Scott Lemieux

In an act of bad faith remarkable even by its standards, yesterday The Wall Street Journal op-ed page attempted to cast the arch-nationalist Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall as a supporter of the libertarian states’-rights logic advanced by those who argue that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. (Showing the depth of its knowledge […]

I strongly recommend Jonathan Cohn‘s new article about constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act. Cohn lays out clearly the underlying constitutional disputes and various ways it could play out. One of the many interesting questions he raises concerns the effect of a ruling holding the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional: But many experts argue, plausibly […]

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court refused to hear a challenge to a federal law banning felons from possessing body armor. (At issue is whether Congress overstepped its authority under the commerce clause when it passed a law prohibiting convicted felons from owning bullet-proof vests.) What makes the Court’s decision to decline the case interesting […]

Via Ian Millhiser, I am shocked and appalled by this un-American passage in Antonin Scalia‘s solo dissent yesterday: The canon against superfluity is not a canon against verbosity. When a thought could have been expressed more concisely, one does not always have to cast about for some additional meaning to the word or phrase that […]

Picking my favorite TAP article of the year is a desperate, essentially arbitrary task, for the happiest of reasons. It was a pleasure to through the archives and be reminded of so much great stuff: Michelle Goldberg and Kay Steiger on the struggle for reproductive freedom abroad and at home; Adam on how non-arbitrary enforcement […]

George Will rises to the defense of the Supreme Court’s disgraceful Bush v. Gore decision on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. (Apparently the Supreme Court was engaged in “judicial engagement” rather than activism.) What’s most telling about Will’s argument is that it makes essentially no attempt to actually defend the Court’s equal-protection holding, and […]

Recently retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has written a review of David Garland’s new book on capital punishment. Among other things, it further explains Stevens’ transition on the issue. Although Stevens was a co-author of the landmark 1976 Supreme Court opinions that reauthorized the death penalty after a four-year moratorium, in a 2008 […]

Stephanie Mencimer and Dahlia Lithwick have excellent roundups of yesterday’s dreary but very important oral arguments in AT&T v. Concepcion. The case involved an AT&T customer who was charged more than $30 in taxes on a “free” cellphone. After they were sued, AT&T argued that their customers were bound by the mandatory arbitration clauses written […]

As if there wasn’t enough bad news last night, the push by anti-gay and lesbian groups to oust three of the judges who joined the Iowa Supreme Court’s historic decision holding that same-sex marriage was required by the state constitution narrowly succeeded. And the fight is just beginning, as the forces of reaction will try […]