Still more criminals are pretending to be cops conducting violent raids on homes. Since the police do smash in doors with little or no warning, point their weapons at residents until they lay prostrate on the floor, and deny people the opportunity to read search warrants, the lines have been badly blurred. Kathryn Johnson was killed after she shot at intruders who turned out to be cops. This DC resident might have been killed by ...

So Hillary Clinton is “on track” to be the nation’s top diplomat, huh? Well, setting aside the wisdom of that decision — forget ideology; does she have both foreign policy expertise and a good working relationship with the President-elect? — it appears that there may be genuine constitutional problems with her expected nomination. To wit, Article I, section 6, clause 2 reads: No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, ...

Recent reporting on the weakness of behavioral profiling in airports has overlooked a key dimension of the problem with it. According to this story in USA Today, interviewing or patting down 160,000 people with (unreported) indicia of suspicion at airports has resulted in 1,266 arrests. It has failed to find wrongdoing 99.3% of the time. Occassionally, investigations based on behavioral profiling have turned up such things as drug possession and the use of fake identification. ...

FBI agent Sam Hicks was killed this week when he and other police officers tried to serve a warrant at 6 am on the husband of Christina Korbe. Korbe says she thought criminal intruders were trying to break into her house. She called 911 and retrieved her handgun. Hicks was shot shortly after he entered the house. This will provide an early test for the incoming Obama administration. Will it matter what Korbe really thought ...

Monday afternoon, the Cato Institute will be hosting Brian Doherty, Senior Editor of Reason magazine. The topic will be his book, Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment. Christopher Rhee, partner at Arnold & Porter, will be on hand for comments as well. Tim Lynch, the Director of Cato’s Project on Criminal Justice, will be moderating. Brian’s book tells the inside story of the litigation that overturned the D.C. ...

Over at Jay P. Greene’s blog, Greg Forster takes issue with those who say that the Constitution does not permit federal excursions like No Child Left Behind. I address these concerns over at the New Talk discussion underway since yesterday, and encourage you to check that out. I offer only one, I think fairly conclusive, rebuttal to Forster here. Greg calls on Federalist Papers nos. 47-51 to argue that federal intervention in state authority over ...

Jonathan Mahler has a smart, informative feature on executive power in this week’s New York Times Magazine. I object only to the title, “After the Imperial Presidency.” As Mahler’s piece makes clear, the title could have used a question mark, at the very least. Mahler writes: Come January, the current administration will pass on to its successor a vast infrastructure for electronic surveillance, secret sites for detention and interrogation and a sheaf of legal opinions ...

As Ted Galen Carpenter has noted, the War on Drugs is active in Afghanistan. Below is a photo from the DEA website of Special Agents burning a bunker of hashish in Afghanistan. Repeat: These guys are DEA agents, not U.S. soldiers. There is an undeniable connection between the narcotics trade and Taliban funding. However, any drug eradication should be pursued as a means of resource denial to insurgents, not as a goal in and of ...

Back in July Sen. Barack Obama promised to repeal any executive orders that “trample on liberty”: Barack Obama told House Democrats on Tuesday that as president he would order his attorney general to scour White House executive orders and expunge any that “trample on liberty,” several lawmakers said. . . . The Illinois senator “talked about how his attorney general is to review every executive order and immediately eliminate those that trample on liberty,” said ...

terrorism [ter-uh-riz-uhm] - noun 1. the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes. 2. the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization. 3. a terroristic method of governing or of resisting a government. So, one would think that countering terrorism would involve resisting coercion by resisting fear and submission. That’s not the case in Washington, D.C., where Metro officials plan to start random searches of travelers’ ...

Former Catoite Radley Balko argues that the Republican Party deserves to lose because it “has exiled its Goldwater-Reagan wing and given up all pretense of any allegiance to limited government.” He goes on to detail all the sordid ways in which the GOP has indeed betrayed its allegedly pro-free market, limited government beliefs and thus “forfeited its right to govern.” I don’t disagree with any of Balko’s analysis, but I do take issue with his ...

The Chicago Tribune quotes me this morning on issues the candidates aren’t talking about and may not anticipate. It’s true that issues are likely to arise in the next four years that no one anticipates today. But there are also some issues that are pretty easy to identify that the candidates aren’t being pressed to talk about. Some of those include: The proper role and scope of the federal government. Both candidates have a laundry ...