SENATORS OBJECT TO PARIS TALKS: Three senators introduced a resolution Thursday stating their objection to the United Nations climate talks in Paris.

“The international community needs to be aware that the U.S. Congress and the American people do not support President Obama’s international climate agenda,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in statement announcing the resolution.

It comes less than two weeks before world leaders meet in Paris to hash out a deal to cut global greenhouse gas levels and combat climate change.

Republicans and opponents of the talks have long said the Senate should get a say in the deal, while the Obama administration has looked to avoid sending a climate accord to a hostile Congress.

The issue of the need for congressional review came up again last week when European officials […]

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In August 1971, a prominent corporate lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, named Lewis F. Powell Jr. authored a “Confidential Memorandum” to the United States Chamber of Commerce. Powell observed that “with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” He urged the Chamber to replicate game-changing litigation victories by “[l]abor unions, civil rights groups,” and “public interest law firms,” which often came “at business’s expense.” Six years later, with Powell himself having been appointed to the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon, the Chamber created a “voice of business in the courts,” the National Chamber Litigation Center.
Signal

The Chamber of Commerce and its allies have worked toward carving out what amounts to a law-free zone.
Simon Lazarus

Over the past month, the Supreme Court heard three cases that show how radically Powell’s strategy has tilted the law business’s way—more so than he could have imagined, or even favored. Indeed, until he retired in 1987, Justice Powell embraced the Chamber’s position in only 53 percent of its cases he heard, whereas the Chamber has won 69 percent of its cases since John G. Roberts became chief justice in 2005. More significantly, as the […]

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Germany could approach the refugee crisis without surrendering its civility. But instead, the basest of anti-foreigner sentiment is taking hold in many places. If it continues, we could soon witness an atmosphere of brutality not seen in decades.

Recently, I just returned to Germany after spending a couple of years in the United States as a foreign correspondent. In that time that I’ve been back, I’ve become concerned, wrought with worry that my own country is losing its civility.

In America, I was often appalled by the brutality of a society where the majority support the death penalty and police are allowed to shoot people in the back even if they don’t present an immediate threat. I can’t change the fact that I am German, but for some time, I was pleased with that destiny. I was proud — not proud of Germany, but proud to be from a country that had apparently succeeded in becoming more empathetic and civil.

Firing on Refugees?

But the country I have returned to is a different one. It’s a country in which the state chairman of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AFD) party in North Rhine-Westphalia has declared that, […]

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