The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are concerned that doing away with FISA’s Section 702 would be the wrong way to punish the FBI.
I agree. But the editors are missing the point. They too narrowly justify 702 with this:
Congress created Section 702 after 9/11 to address intelligence-gathering gaps. It lets the government collect information without a warrant on non-US citizens living abroad.
It seems a Wisconsin man owns some property near Ixonia, and that property has been flooded, gets flooded fairly frequently, by the Rock River against which the man’s property lies. He’s gotten fed up with the airboats that go running across his land, taking advantage of its temporarily flooded condition, and he’s filed suit in Wisconsin’s Jefferson County Circuit Court to put an end to the practice.
Kelo v City of New London was a 2005 case involving our Constitution’s 5th Amendment Takings Clause: a homeowner who didn’t want to sell her home in New London, CT, to a property developer who said he needed the property to finish out the development of shopping mall. New London agreed on the developer’s representation that his mall would produce more tax revenue for the city than the homeowner’s property tax remittances. In the resulting suit, the Supreme Court decided that government has the authority to commit such a Taking and redistribution for the public purpose of increasing government’s tax revenue. The Court said that one man’s private purpose is superior to another’s so that other must surrender his property to the one.
Montgomery County Public Schools, in Maryland, has decided it’s had enough of parent input regarding its program of “storybooks” with sex workers, kink, drag, gender transitions and same-sex romance for elementary-age children. The MCPS, in its magnanimity, had allowed parents to opt their children out of such things, but the parents, en masse, opted their children out.
MCPS responded by issuing a blanket policy of no exceptions and no notifications—no more opt out for all those uppity recalcitrant parents.
Never mind that
It needs a parallel move, as well. Sadly, both are pipe dreams in the current government.
Recall that President Joe Biden (D) has pushed, through the Federal Housing Finance Agency, his Loan-Level Price Adjustment rule which penalizes Americans with good credit scores by requiring mortgage lenders to charge them higher interest rates in order to lower the rates charged those mortgage borrowers who have poor credit scores.
Senator Roger Marshall (R, KS) and Senator Mike Braun (R, IN) have introduced the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act that would block Biden’s move.
The French government is on the verge [a Tuesday vote as I write on Tuesday morning] of authorizing its police forces to
remotely tap into the cameras, microphones, and location services of phones and other internet-connected devices used by some criminal suspects.
The proposed law plainly stipulates that the procedure can be executed “without the knowledge or consent of its owner or possessor” but is limited to suspects involved in terrorism, organized crime, and other illegal activities punishable by five or more years in prison.
Some academics object to Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott moving to ban TikTok from Texas government devices and from personal devices used to conduct Texas official business. Texas’ legislature passed the bill creating the ban, and Abbott signed it into law last December. Now a New York State-headquartered organization, ironically named The Knight First Amendment Institute, which is a facility of New York City’s Columbia University, is suing Abbott among other governors, over the ban, claiming free speech violations.
The lawsuit said the state’s decision…is comprising teaching and research. And more specifically, it said it was “seriously impeding” faculty pursuing research into the app—including research that could illuminate or counter concerns about TikTok.
This example is breathtaking in its explicitness. California Assembly Public Safety Committee Chairman Reggie Jones-Sawyer (D, 59th District) has proposed a piece of openly racist legislation:
Whenever the court has discretion to determine the appropriate sentence according to relevant statutes and the sentencing rules of the Judicial Council, the court presiding over a criminal matter shall consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.
Because the way to eliminate racial discrimination in sentencing is to engage in racial discrimination in sentencing.
This is how steeped in victimhood Party has become. Its members no longer can…discriminate…right from wrong, can no longer discriminate being racist from not being racist.
And too many laws. Jimmy Sexton, CEO of Esquire Group, is right about the rules.
More than 88,000 federal regulations were promulgated between 1995 and 2016, the most recent data I can find. The Federal Register, a compendium of each year’s new federal regulations, proposed rules and notices, totals nearly two million pages dating back to its inception in 1936. And the Code of Federal Regulations ran to 185,000 pages in 2020. In addition, state and local governments have their own laws and rules.
As he noted,
Laws should be easy to comply with and simple to enforce.
A Federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction (meaning the matter must still go through the courts before anything becomes final) barring the Federal government from communicating with social-media companies with a view to influencing what those companies post or allow to be posted on their sites.
Some on the Left are objecting.
Some legal scholars have been skeptical that…courts could intervene without chilling legitimate government speech about controversial matters of public interest.