Categories
national politics & policies too much government

On the Wire

There’s something worse than “printing the myth”: printing government press releases and calling that “journalism.”

In those cases where folks in today’s news media do get their watchdog legs underneath them and yet their questions go unanswered, we citizens need be mightily concerned.

“The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment,” the Washington Post reported yesterday.

What did they refuse to comment on?

Wiretap stats.

Spokespeople for the Obama Administration have been repeating incessantly that we ought not worry about them grabbing all our phone and Internet and financial information and communications. After all, they tell us, to actually delve into that mountain of metadata to gaze at your personal stuff, the Feds have to lug a rubber stamp across town to a secret court to get approval.

But, lo and behold: the Administrative Office of the United States Court released figures on the number of federal wiretaps in criminal investigations, showing that wiretaps had spiked up 71 percent in 2012. Such wiretaps by state and local police increased only 5 percent.

The average number of federal wiretaps between 1997 and 2009 were 550. But in 2010 the number soared to 1,207. The number went down to 792 the next year and then shot back up to 1,354 last year — a 147 percent increase over the 1997-2009 period.

The report further notes that “A single wiretap can sweep up thousands of communications.” For instance, one wiretap in Los Angeles intercepted more than 185,000 calls — nine of every ten deemed non-incriminating.

Why worry about governments having too much power? Governments have been known to use the power.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
crime and punishment

Bottled-Water Buyers: Threat or Menace?

Gone are the happy-go-lucky days of buying water and then going home as though it were no big deal.

Elizabeth Daly learned the hard way. As she and her roommates walked toward her car in a dark parking lot, she was accosted by a crew of Virginia state Alcohol Beverage Control agents. One jumped on her car, another drew a gun. They thought she was lugging beer instead of LaCroix sparkling water.

You must be 21 to buy alcohol in Virginia. Daly is 20.

“They were showing unidentifiable badges . . . but we became frightened, as they were not in anything close to a uniform,” she recalled. “I couldn’t put my windows down unless I started my car. . . . They began trying to break the windows. My roommates and I were . . . terrified.”

As they made their escape, the women dialed 911.

The ABC agents charged Daly with counts of assaulting and eluding enforcement officers. (“Assault” because the car brushed past agents as Daly drove away.) She had to spend a night in jail.

We hear so many stories of government-empowered bullies using the feeblest of excuses to terrify luckless innocents. Renegade T-shirt-wearers, estranged husbands of financial-aid scofflaws, barbers . . . and now water-buyers?

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, says the ABC agents should be fired.

Yes. But when “law enforcement” thugs blatantly violate the rights of innocent persons they should be more than fired. They should be prosecuted. Let’s also shut down agencies that consistently threaten innocent people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Thought

Lew Rockwell

LlewellynRockwellMen as a group . . . are different from women as a group. Northerners are different from Southerners. Californians are different from Texans. Catholics are different from Baptists. Blacks are different from whites. Immigrants are different from natives. The rich are different from the poor. These differences should not be denied, but celebrated, for they are the very source of the division of labor.

Yet our central government attempts to stamp out all these differences by forcing individuals and businesses to act as if they do not exist.

Categories
Thought

Vannevar Bush

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

Categories
links

Townhall: The Court v. The People

Over at Townhall, your weekly Common Sense column surveys the current divisions — not so much on the Supreme Court (they change), but in the federal union itself. There are a few keywords worth thinking about: nullification, interposition, delegated powers, unenumerated rights, and (go full-blooded, here) “checks and balances.”

Townhall‘s where to go. But here‘s where to come back.

Categories
video

Video: Decentralize the Schools

Too many people want to push America’s schools in the wrong direction. Neal McCluskey, of the Cato Institute, isn’t one of them:

Categories
Thought

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For him who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

Categories
Thought

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall judiciary U.S. Constitution

No Right to Defend Your Rights

You have no right as a voter to defend your interests as a voter. Not in federal court.

So decides the Supreme Court in Hollingsworth v. Perry, a case about a controversial California ballot question. The court ruled 5-4 that petitioners “lack standing.” Their interest wasn’t “particularized” enough.

Passed in 2008, Proposition 8 amends the California constitution to stipulate that “only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

Two questions must be distinguished. One, whether Proposition 8 is consistent with the U.S. Constitution. The high court could have agreed with the lower one that it isn’t. Two, whether voters – in this particular case, the official state recognized proponents of the measure – may judicially defend a law brought to ballot by themselves and duly enacted, when state officials decline to defend that law.

I’m no fan of Prop 8. But for the land’s highest court to rule that voters and petitioners have no “standing” here is a horrid precedent. It tells government officials to take heart if they dislike a law that voters have passed. Maybe not enforce or defend it at all, say — and regardless of any constitutional finding. After all, what can We the People do? It’s not as if we have standing!

Justice Kennedy, in dissent, pinpoints the default: “the Court fails to grasp or accept . . . the basic premise of the initiative process . . .  The essence of democracy is that the right to make law rests in the people and flows to the government, not the other way around.”

Oh, yes, the people do have standing.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
judiciary Ninth Amendment rights Tenth Amendment federalism

Too Respectful of Congress?

In disagreements between individuals and the IRS, I tend to side with individuals against the IRS. So Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling against the Defense of Marriage Act seems about right, on the face of it.

Yes, the judicial review and nixing of DOMA regarded a tax case.

The state of New York recognized the marriage of two women, Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer. Ms. Spyer died in 2009. Ms. Windsor inherited, paying $363, 053 in estate taxes. She sued against DOMA because she wanted to claim the federal estate tax exemption for surviving spouses.

The Supreme Court majority sided with Windsor. Chief Justice Roberts dissented, arguing that the court lacked the authority in this case to overturn this law; and Justice Scalia dissented separately, joined by Justice Thomas; Alito wrote another separate dissent.

Fascinating reading, all of it, but I was disappointed that Justices Scalia and Thomas are so deferential to Congress regarding DOMA, without any consideration of the Tenth Amendment, which recognizes that states have powers not delegated to the federal government — and surely regulating marriage was not one of the enumerated powers delegated to Congress — or the Ninth Amendment, which recognizes “rights retained by the people,” and that has a lot of bearing on the practice of marriage.

It seems to me that in matters of marriage, at the very least, the federal government should be following the people and the states, not the other way around.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.