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Garrett Epps

Garrett Epps is a contributing editor at The American Prospect. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. His most recent book is Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.

Recent Articles

Issa's Contemptible Vote

Garrett EppsJun 21, 2012
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

If contempt of Congress (current polls show a whopping 17% approval) is a crime, we are a nation of criminals. That thought leapt to mind at the news that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA.) has voted to ask the full House to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt because of his refusal to turn over internal records relating to the administration’s response to the “Fast and Furious” gun-walking scandal in Arizona. In response to the prospect of that vote, Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole announced that President Obama had asserted executive privilege over the documents requested.

Lethal Injection and the New Immigration Policy

Garrett EppsJun 19, 2012
(AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

In March 1977, two Tulsa horsewomen went to a church parking lot to meet an man who claimed to have Morgan horses to sell. Not long afterwards, their bodies were found near Sallisaw, Oklahoma, buried on land leased to Larry Leon Chaney. Chaney was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

Prop. 8 Heads for the Show

Garrett EppsJun 06, 2012
(Flickr/OZinOH)

One of the most important functions of a dissenting opinion is to throw red meat to op-ed writers. Justice Antonin Scalia is a master of the form. Witness his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, warning that, if same-sex sodomy laws are voided, government may soon force the unwilling to accept gays and lesbians “as boarders in their home.” Justice John Paul Stevens also perfected the zinger; he capped his dissent in Citizens United by saying, “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”

Filibuster Reform Lies in the Voters

Garrett EppsJun 04, 2012
(Flickr / Cle0patra)

In 1906, journalist David Graham Phillips scored a best-seller with his book The Treason of the Senate. “The Senate is the eager, resourceful, indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be,” Phillips wrote.

There’s a good case that the “millionaire’s club” of 1906 was Audie Murphy compared to today’s Senate.

A Gun to the Debt-Ceiling Fight

Garrett EppsJun 01, 2012
(Flickr/zieak)

If Barack Obama turns out to be a one-term president, historians may mark the summer of 2011 as the moment his failure became inevitable. At that point, the new right-wing Republican House majority declared the national debt hostage and demanded Obama’s surrender to them on all points of domestic policy. When the debt-ceiling statute required authorization of a new federal borrowing limit, they refused to vote on the measure without massive cuts in federal spending and no increase in federal revenue. The crisis was averted by the appointment of an idiotic congressional “supercommittee” that was supposed to identify future cuts, matched with a set of “automatic” cuts that were to take effect if the “supercommittee” failed to come up with a compromise aimed at reducing federal debt.

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