Campaign finance regulation met celebrity culture for one morning this week. I was not completely bemused.

…that’s what former Cato policy analyst, Reason senior editor and now Huffington Post reporter Radley Balko reports:

I’m in Monticello, Mississippi, this morning, where Circuit Court Judge Prentiss Harrell has just signed a plea agreement between Cory Maye and the state. Maye has plead guilty to a reduced charged of manslaughter, and has been resentenced to 10 years in prison, time he has already served. He’ll be sent to Rankin County for processing. He should be released and home with his family in a matter of days.

Cory Maye’s is a story about a paramilitary-style drug raid gone grotesquely wrong, a cautionary tale about the human costs of the War on Drugs, and a lesson in how a dedicated investigative reporter can throw a wrench in the ever-grinding wheels of injustice. If you’re unfamiliar with the case, and Radley’s role in it, watch the terrific Rea​son​.tv video, “Mississippi Drug War Blues” below, and read this blogpost I wrote a couple of years ago, when Radley’s work first started drawing attention to the case: “The Cato Policy Analyst Who (May Have) Saved a Man’s Life.” We can remove the “may have” now.

And here’s Radley’s update at the Huffington Post.

In the Wall Street Journal today, Cato senior fellow Walter Olson praises the New York legislature both for passing a marriage equality bill and for including guarantees of religious freedom in the bill:

For those of us who support same-sex marriage and also consider ourselves to be right of center, there were special reasons to take satisfaction in last Friday’s vote in Albany. New York expanded its marriage law not under court order but after deliberation by elected lawmakers with the signature of an elected governor. Of the key group of affluent New Yorkers said to have pushed the campaign for the bill, many self-identify as conservative or libertarian. A GOP-run state Senate gave the measure its approval.…

To their credit, New York lawmakers devoted much attention to the drafting of exemptions to protect churches and religious organizations from being charged with bias for declining to assist in same-sex marriages. Exemptions of this sort are sometimes dismissed as a mere sop to placate opponents. But in fact they’re worth supporting in their own right—and an important recognition that pluralism and liberty can and should advance together as allies.…

Critics have charged that same-sex marriage will constrict the free workings of religious institutions and violate the conscience of individuals who act on religious scruples. Many of the examples they give are by now familiar.…

Observe, however, that it isn’t the legal status of same-sex marriage that keeps generating these troublesome cases; it’s plain old discrimination law. Thus New York’s highest court ordered Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution, to let same-sex couples into its married-student housing. But that ruling happened a decade ago and had nothing to do with last week’s vote in Albany. In the case of the wedding photographer ordered not to act on her scruples, New Mexico didn’t then and doesn’t now recognize same-sex marriage. While some of these rulings are to be deplored as infringements on individual liberty, they’re not consequences of the state of marriage law itself.

Also: Cato’s forum on the legal challenge to California’s Proposition 8, featuring Ted Olson, David Boies, John Podesta, and Robert Levy. And an earlier forum on gays and conservatism featuring Andrew Sullivan, Maggie Gallagher, and British Cabinet minister Nick Herbert.

Today’s 2–1 Sixth Circuit Obamacare decision was an exercise in unwarranted judicial deference, not by the author of the majority opinion, Judge Boyce Martin, who regularly rubberstamps misuses of federal power, but by concurring Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who avoided the logical implications of this ruling and punted the main issue to the Supreme Court. Under a document establishing a government of enumerated and therefore limited powers, the burden is on that government to prove that it has the power to do something, not on the plaintiffs to disprove that power. Never has the Supreme Court ratified the federal power to force someone to buy a product in the marketplace under the guise of regulating commerce. Indeed, never, not even during the height of the New Deal, had Congress asserted such a power—until the health insurance mandate. 

