Free Republic

The Department of Justice intervened in the case of a German family seeking asylum in order to home school their children. The Romeike family fled Germany when authorities threatened to remove their children from their parents' custody if they weren't sent to public school. Lawyers for the family called teaching one's own children a fundamental parental right. Not so, said a brief filed by the US Department of Justice: “Where the boundary lies between parental authority and state authority is a matter of law. The state's interest in promoting a child's socialization as a participant in the collective body of...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative's top executive called a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into how news organizations gather the news. The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP....

PJTV is broadcasting the testimony of Christopher Coates to the Civil Rights Commission live this morning, but they already have his opening statement available in PDF format at Pajamas Media. It contains at least one bombshell, which is that Obama appointee Loretta King ordered Coates to stop asking applicants whether they supported race-neutral enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The question became necessary because of resistance in the Civil Rights division from career attorneys to enforce the law when it resulted in African-American defendants rather than victims, an attitude that Coates first encountered in the Bush era: