Appeals Court Says AR-15s Are Not Constitutionally Protected

AR-15s and other assault weapons with large magazines are not protected by the Second Amendment and can be lawfully banned, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday.

The federal appeals court – based in Richmond, Virginia, and known for its conservative bent – upheld a Maryland prohibition of assault weapons in unvarnished language, writing that "the banned assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are not constitutionally protected arms."

Carly Fiorina Betrays The Central Unifying Principle Of Republican Constitutional Theory

Obamacare is unconstitutional.

There’s no belief that is more central to the Republican Party’s vision of the Constitution than this simple article of faith. Asking a Republican partisan to deny it is like asking a Christian to deny that Jesus is the Son of God. Such is the primacy of the unconstitutionality of Obamacare in the Republican faith.

Trump, Carson, Rand Paul and Other GOP Candidates Defy the Constitution with Anti-Muslim Bigotry

The founders of this nation recognized Islam as one of the world’s great faiths. Incredibly and disgracefully, much of today’s Republican Party disagrees.

Thomas Jefferson, whose well-worn copy of the Quran is in the Library of Congress, fought to ensure that the American concept of religious freedom encompassed Islam. John Adams wrote that Muhammad was a “sober inquirer after truth.” Benjamin Franklin asserted that even a Muslim missionary sent by “the Mufti of Constantinople” would find there was “a pulpit at his service” in this country.

Dr. Ben Carson Isn’t Just Disrespecting Muslims—He’s Disregarding the Constitution

Days after Donald Trump dignified anti-Muslim bigotry at a New Hampshire town hall meeting, Dr. Ben Carson announced that he did not think a Muslim-American should serve as president.

So it goes in a race for the Republican presidential nomination that is increasingly at odds with the contemporary American circumstance and with the long history of the American experiment.

Constitutionally, Slavery Is Indeed a National Institution

Sean Wilentz’s latest op-ed in the New York Times, “Constitutionally, Slavery Is No National Institution,” argues that it is a “myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery.” Instead, the Princeton professor demonstrates a woeful misreading of the debates over the drafting of the Constitution. That the document does not contain the words “slave” or “slavery” in no way indicates that it was written to reject the institution. In the debates, the delegates almost always employed euphemisms such as “this unique species of property,” “this unhappy class,” or “such other persons,” as stand-ins for the more repugnant “slaves.” They simply carried that practice over to the final document.

Justices Breyer, Ginsburg Say It Is 'Highly Likely' The Death Penalty Is Unconstitutional

WASHINGTON -- Two liberals on the Supreme Court on Monday suggested that the death penalty itself may be unconstitutional, saying that it may violate the Eighth Amendment.

Both Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined two other liberals on the court in the dissent that suggested that states would be able to burn prisoners at the stake under the majority's ruling on Oklahoma's use of lethal injection drugs. But Breyer also wrote a dissent, joined by Ginsburg, which said the death penalty in any form may be unconstitutional.

Breyer wrote that he believed it was "highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment" and called for the court to address that "basic question." He suggested that the decline of the death penalty made it an "unusual" punishment that, for the past 40 years, has been "imposed arbitrarily."

It’s Not Too Late: Save Democracy By Amending the Constitution

Walt Whitman got it right, ten years before the founding of The Nation, when he advised Americans to “re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul….” This goes double for the left, which cannot afford to neglect the crumbling infrastructure of our democracy, or to treat as sacrosanct a creaking constitution that thwarts rather than extends the will of the people.

Nothing locks in inequality and dysfunction like a constitution so imprecise that it allows right-wing judicial activists to make buying elections easy and voting in them hard. But don’t just blame “constitutional conservatives” for turning our founding document into an outline for oligarchy. Fret about liberal constitutionalists who imagine we’re just one thrilling presidential appointment away from making our democratic vistas real. Like Democrats dreaming of another FDR, liberals waiting for another Earl Warren miss the point. Our democratic destiny is not something to wait for—it’s something we have to make happen. Dissident Americans have been bending the arc of history by rewriting the US Constitution since amendments were added with quill pens. Today’s dissenters should be about the business of doing so once more.

Why the Founding Fathers Considered Banning Torture Foundational to the U.S. Constitution

I have argued on many occasions that the language of patriotism and appeal to the Founding Fathers and the constitution must not be allowed to be appropriated by the political right wing in contemporary America, since for the most part right wing principles (privileging religion, exaltation of ‘whiteness’ over universal humanity, and preference for property rights over human rights) are diametrically opposed to the Enlightenment and Deist values of most of the framers of the United States.

We will likely hear these false appeals to an imaginary history a great deal with the release of the Senate report on CIA torture.  It seems to me self-evident that most of the members of the Constitutional Convention would have voted to release the report and also would have been completely appalled at its contents.

Lawyers argue law to revoke Canadian citizenship is unconstitutional

The Federal Court of Canada has been asked to void Ottawa’s recent changes to the Citizenship Act and declare it unconstitutional to revoke the citizenship of Canadian-born and naturalized citizens.

A day after the terror-linked gun shooting in Ottawa, constitutional lawyers argued in court on Thursday that Parliament has no legislative power to remove citizenship from individuals involved in armed combat against Canada, treason, spying and terrorism – unless the citizenship was obtained by fraud.

Antonin Scalia Says Constitution Permits Court To 'Favor Religion Over Non-Religion'

The separation of church and state doesn't mean “the government cannot favor religion over non-religion,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued during a speech at Colorado Christian University on Wednesday, according to The Washington Times.

Defending his strict adherence to the plain text of the Constitution, Scalia knocked secular qualms over the role of religion in the public sphere as “utterly absurd,” arguing that the Constitution is only obligated to protect freedom of religion -- not freedom from it.

