Archive for the ‘US government’ Category

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Busted for Intent to Garden

December 29, 2015

Radley Balko writes about the surveillance state again.

Paul sends the link along with the comment, "This has to stop."

Federal judge: Drinking tea, shopping at a gardening store is probable cause for a SWAT raid on your home

In April 2012, a Kansas SWAT team raided the home of Robert and Addie Harte, their 7-year-old daughter and their 13-year-old son. The couple, both former CIA analysts, awoke to pounding at the door. When Robert Harte answered, SWAT agents flooded the home. He was told to lie on the floor. When Addie Harte came out to see what was going on, she saw her husband on his stomach as SWAT cop stood over him with a gun. The family was then held at gunpoint for more than two hours while the police searched their home. Though they claimed to be looking for evidence of a major marijuana growing operation, they later stated that they knew within about 20 minutes that they wouldn’t find any such operation. So they switched to search for evidence of “personal use.” They found no evidence of any criminal activity.

The investigation leading to the raid began at least seven months earlier, when Robert Harte and his son went to a gardening store to purchase supplies to grow hydroponic tomatoes for a school project. A state trooper had been positioned in the store parking lot to collect the license plate numbers of customers, compile them into a spreadsheet, then send the spreadsheets to local sheriff’s departments for further investigation. Yes, merely shopping at a gardening store could make you the target of a criminal drug investigation.

More than half a year later, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department began investigating the Hartes as part of “Operation Constant Gardener,” basically a PR stunt in which the agency conducts multiple pot raids on April 20, or “4/20.” On several occasions, the Sheriff’s Department sent deputies out to sort through the family’s garbage. (The police don’t need a warrant to sift through your trash.) The deputies repeatedly found “saturated plant material” that they thought could possibly be marijuana. On two occasions, a drug testing field kit inexplicably indicated the presence of THC, the active drug in marijuana. It was on the basis of those tests and Harte’s patronage of a gardening store that the police obtained the warrant for the SWAT raid.

But, of course, they found nothing. Lab tests would later reveal that the “saturated plant material” was actually loose-leaf tea, which Addie Harte drinks on a regular basis. […]

DEA delenda est.


Update:

Orin Kerr (at the Volokh Conspiracy blog) writes a follow-up to Balko’s column. No, a federal judge did not rule that drinking tea and shopping at a gardening store amounts to probable cause.

Since I took Balko’s headline as hyperbole and since his column never mentioned such a ruling explicitly, so this isn’t too much of a surprise. But Mr. Kerr is keeping the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed for us.

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What he said (7)

December 24, 2015

Here’s a good article by John Stossel. RTWT.

Politicians Without Borders
Today’s politicians seem to have few limits.

When driving on treacherous roads, guardrails are useful. If you fall asleep or maybe you’re just a bad driver, guardrails may prevent you from going off a cliff.

Recently, The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel used the phrase “no political guardrails” to point out how many of today’s politicians seem to lack any constraints, any safeguards against their use of power. She’s onto something.

“Mr. Obama wants what he wants. If ObamaCare is problematic, he unilaterally alters the law,” Strassel writes. “If the nation won’t support laws to fight climate change, he creates one with regulation. If the Senate won’t confirm his nominees, he declares it in recess and installs them anyway.”

Hillary Clinton does it too. In fact, she promises that once she becomes president, that is how she will govern. If Congress won’t give her gun control laws she wants, she says she’ll unilaterally impose them. Likewise, if Congress rejects her proposed new tax on corporations , “then I will ask the Treasury Department, when I’m there, to use its regulatory authority, if that’s what it takes.”

Whatever it takes. So far, the public doesn’t seem to mind.

Donald Trump’s poll numbers go up after he promises “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” says that “there’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am,” says that he’ll make Mexico “pay for that wall” and so on.

Apparently lots of people like the idea of a big, strong mommy or daddy who will take control of life and make everything better. Constitutional restraints? They’re for sissies. We want “leadership”—someone “strong” to run America.

