justice

FBI agents for years sought sensitive records from telephone companies through e-mails, sticky notes, sneak peeks and other “startling” methods that violated electronic privacy law and federal policy, according to a Justice Department inspector general report released Wednesday.

The study details how the FBI between 2002 and 2006 sent more than 700 demands for telephone toll information by citing often nonexistent emergencies and using sometimes misleading language. The practice of sending faulty “exigent” letters to three telecommunications providers became so commonplace that one FBI agent described it to investigators as “like having an ATM in your living room.”

Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said the findings were “troubling” and urged the FBI and the Justice Department to “take additional corrective action” in response to the 289-page report. Information on more than 3,500 phone numbers may have been gathered improperly, but investigators said they could not glean a full understanding because of sketchy record-keeping by the FBI.

via Inspector general cites ‘egregious breakdown’ in FBI oversight – washingtonpost.com.

It’s an outrage that the United States locks up citizens for so long with such uncertain effect; but it’s also self-defeating, because long sentences give rise to a crisis of legitimacy that can lead to more crime, not less.

via Prisoners of Parole – NYTimes.com.

Mark Tushnet

This morning’s Washington Post has a story on proposed legal challenges to the individual mandate in the pending health care legislation. (In brief, conservatives are arguing that Congress lacks the power to require people to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty, under either the commerce clause and the power to tax and spend for the general welfare.) The story observes that liberal-leaning constitutional scholars think that, as Erwin Chemerinsky puts it, “There are many close constitutional questions. But this is not among them,” or, as Jack Balkin says, “All of these arguments don’t work, but they’re interesting to debate.”

I’m afraid that these reactions demonstrate that liberal-leaning constitutional law types haven’t absorbed the lessons of critical legal studies — or, indeed, the lesson Justice William Brennan taught his law clerks by holding up one hand with his fingers splayed: “With five votes you can do anything.” The CLS lesson was — and is — that where the stakes are high enough and the political energy is available (to lawyers and judges), at any time the body of legal materials contains enough stuff to support a professionally respectable argument for any legal proposition. So too with the constitutional arguments against the individual mandate.

I lack both the interest and the energy to work out the arguments in detail, but I’ve thought enough about the constitutional issues to be able to sketch out an argument, compatible with existing law, that the individual mandate (a) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, (b) doesn’t fall within Congress’s power to tax and spend for the general welfare, and (c) is (in its penalty aspect) a direct tax prohibited by the Constitution. I myself don’t find these arguments particularly strong, but that — on the CLS view — doesn’t mean anything about what constitutional law on this matter “really” is. If, as Holmes said and as CLS reiterated, what the law “is” is what the courts will do in fact, the thing to do is to figure out which side of the argument can count to five first.

Or, put another way, remember Bush v. Gore?

via Balkinization.