Columnist.
Are you skeptical of human-caused global warming or climate change like many respected scientists and climate experts? Then you should be prosecuted like a Mafia mob boss, according to 20 academics at ivory towers like Columbia, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.
Many on the left are in a ferment over Alabama's closure of some part-time Department of Motor Vehicles offices. It's being done for budgetary reasons, but liberals are claiming it's being done to raise a "barrier for poor and minority voters" in getting an ID to vote, according to the Washington Post. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that "it's a blast from the Jim Crow past," and Jesse Jackson claimed that "this new Jim Crow isn't subtle."
In an article in Politico, Mark Rozell, acting dean of the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, and Paul Goldman, a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, point out a fact that should greatly concern all Americans: that the presence of millions of noncitizens, both legal and illegal, could tilt the presidential election toward the Democrat Party and decide the election in favor of the eventual Democratic nominee.
Some critics of the attempt to stop federal funding for Planned Parenthood, the nation's number one abortion provider, are now making the erroneous claim that to do so would be unconstitutional. However, that claim, as expressed by Drexel law professor David S. Cohen, who says that cutting off federal funding would be an unconstitutional bill of attainder (a legislative act punishing someone without a trial), is nonsense.
Critics of the current campaign process for state and federal offices are urging states and Congress to require nonprofit advocacy organizations to disclose the identities of their donors to the government, and thus the public, when they engage in political speech and discussion of public policy issues that might have an effect on an election. However, such forced disclosure may very well violate free speech and associational rights under the Constitution.
Seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia's ban on handguns, D.C. has lost *another* gun case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — one that involves the very same plaintiff, Dick Heller. In the latest case, Heller v. District of Columbia, a three-judge panel has thrown out several gun registration requirements that were clearly intended to discourage gun ownership and make it more difficult to own a gun in the nation's capital.
For those who thought that the lawsuits challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) were at an end, think again. On September 9, Judge Rosemary Collyer of the federal district court for the District of Columbia refused to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the entire U.S. House of Representatives against the Obama administration over its funding of certain aspects of Obamacare. This is a historic lawsuit and a historic decision. In the past, individual members of Congress have filed a number of (unsuccessful) lawsuits against sitting administrations. But this is one of the few occasions when such a suit has been pursued by the *entire* House of Representatives as an institution.
This week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) in a discovery dispute with the National Abortion Federation. CMP is the group of citizen journalists responsible for producing the undercover videos exposing Planned Parenthood's practice of selling baby parts. This decision may end up being a costly one for CMP because it allows the National Abortion Federation to attempt to bury the group with discovery requests. Discovery is a pre-trial procedure in which parties can seek to obtain evidence for their case.
In a historic move, all five justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court have voted to temporarily suspend the law license of the state's attorney general, Kathleen Kane, based on the recommendation of the court's 13-member disciplinary board. This leaves the office of the state attorney general in limbo, since Pennsylvania's constitution requires that the attorney general have a law license, and is prompting the state senate to research "a never used constitutional provision that allows a two-thirds vote of senators to remove" her from office.
When states, counties, and towns redraw political districts, is it constitutional for them to include individuals who are ineligible to vote, such as noncitizens? Or does that dilute the vote of eligible citizens and violate the one-person, one-vote standard that the U.S. Supreme Court established for all redistricting fifty years ago in Reynolds v. Sims (1964)? The Supreme Court is set to finally decide this issue in Evenwel v. Abbott — something it has avoided for decades up until this year.
In Dothan, Ala., the verdict is in: it was election fraud. Last week, a jury convicted 66-year-old Olivia Reynolds on 24 felony counts of absentee ballot fraud in the contested 2013 election for the Dothan City Commission. Reynolds worked on the re-election campaign for District 2 incumbent Amos Newsome. During the tainted 2013 election, she forged and altered enough absentee ballots to guarantee victory for her boss and boyfriend. The verdict will only come as a shock to those who still insist that voter fraud simply doesn't exist in the U.S. In 2013, Newsome narrowly won reelection to his office, besting challenger Lamesa Danzey by a scant 14 votes.
The recently concluded federal trial over North Carolina's election rules proved one thing beyond a reasonable doubt: The Obama administration and its partisan, big-money, racial-interest-group allies will stop at nothing to win elections. And using the courts to change election rules is a key part of their strategy.
