…is a suicide pact.
No federal bailouts, at least without a rewriting of the state constitution.
Category Archives: Law
Tibor Machan
RIP.
I saw him at a Reason event in LA a couple years ago. He will be missed.
[Saturday-morning update]
Nick Gillespie told me on Twitter that there will be a service in Santa Barbara in a couple months. I’ll post an update when I have more info.
Punishing Climate-Change Skeptics
In which my lawsuit (though not me personally) is discussed by my lawyers, in today’s WSJ. It’s now about sixteen months since we argued before the DC appellate court, with no ruling.
The Sixth Circuit
A lot of us did that years ago, but it’s nice to see this. But I expect the stonewalling to continue, because that’s what corrupted bureaucrats do, and will continue to do as long as there is no real accountability or consequences.
Powers And Duties
Does the president have a “duty” to put forth a nominee? Does the Senate have a “duty” to consider him or her? No.
I’ve been meaning to write about this but, as noted there, “shall” does not necessary mean that it is a mandatory act, and there is no time limit on it. The president has the power to nominate, and the Senate has the power to advise and consent, but it is not incumbent upon either to do so. The Framers intent was not to insure that appointees were appointed, but that it not be done unilaterally by a single branch. In their desire to limit government powers, they made appointments, as with much else, difficult, and I doubt they’d be displeased by either the “Biden rule” or the current Republican stance.
The only real duties that either branch has are to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” It is ultimately up to the people to decide if they are doing so, and to rectify the situation if not.
If the president chooses not to nominate, he will be judged in the next election. If the Senate advises and consents by advising the president that they will not consent, they too will be judged in the next election, or at least a third of them will be (as it happens, the Republicans have 24 seats at risk in the fall). But the Senate is doing nothing unconstitutional in deciding to let the people decide.
[Update a while later]
Welp, Kasich said today that he might nominate Garland. So we have that going for us. #RINO
Hillary Doesn’t Just Have An Email Problem
She has an NSA problem:
Now, over two months later, I can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.
Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.
How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.
You don’t say.
The SEDS Act
Dana has been talking about this for a year, but he’s finally introduced it:
To require the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to investigate and promote the exploration and development of space leading to human settlements beyond Earth, and for other purposes.
Development and settlement demand low cost of access to space, while NASA is forced by Congress to pursue a giant rocket that has exactly the opposite effect. I wish they’d left the E word out, because that’s implicit, and it allows people to maintain the status quo: “Well, the first thing we have to do is exploration, before we can think about development and settlement. And we can’t do exploration without SLS!”
I have a query in to Tony DeTora as to how this differs from the 1989 bill, because I still see no teeth in it regarding what to do if the administrator ignores it and doesn’t submit reports.
[Update a while later]
Related: A new book of essays and stories on the spiritual aspects of space
Merrick Garland
It’s too late for the administration to appeal to Constitutional norms:
the Obama administration, with its aggressive assertions of executive power, is in a poor position to appeal to constitutional norms. The administration showed a severe lack of respect for constitutional norms when, for example, contrary to decades of precedent that the Justice Department will defend any federal law with a plausible defense, it refused to defend the Defense of Marriage Act; when the administration forced Common Core standards on local education without anything resembling explicit congressional approval or even debate, based on an aggressive reading of vague existing law; when the administration unilaterally changed immigration policy via executive order, after Congress failed to pass legislation that would have accomplished similar ends; when the president has simply refused to enforce provisions of Obamacare that proved politically problematic; and, for that matter, when the president advocated for and signed perhaps the only major piece of American social legislation (Obamacare) that not only failed to win widespread bipartisan support, but also attracted not a single vote in either house of Congress from the other party. More generally, President Obama has repeatedly promised to try to circumvent Congress using any arguably legal means available, on the rather extra-constitutional grounds, contrary to the norms attendant to the separation of powers, that “we can’t wait” for Congress to pass legislation that the president favors.
Beyond that, it’s not as “moderate” a pick as some are claiming. For instance, he opposed Heller and the 2nd Amendment, and would have disarmed residents of DC.
[Update a few minutes later]
And now for something completely different: Wolf Blitzer actually calls out Debbie Wasserman Schultz for hypocrisy.
Pagliano
He is reportedly a “devastating witness” in the Hillary email case. Setting up a perjury trap for Hillary.
[Update in the afternoon]
The one email that may be the smoking gun that proves she violated the Espionage Act.
Beyond that, of course, she’s under investigation for public corruption. The FBI is putting together the entire chain, with Pagliano’s help, that will almost certainly show some quid pro quos with foreign governments in exchange for donations to the foundation.
[Sunday-afternoon update]
Oh, look another IT guy, at the State Department, who doesn’t want to talk.
I’m sure he has absolutely nothing to hide.
[Bumped]
The Next Supreme Court Justice
There’s no constitutional reason for it. They don’t even have to be lawyers.