“The fourteenth amendment has not extended the rights and privileges of citizenship one iota. They are right where they always were.”
Yesterday in the case of Perry v. Schwarzenegger, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker enjoined California’s Proposition 8 from being enforced on the grounds California has a “constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis.” Judge Walker finds California’s anti-SSM law violates both the Due Process and the Equal Protection clauses under the Fourteenth Amendment. [...]
One of the core arguments advanced by the Justice Department in a lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration law is that under “our constitutional system, the federal government has pre-eminent authority to regulate immigration matters.” The government further states this “authority derives from the United States Constitution …” Here is the problem with this: There is zero [...]
If you think fighting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is a matter solely devoted to filing lawsuits you are deeply mistaken. The reason lawsuits will have little effect is because the entire judicial system is a house of cards built upon a foundation of fiction and lies the court is willing to jealousy [...]
Excerpts from President Monroe’s Special Message on Internal Improvements, May 4, 1822: If, then, the right to raise and appropriate the public money is not restricted to the expenditures under the other specific grants, according to a strict construction of their powers respectively, is there no limitation to it? Have Congress a right to raise [...]
This may be old news by now, but I wanted to add a few remarks regarding the Association of Community Organizations (ACORN) argument that a House resolution amounted to a “bill of attainder” that resulted in a cut off federal grant money to the group. Judge Nina Gershon agreed, writing, “They [ACORN] have been singled [...]
The Supreme Court recently held in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission that corporations had a First Amendment right to spend money to support or oppose political candidates. The Court struck down federal laws regulating independent political advertising by for-profit and non-profit corporations before an election even as they reaffirmed rules about disclosure and disclosures [...]
Like many pro constitutional gun ownership activists, Alan Gura’s brief for the petitioners in McDonald v. City of Chicago attempts to cast doubt on Slaughterhouse precedent that says the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended “as a protection to the citizen of a State against the legislative power of his own State.” He wants to convince [...]
The AP reports that the federal government will begin taking land from seven property owners so that a Flight 93 memorial can be built in time for the 10th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. “We always prefer to get that land from a willing seller. And sometimes you can just not come to an [...]
Reading through the unanimous, 69-page decision of the Iowa Supreme Court striking down the state’s 10-year-old ban on same-sex marriage, reads more as an advocacy for same-sex marriage than constitutional fact finding. While I do not have much time to Blog on this case now, I will quickly point out deliberate and obvious factual errors [...]
“No State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws – not of its laws, but of the laws.” –Rep. John A. Bingham (December 20, 1870) Justice Scalia speaking of the Fourteenth Amendments Equal Protection Clause to students at UC Hastings College of the Law in September 2010 remarked, [...]