Search for posts by tommyg4109

Re: Ben Carson Had a Mic-Dropping Response To An Atheist Who Denigrated His Belief in God

Excellent!

Whitewashing the Democratic Party's History

Indeed.  A good read.


 Here's what the former president of the United States had to say when he eulogized his mentor, an Arkansas senator:

"We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever and for the better. ... In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century's most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes."

 So spoke President William J. Clinton in 1995 of a man who was among the 99 Democrats in Congress to sign the "Southern Manifesto" in 1956. (Two Republicans also signed it.) The Southern Manifesto declared the signatories' opposition to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education and their commitment to segregation forever. Fulbright was also among those who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That filibuster continued for 83 days.

Speaking of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, let's review (since they don't teach this in schools): The percentage of House Democrats who supported the legislation? 61 percent. House Republicans? 80 percent. In the Senate, 69 percent of Democrats voted yes, compared with 82 percent of Republicans. (Barry Goldwater, a supporter of the NAACP, voted no because he thought it was unconstitutional.)

When he was running for president in 2000, former Vice President Al Gore told the NAACP that his father, Sen. Al Gore Sr., had lost his Senate seat because he voted for the Civil Rights Act. Uplifting story -- except it's false. Gore Sr. voted against the Civil Rights Act. He lost in 1970 in a race that focused on prayer in public schools, the Vietnam War and the Supreme Court.

Gore Jr.'s reframing of the relevant history is the story of the Democratic Party in microcosm. The party's history is pockmarked with racism and terror. The Democrats were the party of slavery, black codes, Jim Crow, and that miserable terrorist excrescence the Ku Klux Klan. Republicans were the party of Lincoln, of Reconstruction, of anti-lynching laws, of the civil rights acts of 1875, 1957, 1960 and 1964. Were all Republicans models of rectitude on racial matters? Hardly. Were they a heck of a lot better than the Democrats? Without question.

As recently as 2010, the Senate president pro tempore was former Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd, D-W.V. Rather than acknowledge their sorry history, modern Democrats have rewritten it.

You may recall that when MSNBC was commemorating the 50th anniversary of segregationist George Wallace's "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" stunt to prevent the integration of the University of Alabama, the network identified Wallace as "R-Ala."

The Democrats have been sedulously rewriting history for decades. Their preferred version pretends that all of the Democratic racists and segregationists left their party and became Republicans starting in the 1960s. How convenient. If it were true that the South began to turn Republican due to Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act, you would expect that the Deep South, the states most associated with racism, would have been the first to move. That's not what happened. The first southern states to trend Republican were on the periphery: North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Tennessee and Florida. (George Wallace lost these voters in his 1968 bid.) The voters who first migrated to the Republican Party were suburban, prosperous "New South" types. The more Republican the South has become the less racist.

Is it unforgivable that Clinton praised a former segregationist? No. Fulbright renounced his racist past, as did Byrd and Gore Sr. It would be immoral and unjust to misrepresent the history.

What is unforgivable is the way Democrats are still using race to foment hatred. Remember what happened to Trent Lott when he uttered a few dumb words about former segregationist Strom Thurmond? He didn't get the kind of pass Bill Clinton did when praising Fulbright. Earlier this month, Hillary Clinton told a mostly black audience, "What is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people from one end of our country to another. ... Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of American citizens from voting." She was presumably referring to voter ID laws, which, by the way, 51 percent of black Americans support.

Racism has an ugly past in the Democratic Party. The accusation of racism has an ugly present.

 http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/26/whitewashing_the_democratic_partys_history_127132.html

Ultimate White House trolling: Obama to “diversify” wealthy neighborhoods

Over-reach?  You betcha.


 I remain hopeful that no matter how old you get you can continue to learn. It's with that in mind that I should begin this article by noting that a number of our regular readers have chided me in the past for being too optimistic when it comes to the lengths that the current administration might go in reformatting America's hard drive. I can think of several recent examples where I essentially dismissed the concerns of some of the commentariat, invoking a few different variations of, I'm not that concerned. They couldn't seriously get away with that.

Allow me to take this opportunity to apologize. I was obviously wrong. It would seem that when it comes to the Obama administration, there probably aren't any limits. I realized this when I saw an actual, Not The Onion article at The Hill describing a new initiative being unveiled by Barack Obama's Department of Housing and Urban Development. They want to incentivise the "diversification" wealthier neighborhoods.

The Obama administration is moving forward with regulations designed to help diversify America's wealthier neighborhoods, drawing fire from critics who decry the proposal as executive overreach in search of an "unrealistic utopia."

