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The National Prayer Breakfast appearance by the President drew the usual rounds of pans and praise this week. (Just as a side note, it’s not really the best forum for stand up comedy and Schwarzenegger jokes.) One item which cropped up and drew a lot of media fire was President Trump’s renewed pledge to do away with the Johnson Amendment. As you will recall, that’s the 1954 law which restricts churches and other tax exempt, non-profit organizations from certain political activities. (NPR actually has a pretty good rundown of it here.) Most specifically in this case – and what most of the debate centers on – is the restriction on preachers who wish to tell their flocks who to vote for from the pulpit. Doing so theoretically places their tax exempt status in jeopardy. That’s the part that the President seems to want to see discarded. (WaPo)

This is one of those areas where I once again fall outside much of the conservative mainstream and my inner libertarian hackles are raised. The Johnson Amendment is a relatively toothless artifact of an earlier era and removing it would have almost zero real world impact for the most part, but it at least represents some lip service to a worthwhile principle in government. The amendment itself is really not the issue here. It’s almost entirely symbolic in terms of its effect on the day to day life of Americans. As a previous report indicated, since 2008 (when churches began seriously challenging the law) there has been only one example of a church being investigated on such charges and none have been punished. It’s extremely difficult to enforce and doing so would be met with huge resistance in some quarters. (No politician or law enforcement officer wants to be enshrined in the front page photo of a preacher being hauled off to jail.) So why support the amendment at all? Because we leave decisions about voting to the individual in the United States and, as with many other social and professional interactions, we protect the individual from undue influence by those who hold power over them. I wrote about this exact subject last summer when Trump was first talking about it. Here’s the key portion of the argument.

Preaching politics from the pulpit and using that platform to encourage the election of any candidate from either party is simply wrong. We give churches tax exempt status for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that they are outside of the political and governmental body of the nation. Further, a preacher telling you to vote for Candidate A over Candidate B isn’t just appealing to your intelligence and general sensibilities. They are speaking with the authority of the Almighty and providing you with guidance as to the maintenance of your immortal soul. This provides them with a position of vastly undue influence over your choices. It’s a parallel to the reason we don’t allow doctors to engage in sexual relations with their patients… they simply hold too much influence over them from positions of assumed trust.

The 9/11 trial judge on Wednesday froze pretrial hearings in a death-penalty case over a controversial Pentagon order requiring the judges to move permanently to this remote outpost until their cases are over.In a 10-page order, Army Col. James L. Pohl abated the prosecution of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four accused accomplices until the Pentagon rescinds its move-in order.He ruled that the circumstances surrounding the controversial Jan. 7 relocation order “raise the issue of Unlawful Influence by creating the appearance of improper pressure on the military judge to adjust the pace of the litigation.”Defense lawyers in both the Sept. 11 and USS Cole death-penalty cases have alleged the move is an attempt to illegally rush justice, describing it as a pressure play designed to exile the military judges to Cuba, cut short pretrial hearings and move straight to trial. Unlawful Command Influence, or commanders meddling in the judicial function, is a crime in the U.S. military.

Prosecutors have defended the order, designed by a retired Marine general functioning as a war court overseer, as part of an effort to improve resourcing at the crude compound here called Camp Justice.Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work signed it within a month of getting a recommendation from the overseer, retired Marine Maj. Gen. Vaughn A. Ary. It stripped military judges hearing Guantánamo cases of their other duties, including presiding at U.S. service members’ courts martial, without consultation with the top lawyers of the Army, Navy and Air Force.So far none of the judges has obeyed it pending clarifications from their overall commanders, called The Judge Advocates General.

One 9/11 defense attorney, Jay Connell, said that Pohl “was right to pull the plug on the case” — and recited what he saw as a pattern of government interference.“The FBI has infiltrated a defense team, a former CIA contractor became a defense interpreter, and the Deputy Secretary of Defense has unlawfully attempted to influence the military judge,” said Connell, the death-penalty defender of Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al Baluchi.