Dominic Cummings is right, says Professor James Alexander: the idea that civil servants are the 'guardians of the constitution' is pernicious in the extreme. But who then should play such a lofty role?
The post Who is the Guardian of the Constitution? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
Georgetown law Professor Steve Vladeck is one of the leading critics of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But in an insightful recent post on his substack, he outlines key reasons why "court expansion" is a bad response to its flaws. The cure is likely to be worse than the disease:
[I]t seems to me that those who are fully onboard the expansion-or-bust train should have to do more than simply assert that having four new Democratic appointees on the Court in 2029 would be a self-evidently "good" thing. If nothing else, proponents of expansion should have to answer the following four questions:
- How do we avoid touching off a race to the bottom, where each time one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, it expands the Court to ensure an ideologically and politically sympathetic majority?
- If a race to the bottom is unavoidable, how do we avoid further (and potentially fatal) erosion of public confidence in the Court—which will quite transparently be little more than a lever of power for whichever party last had such a trifecta?
- If eroding public confidence in the Court is a feature, and not a bug, how do we insulate against the same erosion of public confidence in lower federal courts?
- What is the case for why expansion is a better way to achieve the desired reforms than alternatives that would (or, at least, should) avoid many of these forward-looking concerns?
He adds that court-packing could easily "permanently undermine judicial review as an institution." The rest of his piece (which is behind a paywall) offers far from reassuring answers to these questions.
I have offered similar criticisms of court-packing in a long series of articles and blog posts, most recently in a June Lawfare article where I explained (among other things) why the Supreme Court's recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais doesn't justify packing, and in a July UnPopulist article critiquing a court-packing proposal advanced by Andy Craig. In these pieces, I explain why the Court's record of checking dangerous abuses of government power - though not without serious flaws - is considerably better than many critics claim. In addition, I argue that court-packing is likely to undermine effective judicial review - not only by the Supreme Court, but also by lower courts.
Like Vladeck, I think some of the issues that concern critics of the Court can be more effectively addressed in other ways. For example, in the Lawfare article, I explain how Congress can fix the flaws of the Callais decision by banning or restricting gerrymandering. It could also enact a binding ethics code for the justices. Justice Alito was wrong to suggest otherwise, back in 2023. That said, if your main goal is a sweeping reversal of much of the Court's recent jurisprudence, there may be no easy way to achieve that quickly without court-packing or something like it. I would argue that any benefits that might achieve are outweighed by the enormous costs of destroying judicial review.
In addition, if your objection to the Court's recent decisions is that they often don't do enough to constrain unconstitutional actions by other branches of government or by the states, court-packing is likely to make that problem worse, not better. Destroying judicial review won't enforce tighter constitutional constraints on the executive or bring back Roe v. Wade. To the contrary, it would largely destroy any hope of doing so.
In another recent piece, I assessed "non-packing" rationales for increasing the size of the Supreme Court. There, I argue that these rationales are mostly weak; and, to the extent they have merit, there are better ways to address them than an expansion that amounts to court-packing. I even outline possible ways to increase the size of the Court without creating an opportunity for court-packing (this would require allowing the party that doesn't hold the White House to pick some of the new justices).
The post Steve Vladeck's "Hard Questions About Court Expansion" appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Sacrifica ciò che è scomodo, mai il progetto. Il “pal-washing” in azione.
Un copione già noto
Il 9 ottobre 2026 il Comitato norvegese per il Nobel ha assegnato il Premio per la pace a Navanethem Pillay, giurista sudafricana di 85 anni, già giudice della Corte penale internazionale e Alta commissaria Onu per i diritti umani. La motivazione parla di una persona che ha aperto la strada a un ordine giuridico globale più completo. Il presidente del Comitato, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, ha aggiunto che il premio è un messaggio per chi attacca e mina il sistema internazionale e le sue istituzioni. Il verdetto è dichiaratamente politico, ed è su questo piano che va discusso.
La stessa figura che nel 2011 avrebbe «abbattuto» Gheddafi, spianando la strada al saccheggio del petrolio libico e alla schiavitù dei migranti africani, ora «abbatterebbe» Netanyahu, e preparerebbe così la riabilitazione di Israele. Il filo logico non sarebbe la morale né la pace, ma l’agenda dell’Open Society di George Soros: sacrificare i soggetti diventati scomodi, mai l’essenza del progetto. Qualcuno l’ha battezzata «pal-washing». La domanda di fondo è seria, perché chiede se dietro premi e giurisdizioni dell’ordine liberale ci sia una regolarità.
Occorre sottolineare che il copione è già noto. Vi ricordate quando Barack Obama ricevette il premio Nobel per la pace, inaugurando guerre su guerre? O vi ricordare i personaggi in cerca d’autore come Machado, Mohammadi, o i difensori dei criminali Ucraini? Ma andiamo per ordine.
