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Chip Mellor of the Institute for Justice was the WSJ’s weekend interviewee.
The Republican presidential campaign is at full boil, and among the biggest players are so-called super PACs, political-action committees that can raise and spend as much money as they like. Mitt Romney’s version helped ruin Newt Gingrich in Iowa, for example. For that right to free speech (not the ads), you can thank or blame Chip Mellor, who runs the most influential legal shop that most people have never heard of.
Mr. Mellor is the 61-year-old chief of the Institute for Justice, which has been celebrating its 20th anniversary of guerrilla legal warfare on behalf of individual freedom. He’s worth getting to know because he and his fellow legal battlers are behind a larger campaign to restore some of the Constitution’s lost rights. And they’re often succeeding.
Take political speech. The Supreme Court’s January 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC restored the First Amendment rights of corporations and unions to assemble to influence elections. That was followed in March 2010 by SpeechNow v. FEC, in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said that political committees may accept unlimited contributions for the purpose of independent political spending.
“That’s not to downplay the importance of Citizens United,” Mr. Mellor says, “but SpeechNow is the decision that lets people (and corporations and unions) pool their money in Super PACs.” Mr. Mellor’s outfit represented SpeechNow with the Center for Competitive Politics and IJ argued the case before the court.
The campaign finance reform lobby is going to fight relentlessly, Mr. Mellor says. “There continues to be the false premise that the problem in politics is too much money, when in fact the problem is too much government for sale.” Besides, he points out, “these campaign finance laws are really treating only a symptom, not the disease. Until you get to the root cause, which is too much government, you are really not doing anything productive and in many cases you are doing harm.” …
More on an IJ triumph from George Will.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit is famously liberal and frequently reversed. Recently, however, a unanimous three-judge panel of this court did something right when it held that bone marrow donors can be compensated. In effect, it revised a law, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984, because of a medical technique developed since then.
Was this “judicial activism” — judges acting as legislators, imposing social policies they prefer? Or was it proper judicial engagement — performance of the judicial duty to ensure that the law is applied in conformity with the actual facts of the case? Herewith an example of a court’s conscientious application of law in light of a pertinent change — a technological change — in a medical sphere the law regulates.
NOTA made it a felony to sell human organs for transplants. This codified two moral judgments. One is that there is wisdom in an instinctive repugnance about the commodification of the human body, or at least of body parts that are not renewable. The other judgment is that a market for organs — offering perhaps $50,000 for a kidney — would usually, and troublingly, involve affluent people buying from low-income people whose consent is influenced by their neediness.
Here, however, is another moral dilemma resulting from NOTA’s codification of moral impulses: Potentially deadly blood diseases strike tens of thousands of Americans each year. For example, of the 44,000 who will be diagnosed with leukemia, including 3,500 children, half the adults and 700 of the children will die from it. Nearly 3,000 Americans die of various blood diseases because they cannot find matching bone marrow donors. Compensation would substantially increase the number of lifesaving donors. Unfortunately, NOTA classifies as an organ the bone marrow that is the source of lifesaving stem cells that generate white and red blood cells, and platelets.
The 9th Circuit panel ruled this month that a new medical technique has made the phrase “bone marrow transplant” anachronistic. When NOTA was written, extracting bone marrow involved a protracted, painful and risky semi-surgical procedure in which long needles were inserted into the hip bones of anesthetized donors.
Now, however, there is an essentially risk-free technique — called apheresis — for obtaining the stem cells not from hip bones but from the arms — the blood streams — of donors as they rest for six or so hours in a recliner. …
Jennifer Rubin is looking forward to Huntsman’s defeat in New Hampshire.
Jon Huntsman is going nowhere in this presidential race. In the must-win state of New Hampshire, where he has spent virtually all his time, he risks coming in next-to-last, ahead of only the faltering Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
It might have been different, if not for his decision to run as combatively anti-conservative and to throw his lot in with the isolationists.
His key strategist John Weaver, who led the presidential campaign for Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) before being dumped in 2007, learned the wrong lesson from McCain. Certainly McCain had been a thorn in the side of conservatives, but when running for president he did his best to convince them of his social conservative bona fides and mend fences. He didn’t stick his finger in their eye and then ask for their vote.
Huntsman, on the other hand, has gratuitously played to the mainstream media and dumped on conservatives. In an ABC interview, he told Jake Tapper:
“The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party — the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn’t willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science — Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man’s contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.” …
The Telegraph, UK profiles trackers employed by Homeland Security.
In the seemingly endless desert wasteland of the Arizona-Mexico border, amid 30ft high cacti and thorny mesquite trees, an eagle-eyed Native American scout has found what he is looking for.
A freshly dislodged leaf from a Creosote bush is his first sign, followed by a snapped branch still wet to the touch. Nearby, a shiny patch of dirt shows where suspected drug smugglers have tried to evade his ancient skills by brushing over their vehicle’s tyre tracks with a tree limb.
Unfortunately for the smugglers Jason Garcia, 38, a modern day Tohono O’odham Indian, is hot on their trail. Mr Garcia is a member of an elite group called the “Shadow Wolves,” the US Department of Homeland Security’s only Native American tracking unit. The squad also includes members of the Navajo, Lakota and Blackfoot tribes, and they are considered by some the best hunters of human beings in the world.
While a giant multi-billion dollar fence, unmanned Predator drones and electronic sensors are being touted as the way to seal this porous section of the border, Mr Garcia uses the same methods his ancestors developed over centuries to catch deer and peccary.
He and eight other Shadow Wolves operate in the Tohono O’odham Nation, a vast Indian reservation roughly the size of Northern Ireland. The O’odham have inhabited the area for thousands of years and their name translates as “Desert People.”. Some 20,000 of them now live in scattered villages. …
Big football game tonight and there might be some drinking of adult beverages. The Wall Street Journal says it is hard to spell “lush” without the letters LSU.
This weekend, thousands of Louisiana State fans will swarm New Orleans to watch the Tigers take on Alabama in Monday’s BCS Championship game. But before, during and after the contest, these celebrants will gather in the French Quarter to engage in the one activity they’re better at than perhaps any other group of football fans: drinking.
Year in and year out, regardless of how well their team is playing, LSU supporters make other college tailgating crews look like Baptist choirs.
All six games at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, La. this season drew more than 90,000 fans. While beer isn’t sold inside, the parking lots remain jammed during the action.
It’s not uncommon for tailgates to have full bars—with some stations serving as many as 200 guests with bourbon, gin, vodka, scotch, Bloody Marys, mimosas and up to 25 cases of beer. …