Liberty Law Blog

Winning Budget Fights

by Mike Rappaport / 0 Comments

Filed Under: , ,

Print Friendly

Glenn Reynolds states that the Democrats lost the sequester issue.  He writes of the Obama strategy:

The idea was that even the comparatively minor cuts in spending caused by the sequester would be so painful that voters would demand higher taxes rather than endure cuts in spending.

Problem was, when the spending cuts came, nobody noticed. This led the Obama administration to try to up the pain by focusing cuts in places where people might feel the pain: canceling White House tours for schoolchildren, or furloughing air traffic controllers.

That didn’t work either. The tour-canceling just looked mean, and the problem with targeting air travel is that members of Congress, and their top donors, fly a lot. Huge bipartisan majorities in Congress thus quickly passed legislation forcing the FAA to make cuts elsewhere instead.

When there are budget fights, what happens when the fight is joined or the cuts occur is extremely important.  From the perspective of those who favor smaller government, the worst situation is for the costs on the public to be large.  Big government folks know this and so they have traditionally engaged in these type of Obama tactics.  What can be done about this in the future?  The next time there is a sequester, Congress might pass a law that requires the executive when cutting spending to do so in a way that is least disruptive on the public.  While this would not guarantee that the executive would comply, it would put pressure on the executive.  In addition, one might require that the executive to justify the cuts that they make in terms of this minimizing public disruption standard.

Similar issues arise when there are budget fights that deprive the government of overall spending authority – when there is a possibility of a government shutdown.  Again, the larger the costs on the public, the more public reaction there will be. Continue Reading →

Hooray, Hooray, the First of May

by Ken Masugi / 8 Comments

Filed Under: , , , , , , , ,

Print Friendly

marx lincoln red deutschEditor’s Note: Ken Masugi, a veteran of this site, will be guest blogging here for the month of May.

As Friedrich Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom (1944) to “the socialists of all parties,” we might use May 1 to declare a counter-revolution of Marxist materialist science. For this purpose Hayek’s works are an invaluable resource. But an even more fitting response to international socialism was given by a figure Marx actually admired and wrote about—Abraham Lincoln.

Continue Reading →

Internet Sales Tax Update

by Michael S. Greve / 1 Comment

Filed Under: , ,

Print Friendly

The kerfuffle over the “Marketplace Fairness Act,” which would subject internet sellers to sales tax collection and remittance obligations, has abated for the time being. For those who can’t let go of the topic and those who fear (rightly) that the issue won’t go away, here is a little piece I wrote for Forbes (no, I did not write that headline). And here is a link to a discussion on wallstreetoasis.

Striking, to my mind: with the exception of state officials, big retailers, and the U.S. Senate (which voted 74-20 for this concoction), nobody seem to support this exercise in “fairness.” There are potent constitutional arguments against wholly extraterritorial tax collection obligations but that’s not what drives the opposition; it’s visceral.

Debt, Once More

by Michael S. Greve / 0 Comments

Filed Under: , ,

Print Friendly

Last week (April 24), I schlepped to Virginia Tech to deliver a talk on “Our Colossal Debt Versus the Constitution,” as part of the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business BB&T Speakers Series on  Capitalism. Previous speakers include John Allison (formerly BB&T’s Chairman and CEO, who initiated this program); James M. Buchanan; and Robert Samuelson. What I’m doing in that company and in front of a large crowd of finance guys, I don’t really know; but I greatly enjoyed the event.

The slightly abbreviated text appears below, with apologies for the inordinate length of this post. Faithful followers of this blog will find little new. But it’s a convenient summary of points made earlier on this blog and elsewhere, and maybe there’s a fresh thought here or there. Continue Reading →

Fourth Annual Hugh and Hazel Darling Foundation Originalism Works-in-Progress Conference

by Mike Rappaport / 0 Comments

Filed Under: , , , , ,

Print Friendly

Recently, the Fourth Annual Originalism Works in Progress Conference was held at the University of San Diego Law School.  And now the video proceedings of the seven papers are available.  The papers given at the conference, which involved various aspects of originalism, were as follows:

  • James Allan (Queensland), Australian Originalism without a Bill of Rights: Going Down the Drain with a Different Spin
  • William Baude (Stanford Constitutional Law Center), Rethinking the Federal Eminent Domain Power
  • Thomas Colby (George Washington), Originalism and the Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment
  • Allan Hutchinson (Osgoode Hall), Originalist Sin
  • Gregory Maggs (George Washington), Using Dictionaries from the Founding Era as a Source of the Original Meaning of the Constitution
  • Gerard Magliocca (Indiana), John Bingham and the Drafting and Defense of the Fourteenth Amendment
  • John McGinnis (Northwestern), Is Judicial Restraint an Originalist Method?

