In the Trump administration’s response to the lawsuit brought by Texas and the Texas Public Policy Foundation challenging the current constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Department of Justice agreed that several key portions of the ACA were unconstitutional. Immediately, several commentators reported that the Justice Department’s failure to defend the law in...
In 2012, the five conservative justices on the United States Supreme Court (including Chief justice John Roberts) held that key portions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exceeded Congress’s constitutional authority under the Commerce Clause. But, Chief Justice Roberts then joined the four liberal justices on the Court in upholding the ACA as a tax...
In 2016, the city of Austin passed one of the most aggressive sets of regulations for short-term rentals — also known as vacation rentals or furnished rentals — in the country. A constitutional challenge to those regulations is currently pending before the Third Court of Appeals in Austin. In a recent article in the Texas...
The opioid problem is at a crisis level, but targeting pharmaceutical companies because of their deep pockets may enrich a few, but will fail to benefit many. Recently, personal injury lawyers have been chasing Texas counties to file lawsuits on a contingent fee basis against pharmaceutical manufacturers for the cost of dealing with opioid abuse. The...
May the government monitor your internet habits or the location of your cell phone without a warrant? The United States Supreme Court will soon decide. This year, the court could decide as many as three cases involving the scope of the Fourth Amendment in the digital age. If the oral arguments in these cases...
If you are breathing as you read this, you are emitting an officially designated dangerous pollutant, subject to federal regulation. At least that was the position of the Environmental Protection Agency under the past administration. In 2009, the EPA issued an “endangerment finding” concluding that carbon dioxide, the same gas that we exhale, poses...
As with any human endeavor, there will always be some bad actor out there that can provide fodder for anecdotal reports. But we don’t base public policy on anecdotes, we base it on facts — particularly when constitutional rights are at stake. In a recent op-ed in TribTalk, Vivé Griffith wrote an impassioned defense of...
Owners and guests of short-term and vacation rentals in Texas recently racked up another win at the 3rd Texas Court of Appeals. On August 22, the Austin court joined a growing list of state appellate courts to hold that renting your home out for short periods of time does not magically transform it into a commercial enterprise...
The individual mandate survived constitutional challenge solely because it was a tax. The AHCA penalty doesn't have that option. Hopefully, the House's decision to delay the vote on the AHCA will give the GOP an opportunity to reconsider its mistake.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) decision to list the Pacific Bearded Seal as an endangered species. The seal is not currently threatened, but according to the NMFS, it might be threatened in 2095, if current global warming climate-models hold true—a highly unlikely proposition, given the historical unreliability of such models
The Austin City Council has declared war on short-term rental houses. The constitutional rights of owners and tenants are that war’s collateral damage
It's time Congress did its job and clarified the scope of the CWA. If it doesn't, a growing contingent of Supreme Court Justices seems ready and able to flush the Clean Water Act.