Judge’s Opinions

Late last week, President Donald Trump issued a tweet in which he purported to order American businesses to cease doing work with their employees and contract partners in China.
He claimed he was exercising presidential powers pursuant to what he contended was the national emergency surrounding the trading relationship between the United States and China.
Since he did not declare a national emergency, he did not notify Congress and give it the opportunity to ratify or reject his executive orders. In fact, he didn't even sign any executive orders on this.
He merely ordered American businesses in a. . .

While most of us have been thinking about the end of summer and while the political class frets over the Democratic presidential debates and the aborted visit of two members of Congress to Israel, the Trump administration has quietly moved to extend and make permanent the government's authority to spy on all persons in America.
The president, never at a loss for words, must have been asked by the intelligence community he once reviled not to address these matters in public.
These matters include the very means and the very secret court about which he complained loud and. . .

When tragedy strikes, as it did in two mass killings earlier this month, there is always the urge to pressure the government do something. Governments are animated by the belief that doing something — any demonstrable overt behavior — will show that they are in control. I understand the natural fears that good folks have that an El Paso or a Dayton episode might happen again, but doing something for the sake of appearance can be dangerous to personal liberty.
When the Constitution was written, the idea of owning arms and keeping them in the home was widespread. The colonists. . .

Last weekend's mass murders in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have produced a flood of words about everything from gun control to mental illness to white nationalism. Most of those words have addressed the right to keep and bear arms as if it were a gift from the government. It isn't.
The Supreme Court has twice ruled in the past 11 years that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual pre-political liberty. That is the highest category of liberty recognized in the law. It is akin to the freedoms of thought. . .

"Now hatred is by far the Longest pleasure;
"Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure."
— George Gordon, Lord Byron
When I was an undergraduate at Princeton University during the height of the Vietnam War, surrounded by fellow students who condemned it and even some who left the country to avoid fighting in it, the mantra used by its supporters was, "America, love it or leave it." In my misguided "Bomb Hanoi" youth, I uttered this phrase, which I now detest.
The phrase itself — with its command of the government. . .

During the past week, President Donald Trump excited two bitter public controversies by sending and publishing two highly inappropriate and offensively incendiary tweets.
The first of these was aimed at four female members of Congress — each a person of color, and, as members of Congress, each an American citizen. Yet the president said they should go back to the countries from which they came. The second tweet was aimed at Google, which the president argued should be investigated for treason.
The first of these tweets was xenophobic, racist and hateful; the second was just plain ignorant. Together they revealed. . .

Late last month, the Supreme Court ruled on a challenge to a question that the Commerce Department announced it would add to the 2020 census. The census itself has been mandated by the Constitution to be taken every 10 years so that representation in the House of Representatives could be fairly apportioned to reflect population changes.
Over the years, the folks who prepare the census developed an appetite for peering into the personal lives of everyone living in America, and Congress — which has the same mentality as the Census bureaucrats — permitted this. So, the Census Bureau began adding. . .

The Declaration of Independence — released on July 4, 1776 — was Thomas Jefferson's masterpiece. Jefferson himself wrote much about it in essays and letters during the 50 years that followed.
Not the least of what he wrote offered his view that the Declaration and the values that it articulated were truly radical — meaning they reflected 180-degree changes at the very core of societal attitudes in America. The idea that farmers and merchants and lawyers could secede from a kingdom and fight and win a war against the king's army was the end result. . .

Many of my media colleagues have been lauding President Donald Trump for signing an executive order earlier this week directing the federal Department of Health and Human Services to require health care providers to inform patients in advance of the true costs of medications and services.
The gist of the president's order seems universally pleasing. Who doesn't want to know from a health care provider — your physician, an emergency facility or a hospital — what the likely cost will be to you and what the actual cost of medications was to the provider? We all. . .

"...nor shall any person be subject for the same offense
to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb..."
—Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
The government in America is out of control.
Last week, this column discussed the unconstitutional efforts of federal prosecutors in Chicago to punish an American citizen for crimes that had not yet been committed. This week, I address the wish of federal prosecutors in Alabama to charge and to punish a man for a crime for which he had already been convicted and punished.
There is no happy ending here. . .