Professor Foley has some thoughts on Senator Lee’s and Rep. Hensarling’s proposal.
And Mia Love wants to simplify legislation.
The latter is a great idea, but it’s going to be really hard to come up with a way to enforce single-issue that the porkers and get-along-to-go-alongers won’t find a way to circumvent.
SCOTUS is going to review the “take care” clause. This is huge, and a potential opportunity to finally rein in a tyrannical executive.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More at the WaPo from Fred Barbash:
In the view of Texas and others, Obama admitted both that he had no power under the law and that he thus, in his words, “changed the law” while pretending that he wasn’t. Bad faith.
“There generally wouldn’t be any evidence of bad faith,” Georgetown University Law Professor Randy Barnett, who formulated the winning Commerce Clause argument in the Supreme Court challenge to the Affordable Care Act, said in an interview. “But here we have public declarations [from Obama] that ‘I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority, I don’t have the authority’ and that ‘Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act, Congress won’t act’ and then you also have the enactment of what looks like legal rules, not just discretion, but whole classes of people who are exempt from the law, the very same law the president was urging Congress to pass….it suggests that he’s not acting in good faith.”
You don’t say.
So her staff cut and pasted data off a top-secret server so they could send it in the clear to Hillary’s email address on her unsecured server?
Someone will be or is being threatened by the FBI with a long vacation in Club Fed over this. I suspect that someone isn’t going to be willing to take the fall for Her Highness.
I haven’t read the whole symposium yet, but I agree with the Beck And Boaz. I understand, and even share the rage that fuels his campaign. I don’t understand the notion that someone as completely lacking in principles as him is the solution.
..had emails on it containing information beyond top secret.
After what happened to Petraeus (and is currently happening), if she isn’t indicted for this, it will be beyond a travesty. And the end of the rule of law in this country.
[Update a few minutes later]
And the State Department has “found” thousands of new documents under FOIA from Judicial Watch.
[Update a while later]
Good lord, the IG had to be read into the program in order to read the emails.
I’m sure that the media is thrilled that Sarah Palin is endorsing Trump today, so they don’t have to report on this.
[Friday-morning update]
Michael Mukasey’s take: A criminal charge is justified. More than one, I’d say.
[Bumped]
[Afternoon update]
Hillary’s unsecured server may have exposed a human intelligence asset.
It’s time to claim your piece. An interesting read on space property rights at Aeon, with a lot of quotes from your humble correspondent. [H/T to Paul Dietz]
I’ve found a silver lining, over at National Review.
My home town, Flint, Michigan, has been in the news recently, and it’s been many decades since good news has come out of that city. Kevin Williamson notes the word that is rarely used in reporting on the story: “Democrat“:
We have a special problem in the United States, which is that the Democratic party is more of a crime syndicate than a political party, and it is deeply embedded in institutions ranging from the universities (where manufactured hate crimes and phony rape cases are used as political weapons) to the prosecutors’ offices (which bully law-enforcement personnel and file specious felony charges against politicians for such ordinary actions as vetoing legislation) to the unions (see California) and the schools. It doesn’t matter how many laws Hillary Rodham Clinton breaks, or how often she lies about it — the attorney general is a Democrat, and that’s that. Tom DeLay can be brought up on felony charges for allegedly having broken a law that wasn’t even on the books at the time he was said to have broken it (the case was eventually laughed out of court, after it had ended his political career, which was the point) but IRS criminal conspirator Lois Lerner is going to spend the rest of her days enjoying a fat pension at your expense.
And the media is complicit.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Blame the Chicago policy-shooting cover up on one-party rule.
Rep. Bridenstine is planning a new bill to restructure both military and civil space. I gave him a copy of the book a year ago. I wonder if it influenced him?
…for Mars.
They seem to be a little confused about positive versus negative rights. You may have a right to leave, but you can’t demand that someone else pay for it. A “right to oxygen”? Not obvious how to handle that one. The solution to how to overthrow a tyrannical government is, of course, a Second Amendment.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Can a democracy exist on Mars?
…naive, wishful thinking seems to underpin all of the very hard questions about what governance and daily life on Mars might possibly look like. One reason could be the participants: the organizer of these events is an astrobiologist, and they seem to have gotten their insight into politics from writers like Stephen Baxter. This is not a dig against either men — astrobiology is an incredibly interesting subject, and I love Baxter’s books — but they are not experts in governance or nation-building (which is what a colony will be). There is, luckily, an entire field of academic study devoted to these questions: academics who have spent decades understanding how and why regimes can be resisted, how to build new nations, and so on. They don’t seem to have been included in this discussion.
Instead it looks like most other efforts at imagining space colonies: well meaning but ultimately naive technocrats imagining a western technocratic society as the best structure. And just like with Musk’s concept of a Mars colony, the serious economic issues at play here, which are a big deal in designing any society, are ignored. They assume it will be a mostly-deregulated libertarian economic system, again despite the inescapable fact that any space colony will have to concern itself primary with generating enough air and water to keep everyone alive. It is utterly baffling.
As he notes, tech people aren’t necessarily the best people to design a functional society.