"The Apprentice," a movie about Trump's rise in the 1970s and 1980s under Roy Cohn's tutelage, opens in theaters this weekend. Simultaneously, virtually all the people buying tickets to this flick, would, if surveyed, declare that Citizens United was an immoral and catastrophic Supreme Court decision that destroyed democracy. Here's the problem: Donald Trump could've blocked this movie's release before Citizens United and not after. The people most opposed to Citizens United are the least likely to know why that case happened!
A federal appeals court has ruled that geofence warrants are unconstitutional, a decision that will limit the use of the controversial search warrants across several U.S. states.The Friday ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, found that geofence warrants are “categorically prohibited by the Fourth Amendment,” which protects against unwarranted searches and seizures. Civil liberties and privacy advocates applauded the ruling, which effectively makes the use of geofence warrants unlawful across the three U.S. states for now.Geofence warrants, also known as “reverse” search warrants, allow police to draw a shape on a map, such as over a crime scene, and demand that Google (or any other company that collects user locations) search its entire banks of location data for any phone or device that was in that area at a specific point in time. But critics have long argued that geofence warrants are unconstitutional because they can be overbroad and include information on entirely innocent people.
At airports across the U.S., Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents confront flyers as they are boarding flights and ask to search carry-on items. These interactions are supposed to be consensual. But flyers often get the impression that they have no choice but to submit to a search.#IJ currently has a class action lawsuit against the DEA and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) over their unconstitutional searches and seizures at U.S. airports.
On June 28, the Supreme Court handed down its most significant decision since Dobbs. Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo ended a 40 year-old, court-created doctrine "Chevron deference." Around the same time and on top of that, there were two other decisions both trimming the vast powers of the administrative state.And by listening to just this one episode, you'll likely know more about these SCOTUS decisions than any critic you meet.Understandably, progressives were hysterical. But we practice the Steelman here. Jim Babka reacts point-by-point to three progressives making their case (against the Court and for Chevron deference) in an MSNBC program. We go into the exercise presuming that they're making their best arguments. But we show, that's not what they did. In keeping with Grace, Jim improves two of their arguments. Even better, Jim provides provides a constitutional solution that allows them to keep the experts involved.Jim Babka has been nationally-quoted on the issue of bureaucrats "writing the laws" because he co-authored the Write the Laws Act, presently introduced in the Senate. Plus, his Downsize DC organizations filed an amicus brief in the Loper Bright Enterprises case. In it, they called for an end to Chevron deference. If you listen to this show...YOU'LL get quick yet profound insight on three SCOTUS decisions, YOU'LL learn how congress and the regulatory state have worked up till now, and YOU'LL discover why this decision was good news instead of bad. YOU'LL ALSO learn why Tainted Meat is a myth and Leaded Paint is a shibboleth.
In this episode, we provide you with FOUR reasons that both Hunter Biden and Donald Trump are innocent. We also reveal both a Republican and a Democrat hypocrisy in Hunter Biden's case.What are the implications of this case to you and to our future? Must there be escalation? We give both sides a politically powerful strategy that benefits them first, yet also gets us out of this mess.
And that is to say that unity does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And, it is not only possible but necessary to act together when we don't think alike.
Can a document unify a nation? Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute and author of American Covenant argues that the Constitution unified the United States at the founding of the country and that understanding the Constitution can help bring the country together today. Listen as Levin speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how the Constitution not only took into account fractious politics, but also ensured that polarization would lead to a stronger democracy. Topics include the inherent limitations placed on the majority and how that affects policy formation, the vital if misunderstood advantages of the electoral college, and why, despite all the warnings to the contrary, this is far from a dangerous moment in American political history.
In Florida, prisoners are charged $50 for every day of their original sentence—meaning they keep getting charged, even if they are released early. When former inmates inevitably fail to pay this massive bill, it can prevent them from ever moving on from their period spent behind bars.
There’s a fascinating new lawsuit against Meta that includes a surprisingly novel interpretation of Section 230. If the court buys it, this interpretation could make the open web a lot more open, while chipping away at the centralized control of the biggest tech companies. And, yes, that could mean that the law (Section 230) that is wrongly called “a gift to big tech” might be a tool that undermines the dominance of some of those companies. But the lawsuit could be tripped up for any number of reasons, including a potentially consequential typo in the law that has been ignored for years.
On March 4, the U.S. Supreme Court released its opinion in Trump v Anderson, 23-719. This is the Colorado ballot access case involving former President Donald Trump. Read it here. It is only 13 pages long and is probbly written by the Chief Justice, although it is unsigned. Justice Amy Comey Barrett wrote a one-page concurrence, and there is a six-page concurrence by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.All nine justices agree that states cannot enforce Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. The majority opinion says that only Congress can enforce it. The four concurrences agree that states cannot enforce Section Three, but they say there was no need for the majority to also hold that courts can’t enforce it either.Nothing in the opinions discusses state power to enforce other qualifications to hold the presidency or to run for president. Nothing in the opinions mentions the authority of political parties over their own nomination process. Nothing is said about whether Trump engaged in insurrection. There is a general philosophy expressed that it is undesirable for states to adjudicate section three because then there would be a patchwork effect. “State-by-state resolution of the question whether Section 3 bars a particular candidate for President from serving would be quite unlikely to yield a uniform answer consistent with the basic principle that ‘the President…represents all the voters of the Nation.'”Page twelve says, “The ‘patchwork’ would likely result from state enforcement would ‘sever the link that the Framers found so cricical between the National Government and the people of the United States’ as a whole.'” The opinion goes on to criticize a situation in which a presidential candidate is on the ballot in some states but not all of them. This part of the opinion will help to invalidate severe ballot access restrictions that apply to presidential candidates, aside from Section Three matters. Page two of the three-justice concurrence also expresses this point.As a result of the decision, which relies partly on Anderson v Celebrezze and partly on U.S. Term Limits v Thornton, the influence of both of those decisions is enhanced. It is likely that this opinion dooms any effort by supporters of term limits for Congress to get that 1995 ruling overturned, even though it was 5-4 back in 1995.
The Australien Government has made an ad about its Whistleblower Protection Laws, and it’s surprisingly honest and informative.
