How should progressives think about and respond to the assaults of the Roberts Court? Here are three quick and simple suggestions.
Simon Lazarus
Simon Lazarus is a lawyer, former White House domestic policy staffer for President Jimmy Carter, and a writer on the Supreme Court’s handling of legal checks on corporate power and other legal issues.
Posted inArticle
Courting Big Business
This week’s ruling is yet another in a series of disastrous right-wing decisions by the Roberts Court.
Posted inArticle
More Polarizing Than Rehnquist
John Roberts won Senate confirmation by vowing to shun ideological activism. Instead, he’s trashed judicial precedent.
Posted inArticle
Gunning For Congress
Predictably, proponents of Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination have mobilized to scrub a particularly troublesome spot on his record — a 1996 dissenting opinion in a case called United States v. Rybar, in which he voted to invalidate a federal law banning machine guns. Alito insisted that applying the statute to mere intrastate possession […]
Posted inDispatches
Center Court
Two weeks past Congress’ spring break, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist still could not “with certainty” fulfill his oft-repeated vow to squelch Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominations. Skeptics in his own caucus deny him the 51-to-50 majority (including the vice president’s tiebreaking vote) he needs to execute a maneuver known as the “nuclear […]
Posted inBooks, Arts and Culture
The Constitution in Play
Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty By Randy E. Barnett, Princeton University Press, 357 pages, $32.50 Except for conservative activists and a few academics, virtually no one pays attention to right-wing legal theories. But if, as promised, George W. Bush in a second term hands the federal judiciary over to acolytes […]