I don’t. I’m an adult. I don’t want to be “led.” I will run my own life. Also, a president doesn’t “run America.” The president presides over just one of three branches of government, and there are strict limits on what he can and should do.

The Constitution was written to limit political authority. Those limits left individual Americans mostly to our own devices, which helped create the freest and most prosperous country in the history of the world.

Now, advocates for both parties are off the rails. Some Republicans demand that the IRS audit the Clinton Foundation. Part of me wishes that it would. I suspect their foundation is largely a scam, a pretend charity that props up the Clintons’ egos and pays Hillary’s political flunkies. Heck, in 2013, it raised $144 million but spent only $8.8 million on charity!

Shut it down! But where are the guardrails here? As Strassel put it, “When did conservatives go from wanting to abolish the IRS to wanting to use it against rivals?”

Today, politicians act as if guardrails are just an annoyance. And they get rewarded for that. […]

I think Mr. Stossel nails it with the last two sentences above. Constitutional limits? Who needs ’em?

This article reminds me of Gene Healy’s Cult of the Presidency.


Update:
Here’s something John tweeted today. “What he said” for Mr. Read too.
stossel-quotes-read

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Faster, please (2)

November 27, 2015

Here’s an interesting article in today’s Washington Post.

The DEA has failed to eradicate marijuana. Now Congress wants it to stop trying.

The Drug Enforcement Administration is not having a great year.

The chief of the agency stepped down in April under a cloud of scandal. The acting administrator since then has courted ridicule for saying pot is “probably not” as dangerous as heroin, and more recently he provoked 100,000 petition-signers and seven members of Congress to call for his head after he called medical marijuana “a joke.”

This fall, the administration earned a scathing rebuke from a federal judge over its creative interpretation of a law intended to keep it from harassing medical marijuana providers. Then, the Brookings Institution issued a strongly worded report outlining the administration’s role in “stifling medical research” into medical uses of pot.

Unfortunately for the DEA, the year isn’t over yet. Last week, a group of 12 House members led by Ted Lieu (D) of California wrote to House leadership to push for a provision in the upcoming spending bill that would strip half of the funds away from the DEA’s Cannabis Eradication Program and put that money toward programs that “play a far more useful role in promoting the safety and economic prosperity of the American people”: domestic violence prevention and overall spending reduction efforts. […]

Who knew the DEA had a special patch for this effort?
mj-eradication-eagle-has-landed

DEA delenda est!

H.T. USMP of Kentucky

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Know yer rights

October 10, 2015

I don’t know why, but I got a couple of links from Paul B this week related to rights when dealing with police officers in the US. (I hope this doesn’t mean that someone he knows has been busted.)

First he sent a link to this Fifth Amendment Flowchart by Nathaniel Burney. I’d never thought a lot about the topic — I haven’t needed to, luckily — but it surprised me how complicated dealing with the police could get when Miranda warnings and the Fifth Amendment are involved.

Then yesterday Paul sent a link to some podcasts made by folks at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They’re a surprising resource to find. I hope their legal accuracy is as good as their convenience.

Continuing the 5th Amendment bit, I listened to the podcast titled Self Incrimination Roadmap. Not to take anything away from Mr. Burney’s excellent flowchart but I found the podcast a little easier to follow.

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Why we need limited government

October 4, 2015

Jeff sends a link to this documentary and writes, "I have to wonder how many examples there are across the nation where politicians and other guvmint [sic] officials illegally use the IRS to harass U.S. Citizens?"

It’s just shy of 30 minutes long.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7pK69i91SU

I invite your attention to the 8:00 minute mark when an attorney named Mark Fitzgibbons says, "It started out as a good thing as you want local control over local issues. But you have people in county government who have all this power and no checks on their power. Of course they’re going to abuse it." (My emphasis.)

Well said, Mr. Fitzgibbons. Well said.

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More evidence for the limited-government argument

October 3, 2015

When government doesn’t have the power to "pick winners", it can’t practice cronyism. To use a recent example, how about Solyndra?

