Today President Obama stood on the world stage and demanded that suspected terrorists be treated under the “rule of law.” In fact, he used the phrase “rule of law” eight times. It is now time for him to use the phrase “rule of law” when it comes to Americans. In the next two weeks, the President will likely endorse a series of measures in his role as CEO of the car companies that may violate a number of U.S. contract laws, bankruptcy laws and financial rules and regulations. The United States …
Chalk up a big loss for constitutional rule of law, thanks to an Obama Administration sleight-of-hand reported on the front page of today’s Washington Post. When the Executive Branch needs legal advice, it goes to the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice. OLC is like an in-house Supreme Court: it evaluates the constitutionality of pending legislation and issues binding opinions on the legality of different policy options. And like a court, OLC has a strong institutional memory and tradition; its legal opinions generally don’t change much from …
(Commentary by Heritage’s Brian Walsh) The Supreme Court yesterday decided not to consider an important case, Sorich v. U.S., on the meaning and scope of an exceedingly broad federal statute that has been used to prosecute a breathtaking range of conduct. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia again broke with the strict law-and-order stereotype often applied to conservative jurists by penning a trenchant dissent to the Court’s decision not to review the case. Scalia’s dissent also helps illustrate the dire need for federal criminal-law reform. Two decades ago, the Court overturned judicial …
After Secretary Paulson released his first bailout draft, we enumerated some threshold constitutional issues that the proposed legislation failed to pass. The latest House bailout draft not only fails to address these concerns, it actually creates brand new ones. The most glaring problem with the original proposal was the lack of meaningful standards to limit the extremely broad grant of discretion to the Treasury Secretary. The latest House draft attempts but ultimately fails to fix this problem. The draft identifies a long list of “considerations” that the Secretary “shall” consult …
