twin Cities by setting the agenda for the rest of the local media. To the extent that it has influenced Minnesota politics — and its effect is certainly not insubstantial the left-wing tilt of its news coverage and opinion pages has done untold damage. Today’s Star Tribune story by Chris Serres on “racial bias” in child protection shows how it can be
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April 25, 2018 — Paul Mirengoff
The Supreme Court heard oral argument today on President Trump’s proposed ban on travel to the United States from a handful of countries nearly all of which happen to be predominantly Muslim. Things went considerably better for the attorney defending the travel ban (Solicitor General Noel Francisco) than for the attorney challenging it (Neal Katyal). The New York Times’ account is here. This is the report of ScotusBlog’s Amy Howe.
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April 25, 2018 — Scott Johnson
Paul Mirengoff frequently refers to “our robed masters” in the federal judiciary. Yesterday our robed master Bates of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia administered the latest in a series of legal defeats to the Trump administration’s effort to rescind the Obama administration’s unconstitutional program to regularize illegal immigrants by executive decree. The New York Times’s Miriam Jordan gives an account of the ruling in “U.S.
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