National Review

Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey has willfully abused the power of her office to push a progressive gun-control agenda. In July, she unilaterally expanded the state’s assault-weapon ban by reinterpreting it to include guns that duplicate or copy assault weapons. Gun retailers are expected to comply with two vague tests: “If a gun’s operating system is essentially the same as that of a banned gun, or if the gun has components that are interchangeable with those of a banned weapon,” it is now illegal in Massachusetts. But since even two months later no one knows which guns Healey has in mind, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) and four Massachusetts gun retailers have filed a lawsuit challenging her ambiguous directive.

Rather than specify which guns are now banned, Healey has issued an interpretation of the law so nebulous as to give her incredibly broad authority to ban any gun she sees fit. The directive could mean that all banned types of guns, even if they have been modified to abide by state law, are now illegal. (“In other words, it could mean that all AR-15s that have been modified to comport with Massachusetts law are now illegal purely because they are AR-15s,” as National Review’s own Charlie Cooke put it.) Or it could mean that all semi-automatic weapons are now banned in Massachusetts, since nearly every such gun has characteristics similar to those of a banned gun that would fall under the copycat test.

Healey has made no effort to clarify the directive, which gives her the power to criminally charge retailers. NSSF’s lawsuit, however, could force her to establish legal boundaries.

Across the state, gun retailers made numerous “attempts to get clarification” from Healey’s office regarding the directive, Mike Bazinet, NSSF’s director of public affairs, tells NR. But every time retailers reached out to Healey’s office for clarification, they got a similar response: The office “did not know the answer, and they did not have a list of what would be prohibited assault weapons,” according to the NSSF’s court filing. When pressed for answers, Healey’s office simply told retailers to use their “best judgment.”

Why leave it up to retailers to interpret the directive? Because Healey hasn’t devised a way to enforce it herself without violating the due-process protections in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms. The directive, according to the court filing, is “arbitrary and capricious and an abuse of discretion or is not otherwise in accordance with law.”

In the meantime, gun retailers have had to “err on the side of caution,” Bazinet says. No one wants to face criminal charges for unwittingly selling a now-illegal gun, and the only solution is to pull off the shelves any model that might violate the directive. The court filing describes IWI–Tavor model rifles, Smith and Wesson M&P .15-.22 rifles, and other firearms being taken out of stock at various gun shops in response to the threat of criminal prosecution, even though the guns were legal before.

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Charter schools have grown exponentially in recent years, with nationwide enrollment more than tripling between 2004 and 2014. The publicly funded but privately run institutions have a mixed record, but overall they have proven to be a viable alternative to the current failing public-education system. Partly owing to this success, teachers’ unions and their political supporters remain adamantly opposed to charters (which typically do not have unions), and they are eager to pounce on any chance to discredit them. A controversy over a $71 million federal grant to the state of Ohio to fund charter schools has become the latest bone of contention in this dispute.

When the Department of Education announced its competitive charter-school grants last fall, the news that Ohio had won the largest share of the $249 million awarded to eight states faced an immediate backlash. Ohio, critics said, had been a poster child for everything that can go wrong with charters – from misspent funds to failing schools. Ohio Democratic senator Sherrod Brown called on the Obama administration to take another look at Ohio’s programs before releasing the grant money. This month, the administration announced that Ohio would get the funds, with some strings attached. The news was met with scathing media reports.

“It remains an open question why a charter sector with this record deserves a grant at all,” Washington Post reporter Valerie Strauss wrote. She cited Innovation Ohio, a left-leaning think tank, which found that 37 percent of Ohio charter schools that received federal funds either closed down or failed to open. Strauss also highlighted the state’s charter-sector scandals, saying that it had “misspent tax dollars more than any other [state sector], including school districts, court systems, public universities hospitals, and local governments.” However, this narrative is not entirely accurate.

First off, the Innovation Ohio statistics are not as troubling as they seem. Charter schools are designed to be able to shut down – that’s one reason why parents like charters, since their children are not stuck attending an F-grade institution in their district. “Some are going to close,” Chad Aldis, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Vice President for Ohio Policy and Advocacy, told National Review. “And that’s okay. Those that are not serving the kids well should close.”

Compared with traditional public schools, charter schools are run more like businesses. They can begin to operate after an agency – which can be a nonprofit, a university, or a school district – outlines and approves a school’s objectives, standards, and more. And if a school fails to meet the proposed objectives or standards? In stark contrast with traditional public schools, those failures are more likely to result in the schools losing funding or ceasing to operate entirely.

In fact, many of the failed charter schools cited by Innovation Ohio were authorized by the very same school districts that run traditional public schools. So when those charter schools close, “Ohio’s school districts are partly to blame for that,” Aldis notes.

