Posted by Ilya Shapiro on June 29, 2010
By Ilya Shapiro
Here’s what you have missed if you don’t have the luxury of watching C-SPAN all day:
Senator Sessions went after Kagan hard on the Military-Recruiting-at-Harvard imbroglio. I don’t think he did any damage—which I’ll define as convincing someone on the fence to go against her—but the thing to keep in mind here is that the Don’t Ask [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: confirmation hearings, Constitution, elena kagan, Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy, Supreme Court | 
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Posted by David Boaz on June 28, 2010
By David Boaz
Senator Robert C. Byrd, who died today at age 92, had a long and varied career. Unlike most senators, Senator Byrd remembered that the Constitution delegates the power to make law and the power to make war to Congress, not the president. He often held up the Cato Institute’s pocket edition of the Constitution as he made that [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: Cato Publications, congressional powers, Constitution, imperial presidency, Law and Civil Liberties, Political Philosophy, Robert C. Byrd | No Comments »
Posted by Tim Lynch on June 24, 2010
By Tim Lynch
This morning the Supreme Court issued its long awaited decision in the case of Jeffrey Skilling. The most important aspect of the case concerned the so-called “honest services” statute. That law has been an amorphous blob that federal prosecutors could suddenly invoke against almost anyone. All nine justices acknowledged the law had problems, but only three–Scalia, Thomas, [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: Constitution, jury trial, justices, Law and Civil Liberties, Skilling, Supreme Court | No Comments »
Posted by Ilya Shapiro on June 24, 2010
By Ilya Shapiro
Cato adjunct scholar Tim Sandefur, who authored an amicus brief in the case of Skilling v. U.S., writes on his home blog:
Today, the Supreme Court decided the case of Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO of Enron, who had been convicted of the crime of “honest services fraud.” The statute, however, is so vague, that nobody knows what the [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: Constitution, due process of law, fraud, honest services fraud, Law and Civil Liberties, pacific legal foundation, Skilling, Supreme Court, unconstitutional | No Comments »
Posted by Ilya Shapiro on June 7, 2010
By Ilya Shapiro
From the first round of Clinton Library documents regarding Elena Kagan’s White House service, we can now all be shocked – shocked! – that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is a liberal. It’s a mystery why the punditocracy thought someone who despaired at Ronald Reagan’s election, staffed the Michael Dukakis campaign, clerked for Thurgood Marshall, [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: confirmation hearings, Constitution, elena kagan, Law and Civil Liberties, Supreme Court | No Comments »
Posted by Daniel J. Mitchell on June 6, 2010
By Daniel J. Mitchell
It’s rather symbolic of what’s wrong with Washington that a commission ostensibly created to promote deficit reduction is seeking a bigger budget, as noted in the Tax Notes story excerpted below. Rather than impose a bigger burden on taxpayers, though, I will generously suggest that they could easily fulfill their mandate by perusing Cato’s Downsizing [...]
Categories: Politics, Tax and Budget Policy |
Tags: big government, Constitution, debt, deficit, Deficit Commission, federal spending, Government and Politics, government spending | No Comments »
Posted by Tim Lynch on May 28, 2010
By Tim Lynch
Kirk Adams, speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, has an article in today’s Washington Post on the controversial Arizona immigration law. Here’s an excerpt:
Under the law, officers can only attempt to determine a person’s immigration status during “lawful contact,” which is defined as a lawful stop, detention or arrest. Any “reasonable suspicion” can be [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: Constitution, immigration law, Law and Civil Liberties, law enforcement, reasonable suspicion, Trade and Immigration | No Comments »
Posted by Tim Lynch on May 27, 2010
By Tim Lynch
This can’t be happening. Teachers suspended from their posts for showing students a film about the Constitution! I can understand the initial parental inquiry–if a student did say “I was taught how to hide drugs.” There are such films on the market and those would certainly not be appropriate for school. But instead of gathering [...]
Categories: Politics |
Tags: aclu, Constitution, constitutional, flex your rights, Flexyourrights.org, Law and Civil Liberties, parent, students, teachers | No Comments »
