Both of the top Republicans in the House and Senate have now expressed support for rewriting the 14th Amendment. Their goal? To prevent the children of illegal immigrants from becoming American citizens. Thankfully, it will never happen, for reasons that I’ll get to in a bit. I say “thankfully” because it’s [...]

Based on the media reports, I was having a hard time figuring out what was in Arizona’s new and controversial immigration law, so I looked it up directly. The conclusion? This law is a recipe both for confusion and for a spike in lawsuits against Arizona police departments. Oh, and if you [...]

The Supreme Court just decided to take on an extremely interesting, and difficult, case. Back in 2004, Congress passed the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act that mandated a two year prison sentence for anyone who “knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person” (called “aggravated identity theft”). [...]

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve spent a lot more time lately talking about the GOP primary than the Democratic primary. Mostly this is because the Democratic primary has been pretty uninteresting lately. Clinton is obviously the front-runner, Obama the contender, and Edwards the dark horse. The differences between the candidates largely come [...]

In his New York Times editorial today, David Brooks argues that American society has become increasingly splintered along racial and ethnic lines. The bulk of his evidence comes from the world of music. He notes that the artists and audience for rock bands is increasingly white-only, and that as a result modern rock [...]

It’s shockingly easy to motivate racial hatred. Remind people what their problems are: unemployment, taxes, wars, crime, drugs, etc. Tell them that those problems result from a competition for scarce resources. Whatever your problems are, they result from a lack of enough money, jobs, women, etc. to go around. Tell people [...]

Fred Thompson officially entered the presidential race.  More importantly, he now has an official campaign website that has actual policy information on it.  The caveat, of course, is that there isn’t a whole lot of information on his site yet.  Basically he discusses two issues at length: federalism and immigration reform.

A federal district court ruled yesterday that the city of Hazelton, PA has no right to pass anti-illegal immigration ordinances.  At issue were two laws.  One would have fined landlords who did not require proof of citizenship or visa when renting to immigrants.  The other made English the official language of the city, even to [...]

One of the great ironies of the Scooter Libby trial was that the same conservatives who have for years fought for high mandatory minimum sentences–and against allowing judicial discretion to reduce those sentences–ended up complaining that the sentence given to Mr. Libby based on those sentencing guidelines was too harsh.  Now we have the second [...]

The Bush Administration has always had an expansive view of executive authority.  This is old news.  So when I read this article in today’s Boston Globe, I wasn’t horribly surprised.  The GAO found that the Bush Administration had ignored six out of the nineteen randomly chosen laws about which the president had issued signing statements.  [...]