A final Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) rule due out this month is aimed at ending decades of deep-rooted segregation around the country.

The regulations would use grant money as an incentive for communities to build affordable housing in more affluent areas while also taking steps to upgrade poorer areas with better schools, parks, libraries, grocery stores and transportation routes as part of a gentrification of those communities.

"HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all," a HUD spokeswoman said. "The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds."

It's a tough sell for some conservatives. Among them is Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.), who argued that the administration "shouldn't be holding hostage grant monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble."
Normally I would assume this was the script to a bad movie being cranked out in the run up to the next election. I mean... they can't be serious, right? But in fact they are. Now, to be clear, this doesn't sound like a "mandate" in the sense that the feds will be coming in with bulldozers and shovels, knocking down single family homes and piling up towers of "affordable housing" in the empty plots while the displaced homeowners look on from their Obama Relocation Camp rail cars. (Well... not yet, anyway.) But plenty of communities – even formerly prosperous ones – are facing hard financial times and the prospect of a nice payday from Uncle Sam can sway a lot of minds on local city councils.

Grabbing on to that apple may carry a price, though. How would it impact the local economies, particularly in the real estate market? Our colleague Leon Wolf at Red State has some thoughts to share.

I am all in favor of the diversification of America. However, that is not what this policy will achieve or is designed to achieve. This is designed flat out to punish rich people for being rich and the ultimate result of this program may very well be the decimation of the real estate sector of the market. The plan essentially has two parts – the first is to spend money on improving poor neighborhoods by adding schools, libraries, etc. The second, however, seeks to move "affordable" (i.e., lower quality) houses directly into affluent neighborhoods.

The first part of this plan is likely to largely be a waste of money (if history is any indicator) but is otherwise harmless. The second, however, will have devastating economic and social effects. It is no secret to anyone at this point that a large part of what drives real estate cost is the quality of surrounding property. Wedging lower cost housing into expensive neighborhoods will not result in more minorities living in expensive neighborhoods – it will instead result in there being no such thing as an expensive neighborhood anymore.
Leon focuses on the economic fallout and it's not a consequence to be dismissed. But on the cultural and political fronts there are other concerns to be addressed. The Eternal Race Card crowd will be quick to grab on to any objections raised to this scheme and begin the chant which says, you just don't want black folks moving into your tidy white gated communities, you racists! And to be completely fair, taking only a brief glance at the unrest going on on some of the larger cities these days, there's probably some concerns to be raised in terms of throwing gas on that particular fire. But the underlying reality is found in the difference between neighborhoods comprised of primarily single family homes and ones with predominantly rental properties. While it obviously doesn't apply to everyone on either side, rental areas tend to be less well maintained. When you don't own the property, you're less likely to invest a lot of your time and money in caring for it. (This is the same as the common lore about how often people put high test gas in a rental car.)

When a community begins to suffer economically and rental properties creep into the single family housing areas, the general appeal of the neighborhood goes down and the property values follow. Increasing concerns over rising crime rates are generally not far behind. This isn't some fictional theory out of a KKK handbook... I've watched it happen first hand myself. And it happens even in areas where the renters are primarily white or in more affluent minority communities as well. It's not race dependent. This is just economic reality.

If I might humbly offer a bit of advice to the White House, this is the wrong approach. Offering incentives to ship large numbers of people out of impoverished communities and into more prosperous ones doesn't change the people. It only changes the community. If you want to raise up the standard of living in areas afflicted with poverty, start with some leadership. Empower those working to effect positive change, emphasizing greater focus on the community, the churches and the family. Make the communities safer. Rather than tearing down the police, help law enforcement create an atmosphere where residents feel safe in investing in their homes and opening businesses without fear of being looted. Let them hire more people from the neighborhood. Help the parents feel that their kids are walking to school through a safe neighborhood, not a war zone. The best public empowerment program in the world is still a job. Push struggling communities up from the grass roots rather than shipping them out without addressing the underlying problems. This is likely a generational change and I don't expect Barack Obama to snap his fingers and make it happen overnight, but he could take the lead and start the process today.

As to this plan for "reverse gentrification" under discussion, is this something we should worry about? HUD cant really do this, can they? There was a time (as recently as... last week) when I would have dismissed such a possibility as the fever swamp dreams of the paranoid, as I noted at the top of this article. Well... it turns out I was wrong. Welcome to the fourth quarter of the Obama administration. There are no limits and this is the new reality. Not only could it happen, it probably will.

 http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/12/ultimate-white-house-trolling-obama-to-diversify-wealthy-neighborhoods/

Hillary’s Unlawful Plan to Overrule Voter-ID Laws

A good read.


