Can you be stripped of your citizenship for not disclosing that you exceeded the speed limit?

The US Supreme Court heard an interesting case on Wednesday, April 26 involving the conditions under which the US government can strip away the citizenship of a naturalized citizen. The details of the case Maslenjak v. United States (it involved a Bosnian Serb who was granted refugee status) are not as interesting as the question that the court wanted the parties to address, which was: “May a naturalized American citizen be stripped of her citizenship in a criminal proceeding based on an immaterial false statement?”
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The incredible cruelty of petty officials

There are a lot of tragedies in life. But sometimes there are incidents that, in the grand scheme of things may seem relatively minor because they do not involve wars or things like that, but still provoke revulsion because they are examples of people treating other cruelly for no obvious reason when simpler, more humane options are available. And in this class are the actions of petty officials who abuse people because they think they can do so with impunity because the weight of authority is behind them. There are many examples of this, as we have seen in the behavior of the TSA personnel at airports, the Customs and Border Protection agents at borders, and of course the security personnel working for United Airlines who dragged a passenger off the plane.
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Trying to sneak the Bible back into schools

Given their recent successes in the courts in getting ceremonial prayer allowed at town council and school board meetings, we see that religious people have been emboldened to try things that have already been deemed unconstitutional, such as Bible classes in schools. In 1948, Vashti McCollum fought her local school district in Illinois when it required her young son Jim to attend Bible classes in school during regular school hours. The teachers would try to pressure the young child to attend the classes despite the wishes of his freethinking parents.
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A novel lawsuit involving climate change

The difficulty with the climate change problem is that it is a long-term one and thus policy makers, who tend to be older people, may not view it with the same sense of urgency since the most adverse consequences will occur after they are dead. It is young people who will pay the price for my generation’s inaction. Hence I was intrigued by this court ruling that I missed when it was handed down on November 10th of last year. It should have got much wider publicity than it did.
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Prayer allowed at school board meetings

When the US Supreme Court, in the case of Greece v. Galloway in 2013, issued a somewhat incoherent and confusing opinion that opening prayers could be allowed at the opening of town council meetings under certain conditions, many of us felt that this would be the thin edge of the wedge that would be used by religious public officials to increasingly introduce religion into the public square. And so it is proving. On March 20th, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a US District Court judge’s ruling that, following that Greece precedent, a Texas school board could also start its meetings with prayer, saying that the Galloway case set a new precedent.
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Kurt Gödel and how the US could become a dictatorship

Kurt Gödel is widely recognized as being one of the premier mathematical logicians of all time whose incompleteness theorems revealed a stunning limitation on the limits of the axiomatic approach. “His findings put an end to logicist efforts such as those of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead and demonstrated the severe limitations of David Hilbert’s formalist program for arithmetic.” He was also notoriously eccentric. After suffering from severe digestive disorders due to an ulcer, later in life he became convinced that he was being poisoned and his wife acted as his food taster. But his digestive problems and his refusal to eat led to him finally dying of starvation in 1978 at the age of 71.
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Why making accommodations for discrimination is problematic

Some of you may recall the case of Barronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlene’s Flowers in Richland, Washington, who refused to accept a gay couple’s order to make floral arrangements at their wedding because of her religious objections to same-sex marriages. She said that she felt that if she were to accept the order, that would be tantamount to her endorsing such marriages.
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Winning elections at the local and state levels

Amy Howe explains the significance of an opinion handed down on Wednesday by the US Supreme Court concerning the way that electoral districts were drawn in Virginia.

This morning the Supreme Court handed a partial victory to a group of Virginia voters who argued that the 12 state legislative districts in which they live were the result of racial gerrymandering. The justices agreed with the challengers that a lower court had applied the wrong legal standard when it upheld all 12 districts, and the court ordered the lower court to take another look at 11 of those districts. This means that the battle over the redistricting maps that were drawn for Virginia’s state elections after the 2010 census will continue on well into this year, even as the state prepares to hold new elections in November.
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Is this planned chaos or just incompetence?

One passage jumped out at me from the unanimous opinion of the Ninth Circuit panel refusing to overturn the US District Judge James Robart’s temporary restraining order on Donald Trump’s Executive Order on immigration.

The Government has argued that, even if lawful permanent residents have due process rights, the States’ challenge to section 3(c) based on its application to lawful permanent residents is moot because several days after the Executive Order was issued, White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II issued “[a]uthoritative [g]uidance” stating that sections 3(c) and 3(e) of the Executive Order do not apply to lawful permanent residents. At this point, however, we cannot rely upon the Government’s contention that the Executive Order no longer applies to lawful permanent residents. The Government has offered no authority establishing that the White House counsel is empowered to issue an amended order superseding the Executive Order signed by the President and now challenged by the States, and that proposition seems unlikely.
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