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Constitution Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 01, 2015 28 Comments
A group called Disarm NYPD plans to celebrate the 4th of July with an July 1 event featuring the burning of American flags. It started as an event to burn the Confederate Flag. But other groups around the country turned such events into burning both the Confederate and American flags, so the Disarm NYPD group changed the name of the event, as announced on a Facebook Event page:
We changed the name of this event to "Burn the American Flag." We did this for several reasons, all of which are hopefully obvious, and should ring true to everyone with a conscious. The Confederate flag has long been a symbol of white supremacy, slavery, and Jim Crow. However, the Confederacy lost the war the American flag has unceasingly, from the first day it was ever hung, represented the exact same thing.

Posted by Amy Miller on June 17, 2015 26 Comments
There's a simple explanation for why civil asset forfeiture laws are coming under fire---they ruin lives. Not in the way a hefty speeding ticket or 7 am-on-the-dot tow "ruins lives," but in a real, "my life savings are gone and I don't know how I'm going to pay for my next meal" kind of way. Take Philadelphia, for example. From 2002 to 2012, the City of Philadelphia raked in $64 million in forfeiture funds. Licensed marijuana growers in Michigan have had their homes, property, and assets seized, contributing to a 10 year, $250 million payout to law enforcement. New Mexico took in $4 million in one year based on single sniff tests by drug dogs. The kicker? Much of what is seized by law enforcement is held without any evidence that the property owner has committed a crime. Last year, 24 year-old Charles Clark became just one more victim of a system that benefits law enforcement at the expense of everyday citizens. He lost $11,000 after officials decided that carrying cash in an airport should be treated as a crime---even though there's nothing unlawful about it. The Institute for Justice has the details:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 01, 2015 37 Comments
It's often said that the Second Amendment makes all the others possible. Let's take a step back. The Second Amendment is good, I'll admit.  But as readers know, the Third Amendment is just as -- if not more -- important:
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
What's more, what good is the First Amendment if a soldier is quartered at your desk while you try to blog? So I was glad to see Prof. Glenn Reynolds highlight a symposium at U. Tennessee Law School on the Third Amendment:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on February 04, 2015 12 Comments
(This post is just an excuse to gloat over the Patriots' victory, but please read on, there's a point here someplace.) Has there ever been a more exciting Super Bowl final quarter than the one we saw during the Patriots' latest win? First, there was the improbable, amazing, super-stupendous "what the **** just happened" catch to put the Seahawks on the verge of victory: Then, there was Bill Belichek playing mind games with Pete Carroll by not calling a time out, which caused "the call" and "the interception":

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 16, 2015 8 Comments
This day in 1919 was irrefutably one of the darkest days in American history -- the day the 18th amendment to the Constitution was ratified, making Prohibition the law of the land. Forever the hallmark of nanny-statism run amok, Prohibition was a progressive dream come true -- an amendment to the Constitution that limited freedoms rather than securing them. Interestingly enough, the 16th amendment paved the way for the 18th amendment. With the income tax in place, the federal government was no longer reliant upon taxes from alcohol producers. In his documentary Prohibition (which I highly recommend), Ken Burns explains:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 14, 2015 23 Comments
John Boehner gave a speech today that I could have written for him about Obama's lawless immigration actions. The speech hit all the right notes in connection with passage of a House funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security which blocks using funds for Obama's executive immigration plan. That plan, devised by the White House, unilaterally creates a new class of people effectively exempt from being penalized for immigration violations by inventing a process to obtain legal status found nowhere in the immigration laws. It is not executive or prosecutorial discretion as to better implementing current law---it is a rejection of current law.

