Category: Experts Guide

“The court is very clear that the Constitution gives no authority to the president to do any of these things, and that federal law doesn’t either,” Derek Clinger, a senior staff attorney with the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative, told Votebeat.

States have broad power to regulate within their borders unless the U.S. Constitution bars it, but many of these laws raise novel issues that courts will have to sort out, said Harrison Stark, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“There’s not a super clear, concrete legal answer to a lot of these questions,” he said. “It’s almost guaranteed there will be federal litigation over a lot of these policies.”

Federal officials may be prosecuted if they “acted beyond the scope of their duties, violated federal law, or behaved in an egregious or unwarranted manner,” Bryna Godar, an attorney at the State Democracy Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin Law School, wrote in a brief explainer.

States have broad power to regulate within their borders unless the U.S. Constitution bars it, but many of these laws raise novel issues that courts will have to sort out, said Harrison Stark, senior counsel with the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

“There’s not a super clear, concrete legal answer to a lot of these questions,” he said. “It’s almost guaranteed there will be federal litigation over a lot of these policies.”

Her family still in Iran has chosen to join the latest wave of anti-government protests, which are largely focused on the country’s soaring inflation.

“There are very few people in the United States who can wrap their mind around an inflation rate of 42%,” said James Davis, a professor emeritus in the College of Engineering at UW-Madison.

Franciska Coleman, an assistant professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said the First Amendment places firm limits on when speech can be treated as disorderly conduct.

Coleman said courts usually look for evidence of incitement – a call for immediate lawless action – before speech can be punished as disorderly conduct.

“Here, there’s no advocacy of lawless action, period,” Coleman said. “So, it’s hard for it to meet the incitement standard.”

Other categories of unprotected speech, such as threats or “fighting words,” also do not appear to apply here, she said.

Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Director of the Elections Research Center, noted, generally, there simply aren’t many districts that Republicans can win and that are “swingable.”

“There aren’t very many competitive districts, whether we’re looking at the period before this latest round of mid-decade redistricting or since some states have put new maps in place,” said Burden. “Either way, there just aren’t very many districts that are truly up for grabs.”

“Rare earths” is a misnomer, as the elements are relatively ubiquitous in the Earth’s crust, according to Julie Klinger, geographer and associate professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. But extracting them and refining them is the difficult part.

“Federal officers do not have absolute immunity for actions taken on the job but they do have some immunities,” said Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

The idea behind the concept of immunity for federal officers is to prevent a situation where states could grind the federal government to a halt by commonly arresting its agents, Godar said, but the protection is not absolute if the facts of the case support that the officer was acting unreasonably.

Federal courts have sometimes blocked state prosecutions under that provision, out of concern that state authorities are using their prosecutorial power to frustrate the federal government from legitimately exercising its own powers, according to Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative.

Godar wrote in the Lawfare legal publication that federal courts have repeatedly blocked state prosecutions when the federal official was reasonably carrying out lawful federal duties. But, outside those circumstances, courts have allowed the prosecutions to go forward.

“In many cases, the federal officer may ultimately walk away with immunity. But not always,” Godar wrote.

“The legal standard basically is that a federal officer is immune from state prosecution if their actions were authorized by federal law and necessary and proper to fulfilling their duties,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Yablon, who is the faculty co-director of the school’s State Democracy Research Initiative, said state prosecutors would have to consider both state and federal laws to overcome the hurdles of immunity. They would first need to show a violation of state statutes to bring charges, but also that the use of force was unconstitutionally excessive under federal law.

“If the actions violated the Fourth Amendment, you can’t say those actions were exercised under federal law,” he said, referring to the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

David Drake, a forestry and wildlife professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, likens them to America’s “sacred cow.” As Drake and a colleague have outlined in a paper proposing a model for commercialized venison hunting in the U.S., any modern system would be fundamentally different from the colonial-era approach because it would be regulated, mostly by state wildlife agencies. But powerful coalitions of hunters and conservationists remain both faithful to the notion that wild game shouldn’t be sold and fearful that history will repeat itself.

“It is unprecedented,” said Allison Prasch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who studies presidential communication. “I really tried to use that word sparingly, because everything is unprecedented, but I think that’s apt.”

Trump has shifted from a foreign policy approach that advertised military interventions as a way to deliver freedom and democracy, done in conjunction with other western nations. On Wednesday, U.S. officials announced its plans to sell Venezuelan oil as news outlets reported a crackdown on dissent by the government the United States left in place.

“Just try to imagine George W. Bush standing up and boldly proclaiming that he has started this war because of the oil alone,” Prasch said in an interview.

The effort is somewhat comparable to solving a modern serial killer mystery by looking for the same DNA across different crime scenes, says John Hawks, an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was also not involved in the study.

“If you can find the same DNA pattern on paintings, drawings or even places connected with Leonardo,” he says, “you would have some confidence you are looking at his genome—even without being able to find genealogical relatives today.”