Why some billionaires are bad for growth, and others aren’t
Not all inequality is created equal

Over the past few decades, wealth has become more concentrated in the hands of a few global elite. Billionaires like Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Mexican business magnate Carlos Slim Helú and investing phenomenon Warren Buffett play an outsized role in the global economy.

But what does that mean for everyone else? Is the concentration of wealth in the hands of a select group a good thing or a bad thing for the rest of us?

You might be used to hearing criticisms of inequality, but economists actually debate this point. Some argue that inequality can propel growth: They say that since the rich are able to save the most, they can actually afford to finance more business activity, or that the kinds of taxes and redistributive programs that are typically used to spread out wealth are inefficient.

Other economists argue that inequality is a drag on growth. They say it prevents the poor from acquiring the collateral necessary to take out loans to start businesses, or get the education and training necessary for a dynamic economy. Others say inequality leads to political instability that can be economically damaging.

A new study that has been accepted by the Journal of Comparative Economics helps resolve this debate. Using an inventive new way to measure billionaire wealth, Sutirtha Bagchi of Villanova University and Jan Svejnar of Columbia University find that it’s not the level of inequality that matters for growth so much as the reason that inequality happened in the first place.

Specifically, when billionaires get their wealth because of political connections, that wealth inequality tends to drag on the broader economy, the study finds. But when billionaires get their wealth through the market — through business activities that are not related to the government — it does not. […]

(My emphasis.)

I think we should to be a lot more jealous of our Constitutional prerogatives. How about enforcing the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

To put perhaps-too-fine a point on it: constitutionally, the US government has no business concerning itself with funding basic scientific research, or with wealth inequality, or with any number of other things it does when those aren’t directly related to its role has protector and defender of the people.

And it shouldn’t matter what the policy wonks or special interests might think the government ought to be doing.

Via the always readable Coyote blog

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Another example that value is subjective

July 31, 2015

I didn’t know a movie was being made about Kelo v City of New London.

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TANSTAAFL (still)

July 28, 2015

Here’s a David Brooks column in The New York Times.

The Minimum-Wage Muddle

Once upon a time there was a near consensus among economists that raising the minimum wage was a bad idea. The market is really good at setting prices on things, whether it is apples or labor. If you raise the price on a worker, employers will hire fewer and you’ll end up hurting the people you meant to help.

Then in 1993 the economists David Card and Alan Krueger looked at fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and found that raising the minimum wage gave people more income without hurting employment. A series of studies in Britain buttressed these findings. […]

Some of my Democratic friends are arguing that forcing businesses to raise their minimum wage will not only help low-wage workers; it will actually boost profits, because companies will better retain workers. Some economists have reported that there is no longer any evidence that raising wages will cost jobs.

Unfortunately, that last claim is inaccurate. There are in fact many studies on each side of the issue. David Neumark of the University of California, Irvine and William Wascher of the Federal Reserve have done their own studies and point to dozens of others showing significant job losses.

Recently, Michael Wither and Jeffrey Clemens of the University of California, San Diego looked at data from the 2007 federal minimum-wage hike and found that it reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage points (which is actually a lot), and led to a six percentage point decrease in the likelihood that a low-wage worker would have a job.

Because low-wage workers get less work experience under a higher minimum-wage regime, they are less likely to transition to higher-wage jobs down the road. Wither and Clemens found that two years later, workers’ chances of making $1,500 a month was reduced by five percentage points.

I wonder if Governor Cuomo reads the Times — or Forbes.

Via Coyoteblog

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Take my rights. Please.

July 18, 2015

I don’t think this quite reaches the level of civil disobedience but it would certainly be good for civil annoyance. (And maybe give TSA folks a clue that they should find productive work.)

In any case, I think I’ll buy a few because I like the idea.