Atto Primo: la Libia
Nel febbraio 2011 Pillay, Alta commissaria, chiese al Consiglio per i diritti umani un’azione vigorosa per fermare le violenze e chiamare i responsabili a risponderne; il Consiglio condannò le violazioni e istituì una commissione d’inchiesta. Il passaggio successivo toccò al Consiglio di sicurezza: il rinvio alla CPI con la risoluzione 1970, poi la 1973, approvata con dieci voti favorevoli e cinque astensioni (Brasile, Cina, Germania, India, Russia). Nessuno sostiene che Pillay abbia deciso la guerra. Conta la sequenza: il linguaggio dei diritti umani aprì la porta, quello della protezione dei civili autorizzò la forza, e l’operazione scivolò verso il cambio di regime. Già in aprile Lavrov accusava la NATO di eccedere il mandato, e un ministro francese ammetteva che il cambio di regime avrebbe richiesto un nuovo voto.
Poi i costi. Nel 2017 l’OIM documentò aste di migranti subsahariani nel sud della Libia, venduti per somme tra 200 e 500 dollari. Il nesso con il crollo dello Stato dopo il 2011 è la lettura più plausibile, benché la fonte documenti il fenomeno e non la sua causa. Il prezzo lo pagarono la Libia e i migranti; la cornice giuridica ne uscì, sul piano formale, intatta, anche se la controversia sul mandato avrebbe poi pesato sui veti di Mosca e Pechino in altri dossier.
Atto Secondo: Bibi
Il 21 novembre 2024 la Camera preliminare I della CPI emise mandati d’arresto per Netanyahu e per l’ex ministro della Difesa Gallant, per crimini di guerra e crimini contro l’umanità. Pillay aveva lasciato la Corte nel 2008, ma ha presieduto la Commissione d’inchiesta Onu che il 16 settembre 2025 ha concluso che Israele ha commesso genocidio a Gaza. Qui il «pal-washing» trova il suo meccanismo. Il diritto penale internazionale lavora su persone: un imputato, un’imputazione, un periodo. Se il caso si chiude con la sorte di un leader, si apre una cesura narrativa, il prima e il dopo di un uomo, dopo la quale lo Stato può presentarsi come reintegrato. La Libia offre l’analogia: là il caso si chiuse con la caduta di un uomo.
I limiti del percorso giocano a favore della lettura. La Corte non ha una polizia e l’esecuzione dei mandati dipende dagli Stati parte; la Commissione non è un tribunale e non parla a nome dell’intera Onu; lo stesso Comitato, riferisce AFP, ha detto che spetta a una corte stabilire se vi sia genocidio. Il premio non produce effetti giuridici, lo sappiamo, però produce legittimazione per un circuito che promette giustizia e non può garantirla.
Dobbiamo, poi, considerare che dinamiche del genere le abbiamo già viste più volte all’interno dell’ordine globalista che domina in Occidente. L’Open Society Foundations si presenta come il maggiore finanziatore privato al mondo di gruppi per giustizia, democrazia e diritti umani, attivo in oltre cento paesi, e Pillay ha ricevuto lo Stockholm Human Rights Award, lo stesso che nel 2011 è andato a Soros e a Neier. Sembra proprio che si ripeta di nuovo il pattern della agenda sorosiana, fatta di fondazioni, ONG, tribunali, commissioni e burocrazie che condividono un lessico e un orizzonte, quello di un ordine liberale da perfezionare e mai da rimettere in discussione. Chi opera dentro quel lessico può denunciare un governo, un leader, perfino uno Stato, ma non può contestare i presupposti dell’ordine che gli dà legittimità.
Alcuni obietteranno che la Commissione di Pillay attribuisce la responsabilità a Israele come Stato, non soltanto ai suoi leader, il che contraddice l’idea di un’operazione puramente personalizzante. Il secondo è la reazione. Netanyahu ha accusato il Comitato di aver perso la bussola morale, il Ministero degli Esteri israeliano ha parlato di una grottesca strumentalizzazione del premio, e Washington ha annunciato sanzioni contro la CPI poche ore dopo l’annuncio. Tutto vero. Ma avrebbe senso e valore se il sistema occidentale non fosse marcio fin dalle sue fondamenta, se il suo sistema giuridico funzionasse, ma così non è, sotto nessun aspetto (e abbiamo avuto già sufficienti dimostrazioni – non scordiamoci anche il caso Epstein).
Se nei prossimi dodici mesi la caduta politica di Netanyahu verrà presentata come chiusura del caso, anziché come una tappa di un procedimento che riguarda lo Stato, il «pal-washing» guadagnerà peso. Se i procedimenti proseguiranno oltre la sua persona, e se gli Stati parte eseguiranno i mandati, forse ne perderà. Allo stato delle prove la tesi è plausibile e, fino a smentita comprovata, questo è l’ennesimo Nobel della non-Pace, che non possiamo chiamare “guerra”.
On a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, journalist Ron Brownstein described the election as a contest between “the wave versus the wall.” The wave being voter anger and President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity. The wall being structural impediments to voters’ voices, such as gerrymanders and the Republican Party’s stark spending advantage. Now we know […]
The post Don’t let Musk and the billionaires buy America’s elections appeared first on Asia Times.
