Scott Lemieux

I agree with Sanchez and Patashnik that there’s no necessary contradiction between Obama‘s nominal opposition to same-sex marriage and opposition to the California Restoration of Bigotry initiative. As I think I mentioned before, Dan Pinello found a significant number of Massachusetts legislators who didn’t initially support same-sex marriage rights but was opposed to repealing them […]

Jeffrey Rosen continues to claim that liberals “dodged a bullet” when Roberts and Alito were appointed. I continue to find this as unpersuasive as it was a year ago. Some of what he mentions — such as the rhetoric in dissenting opinions becoming less acerbic — is completely irrelevant to the impact of the Court. […]

To follow up on Dana’s excellent analysis of Jim Wallis‘s latest bit of abortion concern-trolling, I continue to be irritated by these kinds of assertions: Without calling for restrictions such as parental consent laws, Wallis believes that if the Democrats were to alter their abortion platform, it could help them make inroads among young evangelicals […]

There’s something of a curious disconnect between two passages of Scalia‘s opinion in Heller: After an exhaustive discussion of the arguments for and against gun control, Justice Breyer arrives at his interest-balanced answer: because handgun violence is a problem, because the law is limited to an urban area, and because there were somewhat similar restrictions […]

Yesterday, many conservatives managed to work themselves into a lather about a plausible interpretation of the Constitution with exceptionally few real-world consequences. I noticed much less outrage about the Court’s opinion in Exxon Shipping v. Baker, which read the justice’s public policy preferences into the law with considerably less textual support in order to protect […]

The only real suspense about D.C. v. Heller was how exactly the right to bear arms would be defined and what the lineup would be. The D.C. gun ban was clearly doomed. Scalia, writing the lead opinion, made a broader coalition less likely, and indeed the Court split 5-4, along typical ideological lines. And yet, […]

Maureen Dowd, responding to criticism of her disgracefully sexist and content-free attacks on Hillary Clinton: “From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, […]

In a general sense, I agree that sometimes people can get a little sloppy about blaming “the Democrats” for the enactment of policies or nomination confirmations opposed by most Democrats in Congress. Pace Ralph Nader, it’s pretty silly to use (for example) the passage of a tax bill that only 12 Dem Sentaors and 28 […]

Taking on Johnathan Cohn on his own terrain (and I think Cohn’s emphasis on presidential ability rather than short-term political tactics is sound), Brad Plumer makes a case for Sebelius as VP pick. This is the bottom line: Sebelius’s biggest strength is the fact that she’s the most competent executive of any of the rumored […]