Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who first caught our attention when he defied a federal court ruling ordering the removal of a Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama state judicial building (a stance that ultimately got him impeached and removed from office) is back in the news. Moore has managed to excite the ire of…
Category Archives: Political cases
Did Obama violate grand jury secrecy rules?
From the Wall Street Journal’s Washington Wire: President Barack Obama was a lawyer before he became a politician, but on Friday he broke one of the most basic legal rules: He publicly discussed a sealed indictment. Speaking at a White House press conference about government surveillance, terrorism, and other topics, the president was asked about his past statements…
Why originalism matters
In his opinion for a unanimous three judge panel of the D.C. Circuit declaring unconstitutional President Obama’s purported recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, Judge Laurence Silberman eloquently explained why adherence to the original meaning of the Constitution is so important: In any event, if some administrative inefficiency results from our construction of…
PA Supreme Court remands Voter ID case
From the per curiam opinion issued today (you can access the full opinion here. Justice Todd’s dissent is here, and Justice McCaffrey’s is here: Thus, we will return the matter to the Commonwealth Court to make a present assessment of the actual availability of the alternate identification cards on a developed record in light of…
Argument on PA Voter ID Law
Is this morning at 9:30. I will be live blogging the oral argument, assuming the plug in I’ve installed for the purpose works (said with fingers crossed).
Three Cheers for Mike Carvin
One of the most consistently vilified decisions of the so-called conservative Supreme Court under John Roberts – indeed, the decision that led President Obama to publicly call out the conservative justices at a State of the Union address – is Citizens United, in which the Court sharply curtailed Congressional limitations on corporate campaign expenditures. It seems…
What did Obama know, and when did he know it?
Interesting days in Washington. The President’s men stonewalling Congress. A flimsy and ill-reasoned invocation of executive privilege. Calls for a Special Prosecutor. A movement to hold the Attorney General in contempt. If I didn’t know better, I’d think we were talking about 1974, Watergate, Nixon, Mitchell, Haldeman, et al. But e’re not. It’s 2012, and…
A final thought on the Clemens case
As you no doubt know by now, a federal jury in Washington, D.C. yesterday acquitted Roger Clemens on charges that he lied to Congress and obstructed a Congressional investigation into steroid use in Major League Baseball when he purportedly offered perjured testimony to a Congressional committee in 2007. We can set aside the question of…
More on Obama’s DOMA Policy Shift
There’s been a lot of commentary about the Obama Administration’s announcement yesterday that it would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. If you’re interested in the legal policy issues and implications on this, I highly recommend that you check out the various posts at the Volokh Conspiracy. There have been…
1 1/2 Cheers for Obama and Holder
I don’t agree with Barack Obama on pretty much anything. That much is probably clear from most of what I’ve posted here and elsewhere. It is probably also clear that I don’t think very much of Eric Holder’s performance as Attorney General, either. And, to be sure, I have some issues with the Attorney General’s…