John Eastman has amassed a small army of support from conservative legal voices backing his bid for the Supreme Court to help him keep his law license.
Among the many amicus briefs urging the justices to grant review of Eastman’s petition are Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Mike Lee, R-Utah. Sounding a similar note to briefs from other supporters, they told the justices that “[p]olitical activists have turned the bar disciplinary process into a weapon against lawyers on the disfavored side of public controversies.”
Whether that support from Cruz, Lee and others will help convince the justices to consider Eastman’s appeal remains to be seen. It takes four justices to grant review.
If the court grants review — we won’t find out for at least a few weeks — that wouldn’t necessarily mean that it will side with Eastman in the end. It would mean that the justices will consider doing so and will issue a ruling one way or the other after holding a hearing. The court denies most petitions.
The California authorities found that Eastman’s disbarment is needed “to protect the public, the courts, and the legal profession” following his misconduct in representing President Donald Trump and his 2020 campaign. The state bar waived its right to respond to Eastman’s petition, which could signal to the justices that the matter is not worth their time, a sign that the amicus briefs urging review are attempting to counteract.
This litigation is developing as an unrelated bar complaint was filed in California against Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, asking the state to investigate whether she violated California law by holding herself out as a lawyer despite apparently not being admitted to practice law.
Among Eastman’s backers are a pack of 17 current and former Trump lawyers and a coalition that includes a group called the Conservative Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Not all the amicus briefs are as partisan-aligned. A filing from law professors warned that disbarments based on political advocacy “are likely to arise again, both from the left and from the right.” The professors noted that Eastman’s case “also involves other allegations of impropriety, such as alleged false statements to courts,” which the academics said they weren’t weighing in on.
Eastman’s petition is currently set to be considered at one of the justices’ upcoming private conferences on Nov. 6. If the court doesn’t call for the state to respond to the petition, then that would all but guarantee that it will deny it.
If the court requests a response, that wouldn’t mean that it will grant Eastman’s petition, but that could prolong the review process. It only takes one interested justice to get the court to request a response. Like the secret vote tallies when the court grants review of petitions, the court does not publicize which justice or justices request responses; the public dockets reflect the actions as taken on behalf of the court.
Justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Eastman clerked, previously recused himself from an Eastman-related case. But the justice did not explain why, so it is unclear whether he will weigh in on this petition. If Thomas recuses himself from this one, too, then that could make it more difficult for his former clerk to attract enough votes for review.
The California bar court rejected Eastman against the backdrop of what the court called his “attempts to actively undermine the results of an election to the most powerful office in the United States with the goal of delaying or invalidating the lawful installation of his client’s electoral opponent and thereby keep his client in office.”
The bar court agreed that Eastman committed several instances of professional misconduct, including trying to mislead the courts, the public and Trump’s first-term vice president, Mike Pence, whom Trump tried to pressure to overturn his 2020 loss to former President Joe Biden through the vice president’s ceremonial role in presiding over the Senate’s certification of the election results.
“Eastman made numerous false claims to help accomplish the conspiracy’s shared objective: to have former Vice-President Pence run interference on the electoral vote count with the goal to have him reject or delay the counting of electoral votes on January 6, 2021,” the court said.
In an opinion affirming a hearing judge’s culpability findings, the court also agreed with the judge that Eastman was not culpable for one of the counts alleged by bar authorities due to a lack of evidence that his statements contributed to the assault and breach of the U.S. Capitol.
Eastman turned to the justices in Washington after the California Supreme Court made his disbarment official earlier this year. Announcing the filing of his high court petition, his lawyers said the case isn’t about relitigating the 2020 election but rather “whether a state can strip a lawyer of his license — and his livelihood — because government officials disagreed with the legal arguments he made on behalf of his client.”
They said that if it can happen to Eastman, then it can happen to any lawyer who takes on unpopular causes. They said Supreme Court review is needed “to remove the threat the decision below poses not just to the First Amendment but to the ability of attorneys fiercely to advocate for their clients without fear of politicized disbarment.”
Meanwhile, Eastman is continuing to work as a lawyer. He has filed briefs in several high-profile Supreme Court cases over the years, including in support of the Trump administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, which a divided court rejected in June.
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The post Ted Cruz and Mike Lee want the Supreme Court to hear John Eastman’s appeal appeared first on MS NOW.
According to The Washington Post, "The chairman of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee is investigating two D.C.-based activist groups over hosting what he called 'jury nullification training sessions,' claiming that their instructions given to potential jurors were an illegal attempt to subvert federal prosecutors."
The committee chair in question, Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), has set his sights on the groups known as Free DC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams because they, in Comer's words, believe "that potential jurors should not make decisions impartially based on applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case, but based on their subjective, personal beliefs and activist agendas."
I hate to break it to Comer, but many prominent members of America's Founding generation would have agreed with those D.C. activists.
