HILLARY-LERNER 2016: As many as 24,000 of Lois Lerner’s IRS emails missing.

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GREECE: THE REMARKABLY IMPORTANT LOOMING FINANCIAL CRISIS YOU’RE NOT HEARING ABOUT.

As Ace notes, as of now, “It Sure Looks Like Greece Will Exit the Euro.”

20 ESSENTIAL JOB INTERVIEW TIPS: “Employers check Facebook accounts so make sure all your photos looking at a spreadsheet and punching the air.”

And on a more serious note, “you won’t be 25 years old forever. You might even, in fact, end up dreading that all that stuff you wrote back then [on Facebook and Twitter] might surface at the worst possible moment. Because it does that, you know.”

(Via Ace of Spades.)

COULTER TO PJ MEDIA: CUT OFF ALL IMMIGRATION, FOCUS ON WHITE VOTERS TO WIN: What could go wrong?

JONATHAN RAUCH: HOW MY PREDICTIONS ABOUT GAY MARRIAGE TURNED OUT. A thoughtful early advocate of gay marriage (and a strong advocate of marriage in general), writes about what he got right, what he got wrong, and what remains to be seen. Worth a read, regardless of your views on the issue.

ROGER KIMBALL ON JUSTICE KENNEDY’S RUSSIAN DOLL: “Whatever your position on same-sex marriage, if you care about the future of democracy in America, you should be profoundly disturbed by last week’s proceedings in which bloviating hermeneutical ingenuity gave cover to breathtaking judicial triumphalism.”

AS A WISE MAN ONCE SAID, PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Univision’s Attack on Donald Trump Backfires.

NICK GILLESPIE OF REASON: HOW THE FEDS ASKED ME TO RAT OUT COMMENTERS:

For starters, the subpoena was unnecessary because the comments obviously weren’t real threats. One of the commenters scooped up in this had written, “I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for that horrible woman” while another opined, “I’d prefer a hellish place on Earth be reserved for her as well.” What kind of country are we living in where you get in hot water for such tepid blaspheming? Even the more outrageous comments—“Its (sic) judges like these that should be taken out back and shot” —wouldn’t exactly stir fear in the heart of anyone who has accessed the Web since AOL stopped charging by the hour.

As White writes, “True threat analysis always examines context. Here, the context strongly weighs in favor of hyperbole. The comments are on the Internet, a wretched hive of scum, villainy, and gaseous smack talk. They are on a political blog, about a judicial-political story; such stories are widely known to draw such bluster. They are specifically at Reason.com, a site with excellent content but cursed with a group of commenters who think such trash talk is amusing.”

But here’s the thing we non-lawyers might think of first: To the extent that the feds actually thought these were serious plans to do real harm, why the hell would they respond with a slow-moving subpoena whose deadline was days away? By spending five minutes doing the laziest, George Jetson-style online “research” (read: Google and site searches), they would have found publicly available info on some of the commenters. I’m talking things like websites and Google+ pages. One of the commenters had literally posted thousands of comments at Reason.com, from which it is clear that he (assuming it is a he) is not exactly a threat to anyone other than common decency.

But that’s your tax dollars at work, costing a reputable, award-winning website—albeit one that is sharply critical of government when it comes to snooping in the boardroom and the bedroom—time and money to comply with a subpoena for non-threatening readers. Even worse, the feds are doing the same to readers who may or may not have any resources to help them comply with legal proceedings that can go very wrong very quickly.

As Mark Steyn likes to say, “The process is the punishment.”

SUNDAY MORNING DECLINE AND FALL: “What do you hold to be the top five — objective — causes of the collapse of the Roman Empire? Why do you think them more important than the others?”, asks Claire Berlinski at Ricochet. “And don’t you find it relaxing to take a day away from contemplating current affairs? I don’t know why thinking about this subject hasn’t relaxed me yet, but I’m sure it will as I meditate upon it more deeply.”

PATTERICO: KING V. BURWELL: INTENTIONALISM TRUMPS TEXTUALISM, AND THE RULE OF LAW DIES:

This reminds me of a hypothetical I offered in 2010:

Assume you make $50,000 a year. The legislature passes a law imposing a hefty tax on “people making over $100,000 per year.” Since the law does not apply to you, by its plain terms, you do not pay the tax. However, you are convicted after a judge finds irrefutable contemporaneous evidence showing that all legislators who voted for the tax intended to impose it on people making over $10,000 a year. The judge, an “intentionalist,” finds that the intent of the legislature controls, regardless of the plain meaning of the law.

Under the plain language of the law, the tax does not apply to you. Applying the intent of the legislators, it does. Which is the better interpretation?

Read the whole thing.

WHY IS THE PENTAGON SO EAGER TO SCRAP THE A-10 WARTHOG, THE WARPLANE THAT ISIS FEARS?

MEGAN MCARDLE: HEALTH INSURANCE IS A FINANCIAL PRODUCT. It may not save lives–recent studies suggest it doesn’t–but, like other forms of insurance, it forestalls financial catastrophe.

