Ohio AG opposes the Orwellian "Disinformation Governance Board"

 

Dillon Burroughs at The Daily Wire reports

Virginia Republican Attorney General Jason Miyares sent a letter signed by 20 GOP attorneys general on Thursday to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening legal action against its ‘un-American’ Disinformation Governance Board.

. . .

“Freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy. Instead of protecting and fostering it, this administration wants to create an organization that would have federal bureaucrats monitoring citizens’ speech. This would undoubtedly lead to Americans self-censoring their ideas and debates. I am concerned about the spread of false information, but creating a federal agency to police speech is not the way to address it. As the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, I cannot stand by as the rights of every Virginian are being threatened. The war on the First Amendment must stop,” he wrote.

In addition to Virginia, the other states represented in the letter include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia.

The effort comes following another letter by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent to new Disinformation Governance Board leader Nina Jankowicz asking her to provide testimony regarding her new role.

The letter was signed by Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, a ranking member of the committee, along with 11 additional GOP House Judiciary Committee members. . . .

Good to see that Ohio is on the list.  Read the full report here.

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Your Weekend Must Read: AG Bill Barr on the Executive branch

Quite a few blogs are linking to AG William Barr’s recent speech at the Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture at the Federalist Society, and with good reason.  It is excellent for his insights into the present political landscape, and also in tracing the provisions in our founding documents as influenced by earlier European history. A short extract:

I wanted to choose a topic for this afternoon’s lecture that had an originalist angle. It will likely come as little surprise to this group that I have chosen to speak about the Constitution’s approach to executive power.

I deeply admire the American Presidency as a political and constitutional institution. I believe it is, one of the great, and remarkable innovations in our Constitution, and has been one of the most successful features of the Constitution in protecting the liberties of the American people. More than any other branch, it has fulfilled the expectations of the Framers.

Unfortunately, over the past several decades, we have seen steady encroachment on Presidential authority by the other branches of government. This process I think has substantially weakened the functioning of the Executive Branch, to the detriment of the Nation. This evening, I would like to expand a bit on these themes.

. . .

Let me turn now to what I believe has been the prime source of the erosion of separation-of-power principles generally, and Executive Branch authority specifically. I am speaking of the Judicial Branch.

In recent years the Judiciary has been steadily encroaching on Executive responsibilities in a way that has substantially undercut the functioning of the Presidency. The Courts have done this in essentially two ways: First, the Judiciary has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of separation of powers disputes between Congress and Executive, thus preempting the political process, which the Framers conceived as the primary check on interbranch rivalry. Second, the Judiciary has usurped Presidential authority for itself, either (a) by, under the rubric of “review,” substituting its judgment for the Executive’s in areas committed to the President’s discretion, or (b) by assuming direct control over realms of decision-making that heretofore have been considered at the core of Presidential power.

Read the full speech here. I hope Mr. Barr’s words are followed soon by indictments.

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Temporary ban on immigration: Is It Legal?

image credit: wisegeek

  

The media is going wild. President Trump fired Sally Yates, the Obama-appointed acting Attorney General, because she would not enforce Trump’s temporary suspension of immigration from seven Muslim majority counties known to aid, abet, and finance terrorists. The legality of President Trump’s EO is at issue, and if you are listening to any of the TV news analyses, his temporary ban is not legal, it’s not American, etc., even though it was reviewed and approved by the Dept. of Justice Office of Legal Counsel. 

Take a minute or two to read through Andrew McCarthy’s legal analysis at National Review. McCarthy was a federal prosecutor for the case against the Blind Sheik and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The concluding take-away:

One can debate the policy wisdom of the executive order, which is plainly a temporary measure while a more comprehensive and thoughtfully tailored policy is developed. The seven countries the president has singled out are surely hotbeds of radical Islam; but he has omitted other countries – e.g., Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 suicide-hijackers who attacked our country on 9/11 – that are also cauldrons of jihadism.

Furthermore, as I have argued, the real threat to be targeted is sharia-supremacist ideology, which is inherently hostile to the Constitution. Were we to focus our vetting, unapologetically, on that ideology (also known as “radical” or “political” Islam), it would be unnecessary to implement a categorical ban on Muslims or immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. That is critical because non-Islamist Muslims who can demonstrate loyalty to our constitutional principles should not be barred from admission; while Islamists, on the other hand, are not found only in Muslim-majority countries – other things being equal, a sharia supremacist from the banlieues of Paris poses as much of a threat as a sharia supremacist from Raqqa.