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Today, Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt announced his filing of the first state-led lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Labor’s new overtime rule, in what could prove a major blow to one of President Obama’s signature policies. Laxalt, in partnership with 20 other state attorneys general and governors, wants to halt the policy’s December 1 implementation date because the new rule, he argues, is an unconstitutional attempt by the Obama administration to “dictate how state and local governments allocate their budgets and provide service to their citizens and constituents.”

The new rule forces both public- and private-sector employers to pay time-and-a-half overtime to any hourly employees earning less than $47,476 per year, nearly double the old threshold of $23,660. Employees earning less than the threshold but performing “executive, administrative, or professional” duties were previously exempt from the DOL’s overtime requirements, but the new rule mandates that they receive time-and-half pay for extra work, too. In so doing, it directly overrides the exemptions outlined by Congress in the Fair Labor Standards Act. In addition to modifying the threshold and eliminating the white-collar exemption, the Obama administration created an algorithmic method to automatically update the salary threshold every three years based on wage growth and other factors. Laxalt calls this algorithm “ratcheting,” and it is a significant component of his lawsuit.

“Not only do we think we have an unlawful rule, but this rule will ratchet upward automatically forever,” Laxalt tells National Review. “We do not believe that federal law allows this to go into effect.”

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When Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey subpoenaed ExxonMobil for 40 years’ worth of company documents in April, she alleged the energy giant had engaged in a conspiracy to bury its scientific understanding of the consequences of burning fossil fuels on the climate. Healey claimed the documents would prove that ExxonMobil “knew about the risks of climate change decades ago and fraudulently concealed that knowledge from the public.” Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, disagreed. Last Friday, he filed an amicus brief on behalf of his state and ten others in support of ExxonMobil, describing the subpoena as a “grave mistake” — no less than a political stunt to silence all climate-change skeptics.

Healey’s subpoena stems from New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman’s probe into ExxonMobil. In November 2015, Schneiderman rallied 19 Democratic state attorneys general and formed “Green 20,” a coalition with one common interest: “Limiting climate change and ensuring the dissemination of accurate information about climate change.” Since its establishment, three members of Green 20 — Schneiderman, Healey, and U.S. Virgin Islands attorney general Claude Walker — have issued subpoenas for ExxonMobil’s climate-change related documents and the files of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free-market think tank that has received funding from the Texas-based oil-and-gas company. (Walker withdrew his subpoenas in June.)

But the Green 20 coalition is now opposed by eleven Republican state attorneys general, marking a major shift in the controversial lawsuit. In addition to Texas’s Paxton, the state attorneys general of Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Utah, and Nevada signed the amicus brief challenging Healey’s subpoena.

Paxton’s brief called into question Healey’s use of her law-enforcement authority in the context of an “ongoing public policy debate of international importance,” noting that it is a threat to freedom of speech. In this, Paxton is correct; government does not have the authority to silence or bully those who disagree with its preferred policy agenda.

“If the [Attorney General Healey] is right,” ExxonMobil’s attorneys wrote in a filing before Massachusetts’s Suffolk County Superior Court, “nothing is to stop a state prosecutor from issuing a subpoena to a political opponent seeking decades of records on the theory that a disagreement about policy constitutes fraud.” Policy disagreements, ExxonMobil’s attorneys argued, should be “resolved at the ballot box, not in the courthouse ” — reasoning closely aligned with Paxton’s. With a countersuit filed in federal court in Texas, ExxonMobil hopes to end Green 20’s investigation based on Healey’s imminent violation of the company’s constitutional rights, including the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and its freedom of speech.

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As part of his lame-duck foreign-policy push, Obama has sought to establish friendlier relations with Laos, a nation that is still a one-party Communist state.

In a speech to the people of Laos on Tuesday announcing a $90 million payment from the U.S. for the removal of unexploded ordnance dating back to the Vietnam War, he nodded at the fact that Laos is not a free country:

As we do around the world, the United States will continue to speak up on behalf of what we consider universal human rights, including the rights of the people of Laos to express yourselves freely and decide your own future.  Yet even as our governments deal candidly with our differences, I believe, as we have shown from Cuba to Burma to Vietnam, the best way to deliver progress for all of our peoples is by closer cooperation between our countries.

Obama also discussed the country’s government corruption. “We believe that there needs to be good governance, because people should not have to pay a bribe to start a business or sell their goods.”

But why would a Communist regime that is ranked 139 out of 165 in public-sector corruption abide by the Obama administration’s wishes for good governance?

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Progressive politicians contend that mandatory-minimum prison sentences are unjust and lead to mass incarceration — until, that is, a judge grants a lenient sentence to someone convicted of a crime that they especially abhor. Then, they suddenly change their narrative.

