Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Government now wants to seize your car for going 5 MPH over the limit, by Simon Black

Posted on December 1, 2018 | 2 comments

Civil asset forfeiture easily ranks in the top 10 list of government scams, although there’s plenty of competition. From sovereignman.com:

We’ve discussed this on and off for several years now. Civil asset forfeiture is a legal process that allows the government to seize assets and cash from citizens without any due process or judicial oversight.

You don’t even have to be charged with a crime. You are assumed guilty unless you can somehow prove your innocence.

Of course, not everyone has this ability… if you aren’t local, state, or federal law enforcement, this is called stealing, and you go to prison.

Did you know? You can receive all our actionable articles straight to your email inbox… Click here to signup for our Notes from the Field newsletter.

But the government is actually a bigger problem than common thieves.

A 2015 report showed that law enforcement used civil asset forfeiture to steal more from US residents than every thief, robber, and burglar in America combined.

About $4.5 BILLION worth of cash, cars, homes, and other property is taken by civil asset forfeiture each year — hundreds of millions more than common criminals steal.

And it happens at every level. Your local cop can use civil asset forfeiture just like your state trooper. And then any one of the armed agents of the US government—from the FBI to the Fish and Wildlife Service—can rob you for whatever reason they want.

Continue reading →

2 Comments

Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Law, Politics

Tagged , ,

American’t: From Midterms to End Times, by Selwyn Duke

Posted on November 24, 2018 | 1 comment

To MAGA, we must first MAMA. From Selwyn Duke at selwynduke.com:

WWII? As for today, how many see that the United States is at what some call a tipping point, what others may call a Fourth Turning? Whatever you call it, the American republic is in its last days. This is too scary for many to contemplate, but there’s something far scarier: playing ostrich and not being prepared for things to come.

The so-called Left, ever violent since its French Revolution birth and as power hungry as ever, wholly controls the culture: the media, mainstream and social; academia; and entertainment. This means it controls long-term politics, since the latter is downstream of culture. So is big business, mind you, which is why the Left controls most of it as well; this, of course, translates into funding.Trump’s 2016 victory will not MAGA; it was merely a stay of execution, a prolonging of the inevitable. This should have been obvious in a country that could elect Barack Obama and then, like the Titanic having backed up to hit the iceberg again, re-elect him. If it wasn’t, it should be obvious now that the Democrats have seized the House in a Watergate-level rout.

The notion that this was a standard result for a president’s first midterm is only comforting when viewing matters in relative terms; that is, the “‘political spectrum’ always has a right and left side no matter how far ‘left’ that spectrum moves.”

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Culture, demographics, Education, Government, Immigration, Labor, Law, Media, Morality, Politics, Religion, Society

Tagged , , ,

What if the President and the Senate Just Pulled a Fast One? by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on October 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

The repetitive questions style is annoying, but Andrew P. Napolitano makes some salient points about Kavanaugh’s confirmation. From Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

What if the whole purpose of an independent judiciary is to be anti-democratic? What if its job is to disregard politics? What if its duty is to preserve the liberties of the minority — even a minority of one — from the tyranny of the majority? What if that tyranny can come from unjust laws or a just law’s unjust enforcement?

What if we have a right to insist that judges be neutral and open-minded rather than partisan and predisposed to a particular ideology? What if presidential candidates promise to nominate judges and justices who they believe will embrace certain ideologies?

What if history shows that Supreme Court justices appointed by Democratic presidents typically stay faithful to their pre-judicial ideologies? What if history shows that justices appointed by Republican presidents tend to migrate leftward, toward the middle of the ideological spectrum? What if some Republican-appointed justices — such as Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David Souter — migrated across the ideological spectrum so far that they became pillars of the high court’s abortion jurisprudence even though the presidents who appointed them publicly expected the opposite?

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Law

Tagged , ,

What Could Be More Important Than A Seat On The Supreme Court? by Christopher Manion

Posted on July 28, 2018 | Leave a comment

The story of a man who put principle over political power, told by his son. From Christopher Manion at lewrockwell.com:

The noise of the universe surrounding the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to take the seat of retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy calls to mind an earlier nomination – less contentious, but profoundly consequential.

