(cross-posted, interestingly enough, back home)

I'm ever-confounded by e-mail signatures--not the frilly and often over-extended messages at the end of e-mails. Those too, I don't understand. But I mean the way people spell out their names at the ends of their e-mails. And by people, I mean people my age, +/- 5 years. Of course I don't mean to set any standards, but it seems only common courtesy to me that one should sign with their full name, e.g.,:

Sudeep

Much love,
Sudeep

See you soon,
Sudeep

Cheers,
Sudeep

Bests,
Sudeep

Hope you're well,
Sudeep

s

You have enough time. Trust me, you have enough time (I scream in my mind's mind) and if you don't, I'll be willing to pay the fifty cents your time is worth (in person, if need be) for you to spell out the other five-odd letters of your name, and throw off this pretense.

Even more obnoxious than the single first initial sign-off by far, however, is the:

-s.

"To be or no to be"
-Shakes.

Sudeep D. Agarwala
Ambassador to French Guyana
Three-time Winner, Heisenberg Award in Computational Chemistry
Prime Minister of Canada 1984-1988
Heisman Trophy winner, 1946, 1947, 1968

Perhaps even more annoying than the "-s."--well, maybe about the same--is simply the initials:

sda

But, of all, the world can stop (anyone's, yes--anyone's) for all the letters of your name. The sea, after all, is very wide.

Sudeep

From the November 15 lecture of Dr. Mark P. Lagon, Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs, at Georgetown's Institute of International Law and Politics:

In trying to implement our vision of democracy, we frequently receive criticism about the aim of the United States to utilize the United Nations to fulfill our own foreign policy goals. We actually agree this is our aim, but we neither consider it to be a criticism nor do we feel others should characterize it as such. After all, why would we be such an active participant in the work of the United Nations if we did not see the United Nations as part of our larger strategy to achieve our foreign policy goals? Especially when those foreign policy goals are wholly consistent with a decent and stable world order, and with positive-sum gains by other UN Member States.

Yes, justifying good works is considerably easier than the task of Deputy Secretary Adam Ereli, spokesman at daily press briefings, who must attempt to navigate questions about the CIA's rendition of prisoners to secret internments in Eastern Europe.

In her latest column for Slate, Dahlia Lithwick complains that having said that it is time for a national conversation about proper judging and the meaning of the constitution, conservatives refuse to step up to the plate. In particular, her beef is that conservatives are unwilling to defend Alito's 1985 comments that the Constitution didn't protect an abortion right.

She does adduce two counter examples-- Bruce Fein and Wendy Long but adds, "Well, good for you, Bruce and Wendy. But, um, where are the rest of you?"

Well, let's see. There's Steve Dillard, Professor Bainbridge, Hugh Hewitt, Sydney Carton, The American Federalist Journal, Sierra Faith, Andrew Hyman, Patterico, Donkey Stomp, Blogs for Bush, Stop the ACLU, AJStrata, Ramesh Ponnuru, Gerard Bradley, to name just a few.

My law school exams are still almost two months away, but others are already starting to fret about theirs. The folks at Prawfsblawg have started this forum to ask and answer exam questions. Given the idiosyncracy of law professors and their demands, I'm not sure how universalizable this advice is, but some may find it helpful.

Right. One final thought on birthright citizenship, etc, before I go bludgeon another topic into submission. As Will has pointed out to me, the issue of what Congress would have to do, and how far they would have to go, to strip themselves over jurisdiction over any particular group of individuals, is pretty murky. At a minimum, though, the Congressional ratification debates make clear that there is a complex web of legal interactions and lines of authority between the government and the citizenry which would have to be chopped down before this could happen.

Rep. Tom Tancredo (who else?) thinks that matters should be simpler. He (and about 60 other mostly-conservative Republicans) are co-sponsors on a bill to strip the government of jurisdiction over the children of illegal immigrants, and thus those children of citizenship. One thing to keep in mind: this is a bill intended to change the legal posture and powers of the government toward these individuals, and thus affect the jurisdictional question. The bill thus is grounded in the interpretation of the Citizenship Clause which Will and I both find most convincing.

So what does the bill do? Does it redefine the government's criminal jurisdiction over these individuals? Does it alter the extent to which they can sue or be sued in American courts? Does it reduce their tax liability, or the benefits which they receive from the government as putative citizens? Nothing so interesting or far-reaching. All the bill does is change the definitional section of the umbrella Immigration and Nationality Act such that children of illegal immigrants are not, for the purposes of that act (and nothing else) "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States. That's it. The bill doesn't change anything else. It doesn't mention anything else about their status within the United States.

