Liberals are busy sending each other twitters falsely claiming that Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, said that he would have voted to uphold school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite!

A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East…

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

In USA Today, liberal law professor Jonathan Turley is criticizing the Obama administration for endorsing a “blasphemy” exception to free speech: “Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law.…

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

Kenneth Gladney, a black critic of Obama’s health-care plan, was beaten, kicked, and called racist names by members of the SEIU, a corrupt and powerful left-wing union that backs Obama’s plan, leaving him wheelchair-bound and too weak to speak. This apparent hate crime took place at a St. Louis “town hall” meeting. SEIU members are bused in to town hall meetings called by liberal lawmakers in order to create the illusion of grassroots support, and intimidate would-be critics.

To curry favor with the corrupt SEIU, the Obama Administration has betrayed union…

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

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

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…

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

Under a recently-introduced bill, H.R. 1966, bloggers would face up to two years in prison if they “harass” public figures by criticizing them in a “severe, repeated, and hostile” manner, and thereby cause them “substantial emotional distress.”

U.C.L.A. Law Professor Eugene Volokh, the author of a First Amendment treatise, has concluded that the bill is unconstitutional. I agree, as I explain here. As a federal appeals court noted in DeJohn v. Temple University (2008), “there is no harassment exception to the First Amendment’s…

Read the full story

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…

Read the full story

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…

Read the full story

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…

Read the full story

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…

Read the full story