Posted by Amy Miller on December 05, 2014 14 Comments
Back in August, the City of Philadelphia made headlines after their police department was busted using asset forfeiture procedures to pad city coffers. Now, officers in Michigan are under fire for targeting private citizens for forfeiture---without ever accusing those people of a crime. Southwest Michigan residents and medical marijuana license holders Wally Kowalski and Thomas Williams both had their property ransacked and assets seized by officers over a year ago; neither men have been charged with a crime, but the police departments refuse to return their cash or belongings.
Kowalski has a license to grow and distribute medical pot to several low-income people who depend on the drug. He grows the plants in a garden area enclosed by a barbed wire fence. But whether or not Kowalski had a legal right to grow mattered little to the state police, who seized his power generator—even though it had nothing to do with his marijuana plants—and some expensive equipment. They also destroyed the plants. ... The police froze his accounts, rendering him unable to make payments on his student loans or other bills. And he could no longer complete the immigration process for his wife, a resident of Africa. ... Thomas Williams, another southwest Michigan resident, suffered a similar ordeal. His medical marijuana activities prompted police to ransack his property while they left him handcuffed for 10 hours. The cops took his car, phone, TV, and cash. Afterward, he had no means of getting to the grocery store or even contacting another human being for days. Like Kowalski, he hasn't been charged with a crime.
Fun fact: police officers ransacked Kowalski's house for what we can only assume is evidence of his participation in a high-power midwestern drug cartel---but they didn't confiscate his marijuana license.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 27, 2014 19 Comments
Thanks to many for making this Thanksgiving so meaningful. This is not an exhaustive list, but it's a good start:
  • The Wife. We celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary earlier this year.
  • The Kids. Three great ones.
  • Health, and Mandy's recovery.
  • The U.S. of A. Still the place to be.
  • The Constitution and Bill of Rights. Beats any alternative I've seen.
  • Those who defend us against enemies, foreign and domestic.
  • Israel. The canary in freedom's coal mine.
  • The Readers. Seriously. Not joking.
  • The Authors, past and present. You helped build that.
  • The blogs and websites that link to us. The continued kindness of strangers is appreciated.
  • Fellow Ithaca conservatives, all ten of you.
  • The hope that the part of the human spirit that yearns to be free can prevail over evil, in Iran and elsewhere. (video h/t Caroline Glick)(original here)

Posted by Mike LaChance on November 23, 2014 12 Comments
Wow. It's not often that I can say it but this new video from the GOP is really powerful. Whoever made this video deserves a promotion. The ad uses an audio track of Hillary Clinton criticizing George W. Bush's so-called "imperial presidency." Via the Washington Free Beacon:
An Imperial Presidency A new video released by the GOP on Friday calls out former Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton for her hypocrisy on the issue of executive action. In 2008, Clinton said the George W. Bush administration was transforming the executive branch into an “imperial presidency.” In 2014, Clinton said she supported President Obama’s decision to grant citizenship to more than four million illegal immigrants. Clinton unknowingly provided the narration for the GOP’s newest video. “Unfortunately our current president does not seem to understand the basic character of the office he holds,” Clinton said of Bush in April 2008. “Rather than faithfully execute the laws, he has rewritten them through signing statements, ignored them through secret legal opinions, undermined them by elevating ideology over facts. Rather than defending the constitution, he has defied its principles and traditions.”
Check it out:
“This administration’s unbridled ambition to transform the executive into an imperial presidency in an attempt to strengthen the office has weakened our nation.”
But that was then. This is now:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 16, 2014 35 Comments
One of the most frequent questions I get is "How can we stop Obama from ...." The ellipses reflects that there are a variety of issues on which people want Obama stopped. The answer to most of those questions is, as Obama himself suggested, to go out and win some elections. And that is exactly what just happened earlier this month. In what appropriately could be termed a legal insurrection, voters around the country rejected the Party of Obama and his policies. So much so that Republicans in the House have a historic majority even beyond what the 2010 wave brought in, and Republicans regained control of the Senate by a comfortable margin. That will go a long way towards stopping Obama, but only if Obama respects the boundaries of his constitutional power. By tradition, a President respects the constitutional powers of the other branches of government, although there always is tension. When that respect is breached, there is precious little constitutional enforcement power. Congress can write laws, but it cannot execute those laws; for that Congress depends on the Executive Branch, which is given some level of enforcement discretion since no legislation can be so specific as to delineate who does what and when. Similarly, the Courts are loathe to get involved in refereeing political disputes between Congress and the President, and there even are questions as to whether Congress has "standing" to sue to demand enforcement. The Supreme Court has no army, other than the public expectation that its decisions will be respected. On the flip side, Congress has no power, for example, to conduct its own foreign policy, appoint its own ambassadors and operate its own embassies. The bonds that keep our constitutional system working are not through the barrel of a gun, but through the core good faith of each branch respecting constitutional boundaries.

