Vander Plaats: ‘I am not the voice of the tea party’

As GOP presidential prospects prepare to announce their candidacies and eye the Hawkeye State for supporters, members of Iowa’s tea party movement are vetting which candidates will best carry their message of regaining fiscal responsibility and limiting government.

Yet, a highly decentralized movement and diversity of political interests within Iowa’s More…

John Yoo Faces Back-to-School Welcome at Berkeley

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.

Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture More…

A Quick Primer on ‘Incorporation’

What is “incorporation?”

Among the many legal terms mentioned over the last four days of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, the term “incorporation,” when it comes to the Second Amendment right to bear arms, is probably the most confusing.

Incorporation in this context refers to whether the Bill More…

Supreme Court Denies Prisoner Right to DNA Evidence

In yet another 5-4 ruling Thursday, the Supreme Court denied a man imprisoned for a rape and attempted murder he says he didn’t commit the right to the DNA evidence that would prove his guilt or innocence.

Concluding that this is a matter for state legislatures, not the federal More…

The Hidden Bush Dictatorship

Last night on MSNBC’s  “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Harper’s writer and lawyer Scott Horton made the astonishing — and very convincing — argument that, while most of us didn’t realize it, over the last eight years President George W. Bush had turned our country into a dictatorship.

Horton, a More…

OLC Authorized Pentagon to Ignore Bill of Rights On U.S. Soil

In an October 2001 memo released today on Monday, then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo advised the Pentagon’s top lawyer that the president may not only deploy the military within the United States, but it may More…