Yet, all that can be debated as we go forward. For now, there is no doubt that the executive order temporarily banning entry from specified Muslim-majority countries is both well within President Trump’s constitutional authority and consistent with statutory law.

But read the whole thing here.

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The Great Internet Giveaway

image credit: salon.com

Internet management EXPIRED

Bad news. I might have thought it would be a banner headline, but if you scrolled down, Drudge linked to this Yahoo.com report:

The US government on Saturday ended its formal oversight role over the internet, handing over management of the online address system to a global non-profit entity.

The US Commerce Department announced that its contract had expired with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which manages the internet's so-called "root zone."

That leaves ICANN as a self-regulating organization that will be operated by the internet's "stakeholders" -- engineers, academics, businesses, non-government and government groups.

The move is part of a decades-old plan by the US to "privatize" the internet, and backers have said it would help maintain its integrity around the world.

US and ICANN officials have said the contract had given Washington a symbolic role as overseer or the internet's "root zone" where new online domains and addresses are created.

But critics, including some US lawmakers, argued that this was a "giveaway" by Washington that could allow authoritarian regimes to seize control.

A last-ditch effort by critics to block the plan -- a lawsuit filed by four US states -- failed when a Texas federal judge refused to issue an injunction to stop the transition.

Read the rest here. No good can come of this.

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Eric Holder: buh-bye

Tea Party Patriots’Jenny Beth Martin offered these comments on the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder:

He will go down in history as the nation’s most corrupt attorney general. Americans must never forget that the blood of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry is on his hands. Eric Holder’s illegal scheme to put guns in the hands of the Mexican cartels led to that brave patriot’s death. He became the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, which is fitting, given his utter and open contempt for the American people and the Constitution.

He began his tenure by dismissing the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia, and he slithers out of office having played defense for Lois Lerner by his refusal to appoint a special prosecutor. He is a disgrace to that honorable office.

As one chapter ends in the Obama Administration’s war on the Constitution, Americans must remain engaged and vigilant. There’s no doubt the President will try to ram through a lame-duck Senate another partisan hack for Attorney General. We cannot allow that to happen.

Over at PJ Media,Roger L. Simon had this to say:

he was a political bagman, a low rent consigliere whose  unquestioning obedience to power was evidently appreciated by Barack Obama and rewarded with the full position of attorney general. Obama knew what he was getting for our number one law enforcement official.  With that background, no wonder Holder investigates nothing, leaving “Fast & Furious,” the IRS, Benghazi, all the scandals, untouched, stonewalled or deliberately obfuscated.  He was chosen to be a “Good German” and he was one.  He spent most of his time inveighing against what he perceived to be racial injustice.

Now I have a theory about the etiology of Holder’s fixation on race. When you know deep down you’re a dishonest person, when you have had to eat the bitter pill of your own corruption who knows how many times (even Clinton finally admitted that he had gone too far pardoning Rich and damaged his own reputation), you have to invent a narrative for yourself to justify your activities.  So over may years Holder developed what I have called elsewhere a “nostalgia for racism.”  No matter that racism was diminishing in our culture, he had to keep racism alive, believe it was alive.  If racism were going away, he would no longer have a raison d’être, an excuse for his biased behavior, an excuse, as it turned out, to go beyond the law, act unilaterally and punish political enemies.

Toward this end, in a sense, Holder encouraged racism, as did Obama.  They are both slightly more polished versions of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.  Like Jackson and Sharpton, they act as if they care about the black man or woman in the street, but in actuality they just care about themselves.  The racial posturing is a form of moral narcissism that works to preserve racism, not to defeat it.

It’s not by accident black America is suffering under Obama/Holder.  At least subconsciously, it’s by design. . . .

 

Who will be the next AG? The WaPo reports that

Possible contenders include U.S. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr.; former White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler; Tony West, the former associate attorney general who just stepped down; Loretta E. Lynch, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York; Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York; and Jenny Durkan, who is about to step down as the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Washington state.

Perhaps I am not paying close enough attention, but I never heard of any of them. I doubt that the Obama administration would consider, oh, Kris Kobach.  

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