It might seem counterintuitive, but when Congress eliminated the $200 registration fee under the 1934 National Firearms Act for the registration of suppressors and short-barreled rifles, it rendered the law unconstitutional. So held Judge Jimmy Hendrix*, and the government has not as yet appealed.

House Republicans added a provision eliminating the $200 tax on suppressors and short-barreled rifles when they passed Mr. Trump’s major spending bill last year.

That change triggered the downfall of the law, which had for 92 years required buyers of restricted arms to submit their fingerprints and seek A.T.F. approval. Gun advocacy groups quickly filed several lawsuits seeking to further weaken the law, arguing that the registration process was unconstitutional without the tax component. Continue reading →

She’s unnamed, but described in twits as being a wife, mother and born and raised “near Bailey’s Crossroads in Northern Virginia.” That didn’t stop an unnamed and masked ICE agent from pointing his weapon at her. The official DHS explanation was routine.

Under most circumstances, there would be no way to challenge this official account, even though so many of the DHS claims about ICE interactions have been proven shockingly false. But this time, the driver had a dashcam. Continue reading →

Long time readers may recall a debate I had with Elie Mystal in the early days of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now calls “Woke 1.” This was before the murder of the George Floyd, before the riots in the street, before #MeToo, cancel culture and Defund Police. I shared many of the end goals of those who called themselves “social justice warriors,” until the name became a pejorative. as did “woke” which followed.

Throughout that period of time, I held firm to the liberal principles of free speech, due process and the presumption of innocence. That made me the enemy of the woke. Others went all in. Some no doubt believed it and embraced left wing fascism in their zeal for Utopia, while others played along, mouthing the mantra and joining the mob condemning the heretic du jour. Continue reading →

On August 9th, 1974, President Richard M. Nixon resigned. Heather Cox Richardson does a good job of chronicling how it came to be that a break-in at the Watergate Complex to tap the telephones of the Democratic National Committee took down a presidency. Putting aside J.D. Vance’s cynical, yet likely accurate, observation that Watergate would have been a 12-hour news story today, one key piece of the saga stands out as an apocryphal telltale of why Blanche is unfit to serve as Attorney General.

Archibald Cox, special Watergate prosecutor, learned from deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield that conversations and telephone calls in the Oval Office were recorded. Oh boy. Cox, as well as Senate Watergate Committee chair Sam Ervin, wanted the tapes. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, Jon Adler makes a good, and deeply disturbing point.

If the Supreme Court does intervene, either on the interim docket or after argument, this case might present a good opportunity for the justices to revisit–and perhaps restrain–the permissive approach to standing in cases against the federal government, particularly those relying upon aesthetic standing. As Judge Rao explains in her dissent, there are serious questions about NTHP’s standing here, both as an organization and as a representative of members who claim “injury” from the ballroom’s construction.

The D.C. Circuit, by 2-1 majority in National Trust for Historic Preservation v. National Park Service, held that only Congress, not the president, has the authority to approve construction of the Trump Ballroom. Continue reading →

By the time you read this, my son will be starting his sixth grade year in school. It’s a new school for him so he gets a half day of orientation today and a half day Monday. The first full day of school for everyone is actually this coming Tuesday in my area.

I’m so old, I remember when you actually had to start school on a Monday and go the entire day. When I was his age, we didn’t do this communist half-day bullshit. We suffered through an entire eight hours and we were proud of it. We also walked both ways five miles uphill barefoot in the snow, but that means nothing to this generation. Continue reading →

Stephen Miller is nothing if not tenacious in his hatred of immigrants, his own ancestry notwithstanding. After the Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s birthright citizenship Executive Order, and given the vast array of grandiose construction projects going poorly, plus that darn war that won’t go away no matter how many times Trump claims he won, and the nagging Democrat-invented “affordability” thingie, you might think that he was too busy to continue pushing the envelope on such a nonsensical cause as ending the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright citizenship that was already decided and doomed to fail.

Miller, however, won’t take the Constitution for an answer, and so Trump signed what Miller put before him. Continue reading →

Sure, the primary race was supposed to be a blow out, and it turned out that Abdul El-Sayed squeaked through by less than a point. But that’s little comfort. Abdul El-Sayed beat the Democratic establishment candidate, Representative Haley Stevens, in the Democratic primary for the senator from Michigan. That he didn’t win huge doesn’t change the fact that he won. Abdul won.

Michigan’s marquee race, the Democratic Senate primary, turned out to be a nail-biter Tuesday. But one thing is clear in progressive Abdul El-Sayed’s surprisingly narrow win over Rep. Haley Stevens, the choice of the old guard: The left-wing insurgency is here to stay.

The New York City win of Zohran Mamdani could be shrugged off as a local quirk. After all, Mamdani won as Mayor of New York. Hell, even Giuliani won as mayor, which tells you how easily New York voters can be led astray. But Abdul was running for Senator, and to hold the Democratic senate seat of retiring Gary Peters. If the Dems have any hope of taking the majority in the Senate, holding this seat is critical. And yet, Abdul won. Continue reading →

When three old friends, Robin Steinberg, David Feige and Dan Arshack, started Bronx Defenders, there was a deliberate intention of providing their indigent clients “holistic” services. By this, they meant that their purpose wasn’t just to beat the case, as would be the scope of ordinary criminal defense, but to help their clients become happy, successful, law-abiding citizens.

While beating the rap was their primary goal, helping clients beyond their legal problems was their ethos. It was, at the time, a novel and very progressive approach for an indigent defense organization. None of the founders remain at Bronx Defenders for various reasons, but the ethos remains. And that, apparently, has given rise to a stumbling block that has caused Bronx Defenders to lose the tune, as its staff has now been on strike for a week and its union has rejected an eminently fair proposal to settle. Continue reading →

After Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn said they were voting against confirmation of Todd Blanche for Attorney General until Blanche put it in writing, Blanche refused to do so, the hearing date for the vote was delayed by 92-year-old Chairman Chuck Grassley, and Trump, because he’s Trump, had to make it all about him.

Continue reading →