It all began on April 6, 1953, my father, Clarence Manion, confronted Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in testimony given before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The issue was the Bricker Amendment, designed by Ohio Senator John Bricker to forbid the president from making secret deals like those that Roosevelt and Truman had made with Stalin during World War II.

Thirty years later, Dulles’ son Avery – by then a Cardinal in the Catholic Church –told me had attended that hearing. His dad was mad.

What galled Secretary Dulles most that day was how Dad buttressed his testimony by quoting Dulles himself, from a speech he had given a year before, when Ike was still running hard to defeat Senator Robert Taft, an avid supporter of Bricker. “The treaty-making power is an extraordinary power, liable to abuse,” Dulles had railed then. Treaties “can cut across the rights given to the people by their Constitutional Bill of Rights.”

The Bricker Amendment was designed to restore the Constitutional requirement that such agreements among nations be publicly disclosed as treaties, debated, and valid only after they had received a 2/3 vote of the Senate. Without the amendment, Bricker warned, any president could run rampant over the Constitution simply by making secret “executive compacts” that changed the Constitution. All he needed was a foreign leader who would go along.

After all, Article VI of the Constitution states that treaties shall become part of the “supreme law of the land.”

Although the platform of the 1952 Republican Convention that nominated Eisenhower strongly endorsed the Bricker Amendment, Ike began backing away from it as soon as he took office in 1953. During that year, the American Legion strongly backed Bricker, and my father sang its praises to packed Legion audiences in every state in the union.

To continue reading: What Could Be More Important Than A Seat On The Supreme Court?

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, Law, Morality, Politics

Tagged , ,

The Supreme Court Is Much Too Powerful, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on July 13, 2018 | Leave a comment

That the confirmation of the next justice of the Supreme Court becomes such an intense and divisive issue shows that the court has too much power. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

The current frenzy over the vacancy on the Supreme Court in the wake of Justice Kennedy’s retirement highlights just how much power has been centralized in the hands of a small number of people in Washington, DC.

The left has grown positively hysterical over the thought of yet another Trump-appointed judge being installed, who could potentially serve on the court for decades. Right-wingers who claim the left is overreacting, however, are unconvincing. One can only imagine the right’s reaction were Hillary Clinton president. She would have already had the opportunity to appoint Scalia’s replacement, and we might now be talking about her nominee to replace Justice Ginsberg.

The right-wing media would be filled with article after article about how the new court would be a disaster for health-care freedom, private gun ownership, and, of course, the unborn.

But, as it is, we live in a country where five people on a court decide what the law is for 320 million people. And for some reason, many people think this is entirely normal. It’s our own American version of the Soviet politburo, but few are even bothering to ask whether it’s a good idea.

After all, if it makes sense for a small handful of people to decide law for the entire country, why even bother with a House of Representatives? Even the Senate — composed primarily of multimillionaires living full-time in Washington, DC, is is extravagantly “democratic.”

The Myths Behind the Court

To combat the obvious absurdity of the Supreme Court’s vast lawmaking powers, however, we have invented a number of myths designed to convince ourselves that the Court is not, in fact just another political institution. It is — we tell ourselves — something special. Something non-political.

To continue reading: The Supreme Court Is Much Too Powerful

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law

Tagged

Filling the Swamp, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on July 12, 2018 | 1 comment

Andrew P. Napolitano doesn’t like President Trump’s Supreme Court pick. From Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

When Donald Trump started running for the Republican nomination for president in June 2015, he began by attacking the Republican establishment in Washington, and he began his attack by calling the establishment “the swamp.”

His real target was the permanent government and its enablers in the legal, financial, diplomatic and intelligence communities in Washington. These entities hover around power centers no matter which party is in power.

Beneath the swamp, Trump argued, lies the deep state. This is a loose collection of career government officials who operate outside ordinary legal and constitutional frameworks and use the levers of government power to favor their own, affect public policy and stay in power. Though I did not vote for Trump — I voted for the Libertarian candidate — a part of me rejoiced at his election because I accepted his often repeated words that he would be a stumbling block to the deep state and he’d drain the swamp.