TSA “Bill of Rights” Card

Mr Jillette and a friend of his got the idea to make playing card size copies of the Bill of Rights printed on metal. It sets off the metal detectors and you get to hear the security person say, “I’m going to have to take away your Bill of Rights.” Well, it’s not going to actually work like that very often, but the idea is there. They’re light and go right into a breast pocket. Purchase 1 or 100 and hand em out to your friends.

H.T. Jeff G

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"Don’t be evil" my aching back

November 11, 2014

I’m taking this report at face value. Assuming it’s correct, this is an amazing show of chutzpah. What do you think that solar plant is, Google, a sports stadium maybe? (My emphasis below.)

World’s largest solar plant applying for federal grant to pay off federal loan

Struggling solar thermal plant seeks huge taxpayer bailout

After already receiving a controversial $1.6 billion construction loan from U.S. taxpayers, the wealthy investors of a California solar power plant now want a $539 million federal grant to pay off their federal loan.

“This is an attempt by very large cash generating companies that have billions on their balance sheet to get a federal bailout, i.e. a bailout from us – the taxpayer for their pet project,” said Reason Foundation VP of Research Julian Morris. “It’s actually rather obscene.”

The Ivanpah solar electric generating plant is owned by Google and renewable energy giant NRG, which are responsible for paying off their federal loan. If approved by the U.S. Treasury, the two corporations will not use their own money, but taxpayer cash to pay off 30 percent of the cost of their plant, but taxpayers will receive none of the millions in revenues the plant will generate over the next 30 years.

Can we get the government out of the habit of picking "winners" and let the market decide what projects get financed? It’s time for some of that Separation of Market and State that I go on about.

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He’s all about political advantage

November 10, 2014

On the one hand, I have to admire Mr. Gruber’s candor. And I agree with his analysis of the games that were played to pass PPACA.

If Mr. Gruber chooses to attribute the PPACA’s passage to the ‘the stupidity of the American voter’ rather than attributing it to intentional obfuscation by Congress — as he should — well, that’s his choice I suppose.

A lot of sharp folks were calling BS on the proposed law but its sponsors refused to speak straight to its faults: they were all working the politically expedient angles. Thanks, Pelosi.


On the other hand, this is exactly the kind of "enlightened despotism" that we need to guard against. When a government gets to the point that some parts of it start to bend its own rules to fool other parts — gaming the CBO score in this particular case — then it’s too messed up to trust.

What particularly galls me about this clip is Gruber’s saying that PPACA was designed so that it could not be regarded as a tax. But when the Supreme Court ruled on it, the Chief Justice based his argument supporting PPACA on calling it a tax and on Congress’ authority to levy taxes.

So we’re damned if they do call it a tax – and we’re damned if they don’t. What a deal.

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A lighter look at civil forfeiture

October 11, 2014

John Oliver takes a cheeky look at civil (asset) forfeiture. You may be surprised by some of the things he mentions.

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When humans lose control

September 23, 2014

This is a pretty interesting article about government bureaucracies – and their incentives – at The Atlantic by Philip Howard. RTWT.

When Humans Lose Control of Government

The Veterans Affairs scandal of falsified waiting lists is the latest of a never-ending stream of government ineptitude. Every season brings a new headline of failures: the botched roll-out of Obamacare involved 55 uncoordinated IT vendors; a White House report in February found that barely 3 percent of the $800 billion stimulus plan went to rebuild transportation infrastructure; and a March Washington Post report describes how federal pensions are processed by hand in a deep cave in Pennsylvania.

The reflexive reaction is to demand detailed laws and rules to make sure things don’t go wrong again. But shackling public choices with ironclad rules, ironically, is a main cause of the problems. Dictating correctness in advance supplants the one factor that is indispensable to all successful endeavors—human responsibility. “Nothing that’s good works by itself,” as Thomas Edison put it. “You’ve got to make the damn thing work.”

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Three cheers for Kahler Nygard

September 23, 2014

The TSA wanted to screen Kahler Nygard after his flight from Minneapolis to Denver. (I don’t know if the flight continued past Denver.)

