On the night of December 15, 2010, U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot and killed by an untraceable assault weapon that was deliberately handed to Mexican drug lords by U.S. officials via Operation Fast and Furious. Ever since, the Terry family and Americans across the nation have asked how this …
Todd Gaziano has outlined at the Foundry the legal doctrine of executive privilege that President Obama has asserted in the congressional investigation of Operation Fast and Furious. The most important part of that doctrine to understand is that a President cannot assert executive privilege for the purpose of hiding wrongdoing …
President Obama invoked executive privilege to prevent further congressional oversight of the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious operation on the same day it bemoaned the supposed lack of transparency among some conservative non-profits. Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, touted efforts on the campaign’s website to get Crossroads GPS, a …
President Obama channeled his inner Richard Nixon with his exercise of executive privilege to shield Attorney General Eric Holder from transparency. Whether the assertion is valid is a question to be resolved between Congress and the President, yet this authority is something that can be waived by the President if …
As a strong defender of executive power (when properly exercised) and executive privilege (when properly invoked), I am concerned when claims of executive power or privilege are abused for any reason—especially if they are invoked to shield potential wrongdoing. In addition to shielding the wrongdoing, it jeopardizes the very executive …
On the heels of Florida filing suit against the Department of Homeland Security for trying to stop the state from removing noncitizens from its voting rolls, yesterday Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy issued a temporary stay in another noncitizen voting case. Arizona v. Gonzalez involves Arizona’s Proposition 200, which would …
More than 80 plaintiffs in 23 different lawsuits are now challenging the HHS mandate that will require many religious institutions to provide health insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and other contraceptive services. At the heart of these lawsuits is whether the government’s purported interest in marginally increasing access to …
It was no surprise today that the most liberal (and most-overturned) federal appeals court in the nation, the Ninth Circuit, refused a request for a rehearing by the entire court of the decision by a three-judge panel that found California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional. This means that the proponents of Proposition …
Not many cases involving the financing of municipal sewer construction projects are likely to raise issues that might interest the Supreme Court (or anyone else for that matter), but at least one has. On Monday, the Supreme Court decided Armour v. Indianapolis, which rejected an Equal Protection Clause challenge to …
Today, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit held unconstitutional a provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) defining “marriage” exclusively as opposite-sex unions, setting up an all-but-certain Supreme Court case for next year. Acting in response to a Hawaii Supreme Court …
