Scott Lemieux

I hate giving Camille Paglia the attention she craves, but since you hear this kind of argument a lot (if sometimes in less overheated prose), I think it’s worth addressing: I have been on the record since the 1990s as strongly opposing hate crimes legislation. I think it is a totalitarian intrusion into citizens’ thought […]

I’ve talked before about the shell game set up by opponents (or even, in some cases, by nominal supporters) of same-sex marriage, in which somehow none of the pre-existing institutional mechanisms is good enough for enshrining marriage equality if another one is available. We now have another example from Rhode Island Gov. Donald Carcieri, as […]

Adam has done an excellent job with Ricci in general and Alito‘s bizarre race-baiting concurrence in particular. But it’s worth addressing one more point. According to Kennedy, New Haven acted illegally because there was “no strong basis in evidence” that an “equally valid, less-discriminatory testing alternative” existed. Admittedly, it’s hard to say that Kennedy is […]

If yesterday’s decision declining to hold Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional was about as good as you can expect, another decision yesterday was more predictably dismaying. Coeur Alaska v. SAC concerned the question of whether the dumping of toxic industrial “slurry” –“discharge [that] would kill all of the lake’s fish and nearly […]

As Adam already noted, the Supreme Court today, by an 8-1 vote, narrowed but did not strike down the “preclearance” provisions of the Voting Rights Act that require certain states to get federal approval for any changes in their election laws. Unlike Adam, I’m not actually surprised by the outcome. The Court’s conservatives have generally […]

In light of two controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decisions this week, Matt Yglesias is reminded of Jeffrey Toobin‘s point that “In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate […]

At Bill Clinton‘s press meeting yesterday, a particularly interesting discussion concerned using the stimulus — as well as other forms of economic policy — to avert the imminent global warming catastrophe. The former president argued, citing his own organization’s Empire State Building initiative as an example, that retrofitting buildings is an example of the way […]

I can’t say I was looking forward to reading Will Saletan on Ross Douthat, but once (and I admit, it’s a big “once”) you get beyond Saletan’s arrogant moralizing, his points are actually quite reasonable. I continue to have less than no use for discussing the merits of imaginary women having abortions under particular abstract […]

Writing about yesterday’s Caperton decision, Paul Campos criticizes the logic of the Roberts dissent: The only way the facts in Capteron could be more egregiouswould be if the litigant had sent a certified letter to the judgetelling him he’d give his campaign three million bucks if the judgecast the deciding vote the right way in […]