To allow such a power now is to read out of the Constitution any structural limitations on federal power, which, as Justice Kennedy reminded us for a unanimous Supreme Court two weeks ago in Bond v. United States, are the Constitution’s first and greatest protectors of liberty. While a progressive like Judge Martin could be expected to accept any exercise of federal power, it is shocking that an avowed constitutionalist like Judge Sutton requires Congress to show only a rational basis behind what it does—a “reasonable fit” between the means it chooses and the ends of regulating interstate commerce—to survive constitutional scrutiny. Under such logic, Congress can do anything it wants so far as it is essential to a larger regulatory scheme. That cannot be the law.

As Chief Justice Marshall wrote nearly two centuries ago, any legislation Congress enacts under its power to make laws that are necessary and proper for executing an enumerated power must “consist with the letter and spirit of the [C]onstitution.” A constitutional interpretation resulting in Congress being the judge of its own powers, that forces people to engage in commerce rather than regulating existing commerce, fails that test. 

Judge Sutton does well to describe the Supreme Court’s inflation of federal authority over the last 75 years and is to be commended for demanding that the Court “either should stop saying that a meaningful limit on Congress’s commerce power exists or prove that it is so.” But he has it backwards in saying that it’s not the role of the lower courts to invalidate legislation that goes beyond even the modern warped doctrine; the decision on whether to expand existing Supreme Court precedent is precisely that ultimate court’s alone.

If the Court joins the Sixth Circuit and goes there, it would mean putting the final nail in federalism’s coffin. But I doubt that proposition will find five votes—and before then we may even see decisions to the contrary from one or more circuit courts.

Judge Mark Wolf gets some well-deserved recognition in a New York Times editorial today for his spectacular effort to bring some accountability to the FBI scandal involving gangster informants. Here’s an excerpt:

The judge uncovered that John Connolly Jr., the F.B.I. agent who was their handler, had protected Mr. Bulger, a 15-year informant, and Mr. Flemmi, a 25-year informant, as they committed murder and conspired with the Mafia, in exchange for leads about the Mafia. It was Mr. Connolly who tipped off Mr. Bulger that he was about to be indicted and sent him on the lam. Judge Wolf testified against the F.B.I. agent at a 2002 trial before another judge. Mr. Connolly was sentenced to 10 years for racketeering, obstruction of justice and making false statements to investigators.…

Judges are supposed to dispense justice but rarely root out crimes. As a result of Judge Wolf’s courage and persistence, the government has paid more than $100 million in claims to families of people murdered by informants shielded by the F.B.I. There is no good evidence that the F.B.I. has set up independent oversight of its informants program like what the judge called for. It’s high time.

It’s a good editorial that’s on the mark. Of course, in a just world, Judge Wolf’s picture should have been on the cover of the Times, not the fugitive who is thought to be responsible for countless crimes.

And in a just world, the corrupt FBI agent, John Connolly, would have had to pay for his own legal expenses. Even though he had more than a million dollars in assets (pensions, vacation home, power boat, etc), a federal magistrate said he was “indigent” and that taxpayers should pay for his legal defense. Not a public defender, mind you, but a top law firm in Boston. Just one of the many sordid aspects of the whole affair.

Here’s a link to Judge Wolf’s exhaustive ruling. Here’s a link to a Cato event that I hosted on this scandal.

As Julian Sanchez detailed yesterday, those who complain about fewer restrictions on corporate political speech but celebrate the freeing of restrictions on corporate videogame speech are in a bit of a logical pretzel. But ultimately both those who think corporations have speech rights and those who don’t miss the larger point: it’s not about corporate rights but the rights of the individuals who freely associate and thus pool their speech via the corporate legal form.

That is, it really doesn’t matter that “corporations aren’t people.” Of course they’re not living, breathing human beings, and their “personhood” for legal purposes is just that: a convenient legal fiction.

