Stuff I didn't know until we elected a Constitutional Law professor President
1.) The Commerce Clause can make you buy stuff, even if you don't want it
2.) The President can make recess appointments when Congress isn't in recess
3.) Executive privilege to protect Presidential communications extends to conversations that never occurred
4.) The President can pick and choose which laws to defend
5.) The President can craft his own legislation
6.) Conservative super-PACs must reveal donors; liberal ones, not so much
7.) The President can kill Americans without due process
2 comments:
From the first link:
Mr. Barnett's own view of the Commerce Clause is extremely narrow. If he had his way, ObamaCare would be struck down on the ground that Congress has no authority to regulate the insurance business. When the Constitution was written, Mr. Barnett says, commerce was understood to mean "trade in things—goods. . . . The Commerce Clause was really put there, essentially, to create a free-trade zone for the United States," not to give Congress power over all economic activity. "Not only was insurance not thought to be a part of the original meaning; in fact, it was held by the Supreme Court for 100 years that it was not something within the commerce power to reach."
Today, however, Mr. Barnett acknowledges that is a losing argument. The court reversed itself in the 1944 case of U.S. v. South-Eastern Underwriters, holding that the Commerce Clause does authorize federal regulation of the insurance business.
There isn't an item on that list that hasn't been done by Bush, by Clinton, or by Bush AND Clinton, or which isn't a logical and inevitable extension of what they did. The closest thing to a novelty is the quasi-recess appointment, which pales in comparison to torture, yet each tactical shift got an official "yup, it's legal!" memo from the DOJ.
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