This has led to a fractured and unpredictable state of the law. These laws, as well as the “assault weapon” bans they tend to come packaged with, are abridgments of the natural right to self-defense. Moreover, they fail to provide sufficient benefit to justify their inherent costs.
He has demonstrated a devotion to legal text and constitutional principle, and has repeatedly affirmed that judges serve not as the champions of faction, but as the readers of laws and adjudicators of disputes.
Originally adopted on July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” and states that “No State shall…deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Throughout that time, his judicial philosophy couldn’t be pigeonholed as “conservative” or “liberal,” and indeed is hard to describe in conventional terms. Most terms he agreed with Cato’s position more than any other justice, and so he’s also sometimes known as the Court’s “libertarian” justice.
Despite President Trump’s calls during the campaign to pull back from the Middle East and more recent statements that he’s ready pack up and go home from Syria “very soon,” he nonetheless ordered missile strikes in Syria, ostensibly in response to reports that Assad killed civilians with chemical weapons.
President Trump’s announcement that the United States, France and Britain had launched airstrikes against Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack might have surprised the people who listened to him campaigning in 2016, when he repeatedly critiqued “stupid” Middle Eastern interventions.
In this, President Trump and his predecessor have something in common: Both he and President Obama came into office promising to change America’s foreign policy, but when faced with crises, both yielded to pressure to intervene. This bias toward action is one of the biggest problems in American foreign policy. It produces poorly thought-out interventions and, sometimes, disastrous long-term consequences.
Senator Kaine is right that, as he said in a speech about the bill, “for too long Congress has given presidents a blank check to wage war.” The 2001 authorization, passed three days after the Sept. 11 attacks and aimed at the perpetrators of those attacks, has done just that. Three presidents in a row have warped its limited authority into an enabling act for globe-spanning presidential war.
In authorizing the use of force against a list of terrorist organizations and their affiliates, the bill states that it “establishes rigorous congressional oversight,” “improves transparency” and ensures “regular congressional review and debate.” Such transparency requirements are an improvement over the status quo. But the bill also turns the constitutional warmaking process upside down.
Two different District Court judges ruled against the “good reason” requirement (one ruling was set aside due to a bit of a procedural morass), and those two cases were combined on appeal to the D.C. Circuit. In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the Court of Appeals struck the “good reason” rule down as unconstitutional.
However, the District can appeal this ruling back to the D.C. Circuit in order to have it reheard en banc. The case could also ultimately end up in front of the United States Supreme Court which, since its rulings in Heller (2008) and McDonald (2010), hasn’t seen fit to offer further guidance to lower courts on whether the 2nd Amendment applies outside the home.
With various federal courts coming to different conclusions on that question, this case represents a great opportunity to finally get a definitive answer from the high court.
To begin, it is very unfortunate that President Trump has chosen to elevate the crime problem in the way that he has because it reinforces the mistaken idea that the federal government “oversees” our criminal justice system. In fact, the Constitution says very little about federal criminal jurisdiction.
According to the constitutional text, piracy, treason, and counterfeiting are supposed to be the federal government’s concern, but not much else. The common law crimes of murder, rape, assault, and theft are to be handled by state and local governments.
President Trump may have good intentions, but his gut instincts in the area of criminal justice are terribly misguided. Criminal justice reformers will likely win some policy battles — especially at the state and local level, but the road ahead looks treacherous indeed.
The scholarly community has — with only rare exception — been either grudging or downright hostile to extending constitutional protection to commercial advertising. Most — although not all — scholars believe that protecting commercial speech trivializes what the First Amendment is truly about, reintroduces the threat to the smooth functioning of the regulatory system first presented by the specious and harmful pre-New Deal doctrine of economic substantive due process, and risks diluting the strong protection traditionally given to more valuable areas of expression.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
