Yet, a highly decentralized movement and diversity of political interests within Iowa’s tea party may prove difficult for Republican candidates to make solid waves in Iowa, a key 2012 early contest.

Monday, The Family Leader chief executive and three-time gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats appeared in Washington, D.C., to speak at a press conference with William Temple, founder of the Tea Party Founding Fathers. Vander Plaats used the opportunity to call for “exceptional leadership” from the candidate who will ultimately face President Barack Obama in 2012.

“I’m telling Iowans and others across the country that America needs a President that will lead on tax reform, on reforming Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, on drastically cutting discretionary spending, and who will refuse to spend more than we take in,” Vander Plaats said Monday in D.C.

Temple is in the process of planning a tea party rally in Kansas City this fall similar to the rally he held in Washington D.C. in 2009. He contacted Vander Plaats to help, which Vander Plaats said he agreed to do.

“I think he knows Iowa is a lead-off state, and wants candidates who [also] realize that to attend this rally and really have the chance to address the core issues of the tea party movement,” Vander Plaats said of Temple.

The movement has already shown political success in 2008 and 2010 elections, said Ryan Rhodes, chairman of the Iowa Tea Party.

“In state [legislative] races, you’re starting to see more people with tea party influences,” he said.

But even with all its given momentum, the movement — both in Iowa and nationally — is hard to classify. There are many different values and interests within the group, which in turn makes it difficult to unify and have a singular voice on issues. Most who consider themselves activists agree they want limited government by repealing health care reform, returning to the basic Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution and implementing fiscally conservative measures.  Several are against Democrat-centric ideas of government spending and creating more government-funded programs.

In an April article, The Des Moines Register quoted tea party activist Steve McCoy, of Indianola, as saying “the tea party’s not a Republican arm … there’s no allegiance to Republicans.” It’s a quote McCoy said he continues to stand by.

“But it’s not just Republicans,” McCoy clarified to The Iowa Independent. “Tea party activists are just upset with the direction the country is going, and with both the Republican and Democrat parties.”

Some tea party groups rally for conservative fiscal policies, while others advocate for home schooling rights, and still others champion for immigration reform. In Vander Plaats case, it’s “pro-family” values — specifically one-man, one-woman marriage and anti-abortion advocacy.

“That’s the blessing and the curse of the movement,” Rhodes said. “It’s fairly decentralized. We’re Republicans, we’re Democrats, we have all kinds of people in the tea party movement.”

Such diversity means there is no one person who speaks on behalf of tea party values, nor is the movement unified, unlike the Republican and Democrat parties.

Though often in the spotlight advocating many shared and individual beliefs held by tea party activists, Vander Plaats said Wednesday, “I am not the voice of the tea party in Iowa. There are a lot of threads to the tea party movement; I want to make sure the family thread is represented, and if I can add to that voice or re-energize the movement here in Iowa, then that’s what I want to do.”

Unlike other political parties, which rely on unity to make a stance and influence public policy, tea party members said loose organization is just as effective.

“We’re not a structured party,” McCoy added. “There’s no organizational structure, and I hope that never happens, because then you won’t have a Tea Party group. We’re people who think for ourselves, and we don’t want a (political) party to tell us what to think.”

Rhodes said his Iowa Tea Party is a loosely organized group. The group does not endorse any candidates, or even represent all activists, though it will lend a helping hand to local groups that ask for help in facilitating advocacy efforts on a specific issue.

A bus tour being launched by Rhodes’s Iowa Tea Party in June will give presidential candidates the chance to debate and will serve as a training tool to the public on caucus procedure.

“Our goal is to give people the tools they need to advocate for their issues and to back the candidate of their own choosing,” Rhodes said.

And candidates need not be only Conservative-leaning, Rhodes added.

“Everyone is welcome,” he said. “If a Democrat wants to come debate — I mean, if Barack Obama wanted to come to Iowa and debate issues with us, I’d be OK with that.”

Even if not a unified party, tea party activists believe the movement’s impact will be noticeable come November 2012.

“The tea party will have a significant voice in 2012,“ Vander Plaats said, adding similar movements have already resulted in drastic power change in other elections, primarily one in 2010, when U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was elected to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s seat. Brown had tea party base support to defeat Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democrat.

Coakley had been believed to be favored to win the seat in heavily-Democratic Massachusetts.

“(Brown) spoke to tea party issues out there, and people rallied behind him,” Vander Plaats said. “Who would have thought he would take Ted Kennedy’s seat?”