On Monday night, he rewarded the swamp denizens and deep state outliers by nominating one of their own to the Supreme Court.

Here is the back story.

The late Justice Antonin Scalia — my friend during the final 10 years of his life — and his neighbor and colleague Justice Anthony Kennedy often remarked to each other during the Obama years that each would like to leave the Supreme Court upon the election of a Republican president. Scalia’s untimely death in February 2016 denied him that choice, but Kennedy bided his time.

When Trump was elected president, Kennedy told friends that he needed to await Trump’s nominee to replace Scalia to gauge whether the judicially untested Trump could be counted upon to choose a nominee of Kennedy’s liking and Scalia’s standing.

Trump knew Kennedy’s thinking, and that guided him in choosing Neil Gorsuch for Scalia’s seat. Gorsuch believes in the primacy of the individual and natural rights and is generally skeptical of government regulators. He is also a former Kennedy clerk.

To continue reading: Filling the Swamp

1 Comment

Posted in Government, Law, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

Kavanaugh Threatens the Left’s Right to Cheat, by Ann Coulter

Posted on July 11, 2018 | Leave a comment

The left doesn’t resort to messy elections to confer its made up rights. It’s a lot easier to secure them through the courts, particularly the Supreme Court. That game may be over, at least for a while. From Ann Coulter at anncoulter.com:

The fact that the media responded to the nomination of a Supreme Court justice by obsessively covering Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Russia and NATO proves that Trump has checkmated them with Brett Kavanaugh.

Liberals know they can’t stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, so they’d just as soon not hear any news about it at all. Please cheer us up with stories about Paul Manafort’s solitary confinement!

But there was one very peculiar reaction to the nomination. The nut wing of the Democratic Party instantly denounced Kavanaugh by claiming that his elevation to the high court would threaten all sorts of “rights.”

Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., tweeted: “Our next justice should be a champion for protecting & advancing rights, not rolling them back — but Kavanaugh has a long history of demonstrating hostility toward defending the rights of everyday Americans.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., tweeted: “If Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court it will have a profoundly negative effect on workers’ rights, women’s rights and voting rights for decades to come. We must do everything we can to stop this nomination.”

If only these guys could get themselves elected to some sort of legislative body, they could pass laws protecting these rights!

Wait, I’m sorry. These are elected United States senators. Of all people, why are they carrying on about “rights”? If senators can’t protect these alleged “rights,” it can only be because most Americans do not agree that they should be “rights.”

That’s exactly why the left is so hysterical about the Supreme Court. They run to the courts to win their most unpopular policy ideas, gift-wrapped and handed to them as “constitutional rights.”

What liberals call “rights” are legislative proposals that they can’t pass through normal democratic processes — at least outside of the states they’ve already flipped with immigration, like California.

To continue reading: Kavanaugh Threatens the Left’s Right to Cheat

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Government, Law

Tagged , ,

Is a Trump Court in the Making? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on July 10, 2018 | Leave a comment

Trump has an opportunity to change the course of the Supreme Court for many years. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

If Mitch McConnell’s Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party.

Not bad for a rookie.

And the lamentations on the left are surely justified.

For liberalism’s great strategic ally and asset of 60 years, the judicial dictatorship erected by Earl Warren and associates, may be about to fall.

Judicial supremacy may be on the way out.

Another constitutionalist on the court, in the tradition of Antonin Scalia, could ring down the curtain on the social revolution the court has been imposing since the salad days of Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Among the changes Warren’s court and its successors succeeded in imposing: The de-Christianization of all public institutions in America. The social war of the 1970s over forced busing for racial balance in the public schools. The creation, ex nihilo, of new constitutional rights, first to an abortion, and then to homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

But while the confirmation of a new Trump justice may bring an end to the revolution, it will return power to where it belongs in a constitutional republic, with elected legislators and elected executives.

There will not likely be any sudden and radical rollback of changes wrought in six decades. For some of those changes have become embedded in the public consciousness as the new normal, and will endure.