Dependency, Properly Understood

by Richard Reinsch / 1 Comment

Filed Under: , , , , , ,

Print Friendly

Yuval Levin provided commentary last week on Utah Senator Mike Lee’s recent speech “What Conservatives are For,” where Lee provocatively argued that the problem with much of the Republican Party’s rhetoric is its insistence that Obamacare, among other welfare state policies, strikes at our individualism and independence. Of course, the most dramatic example of this was Romney’s famous takers’ speech and the crude materialistic anthropology it relied upon. Lee’s speech matters, I think, for the reason that he is viewed as part of a rising group of national political figures like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, among others, who seem willing to rethink standard rhetoric of liberty, limited government, free markets, rule of law and actually pour it into new wine-skins. Continue Reading →

The New Deal Constitution at 75

by Michael S. Greve / 0 Comments

Filed Under: , , , , , , , ,

Print Friendly

This past Thursday marked the 75th anniversary of two foundational New Deal decisions, handed down on Monday, April 25, 1938: Erie Railroad v. Tompkins, and United States v. Carolene Products. The American Enterprise Institute celebrated this day of infamy with a two-part event. The tape is here.

I strongly recommend it. You may want to skip the first 13 minutes (some clown wisecracking about the dairy industry’s contribution to ConLaw) but you do not want to miss the main events: Continue Reading →

Prosecutorial Discretion

by Mike Rappaport / 3 Comments

Filed Under: , ,

Print Friendly

In Crane v. Napolitano, President Obama’s order not to enforce the immigration laws against certain illegal immigrants (who came to the US as children) has been challenged.  The basis of the challenge is that Obama’s order is inconsistent with the governing statute.  The District Court recently held that the plaintiffs are likely to prevail in their claim, although it has ordered additional briefing on a jurisdictional issue.  The court wrote that the statute used the word “shall” and therefore imposed a mandatory duty on the executive.

Let’s assume that Congress did take away the President’s prosecutorial discretion.  Is that constitutional?  In my opinion, the answer is yes, at least under the Constitution’s original meaning.  First, the President is normally required to follow laws that Congress passes.  Even if the President does not like the law, that does not give him the right to ignore it.  The King of England once asserted that power, but the Glorious Revolution ended it and the Take Care Clause adopts that principle for the U.S. Constitution.  Thus, if Congress says that all persons who are 65 years of age and meet certain conditions are entitled to Social Security benefits, the President cannot ignore the statutory directive.  Similarly, if Congress says persons meeting other conditions are not entitled such Social Security benefits, the President must also respect that requirement. Continue Reading →

Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind at 50

by Theodore Dalrymple / 0 Comments

Filed Under: , , , ,

Print Friendly

In his autobiography, John Stuart Mill relates the mental crisis that he experienced as a young man when he asked himself whether he would be happy if all the reforms that he thought necessary were granted or achieved. Would they necessarily fulfill him?

The answer, obviously, was ‘No,’ and Mill, having been nothing if not a man of the most complete integrity, suffered a nervous collapse. ‘The end had ceased to charm,’ he wrote, ‘and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.’

Few people, however, are as intelligent or scrupulous as Mill; but like him, they need something to live for. Indeed, the struggle for existence (or subsistence) having been more or less won – how, without a great deal of determination, do you starve in a modern society? Continue Reading →

Social Justice and the Silence of Modern Constitutionalism

by Ken Masugi / 5 Comments

Filed Under: , , , ,

Print Friendly

In this month’s Forum Samuel Gregg revives “the meaning of social justice in the classical tradition of natural law reasoning, with particular reference to Roman Catholic pronouncements about this subject.” Social justice strives for the common good.  Two learned commentators provide vigorous, reasoned dissents, economist David C. Rose maintaining that this defense of social justice is “both misguided and dangerous.”   Philosophy professor Eric Mack thinks the notion of social justice “necessarily champions extensive state authority.” Though he allows Gregg’s understanding is not egalitarian, he nonetheless seeks to “weigh [social justice] down and sink it.” Continue Reading →

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 »