Similar action could happen in Iowa, as former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other potential presidential candidates sweep through the state in the coming months. As tea party activism grows from dissatisfaction of the two-party system, candidates will need to reach out, tea party members said.

“Candidates will need to address the tea party’s issues, especially where they stand on ‘Obamacare,’ (and) the role of government,” Vander Plaats said. “When people get a candidate who does that, and think the person can go against Barack Obama, they’ll rally behind that person. We welcome all voices. It’s a vetting process.”

And a diversity of tea party groups and diversity even within the pool of GOP prospects could mean trouble for establishment Conservative presidential hopefuls.

“It’s going to depend on who puts their name out there, but if the Republicans put up another John McCain, I think a lot of people will have a problem with that,” Rhodes added. “

Vander Plaats did not give a name when asked who he would support for President.

“I like different traits in many of them,” he said. “I will be examining their core values carefully.”

Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and torture of terror suspects held abroad in U.S. custody, and authorized the suspension of the Bill of Rights on U.S. soil.

The Associated Press reports that campus police arrested at least four people who refused to leave the university’s law school building.

Yoo reportedly ignored the demonstrators and. after police removed them from his classroom, began teaching.

Yoo returned to UC Berkeley yesterday after spending the spring semester at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, where his friend John Eastman is the dean.

According to the AP, Berkeley law students are divided over Yoo: while some think he’s a war criminal who should be fired, his classes are still among the most popular at the law school.

The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release a report any day now analyzing the conduct of Yoo and his colleagues at the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, and determining whether he violated ethical rules.  The report has been delayed for months while its subjects and the Department of Justice review and amend its contents.

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 of Rights applies to the states, as opposed to just the federal government — that is, are these rights incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because they are considered “fundamental to a scheme of ordered liberty,” as the Supreme Court has put it. The First Amendment rights to free speech and exercise of religion, for example, have been incorporated.

But the Bill of Rights has been “incorporated” to the states on a case-by-case basis, and the Supreme Court has never ruled on whether the right to bear arms enumerated in the Second Amendment is a “fundamental” right such that it should apply to the states. In fact, for years it wasn’t even clear that it was an “individual” right as opposed to the right of a state to maintain a militia, for example. Then, last year in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment does guarantee an “individual right” to gun possession, at least in one’s home.

This is why some Republicans at the Sotomayor hearings have focused so many of their questions on whether she sees the right to bear arms as a “fundamental right” and whether it applies to the states.

In the one relevant case she has ruled on, Maloney v. Cuomo, Sotomayor and two of her colleagues on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it’s not “fundamental,” in that sense. But they argued — and she has now argued repeatedly during her confirmation hearings — that the current state of the law required that conclusion. Whether it did or not, though, remains controversial, given that the three-judge panel relied largely on a case from the 19th century that found the Second Amendment does not apply to the states. That was before the Supreme Court started ruling in a series of cases that the Fourteenth Amendment “incorporates” portions of the Bill of Rights, making them applicable to the states.

Because the Supreme Court had never revisited the question with regard to the Second Amendment, the Second Circuit — and Judge Sotomayor — argued that the 1886 case of Presser v. Illinois still stands, and that according to another Supreme Court case about the role of Courts of Appeals, they had to follow it. Other courts have agreed (pdf). In fact, the Seventh Circuit recently explicitly followed the Second Circuit’s lead on the issue, saying that “if a court of appeals could disregard a decision by the Supreme Court by identifying, and accepting, one or another contention not expressly addressed by the justices, the Court’s decisions could be circumvented with ease. They would bind only judges too dim-witted to come up with a novel argument.”

Critics who believe the Second Amendment should apply to the states, however, argue that Sotomayor and her colleagues, who addressed the issue in a short per curiam (unsigned) opinion, failed to adequately address whether under the Supreme Court’s due process analysis, gun ownership is a “fundamental right” and therefore applies to the states.

The National Rifle Association earlier today issued a statement opposing Sotomayor’s confirmation.

A New York lawyer and owner of nunchucks — a weapons used in martial arts that is prohibited by the New York law that was upheld by Sotomayor and her colleagues in the case Maloney v. Cuomo — has asked the high court to use his case to decide the issue once and for all.

Concluding that this is a matter for state legislatures, not the federal courts, to decide, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in District Attorney’s Office v. Osborne that the Supreme Court is “reluctant to enlist the Federal Judiciary in creating a new constitutional code of rules for handling DNA.”