Declaring that Republican-controlled states have "systematically and deliberately" tried to "disempower and disenfranchise" voters, Hillary Clinton has called for a sweeping expansion of federal involvement in elections. In a speech last week in Houston, laying out what promises to be a major campaign theme, Mrs. Clinton called for automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early-voting period and a maximum 30-minute wait period to vote.

She has also endorsed the idea of a federal law permitting convicted felons to vote and allowing individuals, such as students, who reside in one state to vote in another. All of these federal mandates would augment and make more onerous an unconstitutional election-regulating federal statute known as the "Motor Voter" law enacted during her husband's White House tenure.

A federal takeover of election laws—and rolling back state voter-ID laws intended to discourage election fraud—is a high priority for progressives. The billionaire financier George Soros reportedly has pledged $5 million to bankroll legal challenges to laws like those that Mrs. Clinton decries. Part of the effort is intended simply to galvanize the Democratic base by stoking a sense of grievance, but the strategy should be taken seriously—and rebutted as unconstitutional.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate federal elections, not state ones. It also distinguishes between the regulation of presidential versus congressional elections. Specifically, under Article I, Section 4—the Elections Clause—while the states have primary responsibility for regulating congressional elections, Congress can pre-empt their rules by regulating "times, places and manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives," except that Congress cannot regulate the "places of chusing [sic] Senators."

For presidential elections, the Constitution restricts Congress's power and grants states an even more robust role—which is why the president is elected by the votes of the state-driven Electoral College, rather than directly by the people. Accordingly, Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution permits congressional regulation only of "the time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes."

With this constitutional backdrop, Mrs. Clinton's proposals as applied to presidential elections would be entirely unconstitutional. They go well beyond regulating the time of choosing the electors for the Electoral College and the date for voting.

As applied to congressional elections, Mrs. Clinton's proposals fare no better. Her goal of extending voter qualification to felons and transient individuals such as college students is patently unconstitutional. The Constitution establishes some categorical voting entitlements, primarily relating to gender (the 19th Amendment), age (the 26th Amendment) and race (the 15th Amendment). The Constitution doesn't grant Congress the authority to determine voter qualifications. As the Supreme Court said in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona (2013), "the Elections Clause empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them."

Mrs. Clinton's proposals regarding voter registration, 20-day early voting periods and maximum 30-minute wait times are also constitutionally wanting. Congress's Election Clause authority to regulate the "time, place and manner" of congressional elections was meant to allow regulation of how those elections are carried out. But it was not intended to give Congress carte blanche to regulate all aspects of voting. The clause, particularly given its capacious word "manner," must—like all other constitutional provisions—have a meaningful limiting principle.

That principle is in the Supreme Court's federalism-protecting anti-commandeering and anti-coercion doctrines. In New York v. U.S. (1992) the court declared that Congress cannot "commandeer" state legislatures "to enact or administer a federal regulatory program." In Printz v. U.S. (1997) the court expanded the principle to state executive officials, invalidating federal gun laws requiring state and local law enforcement officers to run criminal-background checks.

Congress can use its Elections Clause power to pre-empt state laws, but its pre-emptive authority should be restrained by the anti-commandeering principle. Congress cannot conscript state officials to execute federal congressional-election reforms, but instead must use federal officials to do so.

One year after New York v. U.S., Congress enacted the 1993 the Motor Voter law, imposing numerous obligations on states, including requiring that voter registration be allowed upon applying for a driver's license and by mail, and designating state welfare agencies as voter-registration locations. Illinois, California and Michigan challenged the law, asserting that it violated New York's anti-commandeering principle. All three states lost in the lower courts, but none of the decisions was reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The lower courts concluded that, under the Elections Clause, Congress may "make or alter" state laws for holding elections and thus, inevitably, may commandeer states when exercising this power. But the scope of the Supreme Court's incipient anti-commandeering doctrine was not fully developed. It wasn't until Printz in 1997 that the anti-commandeering doctrine's centrality to federalism became clear.

That federalism limits federal power generally was confirmed by NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), when the court invalidated ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion because it coerced states. NFIB confirmed that while Congress can incentivize states' adoption of election laws such as those Mrs. Clinton proposes, it cannot constitutionally withhold large amounts of funds from states to coerce the laws' adoption.

