Columnist.
The Promiscuous Use of SWAT Teams Is a Bigger Problem Than Armored Vehicles on Our Streets
Rand Paul Challenges Fellow Republicans to Rethink Their Reflexive Support of Law Enforcement
Shaneen Allen faces three and a half years in prison because she made an honest mistake, followed by a mistake of honesty. Allen, a 27-year-old phlebotomist who lives in Philadelphia, drove to Atlantic City with a gun in her purse, erroneously thinking her Pennsylvania carry permit would be respected in New Jersey. Then she told a state trooper about the gun when he pulled her over for a traffic violation. Last week, a state judge refused to dismiss the resulting charges against Allen, a single mother of two with no criminal record, or to order that prosecutors approve her participation in a pretrial diversion program. Her trial, scheduled for October 6, will pit New Jersey's draconian gun laws against compassion and common sense.
Seeking to Shorten 'Draconian' Sentences, the Attorney General Faces Opposition From His Underlings
Senator's Forfeiture Reform Bill Would Limit Govt.'s License to Steal
As thousands of children fleeing violence in Central America seek refuge in the United States, some commentators are blaming American drug users. "If there weren't a lot of Americans seeking marijuana and heroin and cocaine," says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, "there would not be a drug war." Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady seems to agree. "This crisis was born of American self-indulgence," she writes. If so, it was not the self-indulgence of people who consume arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants. It was the self-indulgence of prohibitionists who insist on exporting their disastrous policy to other countries.
Tennessee's Law Criminalizing Drug Use During Pregnancy Heaps Punishment on Reviled Women
Warrantless Surveillance Hits the Target, Along With Many Other People
In 1878, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a Mormon's First Amendment challenge to the federal ban on bigamy. Because marrying more than one person is a crime, the court reasoned, allowing it for religious reasons would be akin to allowing human sacrifice by someone who sincerely believes his deity demands it. The court had a point, but only if you accept the analogy between polygamy and murder. Likewise, critics of this week's Supreme Court decision concerning religious objections to Obamacare's birth-control mandate have a point, but only if you accept their argument that declining to pay for something is the same as "blocking access" to it.
A Senate Hearing Highlights Irrational Hostility Toward E-Cigarettes
A Ruling Against Warrantless Tracking Assumes People Don't Know How Cellphones Work
Are people who assert their Second Amendment rights by bringing rifles and shotguns into stores and restaurants "weird" and "scary"? At least one staff member at the National Rifle Association (NRA) thought so, and he expressed that view in an online commentary that the organization felt compelled to retract last week after it caused an uproar among gun rights advocates. To some extent, the episode reflects divisions among Second Amendment activists, many of whom view the NRA, despite its reputation for adamantly resisting gun control, as insufficiently zealous. But the brouhaha also highlights a shift in American attitudes regarding the public display of guns.
The Horrifying Collateral Damage Inflicted by the War on Drugs
The Isla Vista Massacre Reveals the Emptiness of the Anti-Gun Lobby's 'Real Solutions'
Since the European Union's top court endorsed "the right to be forgotten" last week, Google has received more than 1,000 requests to remove links to embarrassing information from its search results. BBC News reports that the complainants have included a suspended university lecturer, an actor who had an affair with a teenager, a politician irked by an article about his behavior while in office and "a man who tried to kill his family." According to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), national data protection agencies and judges are supposed to weigh the competing interests in each of these cases and decide which will prevail: the right to be forgotten or the right to know. This misbegotten decision illustrates the threat to freedom of speech posed by an amorphous, free-floating right to privacy, unmoored from contracts, property rights or constitutional restrictions on government action.
A year before most of us knew that the National Security Agency was routinely collecting our phone records, Ron Wyden warned that the Obama administration would regret keeping us in the dark. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act," the Oregon Democrat said on the Senate floor in May 2011, "they will be stunned and they will be angry." As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Wyden knew about the NSA's phone record dragnet, but most of his colleagues did not. The outrage he predicted therefore was not limited to the general public; legislators were also stunned and angry, as reflected in the privacy protection bill that two House committees unanimously approved last week. By exceeding the powers that Congress thought it had granted, the Obama administration seems to have assured passage of the most significant surveillance reforms since the PATRIOT Act was approved in 2001.
Sixteen minutes into last week's botched lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, the warden closed the blinds on the windows to the execution chamber and turned off the sound so that witnesses could not see Clayton Lockett writhe or hear him moan. The procedure, designed to resemble a medical treatment -- albeit one with an involuntary patient and a very low probability of recovery -- had begun to look uncomfortably like the cold-blooded killing of a helpless person. Since Lockett himself was guilty of such a killing, having been convicted of shooting a 19-year-old woman during a burglary and watching as his accomplices buried her alive, many Americans -- most, judging from public opinion polls -- would say justice was done. But the eagerness of death penalty advocates to address the shortcomings revealed by Lockett's drawn-out demise suggests that majority support for capital punishment depends on sanitizing the practice to conceal its true nature.
As an Illinois legislator, a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate, Barack Obama repeatedly criticized our excessively punitive criminal justice system. But after he was elected to the White House in 2008, the Obama who worried about nonviolent offenders serving outrageously long prison terms seemed to disappear, replaced by a president with one of the weakest clemency records in U.S. history. Once he had the unilateral power to free people who do not belong in prison, Obama showed almost no interest in exercising it, shortening just one sentence during his first term. But judging from clemency criteria unveiled by the Justice Department last week, he plans to make up for lost time. If he delivers on that promise, it may be his most admirable legacy, ameliorating some of the many injustices committed in the name of the war on drugs.
If Michael Bloomberg is going to heaven, as he recently assured The New York Times, does that mean I am going to hell? The former New York mayor and I do not agree on much, especially when it comes to his two biggest passions: gun control and "public health," both of which involve restricting people's freedom for no legitimate reason. Bloomberg told the Times he plans to spend $50 million this year against politicians who oppose his gun-control agenda. According to the Times, the billionaire busybody's main goal is to "expand the background check system for gun buyers both at the state and national levels."
Mike Lee calls for "a new conservative reform agenda" based on "three basic principles," one of which is federalism. "The biggest reason the federal government makes too many mistakes is that it makes too many decisions," the Republican senator from Utah explained in a speech at the Heritage Foundation last year. "Most of these are decisions the federal government doesn't have to make -- and therefore shouldn't." So why on earth is Lee co-sponsoring a bill introduced last month that would ban online gambling throughout the country, instead of letting each state decide whether to allow Internet-assisted poker? The contradiction illustrates one reason the GOP seems destined for permanent minority status: Too many of its members are unprincipled killjoys who do not understand that federalism requires tolerance of diversity.
