"There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution"

-
So said Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in her opinion calling a halt to the warrantless, FISAless tapping of phones by US intelligence (sic) agencies.

Slate has what seems a good article here, noting its follow-on to Hamdan vs Rumsfeld.

Let's hope a similar, thorough examination of signing statements is not far behind. Taylor quotes Justice Black:

The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. And the Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who make laws which the President is to execute. The first section of the first article says that 'All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States'
Taylor ends by quoting Justice Warren:

Implicit in the term ‘national defense’ is the notion of defending those values and ideas which set this Nation apart. . . . It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of . . . those liberties . . . which makes the defense of the Nation worthwhile.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remote Desktop Connection Manager - a boon for admins

-
I subscribe to a bunch of Microsoft blogs and one of them revealed a gem in the past month.  RDCMan, a tool which allows an admin to group together remote desktops, preset their username/password combos and connect to those groups with a right-click option, has been invaluable in my work lately which involves quickly jumping from server to server or from servers to a group of workstations.  The gorgeous thing about it is not merely a gallery of thumbnails of the connected sessions, but the ability to interact with the thumbnails with sufficiently accurate mouse clicks.  Heartily recommended. Here's the original post: Introducing Remote Desktop Connection Manager 2.2 (You had me at EHLO - the Microsoft Exchange Team blog)
Read more

Chirac gets it right on Lebanon troops?

-
When you have bloggers such as Far and Wide's Steve V and Sicilian Notes' Richard Waghorne , the former a raging critic of Israeli operations in Lebanon and the latter a largely uncritical supporter, agreeing on something you can't help feeling like the unlikely has happened - France is doing something right. They have both criticised France's reluctance to increase UNIFIL troop numbers beyond a fairly token 400, up from their current commitment of 200. France's reluctance is mirrored by the Germans who have offered naval anti-smuggling patrols and perhaps border security, the UK and Denmark who have also offered ships, the Italians who are ready to send 3,000 but not yet and the Irish who have earmarked 200 (which would bring them up to the legal maximum of about 850 overseas at any time due to the Liberia mission) but who are also holding back . The reason is that which I posted on some days ago (albeit having taken a second swing at it) - Resolution 1701 does...
Read more

"Your request could not be completed. Please try again in a few minutes."

-
When setting automatic replies (Out of Office) via Exchange 2013 OWA on behalf of another user, the message in the title can be displayed when saving the text. If you look at the System Event Log on the Exchange Server, you may see the following event ID 4: Current user: '" (domain)/(OU)/(OU)/(administrator) " on behalf of " (domain)/(OU)/(OU)/(User) "' Request for URL ( long URL follows ) failed with the following error: Microsoft.Exchange.Management.ControlPanel.RegionalSettingsNotConfiguredException: We couldn't process the request because the user ' (domain)/(OU)/(OU)/(User) ' hasn't signed in to Outlook Web App and selected a language and a time zone. Ask the user to do this, or, if you are a member of the built-in Organization Management or Help Desk role group, you can use Window PowerShell to select a language and time zone for them. Cancel the Automatic Replies dialog and switch to Settings, which will display a Time Zone selecti...
Read more