Several excellent posts challenge the legality of the President’s exchange of five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo for a U.S. soldier held by the Taliban — see Josh Blackman here, Ilya Somin here (toward the bottom of the post), and especially Tim Sandefur here. As the posts explain, the exchange violated a U.S. statute that prohibits releasing any prisoners…
Monday’s unanimous (on the result) Supreme Court decision in Bond v. United States uses federalism principles to rule against the federal prosecution of Carol Ann Bond, who attempted to injure a romantic rival with toxic chemicals. Briefly: The majority (Chief Justice Roberts, writing for Justices Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan) thought the statute in question — implementing…
Bond was a case about the scope of the treaty power—can Congress do something pursuant to a treaty that it can’t otherwise do?—and yet the majority opinion avoided that discussion altogether in the name of a faux judicial minimalism.
I had an interesting exchange by email with a reader I’ll identify (at his request) just as TJ, an independent researcher, about the original meaning of “natural born citizen” and my views expressed in this post. We’ve covered a lot of ground so I’m just going to pick out a part of it here, regarding the…
At Forbes, Trevor Burrus: No Taxation Without Representation: How A Fundamental American Principle Is A Technicality To The New York Times (responding to this editorial in the New York Times). From the introduction: The Origination Clause was included in the Constitution to ensure that the body that taxed the people, the House of Representatives, was also the most accountable to…
Last week I joined a group of distinguished scholars on this amicus brief filed in support of plaintiffs/appellants in Tuaua v. United States, the Samoan citizenship case now at the D.C. Circuit. As I’ve discussed before, the issue is whether the Constitution allows the United States to treat inhabitants of American Samoa (a U.S. territory) as something less than American citizens…
A May 16th Food and Drug Administration news release reported that U.S. Marshals had seized more than $11,185,000 worth of unapproved drugs. They did this at the request of the FDA because the medications are unapproved and misbranded drugs under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The FDA complaint for forfeiture in paragraph 3…
I’m pleased to report that this past week the brilliant Justice Clarence Thomas cited my work on the Necessary and Proper Clause in his concurring opinion in Town of Greece v. Galloway, an Establishment Clause case that received wide publicity. This was the thirteenth citation in the third Supreme Court case in the past 11 months.…
Walter E. Williams asks: Should we be ruled by what are seen as good ideas or by what's permissible by the U.S. Constitution?
the power at stake here – to receive ambassadors – is expressly given to the President in what appear to be mandatory terms (he “shall” receive ambassadors).