Law professor Stuart Benjamin discusses a decision in the Supreme Court case Packingham v. North Carolina, which ruled that the state’s ban on sex offenders using social media platforms violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.
Listen to More on Bloomberg RadioCategory: Politics-Public Policy
Senate Republicans Plan Even Harsher Cuts To Medicaid Than House GOP
The Senate is contemplating a change in Medicaid that would cut it even more than the $830-billion proposed by the House, according to a proposal leaked from an Obamacare repeal bill. Lowering the growth rate of Medicaid is “a massive cut of future growth,” says health insurance expert David Anderson, a researcher at the Margolis Center for Health Policy.
Read More in The Los Angeles Times
The Architect of the Radical Right
Historian Nancy MacLean’s new book, “Democracy in Chains,” examines the Southern roots of modern conservatism. A reviewer notes that what sets it apart from other recent books on this topic, “is that it begins in the South and emphasizes a genuinely original and very influential political thinker, the economist James M. Buchanan.”
Read More in The Atlantic
The Hardest Part of Trump’s National Security Strategy to Write
Sometime this year, the Trump administration intends to release the legislatively mandated National Security Strategy (NSS). “… The very act of drafting the NSS serves as a (modest) disciplining device on an administration, obliging the team to confront hard truths about previous policy statements and efforts,” writes political scientist Peter Feaver. “Which brings me to the question I have been pondering for quite a while: how hard will it be for President Trump’s team to draft such an NSS? The answer I keep coming to is: pretty hard.”
Read More in Foreign Policy
Is Trump ‘Disrupting’ His Own Foreign-Policy Team?
“What’s unusual here is that the Trump team is facing this significant diplomatic challenge before they’ve got their roster on board,” says political scientist Peter Feaver. “It’s like attempting to do a difficult synchronized swimming maneuver, with half the team not yet in their bathing suits and others not even named to the team yet.”
Read More in The Christian Science Monitor
Can Sessions Discuss Conversations With President Trump?
“In terms of the law of executive privilege, it belongs to the president, and he has not asserted it. General Sessions sought to preserve the president’s ability to assert it, but that is not how it works,” says law professor Lisa Kern Griffin. “… The president could have instructed him not to answer any questions about their conversations because of executive privilege. That, apparently, did not happen, and no privilege was asserted.”
Read More in Vox
Russia Probe: Possible Explosive Moments
Investigators looking into whether Trump’s team worked with Russia to win the White House could go down a path defined by other showdowns, where there’s little history beyond Watergate or Monica Lewinsky to guide them. “A set of two precedents is not a big set of precedents,” says law professor Samuel Buell. “You also have to say whatever the Trump story ends up being, it’s probably going to be something else.”
Read More in Politico
GOP’s American Health Care Act Will Cost Lives
“With Senate Republicans gearing up to pass a healthcare reform bill that will likely maintain the deep cuts to Medicaid, low-income households and minorities are most likely to lose insurance and their lives will be more endangered,” writes Mark Paul, an economist and a postdoctoral associate at the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity.
Read More on Dollars and Sense
Time to Hold Legislators Accountable in Redistricting Process
“People have to pay attention to redistricting and to line drawing and to the way that districts are constructed, and they ought to demand fairness from their legislators,” says law professor Guy-Uriel Charles, founding director of the Duke Law Center on Law, Race and Politics.
Read More in The Progressive Pulse
Can Jeff Sessions Avoid Some Questions By Citing Executive Privilege?
If Attorney General Jeff Sessions cites executive privilege to avoid answering certain questions Tuesday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, there are other options. “The committee can negotiate with the administration to get answers to narrower or different questions or to get answers in a closed session,” says law professor Lisa Kern Griffin. “If they do not come to any agreement, of course the matter could be litigated. The Supreme Court case that describes the scope of executive privilege arose from a similar dispute concerning the Nixon tapes.”
Read More on CNN
Religious Liberals Want Back In Political Game
Liberal religious leaders who used to shun the political arena are getting involved to fight back against President Trump’s policies on immigration, health care, poverty and the environment. Imam Abdullah Antepli says he had hesitated to march alongside gay pastors until he realized their struggles were linked. “We can’t have only Jews cry for anti-Semitism, and Muslims cry for Islamophobia,” Imam Antepli says. “We can only win this if we see it as one big fight.”
The Three Components Of An Obstruction Charge
Law professor Samuel Buell says testimony last week from former FBI Director James Comey provided enough information to lead the special investigator in the Russia election meddling probe to “take a very hard look” at possible obstruction of justice committed by President Trump.
Watch More on MSNBC