I don't really know what you'd have to do to remove a group of people from the jurisdiction of the United States. But I'm pretty sure that what you'd have to do is too in-depth and complicated to fit on one page!

1: Classmate and frequent interlocutor Steve Sachs has put his forthcoming paper on the Law Merchant up on SSRN.

2: The oral argument in Central Virginia Community College v. Katz (the Roberts Court's first argued sovereign immunity case) is available online.

So far, my favorite moment from the argument is this (on page 7 of the PDF):

Justice Breyer: But there is not a Tort Clause of the United States Constitution. There is not a Contract Clause. And there is a Bankruptcy Clause.

Freedom of speech--to state what one thinks Jesus would preach--and freedom of religion--the particular congregation holds as a core values the alleviation of poverty and the promotion of peace and equality--are at stake in the case described below. Should, too, a guest sermon by a pastor emeritus speaking his own personal opinion jeopardize the tax status of the church at which he preaches?

The sermon this Sunday at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, CA focused on the church's woes: All Saints is under investigation by the IRS and risks its tax status being revoked[1] on grounds that the sermon preached by Rector Emeritus, George Regas, on October 31, 2004 violated IRS regulations against campaign intervention. In the IRS's words, the address given on the Sunday preceeding the 2004 presidential election "delivered a searing indictment of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, criticism of the drive to develop more nuclear weapons, and described tax cuts as inimical to the values of Jesus".

All that is true. After preaching that good people of faith would be voting for both candidates, Rector Regas called for his congregation to vote their values and their conscience on November 2nd, in an election in which the key isseus were peace and poverty. [written sermon; mp3] He preached that the fundamental premise behind the war in Iraq--that it was a response to the 9/11 attacks--was not justifiable in a Christian perspective, and that further proposals on how to wage war were unconsciousable.

"I believe that Jesus us to be nuclear abolitionists through the political process. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Jesus places on your hearts this question: when you go to the polls November 2nd, will you vote all your values? Jesus places on your hearts this question: who is to be trusted as the world's chief peacemaker?"[2]

The question of how to live in this world is key to many religions and many religious people.[3] And in times of stress--what is the meaning of a tsunami?--or when difficult decisions are faced--for whom to vote--many people of faith turn to their religious leaders for advice in interpreting their moral and ethical obligations and texts.[4]

All Saints has responded, through counsel, to the IRS:

[Y]our concerns are based on a subjective determination that that the guest pastor was implicitly opposing one candidate and endorsing the other. In contrast, your analysis ignores the fact that the guest pastor explicitly stated at the outset of his sermon that he was not advising anyone how to vote.

The IRS regulation advices that the bar[5] is stricter than that: 501(c)(3) organizations may not take sides on candidates: "Even activities that encourage people to vote for or against a particular candidate on the basis of nonpartisan criteria violate the political campaign prohibition." The criteria in the sermon clearly encouraged votes against Bush.

The standard solution is that of Taxation with Representation (TWR): establish a 501(c)(4) affiliate to employ the necessary accounting tricks.[6] If the First Amendment does not require Congress to subsidize lobbying, a form of speech, then it does not also require Congress to subsidize the existence and speech of churches. As a generally applicable law and Smith still standing, freedom of religion would not be infringed if there were no tax-exempt status for churches. That Congress does choose to subsidize the existence and religious speech of churches does not require it to allow certain money--what would have been taxpayer money had the donations not been exempt---to support political speech aiding or hindering candidates.

And yet, the restriction on what types of discussions may exist within a sermon still strike me as untenable.
- At any time, a minister can speak of how the political situation in 30AD influenced the apostles' writings.
- If it's not election time, a minister can speak of how disregarding the need for environmental protections on the grounds that the Rapture is near is a seriously flawed reading of the Bible.
- BUT: If the candidates are running amuk and this statement would implicate on one of them, a minister cannot speak of how opposed Jesus would be to the use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations.

