Free Republic

Congress can end the war in Ukraine and win a Nobel Peace Prize by enacting a statute withdrawing the United States from NATO — transforming it from a mighty offensive oak into a tiny acorn unalarming to Russia. As early as 1798, Congress nullified a defense treaty with France by statute. A congressional end to United States participation in NATO would be no constitutional novelty. At the very latest, NATO became obsolete in 1991 when its raison d’etre — the Soviet Empire — dissolved. By remaining in NATO and spearheading its expansion to Russia’s borders with 30 members, the United...

Jesus had his Judas, General George Washington had his Benedict Arnold, and the 9/11 victims’ families have their betrayers in Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (S.C.), John McCain (Ariz.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah). The Senators are attempting infanticide of the 10-weeks-old Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) which was enacted with their support to assist the 9/11 families in obtaining judicial redress for the 9/11 terrorist abominations. To paraphrase attorney Joseph Welch’s rebuke of Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings, have Senators Graham, McCain, and Hatch no sense of decency in putting the interests of the misogynist, religiously bigoted,...

The CIA should be abolished. After a trial run of 67 years, the agency has proven a sorcerer’s apprentice. The director and his subordinates have became insufferably arrogant Platonic Guardians hiding behind secrecy in the belief that the rest of us are too stupid or naive to judge what risks to accept to preserve liberty and the rule of law. The CIA has made Americans less safe. Its incorrigible anti-democratic ethos was epitomized by legendary chief of counterintelligence James J. Angleton. He voiced contempt for the Church Committee’s investigation of chronic agency abuses, i.e., the “Family Jewels.” As reported in...

Nonintervention and global neutrality should be the national security creed of the United States. Every soldier deployed abroad — whether in South Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere — should be returned to deter and defend the United States at home. Non-intervention and neutrality everywhere coupled with a threat to annihilate any United States attacker would make the country safer, freer and more prosperous. The United States should recognize the obvious. Its contemporary leaders lack the high-mindedness and wisdom necessary to extend democracy and liberty abroad. Their motives are invariably cynical, and their adventurisms create more enemies than they destroy....

The U.S. Constitution has been orphaned by President Bush and Congress. The Founding Fathers would weep over the abandonment of their brilliant creation featuring checks and balances and muscular protections against government abuses. An Aug. 2, 2007, executive order issued by Mr. Bush that blocks property of persons who present a risk of acting in a way that could undermine the sovereignty of Lebanon or its democratic processes or institutions is emblematic of the Constitution's orphanage. The order was authorized by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a statute that delegates vast legislative powers over national security affairs. IEEPA...

Congress' power to oversee the executive branch for lawlessness or maladministration stands at an abyss. If it neglects to enact a revised edition of the lapsed Independent Counsel Act of 1978, Congress will have been disarmed by President Bush from knowing what the executive branch is doing. Secret government will flourish. And darkness invites executive machinations to violate the law and to destroy political or personal rivals. Remember President Richard M. Nixon's ill-conceived Huston Plan recommending domestic burglaries, illegal electronic surveillances and mail openings of political radicals. President Bush has announced his intent to decline criminal contempt prosecutions of any...

A public opinion poll from the American Research Group recently reported that more than four in ten Americans — 45% — favor impeachment hearings for President Bush and more than half — 54% — favored impeachment for Vice President Cheney. Unhappiness about the war in Iraq isn't the only cause of the unsettled feelings of the electorate. Recent events like President Bush's pardoning of Scooter Libby, the refusal of Vice President Cheney's office to surrender emails under subpoena to Congress and the President's prohibition of testimony of former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers in front of the House Judiciary...

With Republicans controlling Congress and the White House, conservatives these days ought to be happy, but most aren’t. They see expanding government, runaway spending, Middle East entanglements, and government corruption, and they wonder why, exactly, the country should be grateful for Republican dominance. Some accuse Bush and the Republicans today of not being true conservatives. Others see a grab bag of stated policies and wonder how they cohere. Everyone thinks something’s got to change. Now seven prominent conservatives dare to speak the unspeakable: They hope the Republicans lose in 2006. Well, let’s be diplomatic and say they’d prefer divided government—soon....

President Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the international communications of U.S. citizens in violation of the warrant requirement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, abominations. The eavesdropping continued for four years, long after fears of imminent September 11 repetitions had lapsed, before the disclosure by the New York Times this month. Mr. Bush has continued the NSA spying without congressional authorization or ratification of the earlier interceptions. (In sharp contrast, Abraham Lincoln obtained congressional ratification for the emergency measures taken in the wake of Fort...

Misreading Robert H. Bork's 1987 shipwreck, the White House is bizarrely instructing its Supreme Court nominees to disown their prior attacks on wayward constitutional thinking from the high court. During his confirmation hearing for the post of chief justice, John Roberts dismissed tomes of the brilliant, caustic critiques of past constitutional capers that he authored under President Ronald Reagan, calling them merely an attorney's advice to a client. According to his testimony, his intellectual sneers at the creative constitutional theories that summoned into being a generalized right to privacy ( Roe v. Wade in 1973) and exiled all religious acknowledgements...