Posted by Bryan Jacoutot on November 11, 2014 3 Comments
In a recent op-ed for the Daily Beast, Senator Rand Paul became the latest critic of what many see as a long history of Presidential abuse of power stretching back to Richard Nixon. In his piece, entitled "Obama's ISIS war is illegal," Paul made clear his view that the President’s action against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has eclipsed its legality — if there ever was any to begin with — because we have now crossed the 90-day provisional authorization for military force permitted by the War Powers Resolution of 1973. To be sure, it doesn't appear Paul is not advocating for the end of hostilities against the roundly condemned members of ISIS. Rather, he is merely asserting a simple but essential truth about our system of government: Process matters.
I believe the President must come to Congress to begin a war… It must be declared and made valid, or it must be ended. Congress has a duty to act, one way or the other.
While it is true that we live in a time that exposes our nation to swift attacks on a grand scale, this reality does not justify the manner in which President Obama is circumventing the constitutional prerogative of Congress. Indeed, 90 days was ample time for the President to situate a small number of forces on the ground, carry out targeted airstrikes, and prepare a request to Congress to authorize military force. Yet no such request has been submitted. Obama is not the first President to engage in this realm of constitutionally questionable behavior, but the implications of his continued insistence on going it alone in nearly every aspect of his Presidency — foreign and domestic — threatens to undermine the very framework of the nation’s structure of governance.

Posted by New Neo on November 09, 2014 16 Comments
A constitutional crisis may loom on the horizon if President Obama follows through on his threats of executive action on immigration reform. So it might be a good time to revisit what the Founders had to say about protecting future generations from the kind of tyranny that could occur even in a democracy. When the Founders set up our government the way they did, it was not because of any sort of naiveté or vague hopefulness about government or its leaders in general. They realized that there is no way to protect people who have lost their own wisdom and judgment about these things. The Founders tried to put in all the built-in, automatic stops to tyranny they could devise, and they were tremendously clever and creative about it. But they also realized that the task of protecting people was impossible, and that the temptation to go the way of tyranny would be great. Perhaps even unstoppable. But they tried their best. Maybe even the best anyone could have done. Let's hear John Adams:
I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty. When clear prospects are opened before vanity, pride, avarice, or ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate philosophers and the most conscientious moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.
From the same letter:

Posted by 0387erp on October 05, 2014 15 Comments
Have you noticed that everything nowadays gets videotaped? With everyone suddenly having a smart-phone that photographs and videotapes, every newsworthy or even trivial event gets recorded and presented on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or onto someone’s blog. This phenomenon has coincided with the movement of “citizen journalists,” who aim to bring the straight news to blogs and websites all over, giving the unvarnished news to anyone who cares to check the website in question, oftentimes pointed there by the Drudge Report or another news aggregator. No licenses or formal credentials are needed – just a thirst for getting the straight truth out there for viewers or readers to watch and make up their own minds. What about videotaping the police? So much of what they do is newsworthy, and their salaries are paid by our tax-dollars. You would think that videotaping the police in a public area, not interfering with them, would be perfectly fine. Try telling that to Emily Good, the Rochester, New York resident who in 2011 saw the local police arresting someone right in front of her house. From her front yard, Ms. Good pulled out her iPod and started filming. One of the officers involved saw the filming and claimed that he felt unsafe with her filming from that location, so Ms. Good backed up and kept filming. The officer ordered Ms. Good to stop filming and go inside her house, which she refused. Then the officer arrested Ms. Good, claiming that she was obstructing the arrest. The criminal case against Ms. Good was dismissed as soon as a local prosecutor read some of the details, but she spent many hours in jail, and several police officers later showed up at a meeting of supporters and issued parking tickets for cars parked more than 12 inches from the curb.

Posted by Mike LaChance on September 21, 2014 17 Comments
Congressman Adam Schiff of California appeared on FOX News Sunday today and said rather plainly that congress has pretty much given up on the rules. Patrick Brennan of National Review has the details:
Dem Congressman: Is Congress Abdicating Its Consitutional War Powers? ‘Absolutely’ Asked this morning by Fox News’s Chris Wallace whether Congress is forfeiting its responsibilities by recessing before voting on whether to authorize a new war in Iraq and Syria, one Democratic congressman was blunt: “Absolutely,” California congressman Adam Schiff said. A member of the House intelligence committee, Schiff argued “the president has said this is a war, this is going to last years, this is quintessentially something that the Constitution empowered only Congress to declare.
Here's the video: Last week, Schiff wrote a piece for Time Magazine on the same subject:
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