Columnist.
Last week, the Supreme Court overturned federal limits on the total amounts that one person may contribute to candidates and political committees during a single election cycle. "The government may no more restrict how many candidates or causes a donor may support than it may tell a newspaper how many candidates it may endorse," the court declared in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts. But according to Justice Stephen Breyer, who wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined by three of his colleagues, the restrictions challenged in McCutcheon v. FEC are perfectly compatible with the First Amendment, which "advances not only the individual's right to engage in political speech, but also the public's interest in preserving a democratic order in which collective speech matters." The idea that individual rights must be sacrificed for the sake of a vaguely defined collective interest reflects the dangerously broad agenda of campaign finance "reformers," who seek to shape the political debate so that it comports with their own notion of the public good.
Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee last July, Deputy Attorney General James Cole explained why the National Security Agency (NSA) needed to collect everyone's telephone records. "If you're looking for the needle in the haystack," he said, "you have to have the entire haystack to look through." Judging from the changes that President Obama recommended last week, he has decided that looking for a needle in a haystack might not be the smartest way to prevent terrorist attacks. Obama's decision to eliminate the NSA database he once defended as essential to national security shows how important transparency is in protecting civil liberties, because he thought everything was fine as long as it was secret.
According to The New York Times, a case the Supreme Court heard on Tuesday, involving a challenge to Obamacare's requirement that businesses pay for their employees' contraceptives, "pits religious liberty against women's rights." Similarly, last month's controversy over an Arizona bill aimed at protecting business owners from being forced to treat homosexual and heterosexual couples alike was widely perceived as a conflict between religious liberty and gay rights. Both of these debates are more accurately described as clashes between real rights and fake rights. To put it more politely, they pit negative liberty, which requires freedom from external restraint, against positive liberty, which imposes demands on other people's resources. Under the latter vision, giving freedom to one person requires taking it away from another.
Last week the House of Representatives passed yet another bill with an awkward, acronym-enabling title: the Executive Needs to Faithfully Observe and Respect Congressional Enactments of the Law Act. The ENFORCE the Law Act (get it?) would allow either chamber of Congress to authorize litigation aimed at correcting the president's "failure to faithfully execute the laws." While the bill's name is ridiculous and its mechanism is dubious, the basic premise of its supporters, almost all of whom are Republicans, is correct: As the House Judiciary Committee's report on the bill puts it, Obama has engaged in a "pattern of overstepping (his) constitutional bounds." But so did his Republican predecessor -- a fact the report seems designed to obscure.
Next Sunday the people of Crimea are scheduled to vote on whether to secede from Ukraine and become part of Russia. President Obama says the referendum is illegitimate because it violates the Ukrainian constitution. But the president's respect for the Ukrainian constitution is highly selective, and that document's relevance is dubious in any case. It is true that Ukraine's constitution does not allow Crimea's regional parliament to unilaterally hold a plebiscite on secession (even leaving aside the question of whether a free and fair vote can take place while Russian forces control the peninsula). But neither does the constitution allow the national parliament to peremptorily remove the president from office, as legislators purported to do with Viktor Yanukovych last month.
Raymond Yans is president of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB), the U.N. agency charged with monitoring the implementation of anti-drug treaties. It is therefore not surprising that Yans takes a dim view of marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington, which he says poses "a grave danger to public health and well-being." But according to the INCB, legalization is not just dangerous; legalization is illegal. Even Americans who support marijuana prohibition should be troubled by the implications of that argument, which suggests that international treaties trump the Constitution.
Although Macon Baker completed his prison sentence in 2006, the state of Missouri kept him behind bars, repeatedly trying to commit him as a "sexually violent predator." After three juries deadlocked on the question of whether Baker suffers from a "mental abnormality" that makes him "more likely than not" to commit new sex crimes after he is released, a fourth jury on Friday unanimously agreed he does not. In effect, the state retroactively extended Baker's sentence from 10 years to 17. The military prison at Guantanamo Bay is notorious as a place where people can be held indefinitely without charge because the usual rules of criminal justice do not apply. Twenty states have their own versions of Guantanamo Bay for sex offenders, a fact that attracts little attention and generates little outrage because the detainees are even less sympathetic than suspected terrorists.
At the center of the case against Michael Dunn is a disappearing shotgun. The middle-aged software developer claims 17-year-old Jordan Davis threatened to kill him with it during an argument over loud music at a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station in November 2012. But police never found a gun, and no witness reported seeing one. It seems at least one juror nevertheless found Dunn's story plausible, because his trial ended last week without a verdict on the murder charge related to his shooting of Davis. But it is hard to see how that outcome could be attributed to Florida's "stand your ground" self-defense law, which has been widely blamed for hanging the jury.
Amy was 8 when her uncle began raping her. He took pictures. Last month the Supreme Court considered what restitution Amy is entitled to collect -- not from her uncle, but from a man, Doyle Paroline, who downloaded two of those pictures. The potential answers to that question range from zero to $3.4 million. According to The New York Times, the justices seemed "stumped." Their confusion reflects a deeper problem with the justification for criminalizing possession of child pornography, an offense for which legislators have prescribed increasingly harsh penalties with little regard to sense or justice.
