Adam Serwer

We’ve been very careful in keeping score when it comes to decisions on the Affordable Care Act, but when it comes to the other big court battle of our time, the constitutionality of restrictive state immigration laws, judges have been unanimous in striking them down: For the four federal judges who have temporarily blocked efforts […]

One of the parts of Judge Jeffrey Sutton‘s opinion upholding the constitutionality of the individual mandate that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention is his dig at the idea that states, under some kind of incoherent, muddled Tenth Amendment reasoning, would be able to mandate purchases of health insurance even though the Federal government can’t: […]

Mara Hvistendahl, the author of the book on sex-selective abortion Ross Douthat relied upon for his argument that the “liberal West’s current vision of human freedom bears responsibility for 160 million (and counting) missing girls,” argues that Douthat has it wrong. Abortion is part of the story of how sex selection became rampant in Asia. […]

The Republican lovefest surrounding New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is getting comical. From Matthew Continetti: Something else we know: I can’t think of a savvier Democrat in the country than New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The man swings from success to success. He passed a major budget deal that cuts spending and reforms Medicaid without […]

Andrew McCarthy is claiming that the news that the Obama administration is establishing contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood as proof that he is secretly a part of their plan to establish a global caliphate (a plan in which killing Osama bin Laden is a key step!) While Karl Rove, while not ready to declare Obama […]

I find this post from my colleague Robert Kuttner, in which he posits this theory of what might have happened in the hotel room of former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn bizarre: There’s a knock on the door, a young woman enters. Strauss-Kahn expecting his hooker du jour to emerge naked from his toilette, and despite […]

With the cost of mass incarceration putting a heavy strain on state budgets, even conservatives are beginning to come around to the wisdom of ending the war on drugs. That does not include William Bennet and Joseph Califano Jr., who argue against any deescalation at all: Legalization will only make harmful substances cheaper, easier to […]

The argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional, coming just as the United States is inching closer to the possiblity of default due to a stalemate in negotiations, seemed a little too convenient for me at first. But Jack Balkin, who has been one of the more eloquent voices of a “liberal originalism” challenging conservatives’ […]

Ross Douthat has a thoughtful response to my post on sex-selective abortion, although I think he’s mistaken in his conclusion: This isn’t an unusual situation. Every vision of human liberty requires tolerating certain evils in the name of individual rights, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with erring on the side of freedom, and then trying […]

Marcy Wheeler reports that Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham, assigned by Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate cases in which CIA interrogators may have gone beyond the “legalized” torture guidelines established by the Bush administration’s office of Legal Counsel, has recommended investigations of two cases in which detainees died. The original mandate for the investigation […]