Medical expenses really are different from other kinds of public policy programs, because they can be so wildly variable; 99 families out of 100 would be better off if you gave them cash instead of insurance, but the 100th will be hit by an expense that they could never realistically pay.

And that is what insurance is really for. As a health-care economist pointed out to me when the Oregon results came out, they were not actually all that surprising. Insurance is a financial product. It handles financial problems very well. We don’t expect car insurance to make us better drivers, or homeowner’s insurance to keep our house from burning down. Sure, insurance may change some behavior on the margins. But the direction of that change is not necessarily clear: Do you drive more safely to keep your rates down, or take more chances, because someone else will pay the bill if you damage another car? And whatever changes insurance produces are probably pretty marginal. Mostly what insurance does is protect us from financial ruin … and thereby, let us sleep a little easier at night.

The question, then, is “What program would you design if you wanted to give people the benefits that we know insurance confers?”

See her ideas here.

SLOWER PLEASE: Study Shows that 1 in 4 cancer research papers contain faked data.

AND FOR YOUR FINAL DOSE OF INSOMNIA THEATER: HARVEY ON HARVARD’S FREE SPEECH BAIT AND SWITCH – Check out this video of FIRE co-founder Harvey Silverglate’s take on the importance of free speech on campus and Harvard’s deception when it comes to academic freedom.

U.S. AUTHORITIES WORRY OF TERROR ATTACK OVER 4TH OF JULY, a story that dovetails remarkably well with Elizabeth’s link a few minutes ago to Bari Weiss’ Wall Street Journal article on “Love Among the Ruins,” and its reference to the 21st century’s eerie “split-screen age.”

PROGRESSIVES NEED PERSPECTIVE: . . .according to Bari Weiss, who writes about “Love Among the Ruins.”

On Friday my phone was blowing up with messages, asking if I’d seen the news. Some expressed disbelief at the headlines. Many said they were crying.

None of them were talking about the dozens of people gunned down in Sousse, Tunisia, by a man who, dressed as a tourist, had hidden his Kalashnikov inside a beach umbrella. Not one was crying over the beheading in a terrorist attack at a chemical factory near Lyon, France. The victim’s head was found on a pike near the factory, his body covered with Arabic inscriptions. And no Facebook friends mentioned the first suicide bombing in Kuwait in more than two decades, in which 27 people were murdered in one of the oldest Shiite mosques in the country.

They were talking about the only news that mattered: gay marriage. . . .

The barbarians are at our gates. But inside our offices, schools, churches, synagogues and homes, we are posting photos of rainbows on Twitter. It’s easier to Photoshop images of Justice Scalia as Voldemort than it is to stare evil in the face.

You can’t get married if you’re dead.

True that.

IT’S WORTH CONSIDERING: Ted Cruz: Constitutional Remedies to a Lawless Supreme Court.

The Framers of our Constitution, despite their foresight and wisdom, did not anticipate judicial tyranny on this scale. The Constitution explicitly provides that justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” and this is a standard they are not remotely meeting. The Framers thought Congress’s “power of instituting impeachments,” as Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers, would be an “important constitutional check” on the judicial branch and would provide “a complete security” against the justices’ “deliberate usurpations of the authority of the legislature.”

But the Framers underestimated the justices’ craving for legislative power, and they overestimated the Congress’s backbone to curb it. It was clear even before the end of the founding era that the threat of impeachment was, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “not even a scarecrow” to the justices. Today, the remedy of impeachment — the only one provided under our Constitution to cure judicial tyranny — is still no remedy at all. . . .

The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. . . .

Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. . . .

I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections. Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years.

It is time to give serious consideration to such a constitutional amendment. Very few lawyers are exposed, in today’s law schools, to any method of constitutional interpretation other than “living” constitutionalism. Accordingly, the existing and future generations of Supreme Court Justices–drawn mostly from law schools such as Harvard and Yale, which are dominated by elitist progressive, living constitutionalist faculty–cannot be counted on to appreciate, much less adhere to, public meaning originalism. If this is the case, neither the remote threat of impeachment nor the replacement of Justices with new ones will check runaway Justices intent on acting like super-legislators.

Giving more power back into the hands of We the People is desirable. But do the American people care enough to mobilize to the extent required for ratification of a constitutional amendment? It takes 2/3 of both Houses of Congress (or 2/3 of States acting in convention) to propose a constitutional amendment, and then 3/4 of States must ratify.  I don’t know.

ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS MUST NOW LEARN TO LIVE AS EXILES IN OUR OWN COUNTRY:  “Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America,” Rod Dreher of the American Conservative writes in Time magazine.

A GAY CONSERVATIVE’S REACTION TO THE SUPREME COURT DECISION LEGALIZING THE RIGHT TO GAY MARRIAGE: “This morning, my partner of 15 years and I looked at each other and jokingly realized that perhaps – under common law – we were already legally married. So, like any good American, I immediately called our lawyer.”

