Scott Lemieux

WHOOPS, I DID IT AGAIN! An absolute must-read piece by Eric Boehlert on “journalist” Jeff Gerth and the “reporting” that ended up helping a president be impeached. Gerth’s primary strategy is to blame many of the countless errors in his allegations about the Whitewater non-scandal on his colleagues, throwing the editors who inexplicably defended him […]

ROMNEY: LIAR, OR MORON? Maybe it’s just me, but the fact that the leading fundraiser among Republican Presidential candidates is either ignorant of the most basic facts about the Iraq War or is a shameless liar strikes me as significant. But hey, that lie worked for the last Republican campaign, so why not? What’s more, […]

LINE OF THE NIGHT: David Weigel in response to staunch advocate of arbitrary executive power Rudy Giuliani touting New Hampshire’s state motto: “I have no comment on Rudy’s “live free or die” remark. He might ban me from his event tomorrow.” —Scott Lemieux

AGAINST THE PEREMPTORY CHALLENGE. Adam Liptak has an excellent article (via) about peremptory challenges and their ongoing use to produce racially unrepresentative juries. Liptak mentions the 2005 Miller-El case, which I discussed here. (Remarkably, despite extensive evidence that created an exceptionally strong inference of unconstitutional race-based peremptories, Scalia, Thomas and Rehnquist dissented.) This case illustrates, […]

BUSH’s IDEA OF A FAIR JUDGE. Via Matt, an excellent summary of the record of Leslie Southwick, the latest Bush Circuit Court nominee whose primary qualification is a slavish devotion to business interests. Particularly remarkable is the case of Richmond v. Mississippi Dep’t of Human Services, in which the Court of Appeals of Mississippi (in […]

GUTTING WITHERSPOON. Earlier this term the Supreme Court overturned a death sentence because of clear errors of federal law committed by the ultra-reactionary and notoriously hackish Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. What was remarkable was not the outcome, but there were four votes upholding the TCOCA’s transparent attempts to evade federal law (with the dissent […]

IT’S ALRIGHT MR. KENNEDY, MY UTERUS IS ONLY BLEEDING. Marty Lederman points us to an interesting WaPo article, in which a few members of America’s tiny minority of serious, principled “pro-lifers” have come to see that “Partial Birth” bans are silly, irrational laws whose primary purpose is to separate money from their wallets and funnel […]

FEDERALISM, MADISON AND THE 21st CENTURY. Matt has one obvious rejoinder to David Brooks‘s pean to the mediocre character actor and undistinguished one-term+ Senator who seems to be the GOP’s New Fresh Hope for ’08. So instead I’ll take issue with Brooks praising Thompson because “[h]e’s going back to Madison and Jefferson and the decentralized […]

NOT “FREE MARKET.” JUST PRO-(REPUBLICAN DONOR) BUSINESS. It’s always useful when an issue comes along that causes a conflict between the GOP’s nominal “free market” principles and its more frequently evident “pro business who give us lots of money” principles. Just as “pro-lifers” will virtually always choose the regulation of female sexuality over the protection […]

JUSTICE BRENNAN’S EVIL TWIN. The small band of people arguing that Sam Alito would be anything but a catastrophe for liberal constitutional values had very few arguments available to them, given the overwhelming evidence that he would be (including the extremely high esteem in which Alito is held by those who despise the achievements of […]