Harriet Miers is ill-equipped to interpret the Constitution's separation of powers, a chief task of the United States Supreme Court. She may be summoned against herself to prove the point. On June 11, 1995, as a former president of the State Bar of Texas, Miss Miers cobbled together an alarmist letter urging then-Gov. George W. Bush to veto a free enterprise bill (H.B. 2987) enacted by the state legislature that allegedly trespassed on the powers of the Texas Supreme Court to regulate attorney's fees. The bill declared: "The [Texas] supreme court may not adopt a rule that interferes with an...

The patently lame arguments of defenders of Harriet Miers' O Henry-like surprise nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court confirm her unsuitability. She should graciously withdraw and spare the Supreme Court and herself embarrassment. Fallible presidents need skepticism and criticism to check their follies. President Dwight Eisenhower would have profited from protests against two of his self-confessed biggest mistakes: the appointments of Chief Justice Earl Warren and Associate Justice William Brennan. Ditto for President George Herbert Walker Bush's appointment of Associate Justice David Souter, who was preposterously touted as a "grand slam" expounding a judicially conservative philosophy

President George W. Bush should pack the United States Supreme Court with philosophical clones of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and defeated nominee Robert H. Bork. Multiple vacancies will inescapably arise in his second term. Senate Republicans should vote the Senate filibuster rule as applied to thwart a floor vote for judicial nominees unconstitutional and unenforceable. Both measures are necessary to vindicate the Constitution according to its original meaning and to eclipse an airbrush artist interpretive approach embraced by a majority of sitting justices. Neither gambit would impair judicial independence, separation of powers, or appointment traditions. Furthermore, President Bush...

Judge John Roberts soon will be confirmed as the 17th chief justice of the United States to replace William H. Rehnquist. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Joseph Biden of Delaware, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Charles Schumer of New York and Dianne Feinstein of California are frowning and gnashing. Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans Orrin Hatch of Utah, Jon Kyl of Arizona, Jeff Sessions of Alabama and John Cornyn of Texas are smiling and exulting. But something is wrong with this picture.

A Double Democratic Litmus Test by Terence P. Jeffrey Posted Aug 17, 2005 Will a Republican President ever again name a non-stealth conservative to the U.S. Supreme Court? Or will liberal Democrats succeed in imposing not one, but two, Litmus tests on Supreme Court nominations? The first prospective Litmus test is that Democratic presidents, deferring to the liberal base of the Democratic Party, will name only publicly pro-abortion justices to the Supreme Court. The second prospective Litmus test is that Republican presidents, preferring to avoid a major political brawl with the liberal base of the Democratic Party (and their allies...

The United States should follow the instruction of Great Britain in punishing speech likely to motivate terrorism. President George W. Bush should propose legislation making criminal the condoning or glorifying of terrorism against the United States whether uttered domestically or abroad, for example, Bobby Fisher's notorious glee at the September 11, 2001 abominations. Reasonable suspicion of sympathy with terrorism should justify excluding or deporting aliens. And naturalization should require the applicant's oath or affirmation to cooperate with law enforcement and national security authorities in the investigation or foiling of terrorist crimes. The proposals would be no witch hunt. Witches were...

On the heels of apologizing for its old racism in thwarting anti-lynching laws, the U.S. Senate is poised to initiate a new racism celebrated in the so-called "Akaka Bill." It would summon into being for the first time a race-based Native Hawaiian sovereignty operating outside the U.S. Constitution. Only persons with at least "one drop" of Native Hawaiian blood would enjoy the right to create the new sovereign entity with its sweeping immunities from federal and state laws. The Akaka bill would authorize and have the United States facilitate Hawaiian officials in relinquishing the State's sovereignty over a portion of...

The U.S. Supreme Court is too important for mediocrities. The justices chronically write ill-reasoned opinions that sow rather than dispel confusion. Insipid minds incline toward major constitutional blunders. Justice Henry Brown pronounced the "separate but equal" doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); Justice Rufus Peckham embraced free enterprise and Herbert Spencer's Social Statics as constitutional mandates in Lochner v. New York (1905); Chief Justice William Howard Taft declared wiretapping and electronic surveillance outside the limits of the Fourth Amendment in Olmstead v. United States (1928); and Justice Harry Blackmun summoned into being a constitutional right to abortion in Roe v....

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's Supreme Court career epitomizes the judicial lawlessness that has regularly stained constitutional law since Chief Justice Earl Warren's stewardship from 1954-1969. She celebrated standards of interpretation pivoting on discernments unrelated to law or legal education in which judges are no more expert than philosophers, poets, or playwrights. The nation's maiden female justice also viscerally embraced gender discrimination claims to avenge the authentic prejudice that had blunted her professional ambitions. She generally conceived of the judicial role more as a broker striking compromises between competing political factions than as an expounder of longheaded legal doctrines to inform...

Liberal legal culture frowns on religion. The notoriously liberal Colorado Supreme Court is exemplary. The core message of its ill-reasoned decision in People v. Harlan (March 28) is that relying on religious law or teachings in determining the death penalty's appropriateness as a punishment taints the verdict as prejudicial or irrational. Accordingly, Justice Gregory J. Hobbs Jr. writing for a 3-2 majority, invalidated a death sentence for first degree murder because jurors might have been influenced by biblical passages prescribing "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" and commanding obedience to civil authorities. In other words, the free exercise of religion...