The debate over jury nullification asks whether there is a proper place in our legal system for a jury to acquit, not because of any lack of evidence of a defendant's guilt, but because the jury believes the underlying law that was supposedly broken, or the prosecutor's particular enforcement of that law, to be unconstitutional.
In 1791, the influential Founding Father James Wilson, who was a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, delivered a widely discussed lecture on law at the College of Philadelphia. "Whoever would be obliged to obey a constitutional law, is justified in refusing to obey an unconstitutional act of the legislature," Wilson said. "When a question, even of this delicate nature, occurs, every one who is called to act, has a right to judge." Needless to say, jurors are among those "called to act" in this very manner. Jurors therefore have their own "right to judge" the constitutionality of the law (and prosecution) before them.
Thomas Jefferson made a similar point in a 1789 letter to Thomas Paine. "The trial by jury," Jefferson wrote, is "the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." How else may a jury hold the government accountable to the principles of the Constitution than by judging for itself the constitutionality of the government's actions, including the actions of the police and prosecution?
According to Comer, the job of a juror is mechanically "applying the law as instructed to the facts presented before them in the case."
But that's not what Founding Fathers such as Wilson and Jefferson thought. They argued that the job of the juror was to apply the text of the Constitution to the actions of the government and to acquit the defendant if either the law or its enforcement came up short. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in his great book, Democracy in America, the jury "places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or a portion of the governed, and not in that of the government."
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in two cases that are worth keeping track of.
The post Jury Nullification Is Not a Crime appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Thanks to a 2005 DUI conviction in Pennsylvania, Edward Williams permanently lost the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. But he did not realize that until a decade later, and his confusion on that point is understandable.
The federal law that stripped Williams of his Second Amendment rights is commonly described as applying to "felons," and Williams' offense was a misdemeanor. But although his sentence did not include any time behind bars, his crime theoretically could have sent him to prison for up to five years. That was enough to trigger 18 USC 922(g)(1), which covers anyone convicted of "a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year."
When a lawyer alerted Williams to that wrinkle, which made his continued ownership of firearms a federal felony, he got rid of his guns. But he did not think that requirement was fair, reasonable, or constitutional, and this week a federal appeals court agreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit recognized a historical tradition of disarming "physically dangerous individuals" whose possession of firearms would pose a threat to public safety. But it said Williams plainly does not fit into that category.
"The federal government spent nearly a decade trying to permanently disarm a peaceable man over a nonviolent misdemeanor—and it lost bigly," says Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition, which supported Williams' lawsuit. "The government does not get to turn a nonviolent conviction into a lifetime ban on exercising a constitutionally protected right."
The 3rd Circuit's en banc decision in Williams v. Attorney General affirms a 2023 ruling by a federal judge who likewise concluded that disarming Williams was unconstitutional. It elaborates on the logic of Range v. Attorney General, a 2023 decision that restored the gun rights of a Pennsylvania man who had been convicted of food stamp fraud. In both cases, the 3rd Circuit held that applying Section 922(g)(1) to the plaintiffs was not "consistent with this Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation"—the Second Amendment test established by the Supreme Court's 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Writing for the majority in Williams' case, 3rd Circuit Judge Paul Matey acknowledges that the Supreme Court has described "longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons" as "presumptively lawful." But "those longstanding customs restricted the violently dangerous (within which some felons would be included), not felons writ large," he says. "Felons were restricted because they posed a physical danger, rather than for their offense of conviction."
Matey argues that "focusing on physical dangerousness corrects the erroneous argument" that "only law-abiding and responsible citizens can exercise the rights protected by the Second Amendment"—a claim that the Supreme Court rejected in the 2024 case United States v. Rahimi. "We find no history that supports disarming irresponsible people, where 'responsible' is defined by the whim of the sovereign or the will of the majority," he says, alluding to the danger of allowing legislators to whittle away at the Second Amendment by criminalizing an ever-widening range of conduct.
Matey emphasizes "the novelty of forever restricting all felons from possessing firearms for lawful purposes." The original restriction, which Congress approved in 1938 as part of the Federal Firearms Act, applied only to violent crimes such as murder, manslaughter, rape, kidnapping, robbery, and assault with a deadly weapon. In 1961, Congress expanded the ban to cover nonviolent crimes punishable by more than a year in prison.
Williams' 2005 DUI conviction qualified for two reasons. He had a prior DUI conviction, stemming from a 2000 arrest in State College. And when he was arrested again in Philadelphia four years later, his blood alcohol concentration was a whopping 0.223 percent. That made his second offense a first-degree misdemeanor, which carries a maximum prison sentence of five years.
Since then, Williams has stayed out of trouble. "He has done nothing violent, let alone dangerous, for over twenty years, and has held steady employment at the same job for over three decades," Matey notes. Williams drinks only occasionally, and a psychological evaluation found he "has a normal personality, without psychopathology and without addiction or violent tendencies."