Last week, the California state legislature passed Assembly Bill 2888. The measure mandates a minimum three-year prison sentence for those convicted of rape. It was inspired by the case of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner, who sexually assaulted an unconscious woman after a fraternity party and received a mere six-month sentence behind bars — of which he served only three. Just one state legislator voted against the bill.

That legislator stuck to her guns. “We should not perpetuate practices that put an undue burden on minorities and economically disadvantaged communities like minimum mandatory sentences,” Democratic assembly member Cristina Garcia told National Review in a statement. “The limiting of judicial discretion falls primarily on minorities and the economically disadvantaged which are why the bill is opposed by the ACLU and why I voted no on this legislation.”

The California Democratic Party has in the past agreed with Garcia. They have thrown their support behind Proposition 57, an initiative on the ballot this November that would make it easier to parole more non-violent felons. “Non-violent” felonies, as defined by the law, include rape by intoxication, rape of an unconscious person, human trafficking, and the list goes on.

So where were Garcia’s fellow Democrats when Bill 2888 was making its way through the statehouse? Or are mandatory minimums only a problem when they are applied to crimes that Democrats particularly dislike? From the outside, it certainly seems so. Indeed, many of the same politicians who endorsed Prop 57 — a ballot initiative that would take felons convicted of rape out of jail earlier — put their names to Bill 2888, a bill that aims to put those same felons away for longer.

Turner’s short prison sentence deserved the national attention it got. But for the majority-Democrat legislature to propose as a solution the very measure that it has consistently fought against as the root of over-incarceration is preposterous.

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The University of Chicago’s recent decision to not condone “safe spaces” on campus earned a round of applause from First Amendment advocates. “Free speech is at risk at the very institution where it should be assured: the university,” University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer said. But as the University of Chicago has made substantial strides toward freedom of speech on campus, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has opted to narrow the scope of what can be discussed in the classroom.

Last week, three professors co-teaching a course titled “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” released a statement that addressed students who question man-made climate change. “We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” the professors said in a statement obtained by The College Fix. And if you disagree? The professors “respectfully ask that you do not take this course.”

One wonders: If the professors are positive that man-made climate change is occurring exactly in the manner they suggest, then why are they worried about a few students questioning their narrative? Universities are supposed to be places where students can improve themselves and others by debating openly. How does suppressing contradictory views aid that?

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The DOJ has its hands in nearly everything these days. Except, that is, for political corruption.

Attorney General Lynch has found the time to sue North Carolina for its transgender bathroom law and, to launch an immediate investigation into Alton Sterling’s fatal encounter with Louisiana police. But she has not batted an eyelash upon receiving investigative requests into Florida’s corrupt state capital.

In fact, when a bipartisan group led by former Democratic senator Bob Graham asked Holder in 2013 to aid the State Attorney’s Northern District Office (an underfunded office with only 22 attorneys) in investigating corruption, the DOJ responded with a simple “thank you.”

If anything, Graham’s letter to Holder wasn’t a request — it was a demand. “The Northern District Office lacks a freestanding public corruption unit and the institutional expertise and resources that are available in larger offices to investigate and prosecute these complicated and highly important cases,” Graham and his colleagues wrote. “It is too much to expect it adequately to investigate the vast operations of Florida’s $70 billion state government.”

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California’s human-trafficking industry is scandalously large. In 2015, approximately 293 cases of trafficking involving minors were reported by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center. This year, the tally has already hit 200 such cases. Rather than accepting the advice of the authorities who work with victims, California lawmakers have chosen a different route: to pass bills that work in theory, not reality.

Last week, the California state legislature sent SB 823 and SB 1322 to Governor Jerry Brown. The bills seek to decriminalize prostitution for minors and, as SB 823 states, allow “a person arrested or convicted of a nonviolent crime while he or she was a human trafficking victim to apply to the court to vacate the conviction and seal and destroy records of arrest.”

In 2016, voters are fed up with career politicians. This year, both Democratic and Republican congressional candidates are striving to cast themselves in opposition to the Washington establishment.

Ironically, the majority of “outsider” candidates on the ballot in November will have a background in the military, which falls within the long list of government institutions that are the very core of the “establishment.”

With most states having completed their congressional primaries, the success of veterans running outsider campaigns against entrenched incumbents is startling. In fact, 37 of the 72 House candidates nationwide who are espousing an anti-establishment campaign heading into the general election have a military or law-enforcement background, no political experience, and an anti-establishment message.

It’s not hard to explain this apparent contradiction: According to a Gallup poll from June, 73 percent of people have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military, while a mere 6 percent have any confidence in Congress. It seems that not every establishment institution is feeling the public’s wrath.

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