Roe v. Wade may be challenged. But even if overturned, states like New York and California, which had liberalized abortion laws before Roe, are not likely to re-criminalize it.

Affirmative action, however, racial discrimination against white males to promote diversity, may be on the chopping block.

Why did it take until Trump to restore constitutionalism to the Supreme Court, when the Warren Court had been a blazing issue since the 1950s and Republicans held the presidency for 28 years from 1968 to 2016, and had managed to elevate 12 justices?

Answer: Every GOP president save Bush II, has appointed justices who grew to believe the court had a right to remake America to conform to their image of the ideal liberal democracy. And they so acted.

To continue reading: Is a Trump Court in the Making?

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, History, Law

Tagged ,

Supreme Court: Cops Can’t Track Cell Phone Location Without A Warrant, by Tyler Durden

Posted on June 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

There’s good news and there’s bad news. The good news is that the Supreme Court came out the right way on a civil liberties issues. The bad news is that it was a 5-4 decision, not the 9-0 it should have been. Which shows how tenuous our civil liberties are. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that law enforcement cannot track people’s movements for periods of weeks or months without a warrant.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court held that the acquisition of cell-site records by government officials is covered under the Fourth Amendment.

Chief Justice John Roberts who wrote the opinion sided with the court’s four liberal judges; Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer – while Justice Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

While stressing that their decision doesn’t question longstanding surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras, Roberts said that historical cell-site records present even greater privacy concerns than monitoring via GPS.

“Here the progress of science has afforded law enforcement a powerful new tool to carry out its important responsibilities,” Roberts said, adding “While individuals regularly leave their vehicles, they compulsively carry cell phones with them all the time.”

“A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.”

The conservative judges strongly objected – writing four times as much in their dissents than Roberts did for the court’s majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said the government’s search of cellphone location records was permissible because they were held by the service provider, not the individual. “The court’s new and uncharted course will inhibit law enforcement.”

Justice Samuel Alito called it a “revolutionary” ruling that “guarantees a blizzard of litigation while threatening many legitimate and valuable investigative practices upon which law enforcement has rightfully come to rely.” –USA Today

To continue reading: Supreme Court: Cops Can’t Track Cell Phone Location Without A Warrant

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Law

Tagged , ,

Bill Bradley, Call Your Bookie, by Andrew P. Napolitano

Posted on May 17, 2018 | Leave a comment

Andrew P. Napolitano analyzes the constitutional law behind the Supreme Court’s recent decision on sports betting. From Napolitano at lewrockwell.com:

In 1992, Congress passed a statute authored by then-Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who was a former Princeton University and New York Knicks basketball superstar, prohibiting the states from authorizing sports betting. At that time, gambling in Atlantic City was flourishing, and notwithstanding one of its own senators’ efforts to keep gambling away from competitive sports, the state of New Jersey wanted to duplicate Las Vegas’ success with sports betting.

When Bradley’s legislation grandfathered the state of Nevada, legislators in New Jersey came up with an idea to get around the federal legislation that would permit Atlantic City casinos to compete with those in Las Vegas by repealing all laws about sports betting, thereby escaping the federal prohibition on “authorizing” sports betting. It would be up to the casinos to set up their own betting parlors for college and professional sports, and in so doing, they could increase their own bottom lines and thus the state’s tax revenues.

When major professional sports leagues and the NCAA challenged this, a federal district court in Newark read the ‘thou shalt not authorize’ language to mean ‘thou shalt not permit under any circumstances.’ That ruling was upheld by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia, and New Jersey appealed its case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in its favor earlier this week.

Get ready to call your bookie.

The Supreme Court decision reinforces the anti-commandeering jurisprudence of the 10th Amendment, which was dormant from the New Deal era to the mid-1990s. Recall that the states formed the federal government, not the other way around. When they did so, they delegated certain areas of governmental authority to the feds, and as new states were added to the Union, they did the same.

The 10th Amendment is the constitutional recognition of the truism that the legislative powers that the states did not delegate to Congress they retained for themselves.

To continue reading: Bill Bradley, Call Your Bookie

Leave a comment

Posted in Business, Government, Law, Sports

Tagged , ,