Scott Lemieux

PROCESS OF ELIMINATION. Jonathan Chait‘s case for Fred Thompson as the odds-on favorite smartly starts by eliminating purportedly major candidates with no chance of winning the nomination. As I and several TAPPED colleagues have mentioned before, Chait is clearly right on two. Giuliani is a pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage candidate in a party whose base is […]

OYEZ: NOT TRUSTWORTHY? I’ve discussed before the phenomenon of a textbook repeating the right-wing canard that Bush v. Gore was 7-2. And now I see that Oyez, normally a valuable resource, is printing a lie about the vote in the case: the per curiam opinion held 7-2 that the Florida Supreme Court’s scheme for recounting […]

FREE SPEECH AND SELECTIVE ORIGINALISM. The Supreme Court today issued a relatively narrow holding upholding a principal’s suspension of a student for holding a banner reading “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” Clarence Thomas, meanwhile (and, interestingly, without a join from Scalia) wrote a concurrence arguing that the landmark student free speech case Tinker v. Des Moines […]

STANDING FOR ME… The Court’s 5-4 decision today in Hein v. FFRF makes it much more difficult to challenge programs — in this case, the Bush administration’s decision, through executive order, to funnel taxpayer money to religious organizations — that raise serious Establishment Clause questions. I’m not at all persuaded by the Court’s holding; in […]

PILING ON. My colleagues Ezra, Paul, and Bean have already given plenty of whacks to this unspeakably atrocious op-ed by Melinda Henneberger. Others have already noted the most obvious problem: her complete lack of evidence, apart from meaningless random anecdotes, for the claim that abortion “had been very good for Republicans.” (As Paul says, it’s […]

KENNEDY AND CARHART II. Jeffrey Rosen‘s assessment of Anthony Kennedy is, for the most part, good and very much worth reading. First of all, he collects some priceless anecdotes detailing Kennedy’s legendary intellectual vanity. My personal favorite: Kennedy moderated a discussion about American values after September 11 at a public high school in Washington, D.C. […]

BLOOMBERG AND LIBERTARIANISM. Matt notes that libertarians may be irrationally unsympathetic to Michael Bloomberg because of his support for relatively trivial nanny-state regulations like public smoking and trans-fat bans. (As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that public smoking bans actually have a serious non nanny-state, if not quite libertarian, justification: even I’m libertarian enough […]

IN WHICH I BRIEFLY SUCCUMB TO DOWDISM. I try to remain focused on substance here, but I am also puzzled about why someone running for president would analogize themselves to an (albeit fictional) mob family. And, of course, Cox is correct that the punchline is even more horrific; embodying a mass murder and his enabler […]

THOMPSON: GRISWOLD WAS WRONG. I suppose there’s nothing terribly surprising about Fred Thompson asserting that Roe v. Wade is the worst Supreme Court decision since 1967. And nor is it surprising that he would repeat the abject nonsense that overturning Roe would “send the issue back to the states” (a claim that the Supreme Court’s […]