Interestingly, aside from the occasional mention of the Arizona Cardinals, almost every post I’ve marked with the Arizona tag over the last three years is about stupid laws or bills that infringe constitutional rights. What up, Arizona?
April 7, 2012
April 3, 2012
March 26, 2012
Court rules that prostitution is still legal in Canada, strikes down other parts of law
Yes, prostitution is still legal … but some of the worst restrictions hedging it around have been declared unconstitutional:
The Court of Appeal for Ontario has swept aside some of the country’s anti-prostitution laws saying they place unconstitutional restrictions on prostitutes’ ability to protect themselves.
The landmark decision means sex workers will be able to hire drivers, bodyguards and support staff and work indoors in organized brothels or “bawdy houses,” while “exploitation” by pimps remains illegal.
However, openly soliciting customers on the street remains prohibited with the judges deeming that “a reasonable limit on the right to freedom of expression.”
The province’s highest court suspended the immediate implementation of striking the bawdy house law for a year to allow the government an opportunity to amend the Criminal Code.
[. . .]
The appeal stems from the legal oddity that while prostitution was not illegal, many activities surrounding it were, including running a brothel or bawdy house, communicating for the purpose of prostitution and living on money earned by a prostitute.
That disconnect led to a constitutional challenge mounted by three sex trade workers who say the laws prevented them from taking basic safety precautions, such as hiring a bodyguard, working indoors or spending time assessing potential clients in public.
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March 25, 2012
March 1, 2012
A “Confederation theme park”? The jokes write themselves
In the National Post, Lorne Gunter has a bit of fun with the notion of what kind of attractions to put in a theme park celebrating Confederation:
“It’s easy to mock Preston Manning’s idea for a Confederation Theme Park … for starters, it’s somewhat odd to see the pro-small-government, West-wants-in Reform Party founder to be proposing a large government expenditure on a historically slanted amusement park to be located, of all places, in Ottawa.”
So said the Ottawa Citizen’s Mark Sutcliffe — two years ago!
It’s still easy to mock.
Although ultimately endorsing Mr. Manning’s idea (in his own altered form), Sutcliffe called the project “Epcot Centre on the Ottawa River,” a dig at the multinational exposition at Disney World in Orlando, Fla. (The one lasting impression I have of Epcot is that every pavilion was tedious and getting from one to the other required a lot of uncomfortable, fruitless walking. Hey, maybe that would be a good blueprint for a celebration of Confederation after all.)
Sutcliffe had his own satirical ideas of what rides a Confederation Park might offer. There could be “Universal (Health Care) Studios” and the “Sovereignty Movement Roller Coaster” that soared to the same dizzying highs and plunged to the same gut-turning lows as Quebec nationalism has experienced over the past 40 years. Patrons could also “board the Avro Arrow as it sits on the runway and never takes off!”
[. . .]
Imagine the joy on tots faces when Mom and Dad tell them that instead of going to central Florida for Pirates of the Caribbean, It’s a Small World (gad, I still have that cloying song stuck in my head), Space Mountain, Splash Mountain and Typhoon Lagoon, they’ll be heading to Ottawa in February to watch an animatronic debate between robot John A. Macdonald and robot Joseph Howe over the British North America Act’s division of federal and provincial powers at the authentic recreation of Charlottetown’s Founders’ Hall at the PEI display.
Then there’ll be a ride on the Drop of Western Alienation Doom; the Endless Trip to the Sovereignty-Association Dentist (sponsored by “money and the ethnic vote”); the Constitutional Reform Merry-go-round (also dubbed the Canada Round); topped off by the Centre-of-the-Universe Centrifuge where riders strap themselves into cars resembling Canada’s regions and the entire contraption revolves around Toronto.
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February 12, 2012
Daniel Hannan at CPAC 2012
If you want to hear from someone who unmistakably understands the profound impact of America’s founding and believes there is still time for its citizens to take hold of its bureaucratic laden government and return it back to the will of it’s founding, then you must hear this speech from Daniel Hannan. You’ll appreciate America all the more afterwards, I assure you.
H/T to John Ward for the link.
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February 11, 2012
“Courts are often the state’s battering rams, used for breaking down individual rights and freedoms”
George Jonas explains why Canadians were more free before their rights and freedoms were codified in the Charter:
The Canada in which I landed in 1956 may not have had a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but it had rights and freedoms galore, making it the envy of the world. The Canada in which I make my home today has a Charter, but Canadians who say they had more rights and freedoms 50 years ago aren’t paranoid: They did.
There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself. It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them. Minimally, governments will try to take away every freedom you haven’t remembered to include.
“Where does it say you have a right to breathe, sir? Surely it’s not a fundamental right. If it were, it would be in the Charter.”
The 19th century British constitutional scholar, A.V. Dicey, foresaw this. He cautioned against written constitutions for this very reason, among others.