Even as the majority acknowledged the critical new role that DNA evidence can play in the criminal justice system — the test “has exonerated wrongly convicted people, and has confirmed the convictions of many others” — the court ruled that it’s still not, as the imprisoned defendant had claimed, a matter of due process rights guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution, but rather a procedural matter for states to decide how they want to handle the evidence and interpret their statutes regarding post-conviction relief.

In a scathing dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens — joined (again) by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter (in part) — wrote that the majority had misinterpreted both the facts and the law.

The “most elemental” of the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause is “the interest in being free from physical detention by one’s own government,” Stevens wrote. Noting that “nearly all the States have now recognized some postconviction right to DNA evidence,” and that prosecutors are required to turn over exculpatory evidence, it is “appropriate to recognize a limited federal right to such evidence in cases where litigants are unfairly barred from obtaining relief in state court.” Given that the evidence would absolutely prove Osborne’s guilt or innocence, Stevens wrote, Alaska’s refusal to provide it was “arbitrary” and a denial of the federal constitutional right of due process.

Because the Supreme Court had long similarly refused to acknowledge a right to counsel for the indigent in criminal cases by saying it was a matter of state procedure rather than due process, the dissenting justices argued that it was time to recognize a limited right to DNA evidence.

“Osborne has demonstrated a constitutionally protected right to due process which the State of Alaska thus far has not vindicated and which this Court is both empowered and obliged to safeguard. On the record before us, there is no reason to deny access to the evidence and there are many reasons to provide it, not least of which is a fundamental concern in ensuring that justice has been done inthis case.”

Horton, a prominent national security and human rights lawyer, is not on some crazy left-wing rant.  He’s just analyzing the substance of the recently-released Office of Legal Counsel memos.

As we’ve written before, those memos handed the president of the United States extraordinary powers to use the military against U.S. citizens on our own soil, to ignore the Bill of Rights — particularly the First and Fourth Amendments, which are key to basic notions of liberty and freedom from unreasonable government power — and to insulate the executive’s actions from congressional and judicial oversight.

Voila! — we have a dictatorship. It’s the remarkably logical conclusion. Check it out here.

Although the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil, Yoo concluded that “[a]lthough the situation is novel … we think that the better view is that the Fourth Amendment would not apply in these circumstances. Thus, for example, we do not think that a military commander carrying out a raid on a terrorist cell would be required to demonstrate probably cause or to obtain a warrant.”

This memo appears to have formed the legal basis for the Bush administration’s domestic warrantless wiretapping program, which at least one federal judge has since concluded was unconstitutional.

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project, reads it as extending beyond the Fourth Amendment, however.

“This takes the position that the Bill of Rights does not constrain the military in its operations inside the United States,” Jaffer told me this afternoon. “The president can disregard the constitution during wartime, not just on foreign battlefields, but inside the United States.  We had not seen a memo saying that before.”

Of the nine memos released today, at least two — this October one written by Yoo, and another written by Bybee regarding extraordinary rendition — were responsive to earlier ACLU requests for OLC memos in the context of ongoing FOIA cases.

But many more memos the ACLU has requested still have not been released.

“There are still dozens of memos being withheld,” said Jaffer. “We’re hoping that this is a first installment.”

While the memos reveal the legal groundwork that was laid for the Bush administration’s conduct in its “war on terror”, much of which appears to have been illegal, they still don’t answer the critical question that many Bush critics want to know.

“The obvious question that’s raised by these memos is, what conduct did the administration authorize on the basis of the legal reasoning in these memos?” Jaffer said.  “That’s a question that has not been adequately answered.”

Update: After further reading of this memo, I have to update it with some more astounding quotes from John Yoo, who insists that not only the Fourth Amendment, but the First Amendment right to free speech may be overridden by the President in wartime:

“First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully,” writes Yoo.  Yoo then reaches back to a 1931 Supreme Court case to support this idea, which said that “’When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.’ . . . No one would question but that a government might prevent actual obstruction to its recruiting service or the publication of the sailing dates of transports or the number and location of troops.”

Now, no one today would argue that an American has a right to publish secret details about U.S. troop movements in Iraq, either; but the First Amendment already accounts for those sorts of exigencies.  For John Yoo to take from that that the President may actually override free speech and press rights that are guaranteed by the First Amendment goes beyond stretching it — it’s just a blatant, and deliberate, misreading of the law.  After all, John Yoo — Harvard and Yale grad, Berkeley Law prof — is no dummy.