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Benjamin Weingarten

@bhweingarten

Jul 22

Kim Cheatle @GOPoversight Hearing

Secret Service director calls assassination attempt on Donald Trump the "most significant operational failure...in decades"

USSS Director Cheatle can't or won't answer @RepJamesComer's first question as to whether Secret Service personnel were ever on the roof from which the assassination attempt occurred.

"There was a plan in place to provide overwatch."

Says Secret Service prefers "sterile rooftops"

@RepJamesComer Director Cheatle: "There was a sufficient number of agents assigned"

Read 55 tweets

Benjamin Weingarten

@bhweingarten

Jul 15

Judge Cannon just absolutely eviscerated Joe Biden's Justice Department:

"Both the Appointments and Appropriations challenges as framed in the Motion raise the following threshold question: is there a statute in the United States Code that authorizes the appointment of Special Counsel Smith to conduct this prosecution? After careful study of this seminal issue, the answer is no. None of the statutes cited as legal authority for the appointment— 28 U.S.C. §§ 509, 510, 515, 533—gives the Attorney General broad inferior-officer appointing power or bestows upon him the right to appoint a federal officer with the kind of prosecutorial power wielded by Special Counsel Smith. Nor do the Special Counsel’s strained statutory arguments, appeals to inconsistent history, or reliance on out-of-circuit authority persuade otherwise." storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…

AG Garland could've been a Supreme Court Justice.

"The bottom line is this: The Appointments Clause is a critical constitutional restriction stemming from the separation of powers, and it gives to Congress a considered role in determining the propriety of vesting appointment power for inferior officers. The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority, transferring it to a Head of Department, and in the process threatening the structural liberty inherent in the separation of powers."

Judge Cannon: "If the political branches wish to grant the Attorney General power to appoint Special Counsel Smith to investigate and prosecute this action with the full powers of a United States Attorney, there is a valid means by which to do so. He can be appointed and confirmed through the default method prescribed in the Appointments Clause, as Congress has directed for United States Attorneys throughout American history, see 28 U.S.C. § 541, or Congress can authorize his appointment through enactment of positive statutory law consistent with the Appointments Clause"

Read 11 tweets

Benjamin Weingarten

@bhweingarten

Jun 27

In SEC v. Jarkesy it appears SCOTUS struck a blow against the administrative state.

"We consider whether the Seventh Amendment permits the SEC to compel respondents to defend themselves before the agency rather than before a jury in federal court," the Majority writes.

It concludes a defendant is entitled to a trial by jury -- not have to go in front of a court where the administrative state plays judge, jury, and executioner

What Justice Gorsuch describes in his concurrence reflects the inherently tyrannical nature of the administrative state supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…

Justice Gorsuch -- with whom Justice Thomas concurred -- details more administrative state tyranny. We've been de-sensitized to an unelected, unaccountable, awesomely powerful branch of government that's, shall we say, hard to square this with the Constitution supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf…

Read 4 tweets

Benjamin Weingarten

@bhweingarten

Jun 26

Murthy v. Missouri
Perhaps the most significant statement in the otherwise disappointing but predictable majority opinion comes in a footnote.

"Because we do not reach the merits, we express no view as to whether the Fifth Circuit correctly articulated the standard for when the Government transforms private conduct into state action."

The idea that the plaintiffs couldn't prove traceability -- despite overwhelming evidence of government officials and their cutouts working in myriad ways to suppress the very speech at issue reveals a lack of knowledge of the full record IMO from the majority

Worse, the default standard seems to be that government can do a whole host of things to abridge our speech en masse, and the bar is incredibly high for anyone to do anything about it. That's the fundamentally disastrous part of the standing cop-out

Read 23 tweets

Benjamin Weingarten

@bhweingarten

Apr 10

Greatly enjoyed speaking with, and learning from, @karaafrederick @MikeBenzCyber yesterday @Heritage @OversightPR "Weaponization of U.S. Government Symposium" emceed by @jasoninthehouse and organized by @MHowellTweets youtube.com/live/gSG21eAqc…

I wanted to amplify a few points core to the discussion yesterday in a thread.

First, it's critical to understand CISA's role as nerve center of fed-led speech policing. The switch from targeting foreign malign actors to domestic Wrongthinkers; re-characterization of tweets critical of Official Narratives as national security threats to be neutralized via censorship; and the fact the Censorship Regime emerges from the powerful and secretive national security apparatus are all vital points to understand and internalize weingarten.substack.com/p/full-testimo…

Second, the problem set is daunting. Even if we were to map out every federal government-led censorship office, restructure and defund them all, and impose severe penalties for government officials to deter any such behavior going forward, we still have to deal with the cutouts, not to mention state and local deputizers of social media speech police. But government money is no doubt a key driver of the Censorship Regime, and eliminating it would strike a severe blow to it realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/…

Read 7 tweets

Benjamin Weingarten

@bhweingarten

Mar 19

🧵My impression walking out of SCOTUS yesterday, having witnessed oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri was demoralization. The Censorship Industrial Complex proved itself in the case to have cajoled, coerced, and colluded with social media platforms to censor Wrongthinking Americans en masse, and yet that the government's "partners" abridged clear protected political speech wasn't clearly presented and argued. Whether we will retain anything resembling a First Amendment likely hinges on Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett. Herein, a thread I will update as I parse the transcript🧵 nypost.com/2024/03/18/opi…

Multiple times the U.S. government lamented how the plaintiffs in the case were using the courts to "audit" their efforts to conspire with social media platforms to censor us on the Hunter Biden laptop story, election integrity and outcomes, and COVID. Unmentioned is that without Murthy v. Missouri we would've never known about this conspiracy to kill our First Amendment. Is the government's issue with the audit or with what the audit revealed about its depredations?

Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher sought to make this case about the government using mere "persuasion" (legal) versus "coercion" (illegal) to pressure social media companies to violate the First Amendment on its behalf as deputized speech police.

While there was a raft of evidence of coercion, Philip Hamburger -- whose @NCLAlegal represents some of the plaintiffs in Murthy -- persuasively makes the case that that isn't the right standard. As the plaintiffs wrote in their brief, citing Hamburger: "The First Amendment does not require a strict showing of explicit coercion, but capaciously protects the freedom of speech from any 'abridging' (i.e., diminishing) of that freedom."

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