{"id":22625,"date":"2015-03-18T19:44:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T23:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=22625"},"modified":"2015-03-18T19:44:00","modified_gmt":"2015-03-18T23:44:00","slug":"prosecutorial-discretion-needed-at-the-interior-dept","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/22625\/prosecutorial-discretion-needed-at-the-interior-dept\/","title":{"rendered":"Prosecutorial Discretion Needed at the Interior Dept."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>President Barack Obama has rooted most of his amnesty program on the idea that he and his bureaucrats can exercise immense amounts of prosecutorial discretion in refusing to deport millions of illegal immigrants. While this iteration of prosecutorial discretion <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/393094\/no-prosecutorial-discretion-does-not-justify-obamas-lawless-amnesty-andrew-c-mccarthy \" target=\"_blank\">is absurd<\/a>, a more conventional application is badly needed at the Interior Department.<\/p>\n<p>Recently, Interior lost a high-profile legal battle over whether a Native American pastor in Texas could legally possess eagle feathers. The feathers were given to Pastor Robert Soto as a gift for giving spiritual counsel to a dying woman in his tribe. They were confiscated in the middle of a subsequent religious ceremony by undercover federal agents in a sting operation called \u201cOperation Powwow.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>You read that right.<\/p>\n<p>At issue is a federal law that prohibits the possession of feathers from more than 800 different kinds of birds, including eagles. It doesn\u2019t matter how the feathers are obtained. In Soto\u2019s case, the feathers were <em>picked up off the ground<\/em> after the eagle molted. If the law were to be applied in every case like it was in Soto\u2019s the results would be laughable.<\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2026any child who goes to a park and picks up a feather is in violation of federal law if he picks up a common goose or a duck feather and takes it home,\u201d <a href=\"http:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2015\/03\/18\/feds-invade-native-american-gathering-grab-property-threaten-jail\/\" target=\"_blank\">writes Kristina Arriaga<\/a> of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. \u201cHowever, one does not see covert agents sneaking around neighborhoods in an \u201cOperation Park Patrol\u201d to investigate children collecting feathers, playing with them, or using them in school projects.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>At least not yet.<\/p>\n<p>Memo to the federal bureaucracy: <em>This<\/em> is an example of the need for prosecutorial discretion. Refusing to police the border or take action against those who cross it illegally is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>President Barack Obama has rooted most of his amnesty program on the idea that he and his bureaucrats can exercise immense amounts of prosecutorial discretion in refusing to deport millions of illegal immigrants. While this iteration of prosecutorial discretion is absurd, a more conventional application is badly needed at the Interior Department. Recently, Interior lost [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[515,143,981,4660,4615,3609],"class_list":["post-22625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-amnesty","tag-barack-obama","tag-immigration","tag-native-american","tag-prosecutorial-discretion","tag-religious-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22625"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22625\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22633,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22625\/revisions\/22633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}