In a District Court ruling last week, the judiciary proved once agai, how impotent and subservient to unchecked executive power it is when a federal court judge invoked the state secrets privilege and dismissed most of a suit against Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, who infiltrated and spied on mosques in Orange County in California. The ruling essentially gave cover to the FBI, which had lied to the community about engaging in covert operations against the Muslim community. And yet the foundation of the state secrets doctrine is based on government fraud.

Ed DeMarco is really feeling his oats, no doubt thanks to projections of profits at Fannie and Freddie paradoxically spurred by a housing shortage. (Those profits are at least partially derived from Fannie and Freddie evading local government transfer taxes, by the way, not DeMarco’s “responsible stewardship.”) He rejected principal reductions as a means to solve the foreclosure crisis. And now, he’s going after another potential solution floated by some local governments: eminent domain.

The question that many of us asked in the wake of the revelations about money laundering at Standard Chartered Bank is why the federal regulators did apparently nothing, and that this had to get revealed by New York’s Department of Financial Services.

If you are in Congress, and the voters flatly reject you in November, you will still retain power for another 55 days. Even if Obama loses this year, he will still maintain power for an incredible 75 days after the electorate voted to remove him from power. These “lame duck” sessions or periods of time in office after an election result from the fact that elections happen so far before the Constitution allows newly elected officials to take office.

Reactions from political leaders and stakeholders.

This is a complicated ruling, with long-term implications that go well beyond health care. The short version is that the ACA is “upheld,” but that really doesn’t tell the whole story.

At some point, either the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the National Labor Relations Board were bound to issue a ruling that the subjects affected didn’t like, and they would resort to claiming that the recess appointments were unconstitutional, and therefore the rulings handed down inapplicable and illegitimate. It took a bit longer than I thought, but we finally saw that today.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced her support for using the 14th Amendment solution to surmount the debt limit. During last year’s debt limit debate, many commentators observed that the 14th amendment comes in conflict with the notion of a debt limit, as it says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payments of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

In France, Francois Hollande’s Socialists took an absolute majority in Parliament, meaning Hollande will have a fairly easy time implementing his agenda. The question that will now be answered concerns what that agenda is. In Egypt the military mnimized the new elected president’s powers and promised a new constitution and parliamentary elections, effectively undercutting Egypt’s new democracy. But can the effective military control survive in the long run?

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston has affirmed a ruling declaring the Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, bringing the case one step closer to an ultimate resolution at the Supreme Court.