John Yoo interviewed by KQED-FM, Forum, Feb. 7, 2017
“I think it boils down to this straightforward principle: The President under the Constitution was supposed to be aimed at foreign policy and national security. … All these things that President Trump said he’s going to do are actually things that are vested in our Constitution in Congress, because they really are more about domestic policy than they are about the need to act quickly and swiftly in response to foreign emergencies.”
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2017
If the government really wants to preserve the 30-year mortgage market, it should simply limit these two entities to that loan product, and only that 30-year loan product. Everything else seems not only to preserve the tenuous position of Fannie and Freddie, but also to risk making them just instruments for unrestrained housing policy with lots of unintended consequences and risks.
Jesse Choper quoted by California Magazine, Feb. 7, 2017
“I think they did what they could,” Choper said of administrators. “They let Yiannopoulos speak, because they had no real legal justification for stopping the event. They allowed the demonstrators to demonstrate, and dealt with the black bloc when they started destroying property. I don’t come down on the side of the university all the time, but I think they did the right thing in this case. They balanced values and costs.”
William Fernholz writes for The Hill, Feb. 6, 2017
The immigration order should be bone-chilling to those conservatives who care about federal government overreach. And principled liberals should be thanking the conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court for their defense of state independence.
Holly Doremus, Daniel Farber, and Bill Falik quoted by California Magazine, Feb. 6, 2017
Doremus: “There’s not a lot of existing border fencing in Texas, so the wall would have to pass through a lot of private land where barriers haven’t been much of an issue until now,” she says. “And certainly, eminent domain seizures are not popular with Republicans in general and Texas Republicans in particular.”
Farber: “The wall would cost a lot, and its benefits are unclear, but the Secure Fence Act does give the administration pretty broad powers to dispense with legal requirements such as NEPA. I’d love to see it stopped, but it may be difficult.”
Falik: “It’s really expensive,” observes Bill Falik, a lecturer at Berkeley Law and a real estate developer, “and I’m not completely sure at this point that a Republican congress is going to be anxious to go along with that.” Nor is Falik convinced that federal statutes such as the Endangered Species Act and NEPA would suddenly turn the project into smoldering rubble; rather, they might inflict the death of a thousand torts.
Karin Mac Donald quoted by InsideSources, Feb. 6, 2017
“So here’s the funny thing,” Berkeley Law election expert Karin Mac Donald told InsideSources. “There is no more long form questionnaire. We did away with the long form. The last long form was used in the 2000 census. So, they cannot include a question to determine U.S. citizenship and immigration status on the long form because there is no long form.”
John Yoo writes for The New York Times, Feb. 6, 2017
Faced with President Trump’s executive orders suspending immigration from several Muslim nations and ordering the building of a border wall, and his threats to terminate the North American Free Trade Agreement, even Alexander Hamilton, our nation’s most ardent proponent of executive power, would be worried by now.
John Yoo writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 5, 2017
In choosing Neil Gorsuch for the U.S. Supreme Court, Trump kept his campaign promise to replace Justice Antonin Scalia with a judicial conservative, though one with intriguing wrinkles. If Democrats reflexively try to defeat Gorsuch, they will only escalate the confirmation wars to a new level while guaranteeing an even more conservative Supreme Court.
Christopher Kutz writes for Boston Review, Feb. 3, 2017
Career civil servants, unlike political appointees, are supposed to implement the policies of a new administration, regardless of their personal political values. But the Trump administration is presenting many workers with job conditions they never imagined when they entered government service: doing their jobs may mean subverting the fundamental aims and values that brought them into public service in the first place.
Steven Davidoff Solomon writes for The New York Times, Feb. 3, 2017
Snap has followed the natural evolution of this disenfranchisement, simply eliminating shareholder rights from the get-go. And this is not just about replicating the venture capital model, where founders get control but investors get board seats and veto rights over significant transactions. Here, Snap is not even giving crumbs.