The Justice Department nevertheless argued that Williams' continuing disarmament is consistent with the Bruen test, which requires historical analogs that are "relevantly similar" in motivation and scope. In making that case, the government relied mainly on early laws aimed at "habitual drunkards"—the same analogy that the Supreme Court unanimously rejected last June in United States v. Hemani, which involved the federal ban on gun possession by "unlawful" drug users.
Although the Justice Department "acknowledges it may proscribe Williams's possession of firearms only if he 'presently poses a physical danger if armed,'" Matey says, it "offers no evidence to establish this as the aim of the habitual drunkard laws." Those laws, the Supreme Court noted in Hemani, "did not seek to protect the public from violence so much as to protect habitual drunkards from themselves and their families from financial devastation."
Nor did the habitual drunkard laws permanently disarm people, as Section 922(g)(1) does. "Most statutes capped the commitment of habitual drunkards to the state inebriate asylum, prison, or hard labor to a few months or years," Matey notes. "Others provided for an indefinite period of incarceration, but had no indication that upon release individuals continued to forfeit their arms. Rather, once someone was 'safe' to 'go at large,' they were restored to the status of a full rights-bearing citizen."
Contrary to the considerations that the Supreme Court deemed relevant in Hemani, Matey says, the Justice Department "fails to show that Williams threatens to 'misuse[] a gun while intoxicated,' or that he 'poses a danger to himself or others as a result' of
alcohol abuse. In fact, much like those nineteenth-century drunkards released from custody and restored their rights, the record shows that Williams poses no present physical danger from the use of a firearm, or anything else."
The 3rd Circuit is one of three federal appeals courts that have allowed people with nonviolent felony records to argue that Section 922(g)(1) is unconstitutional as applied to them. But such challenges have been blocked in six circuits, notwithstanding compelling historical evidence that the law reaches much farther than the Second Amendment allows. So far, the Supreme Court has declined to accept any of the many petitions asking it to resolve that circuit split.
The post The 3rd Circuit Upholds the Gun Rights of a Man Who Committed a Nonviolent Misdemeanor 2 Decades Ago appeared first on Reason Magazine.
When a president starts with a predetermined policy and then goes looking for a statutory pretext to justify it, he is building on shaky ground. President Donald Trump illustrated that point once again in July, when he announced a third round of broad tariffs after his first two attempts ran into legal trouble.
Shortly after taking office in 2025, Trump claimed to have discovered a previously unnoticed delegation of extensive tariff authority in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that does not mention import taxes and had never been used to impose them. That claim was rejected by every court that considered it.
Last February, the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs at all. But Trump had a backup plan: Hours after that decision, he announced another sweeping set of tariffs, this time relying on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
That provision allows tariffs in response to "fundamental international payments problems" caused by "serious United States balance-of-payments deficits." In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that the new tariffs were illegal because Trump had failed to "identify balance-of-payments deficits within the meaning of Section 122."
Although that decision was stayed pending appeal, Trump's Section 122 tariffs, which were subject to a 150-day statutory limit, expired on July 24. Trump then switched to Plan C, invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act, which authorizes tariffs in response to a foreign "act, policy, or practice" that is "unreasonable or discriminatory" and "burdens or restricts" U.S. commerce.
Trump's Section 301 tariffs supposedly targeted countries that had failed to "impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor." The alleged offenders included 86 economies that accounted for nearly all U.S. imports.
In separate complaints, the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) and the law firm Akin Gump, which had played leading roles in challenging Trump's prior tariffs, immediately asked the CIT to block the new import taxes. By and large, they noted, the government had failed to explain how the targeted countries had fallen short, how their alleged failures burdened U.S. commerce, or why the new tariffs could be expected to ameliorate the problem they were supposed to address.
The LJC argued that the forced-labor issue was "simply a pretext" for reinstating Trump's "invalidated global tariff regime." It added that Trump's reading of Section 301, like his interpretation of IEEPA, would violate the "major questions" doctrine, which requires clear congressional authorization for policies of "vast economic and political significance."
This was Trump's "third attempt" to "impose essentially the same set of sweeping global tariffs," Akin Gump's lawyers wrote. "The third time's not the charm."
The post Trump Keeps Coming Up With Legally Dubious Tariff Justifications appeared first on Reason Magazine.
A federal judge in New York has blocked the Trump administration from entering into, renewing or expanding contracts for a controversial advertising campaign, freezing $20 million in funding allocated through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) amid allegations that public money was being used for partisan political messaging.
RELATED: Trump Demands Leadership Change in Ukraine Amid Zelensky Rift
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon of the Southern District of New York issued a 14-day temporary restraining order on Sunday, citing the risk of “irreparable harm” before publishing her full legal reasoning. The ruling came just over three weeks before the midterm elections.
The lawsuit was filed by a coalition of civic organizations, including the nonpartisan group Common Cause, represented by the legal firm Democracy Forward. The plaintiffs argued that the campaign violated federal restrictions on using funds appropriated by Congress for partisan advertising or propaganda.
“There is no legal justification or precedent for the president to use the machinery of government and public funds to influence election results,” the plaintiffs said in a statement following the ruling.