Democrats are seeking to overturn voting laws in the presidential battleground states of North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. The Associated Press reported on June 4 that one of the lawyers involved in the effort is Marc Elias, who is also general counsel for Mrs. Clinton's campaign.

Republicans have been muted in their response to Mrs. Clinton and the attempt to expand federal power over elections and undermine states' anti-fraud election laws. Such reticence is a mistake. They would have the Constitution and legal precedent on their side in rebutting her proposals—as they would if they launched a fresh legal challenge to the Motor Voter law.

Mr. Rivkin, a constitutional litigator, served in the Justice Department and the White House Counsel's Office in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Ms. Foley is a constitutional law professor at Florida International University College of Law.

 http://www.wsj.com/articles/hillarys-unlawful-plan-to-overrule-voter-id-laws-1434063299

Re: Obamacare: twisted morals

Good read tem.  Thanks for the share.

Re: Building the New Dark-Age Mind

Agreed.

Building the New Dark-Age Mind

A very good read.


 History is not static and it does not progress linearly. There was more free speech and unimpeded expression in 5th-century Athens than in Western Europe between 1934-45, or in Eastern Europe during 1946-1989. An American could speak his mind more freely in 1970 than now. Many in the United States had naively believed that the Enlightenment, the U.S. Constitution, and over two centuries of American customs and traditions had guaranteed that Americans could always take for granted free speech and unfettered inquiry.

 That is an ahistorical assumption. The wish to silence, censor, and impede thought is just as strong a human emotion as the desire for free expression — especially when censorship is cloaked in rhetoric about fairness, equality, justice, and all the other euphemisms for not allowing the free promulgation of ideas.

George Orwell devoted his later years to warning us that while the fascist method of destroying free expression was easily identified (albeit only with difficulty combatted), the leftwing totalitarian impulse to squelch unpopular speech was far harder to resist — couched as it was in sloganeering about the "people" and "social justice." It is easy to object to the speech codes of a self-interested, corrupt dictator in sunglasses and epaulettes, but difficult to fight censorship that allegedly helps the poor, minorities, and the helpless.

We can all but write off today's university as a place of free expression. In the age of Obama, zealots in the university have clamped down on any thought deemed reactionary. "Trigger warning" is a euphemism for trying either to censure literature or to denigrate it. "Safe space" is another term for the segregation of campus areas by race, class, or ideology. "Hate speech" has become a pejorative for uncomfortable truth.

So try a thought experiment. If Professor A in various fora — before the academic senate, at the "free speech" area of the quad, during student advising, in a faculty meeting, or during class — announced that on-campus, Christian student groups practiced hate speech and thus should be monitored or silenced, or he declared that due to white privilege he was holding private tutoring sessions only for people of color, or he urged that global warming deniers should not be allowed to spread their heresies in class, or he insisted that the nature and propriety of sexual intercourse should be post facto defined only by the female participant, he would be hailed, and many of those proposals would be taken seriously if they were not already part of campus protocol.

But if a bookend Professor B in the same venues announced that he found Muslim groups equally suspect, or that, due to constant deprecation of white males, he was holding tutoring sessions only for his European-American students, or that he was hosting a campus conference on the unscientific nature of the global warming movement, or if he urged the university to insist that any allegations of rape follow strictly the rules of evidence and procedures as outlined in the U.S. Constitution and state laws of criminal jurisprudence, he would find himself in a great deal of trouble, if not fired.

A pre-Enlightenment Age is not just the absence of uncomfortable free expression. It is also a sort of groupthink acceptance of a lie in place of the truth on grounds of social utility. Forensic evidence, testimony, and logic have shown that "hands up, don't shoot" is a complete myth. Michael Brown, fresh from committing a robbery, walking down the middle of the street, apparently under the influence, lunged at a policeman, grabbed for his weapon, fled, turned around and charged, before being shot and killed. He was not shot in the back. Nor did he halt and put his hands up, begging the policeman not to shoot him. Yet the president of the United States often invokes generically "Ferguson," as if it were proof of police brutality. "Hands up, don't shoot" is analogous to "the earth is flat" or "the sun revolves around the earth."

"Mattress Girl" is a Columbia University co-ed who had post facto regrets about once sexually hooking up with a young male student. She then recalibrated their pairing as a forcible rape, and yet was not able to demonstrate to either the university or the police that her allegations were valid. Yet she became a cult-hero. The progressive world embraced her as a feminist icon, as she lugged around a mattress and made an explicit sex tape, to further a narrative that could not be proven true. If one assumed that 2,500 years ago Socrates destroyed for good the notion of moral relativism in his take down of the Sophists, think again. The subtext of Mattress Girl's whine is that even if she is lying, her cause still furthers progressive agendas and thus is not really a lie after all.

