William Standring's blog
The debate over whether the accused Underwear Bomber should be tried in a defendant-friendly federal court instead of by a more rigorous military tribunal got me to reflecting: just who was the 100 percent-American Bill of Rights drafted to protect in the first place? Terrorists? Does the reach of the flag-wrapped first ten amendments extend to a radical Nigerian Muslim like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, charged with trying to blow up an airplane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit? He’s not even a citizen of the United States. Just what claim does he have to the Bill’s red-white-and-blue benefits to begin with?
The Supreme Court of the United States has decided that, practice and precedent to the contrary, the First Amendment gives corporations and unions the power to spend as much of their general treasuries as they care to influence candidate elections—just as long as always they do it independently of the candidates themselves. The conclusion may be good or bad, but it had little to do with the cause before it, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
In the prize rings of public disputation, I’m not tagged as a "No más," kind of guy. But like Robert Duran, the Panamanian boxer who probably didn’t actually say those words but really did give up during his 1980 championship fight with Sugar Ray Leonard, I think I’ve had enough.
Among the better features of the English language is that it leaves room for its users to make up words of their own—blog, for example—import words from other tongues—rendezvous, comes to mind—or freight old words with new meanings—like filibuster.
The nexus between science and citizenship may not be obvious. What good does it do a citizen to know about dark energy and dark matter, and the difference between them? Or that we live in four dimensions, or that space bends? That’s stuff for eggheads, right?
In the words of New York Times reporter Adam Liptak, “So far, Heller is shooting blanks.”
Liptak was writing nine months after the United States Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia vs. Heller, a gun-control decision that discovered in the Second Amendment an individual right to firearms that the country’s highest tribunal had not noticed before.
Putting a period, somewhat after the fact, to one of the silliest rumor campaigns in the history of American presidential politics, a federal judge in Washington concluded March 5 that it was beneath the dignity of his bench to hear a lawsuit challenging Barack Obama’s by-birth right of eligibility for the Oval Office.
According to first-hand reports, balloting was running smoothly Tuesday in Williamsburg, Virginia, a town that has been going to the polls since about 1632.
Election officials carefully monitored the contests for president, senator, and representative to be sure there were no irregularities, and that all was fair and above board.
It wasn’t ever thus. During the past 370 years, voting has one or two times, perhaps, been, shall we say, below board.
Fifth in a Series of Five
Read Fourth in the Series What the Court Said
In 1931, the Supreme Court concluded that the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause applied to the states the First Amendment’s ban on free press prohibitions, a stricture that had until then applied only to Congress.
