Today, President Obama signed into law a bill that will dramatically expand the federal hate crimes law, enabling prosecutors to bring federal charges against people who were previously found innocent of hate crimes in state court.  The hate-crimes provisions were added to a defense appropriations bill, which the President signed in a White House signing ceremony this afternoon at around 2:30 p.m.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by…

Read the full story

Yesterday, Congress approved a measure to dramatically expand the existing federal hate crimes law, by adding it to an unrelated defense appropriations bill.  The measure would expand current law to cover virtually all hate crimes already covered by state law (both by adding gender, sexual orientation, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law originally designed to protect racial minorities, and by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime effect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal rather than state court.)

The…

Read the full story

Hate crimes are irrational, and what sets them off is often unpredictable. The hate-criminal whose sentence was upheld in Wisconsin v. Mitchell by a unanimous Supreme Court attacked a young white boy because of the outrage he felt after watching the movie Mississippi Burning, which depicted racism against black people in the Deep South. To him, two wrongs made a right.

If the victim had attempted to sue the makers of Mississippi Burning for inciting the hate-crime, the lawsuit would have been…

Read the full story

When black panthers were caught on videotape menacing white voters in Philadelphia, using nightsticks and racial epithets to drive them away from the polls, Obama political appointees, including Assistant Attorney General Tom Perelli, intervened to dismiss the lawsuit that had been won against them by career Justice Department lawyers — dismissing the case after it had already been won! The Obama political appointees insisted that the Justice Department should throw out its victory by not permitting a default judgment against two…

Read the full story

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has decided to oppose the federal hate-crimes bill. The Commission calls the bill a “menace to civil liberties” because “its most important effect will be to allow federal authorities to re-prosecute a broad category of defendants who have already been acquitted by state juries.” Thus, it will erode protections against double jeopardy.

In deciding to oppose the bill, the full Commission agreed with the position earlier taken by four individual Civil Rights Commissioners, who…

Read the full story

If you were a tourist, would you like to come to a country where you could be tried twice for the same crime — even if you were found innocent the first time around? Not me. But the Senate will likely attach a bill that promotes such reprosecutions to the Travel Promotion Act, reports the Christian Science Monitor. Liberal Senators plan to amend the Travel Promotion Act, a bill to attract international tourists to the U.S., by combining it with a…

Read the full story

Obama promised to end the military’s ban on gays, but his Administration has not done so. In fact, it recently kicked out a West Point graduate “who is fluent in Arabic and just returned from Iraq,” just because he’s gay. Never mind that there is a severe shortage of Arabic speakers and translators in the U.S. military. (Liberal gay groups seem to have given him a pass on this issue, perhaps because he has promised to push another bill they support…

Read the full story