Chronological events---Tuesdays in November---dictate a minister's ability to interpret the Bible relative to current events in front of his congregation. I realize that this is what the regulations say, if the interpretation comes to be a campaign against a candidate, and that the former Chief Justice would have told Little Red Riding Hood that she accepted this bargain when she accepted the Big Bad Wolf's donated cookies (meanwhile, perhaps if she put them in a separate ziploc bag, she wouldn't have to comply). He, though, wrote the dissent; the majority had a severability test.[7]

If there's no way to establish a 501(c)(4) that can, post-haste, 'correct' political sermons by paying out of the properly separate pots, then I'm concerned that Constitutional speech is being excuded contra to the law laid out in League of Women Voters---perhaps it takes the First Amendment overbreadth doctrine to get here, but we keep that thing around for a reason.

If a valid and useful 501(c)(4) can be established to protect the right of churches to speculate as to what Jesus would do, then the IRS regulation seems at best a cumbersome and ill-thought policy that ignores one of the key functions of churches. All Saints is a Peace Church. As an institution, it has decided to abide by and to enact certain views on peace, equality and justice. Talk of these requirements are perfectly apt for sermons, and like many requirements, are tied into the actions of daily life, including voting. I wish I could find more substantial scorn than 'inept and unappreciated policy,' but I have not yet found the proper constitutional hook on which to hang it.

There's the question, too, as to whether or not Rector Regas's sermon should have triggered such an investigation. Remember: he's emeritus. All Saints seems to believe that such a label marks him clearly as a potential loose cannon who has no authority to speak on behalf of the church, and as a stranger whose words could not be predicted before hand. In the IRS'sexpanded guidelines (see p. 7-8), the test for endorsement appears to be whether or not the minister is speaking his views (even if he labels them as personal) through the assistance of the church's assets in communicating his views. The controversial speech was at a church service, but was delivered by a guest minister no longer formally affiliated with All Saints. Surely, it's one thing to be held responsible for any employee exporting dual-use military technology to Uzbekistan, and another entirely to hold a church liable for the remarks---were the church Pentecostal, even made under the influence of the Spirit---of an unbound speaker.

Footnotes:

[1] The L.A. Times has reported that the IRS offered to drop its investigation if All Saints admitted to intervening, a settlement the church has refused. That article noted only one found instance in which a church's status has been revoked for such grounds: a Binghamtom, NY church ran advertisements opposing Clinton for president in 1992 (Branch Ministries v. Rossotti, 211 F.3d 137 (D.C. Cir. 2000)). Notably, churches of all stripes are uniting in opposition to the investigation.

[2] The pastor continued to say that Jesus came to minister for the poor, but that income inequality had been reinforced by President Bush and the Congress; the Jesus who expunged the money-changers had been thrown out by those who invoked his name. He spoke, too, on abortion and reproductive choice: that no one had the right to force a belief on this on to the rest of society. "Shame on all those conservative politicians. . . who have proclaimed their love for children when they were only fetuses--but ignored their needs after they were born."

[3] A fascinating sermon preached this February at a different Pasadena church argued that John 3:16 is meant to emphasize the distinction between Gnostics, who believed that the world was a mistake to be escaped, and early Christians, who countered that if God loved the world, it must have good and value within it. The lesson was not merely one of foundational church history, but a caution to those who interpret natural disasters as a sign of the end times. Evangelicals of that viewpoint and politicians who did not act to protect the natural world were linked in the sermon as people who treat the world as the Bible suggests it be treated.

There was no election at hand, no mention of voting. The question of how to live is a permanent one, and advice and recommendations given in sermons a form of ever-present issue ad intended often to both build the criteria by which listeners imagine a better world and exhort them to make that world a reality.

[4] See also:

This Court has recognized that expression on public issues "has always rested on the highest rung of the hierarchy of First Amendment values." "[S]peech concerning public affairs is more than self-expression; it is the essence of self-government." There is a "profound national commitment" to the principle that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." NAACP v. Claiborne, 458 U.S. 886, 913 (1982) (internal citations removed)

[5] The code at 501(c)(3) defines an eligible organization as one

which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office.

[6] I'm not sure, but I don't think that this is a League of Women Voters situation. Were it, the impossibility of segregating activities according to the source of the funding would require the editorial ban to be struck down. However, that case arose under spectrum scarcity, and it would certainly be possible for a 501(c)(4) affiliate to reimburse the 501(c)(3) church for any election-related sermons that are preached.

[7] That applies at least where limited telecommunications resources (not an element here) are concerned), and noted that in the great variety of opinions, editorializing will benefit all viewpoints roughly equally (true too here, but that wasn't a holding

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