Current popular culture is not empirically grounded, but operates on the premise that truth is socially constructed by race, class, and gender concerns. Imagine if Mattress Girl's male sexual partner had alleged that, in fact, he was coerced into sex, and then he carried his own 50-pound mattress around campus to draw public attention to her coercion. Certainly, he would be ignored or laughed at. Science, logic, probability, evidence — all these cornerstones of the Enlightenment — now mean little in comparison to the race, class, and gender of those who offer narratives deemed socially useful.

Eric Holder called the nation "cowards" for not holding a national conversation on race. But Holder did not wish a freewheeling discussion about the break-up of the black family, the epidemic of violence and drug use, the cult of the macho male, the baleful role of anti-police rhetoric and rap music — in addition to current racism, a sluggish economy, and the wages of past apartheid. Instead, the ground rules of racial discussion were again to be anti-Enlightenment to the core. One must not cite the extraordinary disproportionate crime rate of inner-city black males, or the lack of inspired black leadership at the national level. One most certainly does not suggest that other minority groups either do not promote leaders like Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson or do not seem to have a need for national collective spokespeople at all.

In our current Dark Age, logic is ignored in lieu of ideology. Hillary Clinton is declared a populist and — Presto! — she is a populist, railing about everything from hedge-fund operators to Wall Street hyper-profit making. No one seems to care that her egalitarian rhetoric simply cannot be true for a variety of reasons: Mrs. Clinton's daughter, without any financial experience, worked for Wall Street investment groups and reportedly is now worth $15 million. Chelsea's husband is a hedge-fund operator. Bill and Hillary Clinton have made over $100 million parlaying their public service into quid-pro-quo speaking engagements. The Clinton Foundation is little more than a clearing house that allows hundreds of millions of tax-deductible dollars from foreign grandees to be funneled into the Clinton machine in hopes of future crony capitalist advantages — as the foundation pays for everything from Clinton jet travel to sinecures for temporary, out-of-work political operatives. By any empirical standard, Hillary Clinton is an elitist manipulative multimillionaire, who with her husband mastered the revolving door of pay-for-play lobbying.

The California drought is the locus classicus of 21st-century know-nothingism. In a nutshell, periodic three- to four-year droughts are not abnormal in California. They can be predicated on little-understood changing oceanic temperatures, mostly known as "El Nino," that involve the heating and cooling of central Pacific Ocean currents, which in turn adjudicate the number and nature of productive storms heading down the western coast of North America. Such droughts and the role of El Nino predated man-made concerns over global warming.

No matter. The president of the United States not long ago flew into Fresno, declared the dry spell the wage of global warming, and flew out to the environs of Palm Springs to golf.

The drought problem is not just that the state cancelled the later phases of the massive California Water Project, but that it also diverted precious stored water from reservoirs out to sea, in service to unproven theories about fish restoration. The Enlightenment idea would have been to make prior arrangements for the periodic absence of El Nino currents, by building more reservoirs, curbing releases of stored water for green experimentation, and matching population growth with new infrastructure. The un-Enlightenment preference is to freeze reservoir construction, to damn farmers as water-wasters, to claim that immigrants are being scapegoated for the drought, and to ignore El Nino facts in preference to global warming theories.

A final symptom of an un-Enlightened age is the assumption that lies are truth because untruth offers collective benefits, while veracity disrupts social justice. Take Obamacare. Almost every promoted tenet of the Affordable Care Act proved false: premiums went up; so did deductibles and co-payments. Millions lost not just their doctors but their existing health care plans as well. The much ballyhooed health care website proved dysfunctional. Newly passed mandates were unlawfully suspended to enhance the Obama reelection effort.

Nationalized health care did not per se reduce the deficit, nor will its protocols contain escalating costs without radical curtailments in service. Mandatory electronic record keeping did not free physicians up to spend quality time with their patients, but often resulted in the very opposite with doctors typing into computer screens while distracted from patients' inquiries. Again, no matter. Obamacare is now hailed as the president's "signature achievement" and is becoming institutionalized in the manner of Social Security.

