Transcript of David Rivkin’s appearance on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio show on November 18, 2013.

BILL BENNETT: David, it looks like the President lied [when he said], “if you like your plan you can keep it.” Is there any way to take legal action against the President’s administration or HHS [Dept. of Health and Human Services] for this deception?

DAVID RIVKIN: Well no, if somebody in the private sector has done that, there will be all sorts of criminal and civil options, but you cannot prosecute the President under any of those statutes. The price that he has to pay is the political price and, unfortunately, he’s not going to pay the full price, given the way the media and national Democrats are looking at it. It also, frankly, further undermines the trust of the American people in the government.
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Did you know that you cannot be trusted with knowledge of your own genetic background? That’s what the Food and Drug Administration decreed late last month when it ordered 23andMe to stop marketing its Personal Genome Service.

23andMe is at the cutting edge of mass-market genomics. For $99 the company tests a saliva sample to identify genetic markers that correspond to various conditions and predispositions, as well as ancestry. Based on these markers, the company produces a report describing genetic health risks and inherited traits, along with citations to the research that backs up its analysis and the current scientific “confidence” for each point.

The FDA does not claim that 23andMe is a scam or could cause direct injury. Instead, its concern is that people using the genome service may begin to self-manage their treatments. Essentially, the agency wants to “protect” patients from knowing about their own health.
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The National Security Agency’s surveillance hasn’t changed. Washington has.

By Mike Pompeo and David B. Rivkin Jr.

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s leaks have subjected the NSA’s surveillance programs to unprecedented attack, raising the possibility that Congress will not be able to pass the 2014 Intelligence Authorization bill needed to provide congressional guidance on a host of crucial national-security issues. It would be lamentable if the entirely legal and invaluable NSA surveillance program became more of a political football than it already is.

Some proposals would hamstring the NSA’s ability to obtain, store and analyze information, while forcing disclosures of now-classified operations. Balancing the intelligence community’s need for secrecy with the public’s appetite for disclosure is always difficult in a democracy. But the NSA’s programs have from the start been tailored to balance constitutional requirements, statutory authorizations and operational needs. What’s different today is not how we collect intelligence, but the new and extreme legal and policy arguments against doing so.
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By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Andrew M. Grossman

For all the complaints about the American justice system — litigation is too expensive, too slow, too uncertain — it leads the world in the metric that matters most: uncovering the truth. That has been on particular display in a Manhattan courtroom.

On trial are crusading attorney Steven Donziger and his allies in a decades-long legal battle against the energy giant Chevron. Representing indigenous people in Ecuador’s Lago Agrio region, Donziger obtained an $18.2 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadoran court for pollution that he attributed to drilling operations by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001.

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The D.C. Circuit is the nation’s top regulatory court, responsible for scrutinizing many of the federal government’s most expensive and far-reaching actions. No wonder, then, that President Barack Obama is now trying to push three new judges onto the court and tilt it decisively in his favor. A great deal is at stake here for the U.S. economy, and it is high time for the Senate to have its say.

For a president with an aggressive second-term regulatory agenda, the D.C. Circuit may be a greater impediment than the Supreme Court. By statute, the court hears all challenges to nationwide rules under the Clean Air Act, as well as many major challenges to regulations affecting water, labor relations, securities law, and other fields. It vets agencies’ compliance with constitutional requirements. More than a third of cases in the D.C. Circuit are administrative appeals, compared to 16 percent in other appeals courts. And because the Supreme Court takes so few cases each year, the D.C. Circuit’s word is typically the last when it comes to regulatory challenges.

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David Rivkin was featured on “The Journal Editorial Report” with host Paul Gigot,  the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor.   The video debunks a number of  myths of the impending decisions on raising the debt ceiling.  Mr. Rivkin explains how the 14th Amendment ensures that defaulting on our debt is impossible. The Wall Street Journal’s “Journal Editorial Report” is Fox News Channel feature that runs at least twice during a weekend.