Part of the reason for the inverse relationship between written rights and actual freedom is the court system:
When I came to Canada, a court of law was often a place where individuals went for protection against the state. These days, they’d be taking a chance. Courts are often the state’s battering rams, used for breaking down individual rights and freedoms. Climate trumps the law, obviously, considering the law isn’t the law until a judge says it is. There is global warming, as the world is warming to tyranny. A judicial climate change has turned Canada’s courts from frequent champions of individual liberty to near-permanent defenders of social policy.
A judicial expression used to call policy “an unruly horse.” If you’ve time for only one book to see how events unfold when policy starts driving the law, pick up Christie Blatchford’s account of the native land-claim standoff at Caledonia, Ont., called Helpless. It shows what happens when the justice system becomes a branch of social engineering.
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January 31, 2012
Gary Johnson calls for the immediate repeal of the Patriot Act
Posted at the Gary Johnson campaign website:
Speaking Sunday night to a national ACLU conference, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson called for repealing the Patriot Act in its entirety. The two-term governor and presidential candidate’s remarks were delivered in Orlando, FL, at the ACLU’s annual National Staff Conference.
Johnson said, “Ten years ago, we learned that the fastest way to pass a bad law is to call it the ‘Patriot Act’ and force Congress to vote on it in the immediate wake of a horrible attack on the United States. The irony is that there is really very little about the Patriot Act that is patriotic. Instead, it has turned out to be yet another tool the government is using to erode privacy, individual freedom and the Constitution itself.
“Benjamin Franklin had it right. ‘Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’.
“Absolutely, protecting the American people from those who would do us harm is the federal government’s most basic duty. Everyone gets that. But when harm is done, as on 9-11, it is the nature of government to ask for more power and more authority in order to protect us. That’s how we get laws like the Patriot Act.
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January 28, 2012
Conrad Black on Pierre Trudeau and his political career
Writing in the National Post, Conrad Black discusses Pierre Trudeau’s time in office:
Nor is there truth to the theory that Trudeau possessed any original political ideas. He was a run-of-the-mill 1960s social democrat who wanted big government, the nanny-, know-it-all-state, high taxes, and the confiscation of income from those who had earned it for redistribution to those who had not in exchange for their votes (far beyond what could be justified by the acquisition of votes for federalism in Quebec, where the money transfer was also largely from the non-French to the French).
It was hard to square Trudeau’s professed enthusiasm for civil rights with his friendship with Fidel Castro and other dictators who ruined their countries, such as Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, and his cold-shouldering of Soviet dissidents and other international civil rights advocates, and even the Canadian victims of the Korean airliner the Russians shot down. This was of a piece with his fawning deference to the Soviet leadership and his antagonism to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and even Richard Nixon, who all regarded him as little better than a communist fellow traveller (and told me so).
His campaign to reorient the Canadian economy away from exports to the United States was authoritarian rather than based on any fiscal incentivization of competition, and was a fiasco. His pursuit of arms control was chimerical; he disarmed Canada, did nothing to reduce the country’s military dependence on Washington, and produced a nonsensical plan for more conferences to agree on the unverifiable “suffocation” of defence spending.
[. . .]
His elevation to the headship of the party and government continued the grand Liberal tradition of choosing men lately drawn from outside politics (King, St. Laurent, Pearson). He took it whimsically, and much of his record was just idle dabbling, posturing, and the supreme confidence trick of saving Canada with a Charter of Rights that is revocable by each province (and has unleashed the bench on Canadian life like a swarm of hyper-active social tinkerers); and by imposing bilingual breakfast cereal boxes and television programming even in unilingual parts of the country.
It was clever enough that, as the English say, if you put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel: the rights of man and not governments, our (French-Canadian) house is all Canada, and deluges of Anglo-money in Quebec in the name of social justice, gracieusete du Canada. But it was a ruse, made more farcical by the revelation that Quebec’s supreme separatist strategist, Claude Morin, was a spy for the RCMP.
The Quebec nationalists took the bait, as well as the federal transfer payments, and today Quebec is a bovine clerisy of civil servants and consultants on life support from the rich English provinces, and separation is just a romantic delusion. I think that, at heart, Trudeau was a worldly Gallican Catholic cynic who sincerely despised separatism, was bemused to find himself a national saviour, and played the role with courage, brio and success.
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January 16, 2012
That pesky Constitution and the weird candidate who thinks it somehow matters
Rob Long writes about Ron Paul and his constitutional fixation:
It was always fun to see Paul’s dyspeptic, curdled expression during the 16,000 Republican debates this autumn. (There were 16,000 of them, weren’t there?) It was bracing to see him shrug off appeals to weasel-word his responses — just shutter the Fed! dump NATO! — and it was especially interesting to watch the other candidates, who, philosophically, aren’t supposed to be all that different from Paul, ballet-step around him, like he was one of those loud talkers at the neighborhood bar who make a lot of sense, mostly, but then every now and then say something — Lincoln was a tyrant! — that makes everyone think, “Oh, I get it. You’re just . . . insane.”
