"Since at least 2009, the government's domestic spies have captured the metadata -- the time, place, telephone numbers and duration of all telephone calls -- as well as the content of telephone calls made in America under a perverse interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act, which a federal appeals court has since invalidated.

"The department knows where this data on this killer's cellphone can be found, but if it subpoenas the National Security Agency, the NSA complies with that subpoena and all this becomes public, that will put the lie to the government's incredible denials that it spies upon all of us all the time. Surely, it was spying on the San Bernardino killers.

"There is more at stake here than the privacy of Apple's millions of customers, the security of power grids and all that the Internet serves. Personal liberty in a free society is at stake. A government that stays within the confines of the Constitution is at stake."

"On Tuesday morning, while the president was delivering a statement from the Roosevelt Room announcing his plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Spanish and Moroccan police were arresting four suspected members of an Islamic terrorist cell seeking to recruit fighters to the Islamic State, among whom is a former Guantanamo detainee. ...

"The release of Guantanamo detainees has proven calamitous. As The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes has reported, of 653 released detainees, 117 have returned to the fight against the U.S., and 79 more are suspected of doing so -- a recidivism rate of almost one-third. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is committed to releasing another 35 detainees already approved for transfer. The president has never addressed the high recidivism among terrorists, and his plan offers no way to mitigate the risk. ...

"It is currently illegal to transfer Guantanamo prisoners onto American soil. Congress would need to change the law to allow this. If lawmakers refuse to do this, Obama will no doubt attempt to unilaterally empty the facility by transferring the detainees abroad. There is little recourse available to the Congress to stop that. However, they can ensure that Guantanamo Bay remains available to the next president -- who, one hopes, will put American security above moral grandstanding."

"Republicans are delighted that a recently unearthed Joe Biden speech appears to be a strong endorsement of the GOP's current Supreme Court strategy.

"'Politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date. One can only imagine that role becoming overarching if a choice were made this year, assuming that a justice was announced tomorrow that he or she was stepping down,' Biden said on the Senate floor in June 1992, not long after Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination to challenge then-President George H.W. Bush.

"'A process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all,' Biden continued. 'Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, the nominee or to the Senate itself.'"

"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton's charge that corporate CEOs earn 300 times more than their workers isn't just wrong. It hides another very real wage gap: She earns more in just one speech than the average American CEO in a year.

"Mark J. Perry, a University of Michigan professor and author of the American Enterprise Institute's popular Carpe Diem blog, did the fact-checking of Clinton's numbers and came up with that result.

"The average CEO, using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, makes $216,100. Clinton's speaking agent, the Harry Walker Agency Inc., charged about $275,000 a speech and packaged three for Wall Street's Goldman Sachs at $675,000."

"In 2012, Scalia averred that he would not retire until there was a more ideologically congenial President in the White House. 'I would not like to be replaced,' he explained, 'by someone who immediately sets about undoing everything that I'€™ve tried to do for 25 years.'

"Scalia never got to choose the timing of his leaving office. Those who value the legacy of those now-30 years will determine whether his last wish will be vindicated. Let McConnell do his thing. Then in November it's for us to win one for Nino."

"In their wisdom, the Founders designed an elegantly simple and effective system of checks and balances so no single branch -- no single person -- could amass tyrannical control. Justice Scalia was a powerful check within a check. He was a bulwark for the Constitution, the rule of law and individual liberty. He was a bulwark against the likes of Mr. Obama.

"In blocking Mr. Obama'€™s choice for the court, Senate Republicans will honor Justice Scalia's fearless discharge of his constitutional duties and carry out their own. They have bent to Mr. Obama's (often unconstitutional) will enough.

"The future of the Supreme Court is the future of the country. This is precisely the hill on which to battle. Republicans must fight as if the Constitution depends on it, because it does."

"There's no doubt that if Democrats controlled the Senate during the last year of a Republican administration, they would run out the clock before confirming anyone to the Supreme Court. Sen. Chuck Schumer pledged to block any nominee in July of 2007 should a vacancy open up during the final 18 months of George W. Bush's second term.

"Sens. Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton tried to filibuster Samuel Alito's nomination in 2006.

"Obama has repeatedly ignored and circumvented Congress, abusing executive orders that have been repeatedly overturned by the Supreme Court. It would be fitting if the Senate reasserted its responsibility to hold a rampaging President in check by denying Obama the chance to put another liberal activist on the bench."

"Sen. McConnell vows that the choice of a successor to Justice Scalia, given the historic and long-reaching nature of the choice, should be that of the new president, whoever he or she may be. This is brave and defiant talk; unfortunately brave Republican talk often dissolves under pressure. Sen. McConnell must buck up the courage of his troops when they hear the sound of the guns. Everything is riding on it."

"Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, was not just a conservative icon. He was also a great public servant and one of America's clearest legal thinkers. His opinions, dissents and questions in open court were full of his sharp wit and colorful expression. He was a great jurist and will be sorely missed. ...

"Scalia's pet peeve was the modern tendency to frame every perceived wrong as something that had to be unconstitutional. He believed that in constantly ascribing new and hidden rights to a document that did not contain them, justices were turning the Supreme Court into a super-legislature that dictated cultural norms, rather than a true judicial panel. ...

"The idea of a 'living' or 'evolving' Constitution repelled Scalia. In his view, it represented a backdoor way of letting unelected judges substitute their own values for those of the people who made the decisions to vote and ratify the Constitution and its amendments. 'The risk of assessing evolving standards,' he wrote in one dissent, 'is that it is all too easy to believe that evolution has culminated in one's own views.'"

"Guerrilla videographer James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team have for years documented just how easy it is to commit voter fraud in states ranging from Minnesota to North Carolina. In 2012, his undercover exposes at the polls convinced the New Hampshire legislature to pass a bill mandating that voters show a government-issued ID -- even college ID cards are acceptable. If voters have no form of ID, they can sign an affidavit and still have their vote counted. The votes needed to approve the bill over the objections of then-governor John Lynch were provided by his fellow Democrats.

"This year's presidential primaries were the first in which the ID law was fully in effect, so O'Keefe returned to New Hampshire to see how it was working out. He didn't find the long lines and confusion predicted by liberal critics, but his undercover team found out just how easy it still is for non-residents to vote. He released a video documenting his findings.

"The video shows poll workers advising Project Veritas journalists how to skirt the rules in order to vote as non-residents. Bernie Sanders campaign staffers are shown encouraging undercover journalists to claim false addresses in order to vote in the primary. (No matter how easy the undercover journalists found it would be to cast an illegal ballot, they stopped short of actually doing so.)"