This past Wednesday was Tax Day and to celebrate, many people organized protests, called “Tea Parties,” to register their displeasure regarding the currentl levels of taxation in this country. In response to these gatherings, President Obama took the opportunity to plug his own tax cuts. He said, in part:

Make no mistake: this tax cut will reach 120 million families and put $120 billion directly into their pockets, and it includes the most American workers ever to get a tax cut.

This is an interesting statement, insofar as it characterizes a tax cut as putting money “directly into [the] pockets” of taxpayers. I’m having some trouble with this characterization. Suppose you are walking down the street when you are pulled into a dark alley by a common thug. He throws you to the ground, grabs your wallet, and opens it up. He takes out the $200 in cash it contains and runs off with it, all but a $20 bill, which he leaves behind. Has that thief just put $20 directly into your pocket? Should you be moved by his generosity? Should the fact that the theif left your $20 blunt your protest that he took the other $180?

The answer to these questions depends on your presuppositions regarding ownership of property and wealth. If you assume that the thief has a superior right to your money, then the answers to the above questions are all “yes.” If the thief has a right to your money, then anything he leaves you is a gift. But if your right to your money is superior to the rights of the thief, then you own him nothing.

Shifting back to the direct context of taxation, for President Obama’s statement to be true, that his tax cuts are putting money “directly” int your pockets, it would have to be true that the Government has a superior right to all of your money. If the Government has legal rights to all of the wealth in the country, then anything it lets you keep is a gift. If it does not, then cutting taxes is not putting money into pockets; rather, it is merely refraining from taking it.

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Okay, this is definitely “old news” at this point, but I got to thinking about the fact that President Obama re-took the oath of office after switching some of the words around at his inauguration. The report linked concludes with this quote from White House counsel Greg Craig:

We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the president was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself . . . [a]nd out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time.

Because Democratic liberalism tends to eschew inconvenient constitutional boundaries (such as the actual words of the Constitution), it seems almost ironic that President Obama would be so concerned about the precise order of the words in the Constitution that he would re-take the oath the next day, just to make sure he got it right. Nonetheless, I think this will probably be one of the president’s only homages to textual originalism. The ever-increasing talk of vacancies on the Supreme Court have me concerned that four years from now, the Court will contain one or two more constitutional mavericks.

Today the California Supreme Court is hearing arguments about the contitutionality of the controversial Proposition 8 that was passed in November, amending the California constitution to prohibit homosexual marriage. Based on the things I have read and heard, it seems that many people are having a hard time understanding that the actual issue before the court is not the merits of such an amendment, but whether an amendment of this kind can be made by a simple majority vote. In other words, the California Supreme Court will not (I should say “should not”) be deciding whether or not homosexual marriage is a good thing, but whether the state constitution allows such amendments to be made the way Proposition 8 was. In short, this is a civil procedure case. Read the rest of this entry »

While I have no doubt that this is an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon, I would think that if you can accept the terms of a “click-wrap” license with a mouse, you can accept them with a cat.

As with most legal questions, the answer is a resounding “it depends.” In one respect, there is a right to health care in this country. Various federal and state statutes mandate the provision of emergency health care even if the patient is unable to pay. Many more anti-discrimination laws focus on the health care industry to the extent that many doctors and hospitals practically take any patient that walks through the door. In this respect, there is a right to health care in the sense that anyone who needs it can procure it free from arbitrary objections.

On the other hand, there is not an absolute right to health care in the way it exists in other countries with socialized medicine schemes. With the exception of emergency treatment, medical care is a market commodity that cannot be gotten without paying the price. In this sense, there is no right to health care in the same way that there is no right to a steak dinner; you can get it if you pay for it, but you are not entitled to it in any ontological sense.

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In a culture that recoils at the very idea of teaching school children about the God of the Bible, one has to wonder about said culture’s self-appointed commitment to “truth” when one reads a story like this. So what do you think? Is it the job of educators to impart nothing more than empirically verifiable data or is there room for cultural traditions, even the fabricated ones?

Roe v. Wade and its progeny represent some of the most controversial Constitutional case law in American history. Recently, the Supreme Court has indicated a slight retreat from its virtual “abortion on demand” precedent over the past thirty five years, drawing accusations of judicial activism or legislation from the bench. Whether these accusations are true or not is irrelevant; if the Court is guilty of legislating from the bench, no case is a clearer example of such behavior than Roe itself.

The Roe majority based its holding on several morally bankrupt positions: the rejection of prenatal personhood, the ignoring of any interests of the unborn, and the arbitrary dictate that an individual’s bodily autonomy is a superior interest to a state’s interest in protecting innocent life. Read the rest of this entry »

Students of Constitutional law spend a great deal of time learning about “levels of review” when studying the Supreme Court’s substantive due process jurisprudence. Particularly in the context of the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments, the Court applies this hierarchy of levels when balancing state interests against individual liberties. However, a cursory review of what these “levels” are and how they are used indicates that the entire system is merely a tool to facilitate the Court’s long-held results-oriented approach to deciding social issues. Read the rest of this entry »