Free Republic

Whatever Trump did after the 2016 presidential election, it seems safe to say that it did not retroactively promote his victory.Last January, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg summed up his case against Donald Trump this way: "We allege falsification of business records to the end of keeping information away from the electorate. It's an election interference case." That gloss made no sense, because the records at the center of the case—11 invoices, 11 checks, and 12 ledger entries that allegedly were aimed at disguising a hush-money reimbursement as payment for legal services—were produced after the 2016 presidential election. At that...

Under a legal theory endorsed by the 5th Circuit, Martin Luther King Jr. could have been liable for other people’s violence.In his last protest march, Martin Luther King Jr. led a parade of demonstrators down Beale Street in Memphis, lending his support to striking sanitation workers. After a few young black men started breaking storefront windows, the indiscriminate police response killed one suspected looter and injured dozens of protesters. Under a legal theory blessed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, King could have been held liable for the unanticipated harm that ensued from that March 1968...

The former RNC chair's concession that Biden won "fair and square" did not save her from internal outrage at her support for Trump's stolen-election fantasy.Two weeks after the 2020 presidential election, Ronna McDaniel, then chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC), let Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's lawyer, hold a press conference at the RNC's headquarters in Washington, D.C. During that bizarre presentation, Giuliani and Sidney Powell, another member of the Trump campaign's "elite strike force team," crystallized the craziness of the president's stolen-election fantasy by describing a baroque international conspiracy that supposedly had delivered a fraudulent victory to Joe Biden....

In one opinion published last week, 9th Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke said Ventura County, California, violated the Second Amendment when it shut down gun stores early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In another opinion the same day, VanDyke said the county's policy was perfectly consistent with the constitutional right to keep and bear arms. That second, tongue-in-cheek opinion was meant to illustrate the disrespect that the 9th Circuit and other federal appeals courts have shown for the Second Amendment since 2008, when the Supreme Court explicitly recognized that the provision guarantees an individual right to armed self-defense. The Court may finally...

During Donald Trump's second impeachment trial last February, his lawyers argued that he bore no responsibility for the riot that interrupted the congressional tally of Joe Biden's electoral votes on Jan. 6 because "the breach at the Capitol was planned several days in advance." In their view, that meant the violence had nothing to do with the inflammatory speech that Trump gave that day, during which he urged his supporters to "fight like hell" and "stop the steal." That defense elided the months that Trump spent promoting the fantasy that systematic election fraud had deprived him of his rightful victory,...

Former Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell yesterday responded to the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit that Dominion Voting Systems filed after she repeatedly accused the company of participating in an elaborate international conspiracy to deny Donald Trump his rightful victory in last year's presidential election. Her defense, more or less, is that she did not really mean what she said. True, Powell claimed over and over again that Dominion rigged voting machines to manufacture "millions" of votes for Joe Biden. She fingered a specific Dominion executive as largely responsible for the scheme, claimed the plot had its roots in fraud-facilitating software...

The French film Cuties, currently available on Netflix, has outraged American politicians who say it sexualizes prepubescent girls. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii), a former presidential contender, warns that Cuties, which depicts an 11-year-old's participation in a risqué dance troupe that flouts the values of her conservative Muslim family, "will certainly whet the appetite of pedophiles & help fuel the child sex trafficking trade." Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) goes even further, suggesting that Cuties is illegal. Whatever your take on the film's merits, Cruz presents no evidence to substantiate that claim. In a letter he sent Attorney General William Barr on...

Donald Trump, whose 2016 presidential campaign was consciously modeled after Richard Nixon's 1968 run, seems to think he can win reelection by emulating his predecessor's appeal to a "silent majority" disgusted by raucous anti-war protests. Trump is offering voters a choice between his firm hand and the pusillanimity of "liberal Democrats" who let "violent anarchists" run wild in the streets. Notwithstanding Trump's pose as "your president of law and order," his heavy-handed reaction to the protests triggered by George Floyd's death represents neither. In response to largely peaceful demonstrations against police brutality that have been punctuated by criminal behavior, he...

Matt Gaetz's campaign website features press quotes describing the Florida Republican as "Trump's best buddy," "Trump's ultimate defender," and "the Trumpiest congressman in Trump's Washington." Gaetz clearly was not driven by hatred of the president when he voted for last week's House resolution against an unauthorized war with Iran. Although it may be hard to believe in these hyper-partisan times, Gaetz, a self-described "constitutional conservative," was defending a principle he thinks is more important than loyalty to one man or one party. He was standing up for the legislative branch's long-neglected but crucial role in deciding when the country should...