When he was 26, Douglas Ray Dunkins Jr. received a mandatory sentence of life without parole for participating in a Fort Worth, Texas, crack cocaine operation. If that business had involved cocaine powder, the mandatory minimum would have been 20 years, and Dunkins would be free by now. Instead, he is a middle-aged man condemned to die behind bars for an offense that violated no one's rights. In 2010, Congress sought to ameliorate this sort of injustice by reducing the arbitrary sentencing disparity between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine. But the Fair Sentencing Act, which passed almost unanimously, did not apply retroactively, and so thousands of nonviolent offenders like Dunkins continue to serve prison terms that nearly everyone now agrees are excessive.
President Obama says he opposes marijuana legalization but thinks Colorado and Washington should be able to try it. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who sought to run against Obama in 2012 as a Republican presidential contender, takes the same position. You might call this policy federalism -- but not if you are Barack Obama. According to the president, he has the authority to enforce the federal ban on marijuana even in states that have legalized the drug. But he chooses not to exercise that authority, because he is curious to see how these experiments turn out.
Last June, after news reports revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) was surreptitiously collecting everyone's telephone records, President Obama called this massive dragnet a "modest encroachment" that "the American people should feel comfortable about." Last Friday, he portrayed the program as a significant threat to privacy. Which is it? Evidently the answer depends on the latest polls, which find that the American people are not as comfortable with the NSA's snooping as Obama said they should be. The president's obvious lack of conviction about the threat posed by mass surveillance makes it hard to believe he is serious about addressing it.
Does your doctor nag you about your drinking? The federal government wishes he would. Last week the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) noted with alarm that most Americans say they have never discussed alcohol consumption with a health professional. Physicians' reluctance to broach the subject is especially troubling, the CDC said, because "at least 38 million adults in the U.S. drink too much." Most news outlets reported the latter claim as a fact, failing to notice the value judgments embedded in it. Contrary to what the CDC wants you to believe, the question of what it means to drink too much is a matter of moral and medical dispute.
On Monday, less than a week after Colorado's state-licensed marijuana shops began serving recreational consumers, the anti-pot group Project SAM thanked three public figures who "have galvanized our movement." One of them was Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The Daily Beast, whose contribution consisted of this insight, which she offered to her 75,000 Twitter followers last Friday: "Legal weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber, sleepier nation even less able to compete with the Chinese." This is what passes for smart commentary among pot prohibitionists. Colorado's path-breaking legalization of the marijuana business has revealed the intellectual bankruptcy of people who think violence is an appropriate response to the consumption of psychoactive substances they do not like.
We've all been there, perhaps as recently as Tuesday night. You have a few drinks, and the next thing you know, you're smoking crack. What? You've consumed alcohol on many occasions, but you've never smoked crack? As it turns out, you're not alone. Survey data indicate that 82 percent of Americans have consumed alcohol, but only 3 percent have tried crack; another 11 percent have consumed cocaine in powder form.
A few weeks ago, as the New York City Council's health committee considered a ban on using electronic cigarettes in public, several fans of the battery-powered devices sat in the audience, demonstrating their operation. "I'm watching puffs of vapor go up in this room," said Councilman Peter Vallone. "It is confusing." Last week Vallone and 42 of his colleagues demonstrated their confusion by voting to treat vaping like smoking, meaning e-cigarettes will be banned from bars, restaurants and other indoor spaces open to the public, along with outdoor locations such as parks and beaches. Although that arbitrary edict may relieve the discomfort of politicians bewildered by a new technology, it probably will mean more smoking-related disease and death, the opposite of their avowed goal.
After her purse was snatched in 1976, Patricia McDonough began receiving threatening phone calls from a man who identified himself as her robber. Following one of the calls, she saw a car she recognized from the scene of the crime slowly pass by her house in Baltimore. Police later spotted the same car in McDonough's neighborhood, driven by a man who matched her description of the purse snatcher, and used the license plate number to identify the owner as Michael Lee Smith. Based on this information, the police asked the phone company to install a "pen register," which recorded the numbers dialed by Smith for a couple of days. One of those numbers was McDonough's.
This Saturday marks the first anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. Yet recordings of the 911 calls placed from the school that day were released only last week, thanks to a misguided and lawless attempt to conceal this information. While investigating Adam Lanza's horrifying attack, State's Attorney Stephen Sedensky became so concerned about the feelings of the victims' families that he lost sight of his legal obligations. Sedensky used disingenuous arguments to keep the 911 recordings under wraps, in blatant violation of Connecticut's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which creates a presumption in favor of making public records public.
For many Americans, religion is something you do on weekends and holidays. For others, it is the central organizing principle of life. That split helps explain the dispute over Obamacare's requirement that businesses pay for their employees' contraceptives, which is the focus of two cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear last week. President Obama says forcing employers to provide 100 percent coverage for 20 kinds of contraception is a straightforward matter of "public health and gender equality." He nevertheless recognizes that the rule runs afoul of certain religious doctrines, which is why he exempted churches and offered to accommodate church-affiliated organizations such as hospitals and universities by routing contraceptive coverage through a middleman.
Last December, less than a week after Adam Lanza murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the New York Post described his "eerie lair of violent video games," where he "obliterated virtual victims ... until the virtual became a reality." The Post reported that the troubled 20-year-old "was enthralled by blood-splattering, shoot-'em-up electronic games." The official report on the massacre, released this week by State's Attorney Steven Sedensky, paints a more complicated picture. It casts doubt on the significance of Lanza's gaming habits, as well as several other theories about why he did what he did or how he could have been stopped.