The advertisements, which began airing in late September, feature footage from Donald Trump’s previous presidential campaign, excerpts from speeches warning of the threat of communism and references to recent military operations, including U.S. military action against Iran and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The Justice Department argued late Saturday that the court order was unnecessary because the advertising campaign was scheduled to end on Sunday. The judge nevertheless imposed the restrictions.
The White House has defended the spending, describing the advertisements as “public service and educational messages” and rejecting allegations that they constitute electoral propaganda. Trump has maintained that the campaign promotes the United States rather than himself, noting that he is not a candidate in the midterm elections.
The president has also offered to cover the cost with personal funds or money from his political campaign if authorities determine that the expenditure was improper. Government officials, however, have said there are no immediate plans for reimbursement.
The controversy has drawn criticism across party lines. Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune has questioned the use of taxpayer money to finance the advertisements, while the Democratic National Committee has filed separate lawsuits against the administration over the same issue.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted emergency relief for the Trump administration’s Federal Communications Commission in a dispute over political broadcast advertising rates ahead of the midterms.
Over dissent from Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, it’s the second time in as many months that the high court has acted on the matter after backing Republicans in an earlier round as well.
At the heart of the litigation is the question of whether federal law only gives candidates themselves certain favorable rates, or whether political parties and joint fundraising committees with noncandidate members can also benefit. The FCC and GOP groups have argued for the latter interpretation, which stands to benefit them politically because Democratic candidates generally raise more money than their committees, and vice versa for Republicans.
Last month, the justices said that a federal appeals court lacked jurisdiction when it sided with four Democratic congressional candidates: Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet of Michigan, former Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and former Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina. Jackson dissented from that ruling.
The Democrats then brought another challenge to force the merits of the issue. A divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit sided with them again, accusing the FCC of “gamesmanship” ahead of the midterms.
“If allowed to continue dragging its feet, the FCC will have evaded meaningful judicial review of its newly created rule,” Judges Robert King and James Wynn wrote Oct. 7. The majority gave the FCC a 12 p.m. ET deadline on Oct. 9 to resolve the candidates’ application to review their challenge to the agency’s interpretation.
GOP-appointed Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III dissented from the Democratic-appointed majority’s order, calling it “a direct affront” to the high court’s prior ruling that favored Republicans.
The administration leaned on Wilkinson’s dissent when it turned back to the Supreme Court, seeking to halt the appellate order and Oct. 9 deadline. Chief Justice John Roberts, who fields emergency requests from the 4th Circuit, granted the agency temporary relief pending further word from the court.
In their opposition to the FCC, the Democrats said the agency was engaging in “blatant procedural trench warfare to stave off judicial review of an unlawful agency directive until it is too late to matter.” They told the justices that they’re “up for election in just over three weeks” and are “experiencing exactly the deluge of party spending at the candidate rate that Republican Party committees promised to unleash to ‘obliterate’ them in response to the challenged agency directive.”
The national GOP senatorial and congressional committees brought a parallel Supreme Court challenge to the 4th Circuit order, which the Democrats likewise opposed.
The full Supreme Court weighed in on Wednesday, backing the administration in an unsigned opinion that said the appeals court improperly tried to force the FCC to act on that deadline.
“The Communications Act requires the Commission to act on every application it receives, but it does not obligate the Commission to act within a particular timeframe,” the court said over noted dissent from two of the court’s three Democratic-appointed justices, Sotomayor and Jackson. The pair did not explain their reasoning for dissenting.
The majority said it would be wrong to make the agency “triage its ongoing deliberation process and prepare a final order on an extremely expedited timeline.”
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The post Supreme Court backs GOP again on political advertising rates ahead of midterms appeared first on MS NOW.
Imagine getting a bill from your local government for $900,000 because they see a greenhouse on your property and just assume you're growing marijuana without a permit.
Imagine government demanding $400,000 because you didn't know to fill out a single-page form.
Or you get slapped with a $100,000 fine for parking your car on your own property.
It sounds absurd, but as my newest video shows, that's really happening.
How can that be? Doesn't America's Constitution say government may not impose "excessive fines"?
It happens because some bureaucrats, savoring their power, act like tyrants.
At least now there is hope for a remedy. One of these excessive fine cases has reached the Supreme Court.
Ken Jouppi worked as a pilot in Alaska for 30 years, until one day, state troopers stopped his plane before takeoff.
"I didn't think we had anything to hide," he says. "They searched the airplane, opened up this lady's boxes of groceries and found beer."
Transporting beer. That was his crime.
"Isn't beer legal in America?" I ask Jouppi's lawyer, Mike Greenberg.
"In most places," he replies. But some towns in Alaska ban beer.
Jouppi was convicted of bootlegging.
Every pilot must know which town has what rule, and search everybody?
"They think pilots should search people's luggage," says Jouppi. "It was such a terrible thing to do to another individual, invade their privacy, and assault their dignity….I just didn't feel right about doing that."