Ron Paul isn’t insane, of course. His views on sound money and central banking, and even his narrow interpretation of the national-defense interests, are principled — and not novel — conservative positions. You and I may not agree with them — I do, mostly, up to the part about allowing Iran to bomb Israel — but on the crackpot scale of 1 to Lyndon LaRouche, they’re barely a 3. And if we’re all really honest about it, the sainted Abraham Lincoln did, in fact, violate the Constitution on several occasions. And over a few beers, say, among friends, these are interesting and diverting topics of conversation.
But like all of those kinds of conversations, they always end up the same way. The conversation winds along interesting abstractions and what-ifs, and then someone — usually the old guy at the end of the bar — says something truly out-there — “There’s no constitutional reason, for instance, why the children of illegal immigrants cannot be eaten” — and then the conversation devolves into weird irrational tributaries, and everyone moves on to something else, but you always have the feeling that one guy — usually the old guy at the end of the bar — really meant it.
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January 3, 2012
December 28, 2011
Uncovering the historical definition of “the press”
Elizabeth sent me a link to this Dan Smyth post on what the US Founding Fathers understood the term “the press” to mean:
If the Founders wanted to protect in particular who today we call media, reporters, etc. with “freedom of…the press,” then surely the Founders could have written, for example, “freedom of … journalists” or “freedom of … newsmongers.”
Volokh describes how, with no significant exceptions, prominent writers the Founders often cited, including William Blackstone, Jean-Louis De Lolme, and George Tucker, connected press freedom with the right of every “freeman,” “citizen,” or “individual” to “write,” “print,” or “publish” his or her thoughts. This fact implies the Founders didn’t intend the press clause to protect the existing or future collection of “newsmongers” per se but rather to recognize the right of any person (or “freeman”) to use printing presses (Until 1694, England imposed licenses on publications, which the Founders abhorred). James Madison’s following first draft of the Bill of Rights’ speech/press clauses highlights this point: “The people [emphasis added] shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.” According to Johnson’s dictionary, “people” had such definitions as “a nation,” “men, or per[s]ons in general,” and “the commonality.”
Volokh provides much more evidence for the press clause’s “the press” being the printing press, particularly his evaluations of U.S. court cases from the Founding to 2011 that demonstrate judges have consistently interpreted the press clause as protecting any individuals who use the printing press, including newspaper advertisers and authors of letters to the editor, pamphlets, and books. Volokh describes how it was only the 1970s when some lower courts began interpreting the press clause’s “the press” to be a collection of journalists and not the printing press as a technology.
December 27, 2011
Finding the motivations for those scary “libertarian” folk
Jacob Sullum on a recent New York Times article that tried to define the typical Ron Paul supporter (and whether Ron Paul is responsible for their views):
Why does the Times think it is relevant to note that libertarians who focus on economic freedom are “backed to some degree by wealthy interests”? Isn’t that true of pretty much every political movement and organization, including Marxism and the Democratic Party? The implication seems to be that defenders of economic freedom are carrying water for special interests, who are in it only for the money.
Weirdly, the Times locates the scary militants in the part of the libertarian movement that focuses on “personal liberty,” which includes not only the rights explicitly protected by the Constitution (such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process, and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures) but also such unspecified rights as freedom to engage in consensual sexual relationships, to marry people of either sex, to bet on games of chance, and to ingest psychoactive substances (or even raw milk). So according to the Times, the right-wing extremists attracted to Paul are a tolerant, cosmopolitan group that nevertheless harbors odious views about blacks, Jews, and gay people. Also note that the Times, perhaps unintentionally, says the Constitution “at its extreme has helped fuel militant antigovernment sentiment.” All the more reason to be wary of defending this radical document.
In short, the libertarian movement consists of two parts: 1) self-interested tycoons seeking low taxes and minimal regulation in the name of economic freedom and 2) crazy right-wingers who take the Constitution too seriously and worry about personal freedom. I always thought the distinguishing feature of libertarianism was defending both economic and personal liberty, based on the insight that they are two manifestations of the same thing. But what do I know? I did not realize that the rule of law was a concept invented by F.A. Hayek until the Times explained it to me.
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December 26, 2011
Montana voters angry over “indefinite detention” vote, seek to recall their senators
Jonathan Turley has the details:
We have been discussing the disconnect between citizens who have repeatedly opposed continued rollbacks of civil liberties and the Democratic and Republican leadership pushing for such rollbacks, including the recent provision allowing indefinite detention of citizens under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2011 (NDAA). Now Montana citizens have decided to try another approach given the non-responsive attitude of our leaders — they are moving to remove their two Senators from office over their votes in favor of indefinite detention powers.
Montana is one of nine states with recall laws. The other states are Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Eighteen states have recall laws, but most do not apply to federal officers.
H/T to Radley Balko for the link.
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December 20, 2011
Reason.TV: Grandma got indefinitely detained (A very TSA Christmas)
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