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Posted by Amy Miller on December 13, 2014 2 Comments
Progressives have long decried the existence of the American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC) as nothing more than a private outlet for corporate interests, and attacked its members with all the fervor of a dog on a particularly puzzling bone. As a staffer in the Texas Legislature, I fielded countless calls from liberal groups demanding to know whether or not my boss was a member of the organization, and saw e-mail and phone campaigns attacking ALEC-model legislation fall flat against the reality of solid legislative drafting and conservative policy making. Progressive advocates have started the State Innovation Exchange, or "SIX," as a sort of answer to the the influence ALEC member-legislators have over how bills are crafted in their respective states. The group appears to have a particular commitment to four separate policy areas---criminal justice reform, energy and the environment, campaign finance reform, and income inequality---and is promoting its already-existing "library of legislation" it hopes will eventually counter conservative efforts to implement ALEC model legislation. The real mission of SIX, however, doesn't seem to have anything to do with promoting legislation; instead, organizers seem rather excited about using guerrilla-media tactics to tank conservative legislation based on the slip-ups of any Republican candidate they can catch on camera. From the Washington Examiner:

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Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 13, 2014 14 Comments
The differing treatment of Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren pretty much sums up the state of implicit media bias. Compare these two headlines from The Hill regarding Warren's attempt to cajole the House into defeating the CRomnibus, with Ted Cruz's similar effort in the Senate. Warren made "her mark" and raised her presidential prospects: The Hill Elizabeth Warren Makes Her Mark
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s crusade against the $1.1 trillion spending bill backed by the White House firmly establishes the Massachusetts populist as a powerful player in Washington. The freshman Democrat took on President Obama and her party’s leadership, and appeared to inspire an uprising in the House.... Peter Ubertaccio, a political science professor at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, who follows Warren’s career, said that this week, Warren demonstrated a better feel for the sentiments of her party than her leadership. “If she’s able to succeed in the Senate at the expense of her own leadership team — the team that she’s on — it will have the practical impact of moving the center of power away from folks like Schumer and toward her,” he said. “That’s pretty significant for a freshman senator that’s been brought into the leadership. It could also reverberate in the 2016 presidential race, which liberal Democrats are dying for Warren to enter as a rival to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
As for Cruz, according to the same author of the Warren post he's just the same old obstructionist firebrand he's always been:

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 13, 2014 9 Comments
Last night on Special Report with Bret Baier, Charles Krauthammer offered commentary on Elizabeth Warren's very theatrical protest of the so-called Cromnibus. Things are a little different now that a Democrat is objecting to a government funding bill. Transcript via National Review:
What should one think of Elizabeth Warren’s brinksmanship over the cromnibus bill last night? “Spectacular hypocrisy, a festival of hypocrisy,” says Charles Krauthammer. “And, of course, the media loves it when it’s a liberal Democrat who leads the fight, she’s a ‘principled’ politician,” Krauthammer said on Friday’s Special Report. “Whereas when it’s Ted Cruz, he’s a terrorist, essentially.” Although Krauthammer is not convinced that Warren will run in 2016, “her star is rising,” he said, “and the hero worship of the media is beginning. This sort of sounds and feels a bit like the early Obama years, between 2004 and 2008.
Here's the video, via the Washington Free Beacon: Krauthammer noted that if Warren is running for president, this was the moment she launched her campaign.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on December 12, 2014 6 Comments
Even the Free-Market Jesus Paradise has regulatory issues once in a while. Wednesday, three Texan craft breweries joined with the Institute for Justice to file suit against the state of Texas and specifically, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission. Passed in 2013, Senate Bill 639 faces a Constitutional challenge because it, "strips breweries of their traditional right to sell their distribution rights and instead forces them to surrender those rights to distributors without compensation," according to the Institute for Justice. “It is unconstitutional for Texas to force brewers to give distributors property that they never earned and don’t deserve,” said Matt Miller, managing attorney for the Institute for Justice's Texas office. More specifically, the plaintiffs claim:
Texas cannot force them to give away their territorial rights—a part of their business—for free to distributors. They bring two claims: a takings claim under Article I, Section 17 of the Texas Constitution,[xii] which protects private property rights; and a substantive due process claim under Article I, Section 19 of the Texas Constitution, which protects economic liberty—the right to earn an honest living free from unreasonable government interference.
“For the last 18 years, I’ve poured my life into this business,” said Chip McElroy, president of Live Oak Brewing. “I’m proud to have been part of the Texas craft beer Renaissance. When Texas passed this law, not only did it give away part of what my employees and I built—it took my beer off the shelves in Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and other parts of Texas where Live Oak beer would otherwise be available.”

