Law

Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer was asked on TV this morning whether he thinks the IRS actions violated the law:

"Look, I can't speak to the law here," he said. "The law is irrelevant. The activity was outrageous and inexcusable."

Corporate governance is a much-discussed topic, and the operation of corporations has proven a fertile field for investigative journalism. But even though many colleges and universities are multibillion-dollar-a-year operations, the subject of university governance has been largely neglected. This is unfortunate because university governance raises fascinating questions of great public interest involving the complex intersection of law, morals, and education. Nasar v. Columbia is a case in point.

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on California’s Proposition 8, which defines marriage as being between couples of the opposite sex. Today they’re hearing them on the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a union of one man and one woman at the federal level. Like Roe v. Wade, the high court’s decision on these cases is likely to fuel the culture war for a generation or two, at least. Unlike with Roe, the Court seems to understand that it’s been handed an issue of enormous consequence.

President Obama has grown fond of saying that he’s “not a dictator,” “not a king,” and “not the emperor,” but is instead “the president.”  Whether his tendency to clarify a seemingly obvious point reveals his inner desires or not, his actions in a variety of ways suggest that he doesn’t think the president shares his fellow citizens’ ongoing obligation to obey the law. To the contrary, he seems to view the president as being somewhat above the law.

The relationship between lobbyists and legislators is a delicate subject and cloaked in language that is meant to obscure and confuse.

It’s an old basketball adage that teams that apply a full-court press don’t like to be pressed themselves. They like to force the action, not have it forced on them.  In a similar vein, those who seek to centralized power by spearheading the passage of new federal laws generally don’t like to obey those laws themselves.  Laws are something for other people to dutifully obey — less important people.  

A New York appellate court has ruled that the New York Times's request for a list of gun owners in New York City, under the Freedom of Information Law, violates the state's statute. The ruling overturns in part a lower court's ruling.

If Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey is found guilty of traveling to the Dominican Republic to engage in sexual intercourse with underage prostitutes, he could face up to 30 years prison. The appropriate law, which would seem to apply in this instance, is the Prosecutorial Remedies And Other Tools To End The Exploitation Of Children Today (or the Protect Act).

Have you heard much about President Obama’s $787,000,000,000 economic “stimulus” (now estimated to cost $831,000,000,000) lately?  In its last report, published in 2011, the president’s own Council of Economic Advisors released an estimate showing that, for every $317,000 in “stimulus” spending that had by then gone out the door, only one job had been created or saved.  Even in Washington, that’s not considered good bang for the buck.

President Barack Obama has signed a law that will allow cash prizes to be offered for information leading to the arrest of some foreign criminals, the White House announced. The law is officially called the "Department of State Rewards Program Update and Technical Corrections Act of 2012."

We are in the midst of a crisis of federalism and we don’t even know it. In November, the states of Colorado and Washington legalized recreational marijuana use, while 16 other states and Washington, D.C., already permitted the medical use of marijuana. Yet at the same time, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 prohibits the cultivation, sale, and use of marijuana in all its forms. State and federal law are at odds.