Civil Liberties
It should also make us value federalism more. Moving power away from local hands and toward a central government that necessarily has spies and a military is a terrible idea. The petty tyrants of your local government may be annoying and difficult to challenge, but they’re still easier to deal with than a tyrannical D.C.…
South Kingstown has been receiving national attention recently based on multiple ways in which its school committee and superintendent have been crossing lines of propriety, but related trends bear watching across Rhode Island. Then-Governor Gina Raimondo’s COVID-19 emergency declaration, which now-Governor Daniel McKee has refused to remove, didn’t only restrict the public’s freedom, but also increased…
It’s long, but the conversation between Jordan Peterson and North Korean defector Yeonmi Park on the former’s podcast is well worth a listen. Most of the episode is a description of Park’s experiences as she transitioned from the national concentration camp of North Korea to sex slavery in China to despised minority in South Korea…
Nobody should be upset that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies arrested hundreds of international gang members in the Trojan Shield operation, but everybody should concerned about the methods used toward that end. Mike Corder of the Associated Press describes them: The seeds of the sting were sown when law enforcement agencies earlier took…
According to Jerrick Adams, writing for Ballotpedia, a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard oral arguments in the case on June 9. Adams gives a good quick summary of the two fundamental arguments: The law in question (H7859, enacted in 2012) requires issue advocacy groups to disclose to the…
Politicians always have time to figure out new ways to restrict explicit rights, like the right to bear arms guaranteed in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. They spend considerably less time (if any at all) addressing the changes in our society that actually might reduce violence. Consider the following, from an Epoch Times commentary…
Yesterday, June 10, in the two-thousand and twenty-first year of our Lord, Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee, the first of his name, did sign and decree the “One Hundred and Sixty-Eighth Supplemental Emergency Declaration,” extending the state’s COVID-19 state of emergency for another month. As is typical, the declaration contains “whereas” clauses to offer information…
From nearly the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve argued that Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo abused her authority by declaring an emergency in order to give herself enhance powers. The emergency provisions in Rhode Island law are meant to be used to manage a desperate circumstance in which there is no time to handle a situation…
Mark Zaccaria hones in on a key question that seems like it’s been lost in the shuffle: Can the state government and its subsidiaries selectively emancipate Rhode Island children from their parents for the purpose of deciding whether to be vaccinated against COVID-19? Hey, wasn’t it just a few years ago that the government was…
You’d think it’d be a bigger deal locally that the Ocean State (Cranston, specifically) is at the center of a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision that police violated a resident’s Fourth Amendment rights by seizing his guns without a warrant. Here’s the ruling on this obvious case. Credit has to go to the ACLU for…