To elaborate on these ideas, Cato legal associate Caitlyn Walsh McCarthy and I have written a law review article titled “So What If Corporations Aren’t People?” Here’s the abstract:

Corporate participation in public discourse has long been a controversial issue, one that was reignited by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC, 130 S. Ct. 876 (2010). Much of the criticism of Citizens United stems from the claim that the Constitution does not protect corporations because they are not “real” people. While it’s true that corporations aren’t human beings, that truism is constitutionally irrelevant because corporations are formed by individuals as a means of exercising their constitutionally protected rights. When individuals pool their resources and speak under the legal fiction of a corporation, they do not lose their rights. It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. Moreover, the government would be able to censor all corporate speech, including that of so-called media corporations. In short, rights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups. This essay will demonstrate why the common argument that corporations lack rights because they aren’t people demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the First Amendment.

This article is still being edited — it won’t appear in the John Marshall Law Review till the fall — so comments are welcome. Thanks to Eugene Volokh for making suggestions on an earlier version.

Update: Larry Solum has “recommended” our article on the Legal Theory Blog. Thanks!

With the federal government’s growing assertion of power over the states — Obamacare is just the highest-profile example — state legislators regularly contact me for advice on how to push back while remaining constitutionally faithful. What can they do in areas like health care, immigration, drug decriminalization, and firearm regulation?

One innovative solution is interstate compacts: states can actually create binding federal law by joining together in a sort of multi-state contract. Typically they need Congress’s (but not the president’s) consent, but the Supreme Court has held that when the compacts don’t implicate challenges to federal power, they don’t even need that.

For example, Texas is now considering joining a Medicaid/​Medicare compact established by Georgia and Oklahoma. Many states are considering a Health Care Freedom Act compact, which use preexisting congressional consent for criminal-justice-cooperation compacts to mutually enforce state laws prohibiting the forced purchase of health insurance.

I discussed these innovative policy solutions — on which the law is untested — in a recent podcast. More broadly, however, there are plenty of things states (and of course their citizens!) ought to be considering if they want to reestablish the dual — actually tripartite, adding individuals — sovereignty at the heart of Constitution’s structural protections of liberty. (For more on that point, see part IV of Cato’s most recent Obamacare brief and part III of Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Bond v. United States.)

To that end, our friends at the Goldwater Institute recently released a major new report called “Federalism-Do-It-Yourself: 10 Ways for States to Check and Balance Washington.” The report outlines 10 legal tools that states can use to stand up to federal overreach, without resorting to so-called nullification (states can’t simply declare federal law void). The report includes a number of examples of how these tools have been used in isolated cases and recommends that states embrace them in a clear strategy to start holding the federal government to its constitutional role. From Goldwater’s press release, some of the tools include:

Reinvigorate the Reserved Powers of the States

Remember the REAL ID Act, the federal government’s attempt to create a national identification card through state driver’s licenses? REAL ID never was carried out because 14 states refused to comply. The Supreme Court has ruled the 10^th Amendment prevents the federal government from “commandeering” or forcing state officials to implement federal policies. In “Federalism DIY,” author Nick Dranias writes there are many other areas where the federal government has fooled states into helping to carry out federal mandates when they don’t have to.

Strategic Legislation Plus Litigation

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that states can grant more freedom and civil rights to their residents than what’s protected in the Constitution. And states can use this power to thwart federal efforts to impose new mandates on people. For example, 28 states are challenging President Obama’s health care law in two lawsuits out of Virginia and Florida. Both lawsuits won the first round before U.S. district judges and now are on appeal. Both judges ruled the states could challenge the federal law only because many states have adopted the Health Care Freedom Act, which protects a person’s right to choose his own doctors and not buy government-controlled health insurance. To date, no lawsuit against Obamacare without a state government as a plaintiff has a single victory.

Coordination with Local Governments

Laws creating many federal agencies, such as the Bureau of Land Management, include a standard but little-known provision requiring these agencies to “coordinate” proposed new rules with local governments. This means the agency must sit down with a local government and honestly attempt to craft a rule that doesn’t conflict with existing local policies. If the federal agency fails to do so, a court can block the new rule. Three counties in Utah used the right to coordination to stop the BLM from releasing diseased wild horses onto public ranch lands.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there, so kudos to Nick Dranias and Goldwater for creating this federalism toolkit.