Scott Lemieux

IT’S ANNOYING ABORTION CONTRARIAN DAY! Will Saletan has many of the annoying tics of the blue-state male abortion “centrists” who dominate editorial discourse on the topic, such as viewing national elections as referenda on abortion, and originating policies that prominent pro-choicers have been advocating for decades. His latest entry into the field (via A Bird […]

SUNSTEIN ON REPRODUCTIVE FREEDOM AND GENDER EQUALITY. Law-blogger Bean points us to this op-ed by Cass Sunstein, who argued that Ruth Bader Ginsburg‘s dissent in Carhart II — which rooted a woman’s right to obtain an abortion on the basis that most attempts to interfere with this right violate a woman’s equal citizenship — may […]

MORE TERRORISM ON AMERICAN SOIL. A bomb was left at an abortion clinic in Austin. I’m guessing this will go down the same memory hole as the hundreds of packets of anthrax sent to abortion clinics after 9/11. After, as five reactionary lawyers on the Supreme Court have just informed us, you have to be […]

STRANGE JUSTICE. I like Bill Richardson, and hope that he becomes a viable candidate in the primary. But his choice of “Whizzer White” as his ideal Supreme Court Justice in tonight’s debate is…odd. Myself, I would prefer a justice who was on the right side of (just for starters) Roe, Miranda, and Bowers. (In fairness, […]

PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT LAWS: A POPULAR BAD POLICY. Phoebe Maltz makes a good point about laws requiring that women under 18 get parental consent before obtaining an abortion. Why is it a good idea for state policy to increase the number of teenage mothers? This is particularly true of David Brooks, who thinks that pre-viability abortions […]

LOW BRODERISM. One could spend considerably more text than the column itself explaining the countless problems with David Broder‘s latest adventures in center-right false equivalence. First, you have the Dean’s horror over Harry Reid‘s criticism of Alan Greenspan‘s political motives, just because the latter’s positions on fiscal policy changed when it came time to justify […]

A POX ON THE HOUSE OF FALSE EQUIVALENCES. Karen Tumulty has an account of Carhart II that fits squarely within the extremely annoying pox-on-all-their-houses genre endemic to media coverage of the subject. First, she has to claim that both sides are being dishonest in the D&X debate. The anti-choice lobby is criticized because the distinction […]

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A “PRO-LIFE” REPUBLICAN. The federal GOP’s social and economic model Mississippi, as some of you know, is one of the more than 20 states with latent abortion bans that would come into effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned. (Although, of course, as Ben Wittes points out, going from abortion […]

APPEASING THE UNAPPEASABLE. I don’t really agree with the take of my colleagues Garance and Ezra on Maureen Dowd‘s abjectly horrible column yesterday. The error they’re making, I think, it to assume that these charges have some sort of objective merit to someone, or that there’s some way of avoiding having junior high narratives being […]

NO CHANCE. I’m frankly baffled by Ilya Somin‘s claim that there are plausibly five votes to strike down the PBA Act on Commerce Clause grounds. The most obvious problem with his argument is that it entirely ignores the Raich decision, under which the Commerce Clause issue presented by the Act is plainly insubstantial. Obtaining an […]