Here’s a pop quiz: When can an Army colonel overrule the Secretary of Defense? It happened last week for probably the first time in modern history. The short answer is: Even in the military, the Secretary of Defense cannot change the rules and procedures for criminal...
What if you were allowed to vote only because it didn’t make a difference? What if no matter how you voted, the elites always got their way? What if the concept of one person/one vote was just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if...
My family and friends are angry with me because I won’t tell them for whom I plan to vote for president. I have not voted for the Republican or Democrat for president since 1984, when I happily voted for Ronald Reagan. Since those days, the Democrats have gravitated...
Can the president fight any war he wishes? Can Congress fund any war it chooses? Are there constitutional and legal requirements that must first be met before war is waged? These questions should be addressed in a national debate over the U.S. military involvement in...
In 1791, when Congressman James Madison was drafting the first 10 amendments to the Constitution -- which would become known as the Bill of Rights -- he insisted that the most prominent amendment among them restrain the government from interfering with the freedom of...
When Congress enacted the Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA), it claimed the statute would guarantee the privacy of digital data that service providers were retaining in storage. The act prohibited the providers from sharing the stored data, and it prohibited...
“Oh, what a tangled web we weaveWhen first we practice to deceive.”--Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) The case of the Gitmo plea agreement keeps getting curiouser and curiouser. A few weeks ago, we learned that a plea agreement had been entered into by way of a signed...
“Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”--First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution When James Madison agreed to be the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787, he could not have known that just...
It is always dangerous to human freedom and due process when politics interferes with criminal prosecutions. Yet, present-day America is replete with tawdry examples of this. The recent exposures of the political machinations of the Chief Justice of the United States...
In 1966, two famous Russian literary dissidents, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, were tried and convicted on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet state. The two were authors and humorists who published satire abroad that mocked Soviet leaders for...
“Those who have sown the wind shall reap the whirlwind.”-- Hosea 8:7 The federal antipathy to compliance with the Constitution is well known and well documented. Presidents have declared war in contravention of the constitutional command that only Congress may do so....
“America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy …She might become the dictatress of the world,But she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.”-- John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) In the middle of his term as Secretary of State, the future president John...
Don't miss Judge Napolitano LIVE at the RPI 2024 DC Conference! “Every move you makeAnd every vow you breakEvery smile you fakeEvery claim you stakeI’ll be watching you.” -- “Every Breath You Take,” song by The Police The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution...
Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the “wall” between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited...
In the months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating them on Osama bin Ladin. Then, after it murdered bin Ladin, the government decided that the true mastermind was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. By the time of bin Ladin’s death,...
Sometime before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have “near certainty” that the target of...
“Freedom is always just one generation away from extinction.”-- Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) In December 1776, just six months after the Declaration of Independence had been signed and a year and a half into the Revolutionary War, Thomas Paine sensed a desperation...
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion,and only one person were of the contrary opinion,Mankind would be no more justifiedIn silencing that one person,Than he, if he had the power,Would be justified in silencing mankind.”-- John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) The...
In his famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1928 called the right to be left alone the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. He was referring to the right to be left alone from the...
When a presidential debate devolves into an argument over golf scores and afterward the public argues about the candidates’ mental acuity or personal honesty, when the question for voters is who is the sharper debater rather than who would be more faithful to the...
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