Jeanne Shaheen is the Democratic Party (incumbent) candidate for Senator from New Hampshire.
Aside from the cheap smear in her interruption, it’s interesting that this Democrat doesn’t feel like she has to play by the same rules as us mere citizens.
Judge Reggie Walton, of the DC District Court, dismissed all counts brought by the conservative non-profit, True the Vote, against the IRS for the IRS’ harassment of the organization when it tried to register as a 501(c)(3). The IRS had, on receiving that application
IRS was subjecting [True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht] to multiple rounds of abusive inquiries, with requests to provide every Facebook and Twitter entry I’d every posted, questions about my political aspirations, and demands to know the names of every group I’d ever made presentations to, the content of what I’d said, and where I intended to speak for the coming year.
Under the law defining a c3 organization, none of this information is relevant to the IRS’ application investigation. Indeed, Walton’s ruling explicitly makes no reference to the legitimacy of Engelbrecht’s charges.
Walton dismissed the counts because the IRS—eventually, but before this lawsuit was resolved—registered True the Vote as the c3 for which it had applied.
Unless an actual, ongoing controversy exists in this case, this Court is without power to decide it….
Because
The defendants’ grant of tax-exempt status to the plaintiff, and the defendants’ suspension of the alleged IRS targeting scheme during the tax-exempt application process, including remedial steps to address the alleged conduct, coupled with the reduced “concern about the recurrence of objectionable behavior” government actors….
Never mind that this is a purely voluntary “suspension,” subject to removal at IRS whim, conservative speech remains chilled, other attacks against other conservative entities remain (think Wisconsin), and so on. The present assault has stopped, so there’s nothing for a good judge to decide.
Let me see if my understanding of this is correct. If I stop beating my wife, wholly voluntarily and on my own initiative, I’m home free? My wife has no recourse? Never mind that I’ve only voluntarily suspended the beatings, never mind that my wife remains intimidated and vulnerable, I’ve got nothing to worry about from any court?
Walton’s ruling can be seen here.
Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring hotel operators to give up data in their guest registers to the police, even when they don’t have a warrant.
The ordinance, approved by the city in 2006, requires hotels to collect and maintain guest information such as name and address, the number of people in the guest’s party, vehicle information, arrival and checkout dates, room number, and method of payment. Hotel operators who fail to comply with it face as many as six months behind bars and a $1,000 fine.
A motel operator demurred, and at this point, the 9th Circuit agrees: they struck the ordinance as unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment.
There are a couple of fundamental misunderstandings, though. One is in the 9th‘s ruling, paraphrased by Joe Palazzolo at the above link:
[H]otels have an interest in keeping guest records private, even if the guests themselves have no such privacy rights because they willingly give their information to a third party.
Guests do have a legitimate expectation of privacy regarding “their information,” though. They’re not giving their information to “a” third party; they’re giving it to a particular third party as a necessary thing so that the particular third party can provide the contracted service. Moreover, much of the information that is given over is not necessary for the transaction to occur; it’s mandated by a different third party—a government entity, for the government’s convenience.
A second misunderstanding is in the argument offered by LA’s lawyers.
These laws expressly help police investigate crimes such as prostitution and gambling, capture dangerous fugitives and even authorize federal law enforcement to examine these registers, an authorization which can be vital in the immediate aftermath of a homeland terrorist attack[.]
Say that’s all true. Get a warrant. Time hardly seems of the essence in these hypotheticals, even with the apocalyptically offered “homeland terrorist attack:” the cops are unlikely to be near the hotel or motel when an attack goes in. If time really is of the essence, come armed with a warrant in the first place; they’re disappointingly easy to get.
A third misunderstanding is in Judge Richard Tallman’s dissent, again summarized by Palazzolo.
[T]he hoteliers challenging the ordinance failed to show that police were applying the statute in an unconstitutional way.
The hoteliers had no requirement to do so. The law must be constitutional in the first place; its application by the police is wholly irrelevant after its unconstitutionality is shown.
The matter now is before the Supreme Court, and we’ll learn later who’s right. Legally, anyway.
This is an amazing development for the authors of the Magna Carta. That charter, recall, codified for the first time in Anglo-American history, limits to government’s (king’s at the time) right to intrude into a man’s private affairs and possessions except under some severely constrained conditions: due process of law.
This is that amazement:
Registered gun owners in the United Kingdom are now subject to unannounced visits to their homes under new guidance that allows police to inspect firearms storage without a warrant.
The new policy from the British Home Office went into effect Oct 15, permitting police and constabularies to conduct surprise home visits to legitimate gun owners.
Why else, it turns out, have a gun registry, except to identify those honest citizens in the best position to resist excessive government—like the barons and others who resisted King John’s excesses? Like those later colonial Americans who resisted King George III’s excesses?
And this is where our own gun control lobby and the Progressives in our own government are headed.
The government is continuing to misunderstand the import of the 4th Amendment’s stricture regarding searches, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects and especially Warrants…particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, and of the major purpose of our Constitution generally.
Even accepting things like Edward Snowden’s leaks and the NSA’s overbroad and non-particular descriptions of things for which to be “searched” in our cell phone metadata as being aberrations, the existence of the aberration demonstrates the fragility of government handling of that much searching capacity.
I wrote nearby about the FBI’s dangerous zeal in demanding that cell phone operating system software be made vulnerable to government-desired searches. Following is another demonstration of the government’s misunderstanding.
“This sort of encryption creates a virtual sanctuary for criminals who are very determined and smart,” warned Ron Hosko, the former head of the FBI’s criminal division….
So does the 2nd Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms give criminals who are very determined and smart access to tools for supporting their efforts. So does the 1st Amendment’s acknowledgment of a range of freedoms give criminals who are very determined and smart access to tools for supporting their efforts.
That’s a risk we members of our social compact have agreed to accept in order to have a government with the strength otherwise to protect and enforce those freedoms. We’ve done nothing to alter those terms of our compact—our Constitution—since then.
Our Constitution was written the way it was, in fact, to limit our government’s powers as far as we could and still leave it the necessary strength with which to effect those protections. The powers of our government are, by design, few and defined. Our Constitution was, in fact, written to restrain our government, and to carry out that restraint before our government could act, not to attempt to redress a situation after government has acted. This relationship between us compact members, us citizens, and our government, furthermore, is neither symmetrical nor reciprocal.
We restrain our government before the fact; it does not engage in prior restraint of us. Yet, this government demand for ready and broad, non-particular access to the contents of our communications—the contents of our private speech—through a third party and not through us is exactly that attempt by our government to priorly restrain us, if only through the chilling of our speech through government snooping with its implied threat of subsequent harassment. Think IRS. Think Federal whistleblower treatment.
This final thought:
“I don’t think the legislative branch or the judicial branch can sit idly by while destruction comes,” said Hosko….
Neither can We the People sit idly by while the destruction of our inalienable rights comes.