“I think the main fight is to dissuade Americans from what the secularists are trying to persuade them to be true: that the separation of church and state means that the government cannot favor religion over non-religion,” the Reagan-appointed jurist told the crowd of about 400 people.

With FIPA, Harper Shows There's More than One Way to Skin a Constitution

Is Stephen Harper on crack? Why would someone who was such an outspoken critic of communist China sign the Canada-China FIPA -- a three decade investment treaty so disadvantageous to this country that the Financial Post called the terms "unbecoming a nation state." So bad is this deal for Canada that experts worry that it would effectively allow closed door trade tribunals to undermine the authority of Parliament or even our constitution.

Could it be that Harper signed the FIPA because it was such a terrible deal? Let me explain. Harper's abiding preoccupation during his tenure has been scaling up resource exports, particularly Alberta's bitumen by pipeline to the B.C. coast. To that end, the Harper government has gutted Canadian environmental laws and made National Energy Board rulings subject to cabinet approval.

Part of Harper government’s tougher sentencing laws ruled unconstitutional

TORONTO - The Harper government's tough-on-crime agenda took another hit Wednesday when Ontario's top court struck down provisions that limit pre-trial sentencing credit.

In its decision, the Court of Appeal ruled the law unconstitutional because, among other things, it could create sentencing disparities for similarly placed offenders.

"Both the offender and the public must have confidence in the fairness of the sentencing process and in the results," the court ruled.

‘It’s unconstitutional’: lawyer Rocco Galati targets Conservative citizenship law

OTTAWA – Toronto lawyer Rocco Galati has launched yet another Constitutional challenge against the Conservative government – this time to do with a recently-passed citizenship law.

In court documents filed Wednesday, Galati says changes to the Citizenship Act are unconstitutional because they give Parliament the authority to strip Canadian-born citizens of their citizenship.

“If you can place the citizenship of Canadian-born citizens into chaos and uncertainty, well the entire bedrock for your democracy goes,” Galati said in an interview.

Federal Judge Rules No-Fly List Is Unconstitutional

June 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. government's no-fly list banning people accused of links to terrorism from commercial flights violates their constitutional rights because it gives them no meaningful way to contest that decision, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Anna Brown, ruling on a lawsuit filed in federal court in Oregon by 13 Muslim Americans who were branded with the no-fly status, ordered the government to come up with new procedures that allow people on the no-fly list to challenge that designation.

Was the Constitution Designed to Benefit the Economic Elite?

One of the great debates surrounding the American political history is whether the U.S. Constitution really was designed to protect all of the people against the power of government and its excesses or whether it was written to serve the interests of the people and groups who wielded the economic power in the United States after the Revolution. In other words was the American Constitution a democratic constitution or was it a means by which a dominant economic and social class maintained its power over a subordinate class of citizens?

The U.S. Constitution was written by men who represented money, public securities, manufacturing, and trade and shipping. In other words, Big Money and Big Business and like the "captains" of industry of today, they wanted to pay as few taxes as possible. While maintaining their status as the Elite of politics and society.

The Post-Constitutional Era

The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power—one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed—a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating—is a cruel joke. And it means that if we do not rapidly build militant mass movements to overthrow corporate tyranny, including breaking the back of the two-party duopoly that is the mask of corporate power, we will lose our liberty.

John Paul Stevens Pitches 6 Major Changes To The Constitution In New Book

WASHINGTON (AP) — In the aftermath of the Connecticut school shootings that left 20 first-graders and six educators dead, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens began thinking about ways to prevent a repeat.

The result is Stevens' new book — his second since retiring from the court at age 90 — in which he calls for no fewer than six changes to the Constitution, of which two are directly related to guns. Others would abolish the death penalty, make it easier to limit spending on elections and rein in partisan drawing of electoral districts.

How One Country Emerged From the Arab Spring With a Democratic State

Tunisians have shattered the dogma that citizens of the Arab world must either accept a secular authoritarian status quo or submit to Islamist authoritarian rule.

When Tunisians rose up in peaceful protest from December 2010 to January 2011 to oust former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, they inspired Egyptians, Libyans and Syrians to take to the streets against their own autocratic leaders. None of the uprisings in any of those countries have ended in anything resembling democracy. Even in Egypt, the country whose path has most closely followed Tunisia’s, the secular/Islamist divide has led to bloodshed and trauma.

The NSA's Telephone Metadata Program Is Unconstitutional

In my last post, I concluded that the NSA's bulk telephony metadata program is a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. But because the Fourth Amendment prohibits only unreasonable searches, the next question is whether the program is "unreasonable." This turns out to be a rather complicated question. So, bear with me as I try to work my way through it.

At the outset, it is important to recall exactly what the bulk telephony metadata program does. Under section 215 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as interpreted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the NSA is authorized to obtain from telephone service providers on a daily basis the calling records of millions of Americans. The calling records, or metadata, consist of the phone numbers called by a particular phone number and the phone numbers that have called that particular number. They do not include any information about the identities of the individuals or the contents of the calls. The NSA holds this metadata in a very large database for a period of five years, after which it is expunged.

Obama Wrongs the Bill of Rights

President Barack Obama proclaimed Dec. 15 Bill of Rights Day, praising those first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution as “the foundation of American liberty, securing our most fundamental rights—from the freedom to speak, assemble and practice our faith as we please to the protections that ensure justice under the law.” The next day, U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon called Obama’s surveillance policies “almost Orwellian” in a court order finding the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of Americans’ telephone metadata very likely unconstitutional. If that was not enough, the president’s own task force on the issues, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, delivered its report, which the White House released, with 46 recommendations for changes.