So he called their bluff about getting the local police involved and he walked – bless his heart. This nonsense won’t stop until we put a stop to it.

If you don’t defend your rights, you don’t have any.

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Present-day highwaymen is what I’d call them

September 10, 2014

The Institute for Justice has been running a campaign to end civil forfeiture — a topic I mentioned recently with the video about the ‘forfeiture machine’ in Philadelphia.

The IJ contributed to a three-part series in The Washington Post titled Stop and seize. The first installment is a long article but the thing that jumped out at me was this bit (fairly early on).

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network’s chat rooms and sharing “trophy shots” of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

“All of our home towns are sitting on a tax-liberating gold mine,” Deputy Ron Hain of Kane County, Ill., wrote in a self-published book under a pseudonym. Hain is a marketing specialist for Desert Snow, a leading interdiction training firm based in Guthrie, Okla., whose founders also created Black Asphalt.

Hain’s book calls for “turning our police forces into present-day Robin Hoods.”

Evidently we’re all fair game now, according to Deputy Hain.

Here are Part 2 and Part 3.

As I often say, RTWT.

And when you have time, pay a visit to the IJ’s EndForfeiture site.


Update (9/22/14):

Here’s an editorial by John Yoder and Brad Cates (both former directors of the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Office) that appeared in The Washington Post on September 18th. My emphasis below.

Government self-interest corrupted a crime-fighting tool into an evil

Last week, The Post published a series of in-depth articles about the abuses spawned by the law enforcement practice known as civil asset forfeiture. As two people who were heavily involved in the creation of the asset forfeiture initiative at the Justice Department in the 1980s, we find it particularly painful to watch as the heavy hand of government goes amok. The program began with good intentions but now, having failed in both purpose and execution, it should be abolished.

Asset forfeiture was conceived as a way to cut into the profit motive that fueled rampant drug trafficking by cartels and other criminal enterprises, in order to fight the social evils of drug dealing and abuse. Over time, however, the tactic has turned into an evil itself, with the corruption it engendered among government and law enforcement coming to clearly outweigh any benefits.

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What he said (4)

August 24, 2014

Jeff sends a link to this post by Kevin Williamson at NR’s The Corner. (It’s the whole post, since it’s not easily excerpted.)

In the Wrong Business, Part 247

The school board of Centinela Valley Union High School District in Los Angeles County is firing its superintendent, Jose Fernandez.

He was paid $750,000 a year. 

That’s three-quarters of a million dollars a year — not to manage some sprawling big-city school system (which would be questionable enough) but to oversee five schools and an independent-study program in the suburbs. 

But not to worry: He was previously paid only about a half-million a year. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “Fernandez’s unusually high compensation was in part the result of a one-time payout of $230,000 he used to increase his pension credits, which would give him a higher annual pension upon his retirement.”

So they were paying him an outrageous sum of money today in order to pay him an even more outrageous sum in the future.

These thieves are why we’re broke.

Amen, brother.

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Policing the police (2)

August 19, 2014

Here’s some follow-up on a post from last December about equipping police officers with body cameras.

Gee, what a surprise!</sarcasm>

What Happens When Police Officers Wear Body Cameras

Use of force by police officers declined 60% in first year since introduction of cameras in Rialto, Calif.

With all eyes on Ferguson, Mo., in the wake of the death of Michael Brown, a renewed focus is being put on police transparency. Is the solution body-mounted cameras for police officers?

Sometimes, like the moments leading up to when a police officer decides to shoot someone, transparency is an unalloyed good. And especially lately, technology has progressed to a point that it makes this kind of transparency not just possible, but routine.

So it is in Rialto, Calif., where an entire police force is wearing so-called body-mounted cameras, no bigger than pagers, that record everything that transpires between officers and citizens. In the first year after the cameras’ introduction, the use of force by officers declined 60%, and citizen complaints against police fell 88%.