Alaskan officials say the beer was visible, so Jouppi should have known about it. They jailed him for three days and seized his plane.
"That airplane was my primary source of income," says Jouppi. "Without it, I didn't have a business anymore."
I assumed such excessive punishment would be dismissed quickly by a court. But it wasn't.
"Jouppi has been fighting to keep his plane for 14 years," says Greenberg. "The plane is still sitting on a tarmac….It's a ludicrous situation where the state has every interest in going after valuable assets rather than actually fighting supposed harms of alcohol."
Greenberg's law firm, the Institute for Justice, took Jouppi's case, and now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear it.
I hope he wins. It's just wrong when governments destroy lives for small mistakes.
They're also doing that to Tuncay Saydam, a retired professor.
The IRS demands he pay $400,000 because he didn't know to fill out a one-page form about an old bank account in his native Turkey.
"The fines," says Saydam, "will destroy my life….We have never been rich."
His unpaid tax is less than $30,000. But the IRS demands he pay them more than $400,000. A California court upheld that penalty. Northern Californian Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu wrote, "Government suffered a significant tax loss."
Finally, bureaucrats in Humboldt County, California, took aerial photos of people's property to search for unlicensed marijuana farms.
When they saw greenhouses, they fined property owners.
Blu Graham was fined $900,000, "$30,000 a day, when all I've ever done is grow vegetables in my greenhouses."
"There actually was no marijuana on the property!" says Greenberg. "They were just guessing that if you built a greenhouse, this must be connected to marijuana."
Finally, a lawsuit got the county to promise to end its ruinous fine system.
But it took four years.
Why do governments fight to keep outrageous fines that punish largely innocent people?
"Unlike other forms of punishment," says Greenberg, "fines make the government money. The prosecutor's office, state troopers, they get to keep the proceeds. It's an abusive system because they have every incentive to continue to prosecute."
I invited the heavy-fining judges and government lawyers to appear in my video to explain these fines. None would agree to talk about it.
Bureaucrats always want more money. It's a reason the Constitution prohibits excessive fines.
I trust that the Supreme Court will put a stop to these abuses.
COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post How Local Governments Turn Minor Violations Into Financial Ruin appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Back in 1983, the Supreme Court declared that "a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another." That increasingly doubtful proposition underpins a nationwide network of more than 144,000 AI-assisted cameras that track the travels of innocent motorists across the country billions of times each week.
So far, state and federal courts have almost uniformly rejected constitutional challenges to automated license plate readers (ALPRs) installed by companies such as Flock Safety. But in a decision that could signal a shift in the legal treatment of Flock cameras, a federal judge in Oklahoma recently recognized that they enable "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."
ALPRs are much more sophisticated than the technology that the Supreme Court considered in 1983, when it approved the warrantless use of a radio transmitter that helped police tail a suspected methamphetamine manufacturer's car. Three decades later, by contrast, the Court said police should have obtained a search warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to another drug suspect's car.
The majority opinion in the latter case emphasized the physical intrusion necessary to install the tracker. But five justices embraced an alternative rationale, saying GPS tracking impinges on reasonable expectations of privacy by revealing potentially sensitive information about the target's historical whereabouts.
That theory came to the fore in a 2018 case involving mobile-phone location data collected by cell sites, which the majority said implicated the Fourth Amendment because "individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements." The Supreme Court reiterated that principle this year, extending it to data collected by Google's Location History feature.
"An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location," Justice Elena Kagan said in the majority opinion, "and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information." By similar logic, U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill concluded this month in the Oklahoma case, people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in ALPR records, and police therefore generally need a warrant to search them.
Those databases include "information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times," which police can peruse "on demand," Hill noted. "Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts," as reflected in the Supreme Court's cellphone decisions.
Like cars, cellphones "move in public places where people can see you in plain view," Hill wrote. "But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient."
At this point, Hill's decision is an outlier. "It appears that nearly every court examining the issue to date has determined that ALPR technology use is not a search under the Fourth Amendment because people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on public streets," she noted.
Last month, for instance, a federal judge in California held that ALPR database searches are "clearly distinguishable from and less extensive than the 'near perfect surveillance' achievable" with cell-site or Location History data. And the day after Hill's ruling, a state judge in California rejected a challenge to San Jose's Flock camera network, saying "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in license plate data collected from cameras directed solely at public streets."
A federal lawsuit involving the same city's ALPR system, which the Institute for Justice filed last April, is still pending. So are challenges to Flock cameras in cities such as Wichita, Kansas, and Norfolk, Virginia.
Even when they reject such lawsuits, courts commonly acknowledge that the legal picture could change as the number and capabilities of ALPRs multiply. If so, it seems likely that Hill will eventually be joined by other judges who recognize the perils of "indiscriminate mass surveillance."
© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post Other Courts Should Heed a Federal Judge's Warning About Flock-Enabled Mass Surveillance appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Sacrifice the inconvenient, never the project. “Pal-washing” in action.
