A Fickle Federalism
The revival of a doctrine of federalism that constrains the power of Congress has been a signature feature of the work of the Rehnquist Court. The Court’s five-justice conservative majority has repeatedly held that the preservation of states’ rights requires broad new limits on what the national government may do to protect its citizens. Indeed,…
In the Bedroom
You’re making love. Suddenly the police burst into your apartment, arrest you for engaging in “deviate sexual intercourse” and haul you off to jail in your underpants. Are you in: a) Afghanistan; b) Saudi Arabia; c) Cuba; or d) Texas? Yes, it’s Texas. On Sept. 17, 1998, the Harris County sheriff’s office got a complaint…
Courts v. Citizens
Liberals need to think of the Republican Party’s spreading control over the federal courts in democratic and not just civil-libertarian terms. Our traditional anxiety is that conservative judges will fail to protect the rights of political minorities from attack by an overzealous majority. But the greater danger today is quite the opposite. The new conservative…
Books in Review
Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools By Jonathan Zimmerman, Harvard University Press, 307 pages, $29.95 It shouldn’t be surprising that the public schools have long been the biggest battleground in America’s culture wars: It’s in the schools, after all, where the rubber of our pluralism and deepest social disagreements hits the road of…
No Death-Penalty Doubts at Justice
In a time of growing doubt about whether the death penalty is being administered fairly and accurately, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is hewing to a policy of full speed ahead in implementing it. “He’s the anti-Ryan,” says David Bruck, a federal capital-defense lawyer in Columbia, S.C., contrasting Ashcroft with former Gov. George Ryan (R-Ill.),…
A Hostile Takeover
If you want to understand the systematic nature of the right’s takeover of American public life, consider the Federalist Society. During the first Bush presidency and less than a decade after its founding in 1982, the society had already gained control of the process of vetting federal judicial appointees. By 2001 the Federalists were so…
First They Came for the Muslims …
The Palmer Raids were one of the most notorious episodes in American legal history. A. Mitchell Palmer, President Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general from 1919 to 1921, rounded up 3,000 allegedly “subversive” aliens for deportation. Only about 300 were actually deported, but the roundup was widely deplored as crude and lawless intimidation. In the wake of…
Affirmative Reaction
In racial matters, good news from the Supreme Court is generally no news. Since at least the mid-1970s, the Court has been mostly inhospitable to those seeking to advance progressive racial policies through litigation. That is why civil-rights activists often deliberately keep potentially far-reaching cases away from the High Court. In a revealing episode in…
At War With Liberty
As expected, September 11 has prompted an expansion of law-enforcement powers at almost every level. And who would have it otherwise? For those of us who live and work in Manhattan, 9-11 was not a single horrific day but an extended nightmare. For weeks, kiosks, store windows and parks displayed fliers by the thousands, pleading…
The Right-Wing Assault
Since the election of President Reagan, a disciplined, carefully orchestrated and quite self-conscious effort by high-level Republican officials in the White House and the Senate has radically transformed the federal judiciary. For more than two decades, Republican leaders have had a clear agenda for the nation’s courts: to reduce the powers of the federal government;…
Liebermama
On Jan. 13, Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) vowed to return to the national campaign trail and seek the presidency. And that can only herald one thing: the return of Marcia “Baba” Lieberman. The 88-year-old mother of Sen. Lieberman may be a little weak in the arthritic knees these days, and she says she’s at the…
More Years in the Desert
JERUSALEM — I ran into the Labor party politician at a bar mitzvah celebration, a few days after the election in which the Israeli left suffered its worst-ever defeat. “Celebration” is a euphemism. The bar mitzvah boy was the son of a left-wing activist; most of the guests belonged to the same political camp, and…
Hard Money, Harder Races
Like retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), two-time presidential candidate and former Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) is expected to make national security a centerpiece of any possible White House campaign. The 66-year-old Hart — who predicted terrorist strikes against the United States before September 11 and has argued that waging war against…
Class Warfare, Bush-Style
While the nation’s attention is riveted by the inexorable march to war against Iraq, the Bush administration has quietly opened a new front in the relentless, largely covert war it has been waging here at home against U.S. workers and their labor unions. In December the Labor Department issued new union reporting regulations, which would…
Not Slumming It
“On the fair green hills of Rio / There grows a fearful stain / The poor who come to Rio / And can’t go home again.” So wrote Elizabeth Bishop, although a visitor to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is just as likely to find something eerily beautiful in the apparition of the favelas, or slums,…
From Put-Down to Catch-Up
After months spent diligently not noticing — or belittling — the anti-war movement, mainstream news media are suddenly listening up. But their sluggishness and incapacity illustrate a more general flaw: the inability of journalists to connect dots and put together big pictures. The movement’s sudden arrival on media radar screens comes about partly because the…
Trickle-Down Pain
Even as the administration prepares for war in Iraq, Bush has revived trickle-down economics with an audacity that’s leaving old supply-side fanatics breathless. He’s pushing new tax-exempt savings accounts, more tax-favored retirement accounts, tax-free dividends, accelerated income-tax cuts and an end to inheritance taxes. Every reputable analysis shows that these provisions overwhelmingly benefit the very…
A National-Security Gender Gap
We’re hearing a lot about national security these days, but it’s always defined in one-dimensional terms — as protection from external enemies. But there is another aspect of national security that is traditionally recognized as vital to any nation, and this is protection from the internal enemies of neglect, ignorance and despair. These may not…
The Race Case
One of the pleasant fictions that helps justify the Bush administration’s opposition to affirmative action is the pretense that America has left behind the evils of segregation and achieved something approaching a race-blind society. “Every day that our nation was segregated was a day our nation was unfaithful to our founding ideals,” the president said…
Meet Mr. Credibility
The Democrats, as we know, have many political problems: their uncertainty, their inability to trade jabs with the Republicans, their likely minority status in Congress for some time to come. Checked out a map yet of which senators are up in 2004? Let’s just say that if you’re not sure you can take much more…
Gary Hart’s Comeback
Like retired Gen. Wesley Clark and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), two-time presidential candidate and former Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) is expected to make national security a centerpiece of any possible White House campaign. The 66-year-old Hart — who predicted terrorist strikes against the United States before September 11 and has argued that waging war against…
The Tough Dove’s Moment
It is Saturday morning, Jan. 18, and in Washington and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have gathered to protest the president’s pending war. In Des Moines, Iowa, hundreds of Democrats are turning out, too — both to oppose that war, it seems, and begin the process of unseating that president. Almost a year…
The Easy War
“If you want peace, understand war,” the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart once wrote, and during the past century — some would say ever since Gen. Sherman’s march through Georgia — that injunction meant anyone interested in peace needed above all to understand the practice of “total war.” Total war overflowed earlier boundaries. Instead…
Radicals in Power
In the debate about America and Iraq, two questions keep getting confused. First, does the United States have grounds to remove Saddam Hussein? And second, is an American invasion the best available course of action, after we balance all the likelyrisks and gains? The answer to the first question is a resounding yes. The Iraqi…
Why Iraq?
When a country goes to war, one question that already should have been answered is “why?” But many people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are genuinely perplexed about why the Bush administration is so determined, even at the cost of war,to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In their public statements, administration officials have,…
Circuit Breaker
As early as this week, the full Senate may vote on the nomination of the conservative lawyer Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Estrada’s nomination squeaked out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a 10-9 party line vote: no Democrat supported it, and now liberal activist groups…
