law

The American murderocracy

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged law liberty on by

The first year of the second Trump administration isn’t over, and it’s already sunk into premeditated murder and death threats against members of Congress. If the USA were at all sane, Trump would long since have been impeached, convicted, and kicked out of the White House. Where we’ll be by the 2028 election is depressing to think about.

The US government has conducted extrajudicial killings of the crews of several boats in the name of stopping the drug trade, and recent disclosures show that survivors were slaughtered without cause on orders by Pete Hegseth:
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Sometimes everybody is wrong

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged law liberty Minnesota on by

A recent news article reports on a case where a woman acted like a scumbag but was apparently within her First Amendment rights. Everything about it is strange, and everyone seems to be wrong in important ways.

The article says: “Minnesota prosecutors filed misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges Tuesday against a woman accused of using a racist slur against a Black child at a playground — an incident the woman has since used to raise more than $800,000 after she appealed for help with relocating.” The article doesn’t give her exact words, but the linked official document says she used “the N-word” more than once. The charge is engaging “offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct, or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language that would reasonably tend to arouse alarm, anger or resentment in others.”
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The Democratic Party has abandoned America 1

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged law liberty New Hampshire on by

I am furious at the Democrats. They are cowards who won’t stand up to a president grabbing as much power as he can. To a man who has literally portrayed himself as king and pope. To a man who says he doesn’t know if he needs to uphold the Constitution.

To be precise, I mean the office holders and leaders in the party. Voters have to choose a party if they want to vote in primaries, and they choose where they think they’ll have a positive effect. They don’t necessarily like what the leaders are doing. But I have utter contempt for nearly all the Democrats in Congress.

The Republicans in Congress are despicable, with rare exceptions like Rand Paul. They’re actively collaborating with Trump to enable abductions of people and maintain a fake “emergency” so he can impose ruinous taxes on us. But that’s not the topic here. The Democrats are supposed to fight this. They don’t feel like it.
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Bad news for free speech in Bow, NH

This entry was posted in Censorship Commentary News and tagged censorship law New Hampshire on by

This has been a bad year for freedom of expression in the United States. ICE thugs have hauled people away without charges for expressing views that the government doesn’t like. In New Hampshire, a federal judge has delivered an outrageous decision regarding a protest in Bow, New Hampshire.

The ruling by Judge Steven McAuliffe is full of absurdities and disregard for the First Amendment. The basic argument is that school athletic events are a limited public forum, and the schools retain some control over types of expression at them. This is true, but it doesn’t mean they can arbitrarily decide what people can say or can’t. The restrictions have to serve a legitimate purpose and be viewpoint-neutral, and they have to be enforced evenly.
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“Experts are divided”

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged journalism law on by

A Washington Post article header has drawn outrage on Bluesky. Here it is:

How Trump is blasting through norms and testing limits of his power
 
Experts say President Donald Trump’s actions have pushed the country into fraught territory. They are divided on whether he has breached constitutional guardrails.

That implies that a significant number of experts think Trump hasn’t “breached constitutional guardrails.” Who are these experts? The one person they cite is Steven Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and co-chair of the Federalist Society. The article says:

He praised Trump’s embrace of a concept called the “unitary executive theory,” which posits that the president has supreme power over the executive branch, including the ability to remove officials.
 

In particular, Calabresi said, he was pleased with Trump’s moves to dismiss members of the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board.

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Trump goes after voters 1

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged law liberty on by

Donald Trump’s latest decree takes his power-grabbing to a new level. He has commanded the states to alter their laws to require proof of citizenship for voting. He has no legal authority at all to do this. The Constitution lets the states run elections; Congress has a limited ability to set requirements, and the president has no authority without an act of Congress. He is relying on intimidation of state officials and federal judges to get his way. Claiming the personal authority to decide who can vote is the action of a dictator or would-be dictator.
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Equating harassment with protest, and denying due process

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged education journalism law on by

The situation with harassment of Jewish students and the Trump administration’s actions is a mess where serious wrongs turn up on all sides. It’s vital, and difficult, to evaluate actions on principles rather than on tribal criteria. On the one hand, there is harassment and intimidation that hides under the innocent name of “protest.” On the other, there’s the improper invocation of laws and denial of due process against people accused of doing that.

Governmental overreach is the bigger concern, especially when the current executive branch is aggressively expanding its power. At the same time, intimidation on campus is a serious concern, and downplaying it as mere “protest” only gives the administration’s actions a facade of credibility. An example is a Washington Post article with the headline “New Trump demand to colleges: Name protesters — and their nationalities.”
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Anatomy of Trump’s SSA data grab

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged DOGE law liberty technology on by

In my previous post, I talked about inconsistencies in the reporting about what DOGE is doing and can do. I wrote the article on March 9 and had it appear publicly early on March 10, following my usual practice. About the time it appeared, I came upon a Washington Post article that linked to a detailed court filing that helps to clarify things. It’s a terrifying story, so here’s another post on the same day.
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Unraveling DOGE reporting

This entry was posted in Commentary and tagged DOGE journalism law liberty on by

A lot of what’s allegedly happening with DOGE doesn’t make sense. Some things just can’t be happening as reported; others need explanations that no one is giving. The news media are doing their usual bad job of delivering facts.

To start with, what is DOGE? The “Department of Governmental Efficiency” isn’t a department of the government, in spite of its name. Officially, it’s a “special commission” created by the president. It has no power over anybody beyond its own employees. Yet we keep hearing of government employees being fired by DOGE. A notice of termination by DOGE to, for example, a Department of Energy employee has no more significance than one from me. Either the terminations are actually coming from somewhere else, or people are complying for no apparent reason.
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