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Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 12, 2014 25 Comments
College Insurrection and others recently reported how the President of Smith College apologized to the student body for using the term "All Lives Matter" rather than "Black Lives Matter." A Cornell engineering student just tweeted to me about a similar statement from the Chief of the Cornell University Police, Kathy Zoner, in an all campus email. https://twitter.com/TTimeOnThe19th/status/543545839927693312 I checked my own email, and sure enough, there it was: Cornell Police #ALLLIVESMATTER That original message from the week before was:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 12, 2014 23 Comments
You thought it was bad that law students at Columbia, Harvard, Georgetown and Berkeley demanded exam delays because of the failure of grand juries to indict in the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner? Sit down. Harvey Silverglate, civil liberties lawyer and co-founder of the FIRE, tweets a link to a Volokh Conspiracy post: https://twitter.com/HASilverglate/status/543529885248282625 The original story is from the UCLA Daily Bruin, Law school exam question on Ferguson shooting draws criticism:
Some students at the UCLA School of Law have expressed concerns after a professor asked an exam question this week relating to the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, in Ferguson, Mo. The exam, given by Professor Robert Goldstein in Constitutional Law II, asked students to write a memo related to the Ferguson shooting. Some students who took the exam said they found it difficult to write about the incident in terms of the first amendment while ignoring issues such as police brutality.... Hussain Turk, a second-year law student who took the exam, said he thinks the question was problematic because he thinks exams should not ask students to address controversial events. He added that he thinks the question was more emotionally difficult for black students to answer than for other students.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 12, 2014 4 Comments
Update: The Senate has managed to muster the majority vote needed to pass the NDAA. Votes are still flowing in. (Bill eventually passed 89-11.) --- You can watch the debate and final vote here, via C-SPAN. The Senate has been in session since 10 this morning, debating a $585 billion defense authorization. The National Defense Authorization Act, when passed, will authorize spending by the Pentagon into 2015, and includes a controversial lands use portion that would create new national parks and expedite the permit process for oil and gas drilling. Interestingly enough, most of the chatter about the NDAA has revolved not around defense spending itself, but around the unrelated, deficit-neutral land use provisions. From The Hill:
“The NDAA for fiscal year 2015 is a legislative hodgepodge that includes those straightforward, noncontroversial items that almost all of us support, but also numerous other provisions that are unrelated to national defense,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said. “Most egregiously, the drafters secretly added 68 unrelated bills pertaining to the use of federal lands.” ... As the House prepares to leave town Thursday night, the bill's authors made it clear it that this bill was the only chance to pass an NDAA authorization by the end of the year. “We have to pass this bill,” Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said ahead of the vote. “The House is going to go home and there are no ways to make any changes.” Senators on both sides of the aisle defended the lands use portion, saying the Congressional Budget Office reported it would be deficit neutral. It designates new national parks and wilderness areas and expedites the permit process for oil and gas drilling, among other things. “That is why the package of lands bills in the National Defense Authorization Act is vitally important to America.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said. “This compromise is the chance for the Senate to get something done.”

Posted by Amy Miller on December 12, 2014 17 Comments
The NLRB has spent the past year doing their best to make it easier for union organizers to force workers into union membership. Their McDonald's ruling brought us closer to mass unionization, and a new rule that was just passed seeks to speed up the union elections process: From Politico:
The rule will require businesses to postpone virtually all litigation over eligibility issues until after workers vote on whether to join the union, thereby depriving management of a stall tactic that unions widely claim benefits the employer. In effect, regional NLRB directors will be given broad discretion to rule such litigation unnecessary until an election takes place. ... The regulation will eliminate a previously-required 25-day period between the time an election is ordered and the election itself, and it will require employers to furnish union organizers with all available personal email addresses and phone numbers of workers eligible to vote in a union election. An NLRB decision handed down yesterday essentially prohibited employers from denying union organizers access to company email. The rule will also, for the first time, allow for the electronic filing and transmission of union election petitions.
You can call it a stall tactic, but it's certainly a valid one, considering the demands union organizers make not only on employers, but on the personal privacy of employees. Now, employees won't even have a choice when it comes to participating in the conversation. Obviously, businesses and unions are at odds with each other over whether or not this new rule will help workers, or make it impossible for them to make an informed choice about unionization:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on December 12, 2014 5 Comments
Rasmea Odeh, convicted in Israel of involvement in a supermarket bombing that killed two students and in Detroit of immigration fraud, was released yesterday on $50,000 cash bond. Prosecutors had planned to challenge the source of the bond money, but withdrew that challenge. Odeh's guilt on the bombing and other terrorist activity, and the immigration fraud, is beyond serious doubt, notwithstanding the propaganda hyperbole by anti-Israel activists and websites supporting her. Odeh will be sentenced in March. She faces 10 years in prison, but almost certainly will receive a small fraction of that. Regardless, she will be deported after her prison sentence. Yet Odeh's inability to acknowledge her guilt on the immigration charge, and defiant claims that the immigration conviction was unjust and based on racism, may result in a longer prison sentence than otherwise could be expected.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 12, 2014 11 Comments
Democrats speak out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to campaign finance laws. They say they want big money out of American politics but they'll stop at nothing to raise big money to install Hillary Clinton as America's next president. Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon reports how that goal may have resulted in a violation of law:
Pro-Hillary PAC Accused of Illegal Activity in FEC Lawsuit An anti-Hillary Clinton PAC filed a lawsuit on Thursday to compel the Federal Election Commission to determine whether the pro-Clinton Super PAC Ready for Hillary is violating campaign finance laws. The Stop Hillary PAC originally filed a complaint with the FEC in January, claiming that Ready for Hillary may be illegally conducting authorized campaign activity on behalf of Hillary Clinton. According to the complaint, Ready for Hillary used an email list owned by Hillary Clinton’s Senate committee to send out fundraising letters. Ready for Hillary also allegedly sent out the solicitations using the email address [email protected]—a website that the complaint says is owned by Clinton’s authorized committee. The Ready for Hillary email stated “now is the time to get our support for Hillary organized and ready for 2016,” according to the lawsuit.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 11, 2014 38 Comments
UPDATE: The House passed the massive spending bill. Looks like Senate short term vote tonight and vote tomorrow on bill: You know what comes next:
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