"We're facing an anti-Semitism crisis, and not just in this city," New York Mayor Bill de Blasio declared on Sunday. "It's happening across our country and planet." De Blasio's warning, which came on the same day that thousands of people responded to recent anti-Jewish crimes in the New York area by joining a solidarity march in Manhattan, was more sweeping than the evidence justifies. While New York City has seen a substantial increase in reports of anti-Semitic crimes during the last two years, the story in the rest of the country is more complicated and less alarming. According to the...

On Monday evening in Houston, a dozen armed men broke into the home of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, a middle-aged couple who had lived in the house at 7815 Harding Street for at least two decades. The first man through the door, who was armed with a shotgun, used it to kill one of the couple's dogs. Tuttle responded to the home invasion by grabbing a revolver and shooting the man with the shotgun, who collapsed on a sofa in the living room. As Nicholas tried to disarm the intruder, his accomplices shot her. Tuttle returned fire, and by...

When the ACLU of Colorado likened a baker who won't supply cakes for gay weddings to a police officer who refuses to protect a church or synagogue, it blurred the distinction between private action and state action, which is vital to a free society. Conservatives who defend Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who last week went to jail rather than issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, are making the same mistake. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, said a federal judge's decision to hold Davis in contempt of court amounted to "the...

Last October, while campaigning in Toledo, Ohio, Barack Obama called for "a new ethic of responsibility." The nation's economic troubles, he said, occurred partly because "everyone was living beyond their means," including politicians who "spent money they didn't have." In his inaugural address last month, Obama regretted "our collective failure to make hard choices" and heralded "a new era of responsibility." Now President Obama, as one of his first priorities, is pushing a gargantuan "stimulus" plan that will add around $1 trillion to the national debt and cannot possibly work as advertised. Welcome to the new era of responsibility. Remember...

"We need more than the same old empty promises," President Obama declared on Monday. He therefore offered new empty promises, most conspicuously a vow to create "a new energy economy that puts millions of our citizens to work." As he did during his campaign, Obama presented his plan to ameliorate global warming as a way of stimulating the economy, with the first steps -- money for weatherizing buildings, boosting alternative energy production and improving power transmission -- incorporated into his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan. Thus he continues to ignore the enormous cost of dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions, falsely...

The Apollo Alliance, a coalition of environmentalists and labor unions, wants the federal government to spend $500 billion over 10 years to "build America's 21st century clean energy economy" and thereby "create more than five million high quality green-collar jobs." Barack Obama says he can accomplish the same goal for only $150 billion, which gives you a sense of how reliable these projections are.More fundamentally, both the Apollo Alliance and Obama, who has liberally borrowed from its ideas, mistakenly treat the manpower required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a measure of success, when it should be viewed as a...

In a taped speech shown to attendees at a climate change conference in California this week, Barack Obama continued trying to distract Americans from the enormous cost of making substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions by promising "five million new green jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced." Not only is this number pulled out of thin air; it's nothing to be happy about. As I've noted, the manpower required to transform the economy so that greenhouse gas emission targets can be reached is a measure of the cost involved. Obama makes it seem as if we should try...

The day after Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger crashed his motorcycle, while he was still recovering from surgery to repair his fractured face, The Cincinnati Post scolded the Ohio native for not wearing a helmet. "Riders should wear helmets," the paper proclaimed, "and if they're not going to, perhaps the government should step in and make them." The Post pined for the days when "all states required helmets," bemoaning the fact that 30 states now let adult motorcyclists decide for themselves what, if anything, to wear on their heads. The laws were changed, the editorial explained, because of "pressure from...

I did not realize I had sued Citibank until I received my latest Visa bill. The statement includes a credit of 73 cents labeled "SCHWARTZ SETTLEMENT REFUND." It turns out the money is my share of the $18 million that Citibank put up to settle a class action lawsuit arguing that the bank had violated the Truth in Lending Act by counting its customers' payments as late if they arrived after 10 a.m. on the due date. In theory, the 73 cents I got compensates for late fees I should not have been charged. But Citibank says calculating each customer's...

Lying in the name of public health A recent study by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the most popular brands of smokeless tobacco in this country are the ones with the highest levels of readily absorbed nicotine. For the researchers, the finding was an opportunity to once again mislead the public about the hazards of oral snuff. "Consumers need to know that smokeless tobacco products...are not safe alternatives to smoking," said co-author Patricia Richter of the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health. "The amount of nicotine absorbed per dose from using smokeless tobacco...

You have no right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law. Then again, it may not be, because you may never get a trial. You have no right to speak with an attorney, but we're going to let you have one anyway. We're not sure why, since you have no right to any sort of procedure for determining whether or how long you should be imprisoned. That, in essence, is what the Bush administration has told Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured in Afghanistan two years ago who is being...