On April 29, the House voted 249-to-175 to pass the federal hate crimes bill, which the bill’s supporters explicitly want to use to prosecute people already found innocent in state court all over again in federal court. Such reprosecutions are, sadly, allowed under a Constitutional loophole known as the “dual sovereignty” doctrine, which says that state and federal governments are different sovereigns, and that double jeopardy only applies when you are prosecuted twice by the same sovereign. (This loophole was established…

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On April 23, the House Judiciary Committee voted 15-to-12 to approve a dramatic expansion of the federal hate-crimes law. The bill, H.R. 1913, would add gender, sexual orientation, and transgender characteristics to a law originally designed to protect racial minorities. It also greatly expands the law’s reach over local offenses typically handled by state prosecutors, by eliminating many jurisdictional limits.

The bill would allow people who have been found innocent of a hate crime in state court to be reprosecuted in…

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The outcome of a special Congressional election in New York’s 20th Congressional District will likely turn on the illegal exclusion of up to 1,000 overseas military ballots, which otherwise would have tipped the race in favor of James Tedisco (R). Tedisco and Scott Murphy (D) are in a dead heat, with 77,225 votes each.

Democrats on the state elections board blocked GOP attempts to allow overseas military voting in the special election. Overseas ballots take weeks to reach voters and…

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A bill that would give residents of Washington, D.C. a Congressman is unconstitutional, lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel concluded. But politics overrode law as Attorney General Eric Holder, who has a contempt for constitutional safeguards, ignored their conclusion and decided instead to declare it constitutional. The bill was passed in slightly different versions by both Houses of Congress on largely party-line votes, although differences between the two versions have to be ironed out before it can be signed…

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Your hosts Richard Morrison and Cord Blomquist welcome back special guest co-host Michelle Minton for Episode 35 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We begin with a celebration of human achievement and a peek into the realm of secret government documents. We then investigate how the White House is going to waste another $1 trillion of your money and how the British beer tax has managed to kill off 20,000 jobs. Finally we focus on the history of the scandal-addled Sen. Dodd of…

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A federal appeals court recently upheld an injunction barring a county official from continuing to prevent people from voting based on their race. The unanimous ruling in United States v. Brown (5th Cir. 2009) was a victory for the Justice Department, which brought the case back during the Bush Administration.

But Eric Holder, Obama’s new attorney general, is ashamed of the decision, and his Justice Department is keeping mum about it. The Justice Department refused even to issue a press release announcing…

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Eric Holder, Obama’s choice for attorney general, is hostile to civil liberties. He has previously expressed veiled support for using the misnamed “Fairness Doctrine” to squelch “conservative critiques” and “conservative media,” such as Fox News (which Holder believes is anything but “Fair and Balanced,” contrary to its slogan). The “Fairness Doctrine” is designed to shut down conservative Talk Radio.

Holder also has advocated hate-crimes legislation to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify…

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President-elect Obama is poised to appoint Eric Holder as the next attorney general. I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, Holder blatantly lied during the Elian Gonzalez fiasco. And he schemed to bring about the infamous pardon by Bill Clinton of fugitive financier Marc Rich, to the dismay of federal prosecutors and disgust of even hard-core Clinton supporters and liberal lawmakers.

On the other hand, his being appointed reduces the likelihood that a wacko like Charles Ogletree, the Harvard law professor…

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Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that many supporters of the federal hate crimes bill want to allow people who have been found innocent of a hate crime in state court to be reprosecuted in federal court.

Apparently, this was true of the most prominent supporter of the bill when it was first introduced, the Clinton Administration. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for…

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