Supreme Court
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The Phony Left: Pawns in a Game It Doesn’t Understand
Few communities in America prospered as much as Texarkana during President Joe Biden’s four years in the White House, and few communities were more ungrateful than the voters of that region, which is anchored around twin cities spread across the Texas-Arkansas border. In 2024, in spite of economic growth under a Democratic president at rates
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The Difference between Republicans & Democrats
Today’s Republican Party … is an insurgent outlier. It has become ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government. The Democratic Party, while no
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Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” —Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980. The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th
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Barrett = ACA’s Demise?
I doubt it–if the Dems take the Senate. I've been arguing here since the Barrett nomination that if the Dems win the Senate, they should expand the court. If Barrett and the other conservative ideologues vote to destroy the ACA, it will all but insure that the court will be expanded as the first order of
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Adam Serwer on Robert’s Civil Rights Jurisprudence
Roberts’s decision in Shelby County surprised few legal observers. As a judge, he has frequently ruled that state measures addressing racism are worse than racism. This is a deeply held philosophical perspective, one he has advanced since he was a young attorney in the Reagan Justice Department. In that role, he argued against adding a
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Pack the Court 3
Much of the discussion about Barrett’s nomination has focused on social issues, like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage. They’re all important, obviously. But they are not the issues that animate many activists and wealthy campaign donors who have spent decades pushing for a conservative overhaul of the courts. Koch gave that speech in 1974, and
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Barrett’s not the Problem; McConnell Is (Updated)
“If the Court’s opinions change with its membership, public confidence in the Court as an institution might decline. Its members might be seen as partisan rather than impartial and case law as fueled by power rather than reason.” A justice must “think carefully about whether she is sure enough about her rationale for overruling to
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Pack the Court 2
This is not to say that a Republican-controlled Senate doesn’t have the constitutional power to confirm a nominee right now—it clearly does. But in exercising this power, Republicans would be committing themselves to an extreme form of “constitutional hardball”—a term coined by the legal scholar Mark V. Tushnet to describe the exercise of raw political
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Pack the Court [Updated]
The trouble for Belkin and other Democrats is …[in packing the court's] political feasibility—and not just because the party has to win the Senate and the White House first. Joe Biden has shown reluctance to eliminate the filibuster, which Democrats would need to do to pass a court-expansion law, and he is outright opposed to
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Thoughts on the Kavanagh Affair
When he was first nominated, I saw Kavanagh much as I saw Gorsuch: an establishment figure who leans conservative, and thought that's what you're going to get because clueless establishment Democrats allowed Donald Trump to win the election. But better someone like him than someone like Harriet Myers or Clarence Thomas, or someone else who's