A failed war does not end when the drones stop flying. It creates a new danger: A government that refuses to admit defeat and a president who, having failed abroad, seeks muscular victories elsewhere. The war against Iran is a case study in the limits of military...
The recent suppression of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture-tainted confessions at Guantanamo Bay is far more than a victory for a defendant. It is a victory for the Constitution. The United States government today alleges that Mohammed was the mastermind of the Sept....
There is a point in the decline of republics when the problem is no longer that government breaks its own laws. Governments will always behave unlawfully. The deeper problem comes when the constitutional machinery designed to prevent those acts stops functioning --...
When a government agency comes to an internet service provider demanding information about Americans because of what they have said on social media, the provider should discard the demand, close the door or hang up the phone. The government is not entitled to rummage...
"The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. … They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone -- most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.”-- Justice Louis D....
The war in Iran is unlawful and unconstitutional, but in post-World War II America, it is normal. Here is the backstory. When President Donald Trump decided to begin bombing Iran last June, he did not state a coherent or lawful reason for doing so. His director of...
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is not qualified to be the attorney general of the United States because he has demonstrated a hopeless conflict between the rule of law -- which he has taken an oath to support -- and his sense of personal loyalty to President...
One of the defining failures of modern American government has been the steady erosion of Congress's constitutional authority over war. The Constitution grants Congress -- not the president -- the power to declare war. Congress decides to go to war. The president...
The question recently asked by a federal judge in Miami -- can the president sue an entity in the executive branch of the federal government and benefit from the resolution of that lawsuit? -- seems to beg the question. How could anyone sue an entity he...
Which is better -- to be ruled by one tyrant 3,000 miles away or by 3,000 tyrants one mile away? -- Rev. Mather Byles (1706-1788) Does it really matter if the instrument curtailing liberty is a monarch or a popularly elected legislature? This conundrum, along with the...
Since its inception, the government of the United States has inexorably exceeded its powers under the Constitution. All three branches have been complicit in a consistent pattern of constitutional indifference. Congress has regulated in areas of governance nowhere...
The Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, embraces two value sets. The first is natural rights, and the second is limited government. After 250 years, neither value has survived, and the opposite of each currently prevails in America. Thomas Jefferson drafted...
When President Donald Trump appointed an obviously unqualified friend, a home builder executive, to be acting director of national intelligence, he inadvertently triggered attention to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The director of national...
America’s longest current criminal prosecution is in its 15th year, on its fifth judge, and still has no trial date. The defendants are Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged mass murder co-conspirators. Mohammed is the second person that the government has...
Some of the recent legal challenges to the use of surveillance by the Department of Homeland Security upon Americans have resulted in the revelation of truly terrifying behavior by the government, in direct defiance of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. We now...
This week, President Donald Trump announced that he plans to give away tax dollars without congressional or judicial authorization to his friends and allies whom he believes were mistreated by the Biden administration. Can he legally do...
"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punishedunless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” -- Voltaire (1694-1778) Last week, when the Pentagon resumed its attacks on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, the media...
In 200-plus years of interpreting the free speech clause of the First Amendment, the courts have narrowed and expanded its scope. The Supreme Court employed a particularly narrow approach during much of the last century, through two world wars and then the Red Scare...
The Fourth Amendment protects all persons from warrantless government searches and seizures of their persons, houses, papers and effects. It requires that warrants be supported by probable cause of crime and specifically describe the place to be searched and the...
In a famous Supreme Court one-liner, reminding the legal community of the finality of the court’s rulings, the late Justice William J. Brennan Jr. is reputed to have said that the Constitution means whatever any five of us say it means. This reflects the basic math...
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