ArcaMax

Can the president fight any war he wishes? Can Congress fund any war it chooses? Are there constitutional and legal requirements that must first be met before war is waged?

These questions should be addressed in a national debate over the U.S. military involvement in Ukraine and Israel. Sadly, there has been no debate. The media are mouthing ...Read more

In 1791, when Congressman James Madison was drafting the first 10 amendments to the Constitution -- which would become known as the Bill of Rights -- he insisted that the most prominent amendment among them restrain the government from interfering with the freedom of speech. After various versions of the First Amendment had been drafted and ...Read more

When Congress enacted the Stored Communications Act of 1986 (SCA), it claimed the statute would guarantee the privacy of digital data that service providers were retaining in storage. The act prohibited the providers from sharing the stored data, and it prohibited unauthorized access to the data, commonly called computer hacking -- except, of ...Read more

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive."
--Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)

The case of the Gitmo plea agreement keeps getting curiouser and curiouser.

A few weeks ago, we learned that a plea agreement had been entered into by way of a signed contract between the retired general in the Pentagon who is...Read more

"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

--First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

When James Madison agreed to be the scrivener at the Constitutional Convention during the summer of 1787, he could not have known that just four years later he'd be the chair of the House of Representatives ...Read more

It is always dangerous to human freedom and due process when politics interferes with criminal prosecutions. Yet, present-day America is replete with tawdry examples of this.

The recent exposures of the political machinations of the Chief Justice of the United States in the presidential immunity case is just one sad example of the highest judge...Read more

In 1966, two famous Russian literary dissidents, Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, were tried and convicted on charges of disseminating propaganda against the Soviet state. The two were authors and humorists who published satire abroad that mocked Soviet leaders for failure to comply with the Soviet Constitution of 1936, which guaranteed the ...Read more

"Those who have sown the wind shall reap the whirlwind."

-- Hosea 8:7

The federal antipathy to compliance with the Constitution is well known and well documented. Presidents have declared war in contravention of the constitutional command that only Congress may do so. Congress itself has enacted legislation in areas that the drafters of...Read more

"America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy ...

She might become the dictatress of the world,

But she would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit."

-- John Quincy Adams (1767-1848)

In the middle of his term as Secretary of State, the future president John Quincy Adams addressed a joint session of Congress. What ...Read more

"Every move you make

And every vow you break

Every smile you fake

Every claim you stake

I'll be watching you."

-- "Every Breath You Take," song by The Police

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to privacy. Like other amendments in the Bill of Rights, it doesn't create the right; it limits government ...Read more

Among the lesser-known holes in the Constitution cut by the Patriot Act of 2001 was the destruction of the "wall" between federal law enforcement and federal spies. The wall was erected in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which statutorily limited all federal domestic spying to that which was authorized by the Foreign ...Read more

In the months following the attacks of 9/11, the government laid the blame for orchestrating them on Osama bin Ladin. Then, after it murdered bin Ladin, the government decided that the true mastermind was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

By the time of bin Ladin's death, Mohammed had already been tortured by CIA agents for three years at various black ...Read more

Sometime before he withdrew from the presidential race, President Joe Biden secretly reaffirmed his own self-willed and self-created authority to kill persons in other countries, so long as the CIA and its military counterparts have "near certainty" that the target of the homicide is a member of a terrorist organization. That standard was ...Read more