It isn’t known how many police departments are making regular use of cameras, though it is being considered as a way of perhaps altering the course of events in places such as Ferguson, Mo., where an officer shot and killed an unarmed black teenager.

What happens when police wear cameras isn’t simply that tamper-proof recording devices provide an objective record of an encounter—though some of the reduction in complaints is apparently because of citizens declining to contest video evidence of their behavior—but a modification of the psychology of everyone involved.

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Cops into Robbers

August 12, 2014

Today the Institute for Justice will announce a major federal lawsuit on behalf of a group of Philadelphians seeking to end the city’s particularly shocking system of seizing nearly $6 million in property from thousands of its citizens each year.

"Settle" for half the market value indeed. What a racket!

Thank Heaven for IJ; there are No Rights without Property Rights.

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Rand Paul’s FAIR Act

July 26, 2014

It’s legislation like this that impresses me with Rand Paul. As Matt Welch (with Reason) once said, "You have to remind yourself that Senator Paul’s a Republican."

What a guy. Go get ’em, Tiger.

Sen. Paul Introduces the FAIR Act
Jul 24, 2014

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sen. Rand Paul yesterday introduced S. 2644, the FAIR (Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration) Act, which would protect the rights of citizens and restore the Fifth Amendment’s role in seizing property without due process of law. Under current law, law enforcement agencies may take property suspected of involvement in crime without ever charging, let alone convicting, the property owner. In addition, state agencies routinely use federal asset forfeiture laws; ignoring state regulations to confiscate and receive financial proceeds from forfeited property.
 
The FAIR Act would change federal law and protect the rights of property owners by requiring that the government prove its case with clear and convincing evidence before forfeiting seized property. State law enforcement agencies will have to abide by state law when forfeiting seized property. Finally, the legislation would remove the profit incentive for forfeiture by redirecting forfeitures assets from the Attorney General’s Asset Forfeiture Fund to the Treasury’s General Fund.
 
“The federal government has made it far too easy for government agencies to take and profit from the property of those who have not been convicted of a crime. The FAIR Act will ensure that government agencies no longer profit from taking the property of U.S. citizens without due process, while maintaining the ability of courts to order the surrender of proceeds of crime,” Sen. Paul said
 
Click HERE for the FAIR Act legislation text.

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Dear Congressman Smith

April 12, 2014

As a Missouri citizen, I was embarrassed to learn that you’re a Republican for Missouri’s 8th district. Now to be honest, I wouldn’t expect a Republican from the Boot Heel to support a repeal of marijuana prohibition. That’s no surprise.

What was a surprise was reading about your asking the current administration to override the will of those states that have repealed marijuana prohibitions.

Republicans Demand That the Feds Impose Pot Prohibition on States That Have Opted Out

Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder was grilled once again about his response to marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington. He correctly responded that the Justice Department has “a vast amount of discretion” in deciding how to enforce the Controlled Substances Act and argued that his decision to focus on eight “federal enforcement priorities” in states that have legalized marijuana for medical or general use is “consistent with the aims of the statute.” Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.) was not buying it. “Federal law takes precedence” over state law, Smith said. “The state of Colorado is undermining…federal law, correct? Why do you fail to enforce the laws of the land?”

What will your constituents think about your wanting the US Department of Justice to crack down on those states that dare to exercise their own authority? Whatever happened to the idea of limited government, Mr. Smith? And what about the states as ‘laboratories of democracy’? Hmm?

But take those as rhetorical questions. I suspect your questioning of A.G. Holder about marijuana laws will play pretty well in most of Cape Girardeau.

So let me change my tack. Do those concepts of limited government and state sovereignty only apply to gun laws and not to drug laws?

What will you be saying if Missouri nullifies federal gun control laws and the DOJ doesn’t attempt to overrule it? Will you say that Missouri is "undermining… federal law"? Will you ask Mr. Holder why he’s failing to enforce the "laws of the land" by not enforcing federal gun laws in Missouri?

I think Ima join both NORML and the NRA, just to make a damned point.