Scott Lemieux

I hadn’t seen the wealthy urban male proposing to “solve” the abortion debate by letting anti-choicers win (hey, women he knows will be able to get abortions, so sho cares, right?) routine in its pure form for a while, but Damon Linker is back to the plate: How could Obama — how could liberals, how […]

To follow-up on Ann‘s post about the support for contraception for poor women (and Obama’s attempts to strip the provision from the bill), this is unfortunately instructive not only about how unserious Republican claims to be “pro-life” are (uh, shouldn’t you be trying to reduce unplanned pregnancies then?) but is also bad news about Obama’s […]

Jon Chait and Publius correctly make fun of this disingenuous plea for civility and judicial restraint from Harvie Wilkinson, who, now that a Democratic president has taken charge, thinks that ideology shouldn’t be a major factor in judicial appointments. What an amazing coincidence that it would occur to him now! In the wake of Bush […]

I think I’m going to have to be stronger than Dana and say that Paterson has made a very poor selection to fill New York’s vacant Senate seat. Kirsten Gillibrand‘s Republican dynastic background doesn’t bother me in itself, but being a Blue Dog really should disqualify you from consideration for statewide office. To add to […]

It seems to me that Eric Posner’s response to Paul Krugman‘s excellent column today misses the point. Krugman, as far as I can tell, is not arguing that nationalization can avoid the problem of “overpaying” for assets. Since many of these assets are worth nothing, the only way to avoid “overpayment” would be to simply […]

For people who care about civil liberties, it was definitely not a good thing when the Roberts Court decided to hear an exclusionary rule case this term. As Adam notes below, the Court’s Wednesday decision in Herring v. U.S. confirmed these fears, holding that evidence obtained after an illegal search did not have to be […]

In an important post, Hilzoy notes that an initial exit poll substantially overestimated African-American support for Prop 8. And once the outlier poll is eliminated, higher levels of African-American support are explained almost entirely by religion. It should be noted that something similar happened in 2004, when some answers to vague exit poll questions led […]

I strongly endorse Dahlia Lithwick’s position in the debate in the Sunday Times about the prosecution of Bush administration war criminals. Making Lithwick’s argument stronger are the embarrassingly weak conclusions reached by Charles Fried. First, we get the “Dick Cheney is better than Pol Pot” gambit, which I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more […]

My position on the Senate’s authority to refuse to seat Roland Burris appears to be in conflict with several of the legal scholars I most admire (cf. Tushnet, Balkin, and Amar, but see also Levinson). My chances of persuading many people against that kind of all-star team are probably pretty remote, but I remain unpersuaded. […]

Long-time readers will know I agree entirely with Matt Yglesias on this: So that’s the context in which to ask whether or not it makes sense to have a supermajority requirement for many Senate votes. I would say “no.” Even absent the filibuster, our system would still feature an unusually large number of veto points, […]