JEB BUSH DIGS A DEEPER HOLE ON JUDGES. In responding to criticism of his brother’s selection of John Roberts to be Chief Justice, Jeb Bush revealed what he looked for in choosing judges as governor. Turns out it is exactly the sort of judicial conservatism that gave us our current problem with the Supreme Court:

“When I was governor, we tried to find people with a proven record of judicial restraint, and people that were committed to enforcing the constitutional limits on government authority. In essence, what I’m saying is I think we need to have people that have not just theoretically, but have had a proven record of not legislating from the bench.”

He then doubled down:

“All justices disappoint their presidents some of the time but Souter was like a 90 percent swing and miss,” Hewitt said. “How do you avoid Souters?”
“You focus on people to be Supreme Court justices who have a proven record of judicial restraint,” Bush answered.

This is exactly the problem with the judicial philosophy promoted by many conservatives for the past 30 years: “judicial restraint” in “enforcing constitutional limits on government authority” leads to NFIB v. Sebelius.  In fairness, that is not what Bush actually said but, as George Will recently observed, that is what this judicial philosophy produces in practice.

Thoughtful conservatives today will insist that, properly defined, “judicial restraint” includes enforcing constitutional limits, and the term could be defined that way.  But that is not the mentality of “restraint” as it was originally formulated by the Progressives and has been perpetuated by some conservatives. For years, “judicial restraint” has been primarily about not thwarting the will of “democratic majorities.” There are myriad doctrines to accomplish this. For example, you adopt a “presumption of constitutionality” that cannot be rebutted. Or find a “saving construction” of a statute to avoid finding it unconstitutional. Or you “defer” to administrative agencies’ interpretation of statutes. Or you make a statute “work” as the “legislature intended” (even if that means ignoring the plain or natural reading of its words).

Many good conservatives truly wanted Obamacare invalidated in NFIB because it was unconstitutional. And they then sincerely wanted it to be enforced according to its terms in King. But selecting judges with the judicial mindset of “judicial restraint” and “deference” to the majoritarian branches leads to the results we witnessed in NFIB and King. If conservatives persist in supporting presidents who select judges on this basis, they will persist in being disappointed.

I know, I know. What about Obergefell and gay marriage? Didn’t that result from a lack of “restraint”? No, if you don’t approve of Obergefell, it is because you do not agree with the constitutional rationale Justice Kennedy articulated for invalidating the state laws at issue, not because he was “unrestrained.” Winning Obergefell on the grounds urged by Chief Justice Roberts in his dissenting opinion also gives you NFIB and King. If you want to avoid the latter, then you should criticize the majority on the ground that Justice Thomas did in his dissent: that the majority misinterpreted the Due Process Clause, not that they were “unrestrained.” You will notice that Chief Justice Roberts did not join Justice Thomas’s dissent (though regrettably, Justices Thomas and Scalia joined his). The Chief Justice’s dissent was all about restraint and only secondarily about correctness. He cited Lochner v. New York 16 times because Lochner was supposedly about activism, rather than appropriate restraint. In contrast, Justice Thomas appealed to the original meaning of “the due process of law.” There is a big big difference between these two judicial mindsets.

So, if conservative Republicans want a different performance from the judiciary in the future, they must vet their presidential candidates to see whether they understand this point. Jeb Bush clearly does not. And I have personally heard Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina say much the same sort of thing about judges, showing that they do not understand this either–at least not yet. Only Rand Paul has been very clear about the duty of judges to invalidate unconstitutional law without restraint or deference.

I haven’t heard yet what other candidates think about this, but everyone should be listening closely. If you hear catch phrases like “judicial restraint,” “deferring” to “the democratic branches,” or “not legislating from the bench,” then you know this candidate intends to repeat the mistakes of past Republican presidents.

Conservatives must learn from the recent past what not to look for in a justice.

Cross posted on The Volokh Conspiracy.

THE GREEK CRISIS, HAVING BEEN BUILDING FOR YEARS, IS BLOWING THE HARDEST: “Beyond the potential for the first eurozone exit, Greece could be at risk of becoming a failed state – an outcome that would pose a multi-dimensional threat to the rest of Europe. Mitigating the adverse humanitarian consequences (associated with cross-border migration), and geopolitical impact of this storm would be no easy feat,” Zero Hedge notes.

RELATED: Greeks Line Up at Banks and Drain ATMs as Tsipras Calls Vote.

THIS IS CNN: ‘Look a bit closer’: CNN told why that wasn’t an ISIS flag at a gay pride parade:

https://twitter.com/alexqgb/status/614885767853182976

https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/614879774994001920

@DefendWallSt @camboviet This is some scary stuff here , they better watch their back

— Johnna Beuerlein (@fcwic1) June 27, 2015

Heh.™

UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY ACCORDINGLY: State Department Officially Calls Iran’s Forced Sex Change Surgeries ‘Confirmation:’

By referring to the surgeries as “gender confirmation,” rather than the much more widespread and morally neutral “sex reassignment surgery,” the State Department seems to be siding with the Iranian government’s false “cure” for homosexuality.

John Kerry never got the memo that Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not a how-to guide.