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A familiar script
On 9 October 2026, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to Navanethem Pillay, an 85-year-old South African jurist, former judge at the International Criminal Court and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The citation speaks of a person who has paved the way for a more comprehensive global legal order. The Committee’s chair, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, added that the prize is a message to those who attack and undermine the international system and its institutions. The verdict is avowedly political, and it is on this level that it must be discussed.
The very same figure who, in 2011, is said to have ‘toppled’ Gaddafi, paving the way for the plundering of Libyan oil and the enslavement of African migrants, would now ‘topple’ Netanyahu, thereby paving the way for Israel’s rehabilitation. The underlying logic would be neither morality nor peace, but the agenda of George Soros’s Open Society: to sacrifice those who have become inconvenient, never the essence of the project itself. Some have dubbed it ‘pal-washing’. The fundamental question is a serious one, for it asks whether there is a pattern behind the prizes and jurisdictions of the liberal order.
It must be emphasised that the script is already familiar. Do you remember when Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, whilst launching war after war? Or do you recall figures in search of a cause such as Machado, Mohammadi, or the defenders of Ukrainian criminals? But let us proceed in order.
Act One: Libya
In February 2011, Pillay, the High Commissioner, called on the Human Rights Council to take vigorous action to stop the violence and hold those responsible to account; the Council condemned the violations and established a commission of inquiry. The next step fell to the Security Council: referral to the ICC via Resolution 1970, followed by Resolution 1973, approved with ten votes in favour and five abstentions (Brazil, China, Germany, India, Russia). No one claims that Pillay decided to go to war. What matters is the sequence of events: the language of human rights opened the door, that of the protection of civilians authorised the use of force, and the operation gradually shifted towards regime change. As early as April, Lavrov was accusing NATO of exceeding its mandate, and a French minister admitted that regime change would have required a new vote.
Then there are the costs. In 2017, the IOM documented auctions of sub-Saharan migrants in southern Libya, sold for sums ranging from 200 to 500 dollars. The link with the collapse of the state after 2011 is the most plausible interpretation, although the source documents the phenomenon rather than its cause. Libya and the migrants paid the price; the legal framework emerged, formally speaking, intact, even if the controversy over the mandate would later weigh on the vetoes of Moscow and Beijing in other matters.
Act Two: Bibi
On 21 November 2024, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Pillay had left the Court in 2008, but chaired the UN Commission of Inquiry which, on 16 September 2025, concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. This is where ‘pal-washing’ comes into play. International criminal law deals with individuals: a defendant, a charge, a period of time. If the case concludes with the fate of a leader, a narrative break occurs – the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of a man – after which the state can present itself as restored. Libya offers an analogy: there, the case concluded with the fall of a man.
The limitations of the process work in favour of this interpretation. The Court has no police force and the execution of warrants depends on the States Parties; the Commission is not a court and does not speak on behalf of the entire UN; the Committee itself, according to AFP, has stated that it is up to a court to determine whether genocide has taken place. The award has no legal effect, as we know, but it lends legitimacy to a system that promises justice yet cannot guarantee it.
We must also bear in mind that we have already seen dynamics of this kind on numerous occasions within the globalist order that dominates the West. The Open Society Foundations presents itself as the world’s largest private funder of groups working for justice, democracy and human rights, active in over one hundred countries, and Pillay received the Stockholm Human Rights Award, the same prize that went to Soros and Neier in 2011. It certainly seems that the pattern of the Soros agenda is repeating itself once again – an agenda comprising foundations, NGOs, tribunals, commissions and bureaucracies that share a common lexicon and worldview: that of a liberal order to be perfected and never called into question. Those operating within that lexicon may denounce a government, a leader, or even a state, but they cannot challenge the underlying assumptions of the order that grants them legitimacy.
Some will object that Pillay’s Commission attributes responsibility to Israel as a state, not merely to its leaders, which contradicts the idea of a purely personalised operation. The second point concerns the reaction. Netanyahu accused the Committee of having lost its moral compass; the Israeli Foreign Ministry spoke of a grotesque exploitation of the prize; and Washington announced sanctions against the ICC just a few hours after the announcement. All true. But it would make sense and have value if the Western system were not rotten to its very core, if its legal system were functioning properly, but this is not the case, in any respect (and we have already seen sufficient evidence of this – let us not forget the Epstein case either).
If, over the next twelve months, Netanyahu’s political downfall is presented as the conclusion of the case, rather than as a stage in proceedings concerning the state, ‘Pal-washing’ will gain traction. If the proceedings continue beyond his person, and if the State Parties execute the warrants, perhaps it will lose ground. Given the current evidence, the argument is plausible and, until proven otherwise, this is yet another ‘Non-Peace’ Nobel Prize – one we cannot call ‘war’.
O Auditório Municipal Maria Barroso recebe, esta noite, a partir das 21h30, um concerto de Tiago Bettencourt.
O conteúdo Hoje há concertos dos Blind Zero e Tiago Bettencourt no Algarve aparece primeiro em Algarve Marafado.
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