The country is terrified about having a rational and logical discussion about almost every great issue of our times: unsustainable national debts and deficits, the new nexus between leftwing plutocracy and populism, the viability of Social Security and Medicare, deteriorating race relations, the Soviet-style American campus, global warming, and the deterioration of medical care. Instead, to preclude honest talk, we offer perfunctory charges of sexism and racism, and seek cover in "fairness" and "equality."

The redistributionist, equality-of-result state — fueled by a national progressive ideology — is the new deity that determines what is free expression. Blasphemy is now defined as daring to use logic and evidence to expose the state's failed, deductive tenets.

This descent into the Dark Ages will not end well. It never has in the past.

 http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/building-the-new-dark-age-mind/?singlepage=true

Re: Governor Malloy endorses Hillary Clinton for president

Surprise surprise.

Re: John Mack standing by Hillary Clinton

Who?  lol

Obama lawyers asked secret court to ignore public court's decision on spying

Isn't that nice?  (sarcasm alert)


 The Obama administration has asked a secret surveillance court to ignore a federal court that found bulk surveillance illegal and to once again grant the National Security Agency the power to collect the phone records of millions of Americans for six months.

The legal request, filed nearly four hours after Barack Obama vowed to sign a new law banning precisely the bulk collection he asks the secret court to approve, also suggests that the administration may not necessarily comply with any potential court order demanding that the collection stop.

 US officials confirmed last week that they would ask the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court – better known as the Fisa court, a panel that meets in secret as a step in the surveillance process and thus far has only ever had the government argue before it – to turn the domestic bulk collection spigot back on.

Justice Department national security chief John A Carlin cited a six-month transition period provided in the USA Freedom Act – passed by the Senate last week to ban the bulk collection – as a reason to permit an "orderly transition" of the NSA's domestic dragnet. Carlin did not address whether the transition clause of the Freedom Act still applies now that a congressional deadlock meant the program shut down on 31 May.

But Carlin asked the Fisa court to set aside a landmark declaration by the second circuit court of appeals. Decided on 7 May, the appeals court ruled that the government had erroneously interpreted the Patriot Act's authorization of data collection as "relevant" to an ongoing investigation to permit bulk collection.

Carlin, in his filing, wrote that the Patriot Act provision remained "in effect" during the transition period.

 "This court may certainly consider ACLU v Clapper as part of its evaluation of the government's application, but second circuit rulings do not constitute controlling precedent for this court," Carlin wrote in the 2 June application. Instead, the government asked the court to rely on its own body of once-secret precedent stretching back to 2006, which Carlin called "the better interpretation of the statute".

The second circuit court of appeals is supposed to bind only the circuit's lower courts. But the unique nature of the Fisa court – whose rulings practically never became public before whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations – has left ambiguous which public court precedents it is obliged to follow.

"While the Fisa court isn't formally bound by the second circuit's ruling, it will certainly have to grapple with the second circuit's interpretation of the 'relevance' requirement. The [court] will also have to consider whether Congress effectively adopted the second circuit's interpretation of the relevance requirement when it passed the USA Freedom Act," said Jameel Jaffer, the deputy legal director of the ACLU, which brought the lawsuit the second circuit decided.

The second circuit did not issue an injunction stopping the bulk collection. It deferred to the then-ongoing congressional debate over the USA Freedom Act, citing legislation as the more appropriate mode of relief. The ACLU, now confronting a potential return of bulk surveillance via the Fisa court, is considering seeking an injunction in the appropriate federal district court should the Fisa Court grant the government surveillance request.

Yet Carlin's request to the Fisa court suggested the Obama administration would not consider the second circuit the last word – and might seek to challenge the injunction.

Carlin told the Fisa court that the government was "considering its litigation options in regard to the second circuit's opinion", which would have to mean a challenge before the US supreme court.

Carlin added in a footnote: "In the event an injunction of some sort were to issue by the district court, the government would need to assess, in light of the nature and scope of whatever injunction the district court issued, its ability to carry out authority granted under an order issued by this court."

But the Fisa court must first decide whether the new bulk-surveillance request is lawful.

On Friday, the conservative group FreedomWorks filed a rare motion before the Fisa court, asking it to reject the government's surveillance request as a violation of the fourth amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Fisa court judge Michael Moseman gave the justice department until this coming Friday to respond – and explicitly barred the government from arguing that FreedomWorks lacks the standing to petition the secret court.

"The only federal appeals court to have considered this surveillance concluded, after very careful analysis, that it's unlawful. It's disturbing and disappointing that the government is proposing to continue it," said Jaffer, of the ACLU.

 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/09/obama-fisa-court-surveillance-phone-records