United Liberty

Below is a collection of several links that we didn’t get around to writing about, but still wanted to post for readers to examine. The stories typically range from news about prominent figures in the liberty movement, national politics, the nanny state, foreign policy and free markets.

Below is a collection of several links that we didn’t get around to writing about, but still wanted to post for readers to examine. The stories typically range from news about prominent figures in the liberty movement, national politics, the nanny state, foreign policy and free markets.

Below are a collection of links that I didn’t get around to writing about, but still wanted to post for readers to take a look at. Since I end up with a dozen or more stories a day that I don’t post on, this will hopefully be a daily feature from this point forward.

Over at the Washington Examiner, Gene Healy, author of Cult of the Presidency, unloads on the campaign by Washington to punish Julian Assange and WikiLeaks by undermining the First Amendment:

Anyone who values the First Amendment ought to oppose the campaign to “get” Assange by any means necessary. In a free society, you can’t just “change the law” to persecute someone you don’t like, and you can’t abuse your position to silence speech you oppose.

Last week in the Wall Street Journal, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., demanded that Assange be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act. After all, she wrote, the First Amendment isn’t “a license to jeopardize national security,” any more than it’s a license to “yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater.” A poor choice of metaphor: It comes from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ 1919 opinion in Schenck v. United States, when the Supreme Court allowed the Wilson administration to imprison a man for the crime of publicly arguing that the draft was unconstitutional.

We’ve since done a much better job protecting the First Amendment. In 1971’s New York Times v. United States, the Supreme Court rebuffed the Nixon administration’s attempt to stop the paper from publishing classified documents showing that the government had lied America into the Vietnam War.

With the United States’ case against Julian Assange still up in the air, politicians are still pounding their chests over WikiLeaks - even threatening newspapers for publishing the domestic cables:

Several legal experts pointed out to ABC News on Monday that the U.S. Justice Department could have a tough time actually enforcing the World War I-era law, which—as written—could also implicate severl such news organizations that published cables, such as the New York Times and the U.K. Guardian—or even anyone who’s read the cables or passed them along to friends over Twitter or Facebook.

American University law professor Stephen Vladeck told ABC News that “one of the flaws of the Espionage Act is that it draws no distinction between the leaker or the spy and the recipient of the information, no matter how far downstream the recipient is.”

If the Justice Department can’t prosecute under current law - and there is plenty of reason to believe they won’t be able to try him for espionage, Congress may pass new legislation to prosecute Julian Assange, editor of WikiLeaks:

That Washington would like to take legal action against him and as quickly as possible can hardly be in doubt. But building a case solid enough to allow Eric Holder, the US Attorney General, to seek Assange’s extradition from Britain, if that is where he still is at the time, or – possibly more problematically – from Sweden, may not be easy. The most obvious first stop might be the 1917 Espionage Act. But when the US government tried to use it to punish The New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, it failed.

It is for that reason that some US politicians are introducing draft legislation to expand existing US laws to make it easier for Mr Holder to do his job. The so-called Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination (Shield) Bill was thus introduced by Congressman Peter King, a Republican from New York who will become chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when the new House of Representatives with a Republican majority convenes in January. The Bill would make it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants.

I know member of Congress aren’t familiar with the Constitution, but they really should do themselves a favor and read Article I, Section 9, which states that “[n]o bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.”

Yesterday, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) took to the floor of the House of Representatives to offer a defense of WikiLeaks. You can read the full text of his speech here.

In recent weeks, the debate over the the retention of tax cuts initiated during the George W. Bush administration monopolized the political discussion, aside from a few politicians showing us that they care nothing for the First Amendment as they condemn Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. What Congress and President Obama seem not to grasp is that regardless of tax policy, the underlying issue for our economic situation is spending, specifically our affinity to borrow money to pay for spending beyond revenue.

No matter what the Presidential Budget Commission recommends with regard to taxation, a value-added tax (VAT), a broader-based income tax with few exemptions, or a switch to a consumption-based tax system, the Federal Government has an addiction. That addiction is to spending taxpayer money.

Whether it is funding for our imperial efforts to expand the American reach across the globe in the name of democracy and fighting terrorism, to continue to fund Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs, or a variety of other government programs, substantial cuts to spending MUST crop up in the debate over how to “right the ship.” The addiction to spend is not a Democrat problem, and it is not a Republican problem; it is a bipartisan problem, and the only answer lies in a nonpartisan solution to break the addiction.

I understand that there are significant obstacles to breaking any addiction, and the Federal Government committed funding to many people and programs. Currently, we are at a point that difficult choices must be made NOW to avoid necessary, drastic, and clumsy choices when the funding is no longer available.

The First Amendment has taken some hits this week. Sen. Joe Lieberman is hinting that The New York Times may have violated the law for reporting the news in relation release of documents by WikiLeaks (by the way, Joe, you can’t charge someone who isn’t an American for treason). And now there are reports that the FCC is concocting a plan to regulate the news:

Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) pushed back on Monday against a contention by a Democratic FCC commissioner that the government should create new regulations to promote diversity in news programming.

Barton was reacting to a proposal made last week by FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, who in a speech suggested that broadcasters be subject to a new “public values test” every four years.

“I hope … that you do not mean to suggest that it is the job of the federal government, through the [FCC], to determine the content that is available for Americans to consume,” Barton wrote Monday in a letter to Copps.

Copps had suggested that the test would make a broadcaster’s license renewal contingent upon proof that they meet a prospective set of federal criteria.