Andrew P. Napolitano

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: George W. Bush, Obama trampled Fourth Amendment

President George W. Bush was fond of saying that "9/11 changed everything." He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts.

February 11, 2015

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: To vaccinate or not to vaccinate?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie unwittingly ignited a firestorm earlier this week when he responded to a reporter's question in Great Britain about forced vaccinations of children in New Jersey by suggesting that the law in the United States needs to balance the rights of parents against the government's duty to maintain standards of public health.

February 4, 2015

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Torturing terror suspects leads to little justice

Ali Saleh al-Marri is a convicted conspirator who entered the United States before Sept. 11, 2001, in order to create a dreaded sleeper cell here that might someday launch an attack on Americans similar to what we witnessed earlier this month in Paris. When the feds woke from their slumber on Sept. 11, they wisely began to search immigration records for persons who came here with no discernible purpose from places known to spawn terrorist groups and who had overstayed their visas. Al-Marri was one such person.

January 28, 2015

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Government steals Americans’ freedoms with NSA snooping

While the Western world was watching and grieving over the slaughter in Paris last week, and my colleagues in the media were fomenting a meaningless debate about whether President Obama should have gone to Paris to participate in a televised parade, the feds took advantage of that diversion to reveal even more incursions into our liberties than we had known about.

January 21, 2015

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: French government decides what speech is free

The photos of 40 of the world's government leaders marching arm-in-arm along a Paris boulevard on Sunday with the president of the United States not among them was a provocative image that has fomented much debate. The march was, of course, in direct response to the murderous attacks on workers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo by a pair of brothers named Kouachi, and on shoppers at a Paris kosher supermarket by one of the brothers' comrades.

January 14, 2015

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: U.S. government stealing Americans’ freedom

A British author, residing in the United States for the past 30 years, created a small firestorm earlier this week with his candid observations that modern-day Americans have been duped by the government into accepting a European-style march toward socialism because we fail to appreciate the rich legacy of personal liberty that is everyone's birthright and is expressly articulated in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

January 7, 2015

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Obama, Congress defy Constitution with budget bribery, breaches of power

When the government is waving at us with its right hand, so to speak, it is the government's left hand that we should be watching. Just as a magician draws your attention to what he wants you to see so you will not observe how his trick is performed, last week presented a textbook example of public disputes masking hidden deceptions. Here is what happened.

December 17, 2014

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The CIA and its torturers

When the head of the CIA's torture unit decided to destroy videotapes of his team's horrific work, he unwittingly set in motion a series of events that led to the release this week of the most massive, detailed documentation of unlawful behavior by high-ranking government officials and intentional infliction of pain on noncombatants by the United States government since the Civil War era. Here is the backstory.

December 10, 2014

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Ferguson riots failures of racial sensitivity, police militarization

The city of Ferguson, Missouri, is now burned into our consciousness in a way that few other places are. In my youth, the race riots in Newark, Detroit and Los Angeles marked turning points in my own and in the public's awareness of the problems of a black underclass that perceives itself as being so unfairly governed by a white power structure that it resorts to violence.

December 3, 2014

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Give thanks to God, not to government

What if the government is designed to perpetuate itself? What if the real levers of governmental power are pulled by agents, diplomats and bureaucrats behind the scenes? What if they stay in power no matter who is elected president or which major political party controls Congress?

November 26, 2014

ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Questions for Loretta Lynch’s Senate confirmation hearings

Within hours of realizing that his party lost control of the U.S. Senate last week, President Obama nominated Loretta Lynch, the chief federal prosecutor in Brooklyn, N.Y., to be the next attorney general.

November 12, 2014

ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO: Can the Republicans make a difference?

With the midterm elections complete, it is clear now that the Republicans will control the U.S. Senate for the next two years. Will it make a difference?

November 5, 2014

ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO: The presumption of liberty

In the years following the adoption of the Constitution, before he was secretary of state under President Thomas Jefferson and then president himself, James Madison, who wrote the Constitution, was a member of the House of Representatives.

October 29, 2014

ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO: The feds’ ‘truthy’ new chill on free speech

Earlier this week, the federal government's National Science Foundation, an entity created to encourage the study of science, announced that it had awarded a grant to study what people say about themselves and others in social media.

October 22, 2014

ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO: A euphemism for tyranny

Earlier this week, FBI Director James Comey in an interview on "60 Minutes" revealed a flawed understanding of personal freedom.

October 15, 2014

NAPOLITANO: Parallel reconstruction, an edifice of lies at NSA and DOJ

While the political commentators in the nation's capital are wrapped up in the debate over what to do about the Islamic State … the president's spies continue to capture massive amounts of personal information about hundreds of millions of us and lie about it.

October 8, 2014

NAPOLITANO: Throwing Clapper under the bus

When President Obama attributed the rise in Iraq of the Islamic State, or ISIS, to the failures of the U.S. intelligence community earlier this week, naming and blaming directly National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper, he was attempting to deflect criticism of his own incompetence.

October 1, 2014

NAPOLITANO: Mistakes of the past are back in Iraq and Syria

What if the American invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction? What if whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein once had were sold to him in the 1980s by American arms dealers with the express permission of the U.S. government?

September 24, 2014

NAPOLITANO: More unlawful presidential killing

The nation has lost sight of the more fundamental issue of President Obama's infidelity to the rule of law.

September 17, 2014

NAPOLITANO: When America wages war

Chief among those restraints, in Madison's view, was the delegation to Congress, and not to the president, of the power to wage war.

September 10, 2014