Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan's attorney general, spoke for many Republicans when he called President Obama's 2012 appointment of four federal officials without Senate approval "a breathtaking violation of the separation of powers." But according to a recent federal appeals court decision, abuses like Obama's have been a bipartisan practice in recent decades, with Republicans, including Meese's former boss, more sinning than sinned against.

Last week, when the Colorado General Assembly passed groundbreaking legislation aimed at taxing and regulating marijuana, it also passed a bill redefining when cannabis consumers are considered too stoned to drive.

This week, the Colorado General Assembly put the finishing touches on legislation aimed at taxing and regulating the commercial distribution of marijuana for recreational use. The process has been haunted by the fear that the federal government will try to quash this momentous experiment in pharmacological tolerance -- a fear magnified by the Obama administration's continuing silence on the subject.

At a 2008 shareholders meeting, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos explained why he opposed requiring businesses like his to collect state and local taxes on their interstate sales. "We're not actually benefiting from any services that those states provide locally," Bezos said, "so it's not fair that we should be obligated to be their tax collection agent."

Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, captured last Friday evening, was not informed of his right to remain silent and his right to a lawyer until Monday morning, nearly three days after his arrest.

Urging Congress to expand background checks for gun buyers, President Obama claims the current system has "kept more than 2 million dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun" during the last two decades.

"This is about doing the right thing for all the families who are here that have been torn apart by gun violence," President Obama declared on Monday, promoting his "common-sense gun safety reforms" in a speech at the University of Hartford, where the audience included parents of children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in nearby Newtown last December. "This is not about politics."

In two cases last week, lawyers urged the Supreme Court to respect the democratic process by upholding bans on legal recognition of gay marriages. But only one of those bans can plausibly be portrayed as representing the will of the people.

The first time David Floyd was stopped and frisked, on a Friday afternoon in April 2007, he was walking down Beach Avenue a few doors from his house in the Bronx when two police officers confronted him, demanding to know who he was, where he was going, what he was doing and whether he was carrying any weapons. Floyd, at the time a freelance film editor and now a medical student, presented his driver's license and explained that he was walking home

Back in 2007, when he was running for president, Barack Obama criticized George W. Bush's expansive vision of executive power, saying, "I reject the view that the president may do whatever he deems necessary to protect national security.

Last month, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence gave John Brennan, the new CIA director, another opportunity to answer a question he had dodged at his confirmation hearing: "Could the administration carry out drone strikes inside the United States?" Brennan's written response: "This administration has not carried out drone strikes inside the United States and has no intention of doing so."

When President Obama endorsed gay marriage last year, he said the issue should be left to the states. Last week, he said it shouldn't.

The court previously has said that police may use drug-sniffing dogs at will during routine traffic stops and may search cars without a warrant, based on their own determination of probable cause. Now that it has said a dog's alert by itself suffices for probable cause, a cop with a dog has the practical power to search the car of anyone who strikes him as suspicious.

In her most recent report to Congress, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson notes that "tax expenditures" -- the exclusions, exemptions, deductions and credits that make the Internal Revenue Code such a bloated, bewildering behemoth -- total more than $1 trillion a year.

When President Obama approves a drone strike against someone he identifies as a terrorist, John Brennan explained at his confirmation hearing last week, the missile fired from that unmanned aircraft is delivering prevention, not punishment.

Three months ago, voters in Colorado and Washington approved ballot initiatives aimed at legalizing the possession, production and distribution of marijuana. A month later, Attorney General Eric Holder said the Justice Department would settle on a response to this historic development "relatively soon."

Last week, Sen. Dianne Feinstein introduced a new, supposedly improved version of the federal "assault weapon" ban that expired in 2004. But like that earlier law, which the California Democrat also sponsored, Feinstein's bill prohibits the manufacture and sale of guns based on characteristics that have little or nothing to do with the danger they pose.

"The single most important thing we can do to prevent gun violence and mass shootings," President Obama said last week, "is to make sure those who would commit acts of violence cannot get access to guns." Toward that end, he wants to require background checks not just for sales by federally licensed firearms dealers (as under current law), but for all gun transfers except those between relatives.

A limit on magazine capacity is emerging as a leading contender for the something that supposedly must be done in response to last month's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. A ban on "large-capacity ammunition feeding devices" is one of the new gun restrictions approved by the New York legislature this week and one of the measures President Obama wants Congress to enact.

Will Barack Obama go down in history as our least merciful president? With less than two weeks to go in his first term, this reputedly progressive and enlightened man has a strong shot at winning that dubious distinction.