Terri Shiavo’s tragic struggle is a hard case, and hard cases, we are taught, make bad law. Her husband, Michael, believes she is in a permanent vegetative state and that she would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially. Her parents, however, believe that she stands a chance of recovery and, further, that, as...
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A Closely Watched Term
The Supreme Court’s closely watched October 1999 term came to an end on June 28, and its themes finally became clear: inconsistency, incoherence, and arbitrariness. On that last day, the Court released important decisions on abortion, aid to religious schools, and homosexual rights, and refused to intervene in the Elian Gonzalez case. The Supreme Court’s...
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Texas Is Correct to Defend Its Sovereignty from the Border Invasion
The mass invasion now transpiring at the U.S. southern border is illegal, immoral, and unsustainable. Texas is within its rights to resist it.
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Government by Judiciary
The two most prominent newspaper journalists covering the U.S. Supreme Court have written biographies of two of the most prominent justices of our time. Predictably, Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, who has written Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun’s Supreme Court Journey, and Joan Biskupic of USA Today, who recently published Sandra Day O’Connor:...
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Secession Becomes Thinkable
American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup; by F. H. Buckley; Encounter Books; 184 pp., $23.99 When asked whether a state can constitutionally secede from the United States, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia brushed the question aside, saying the matter was settled by the Civil War. He was wrong. A Zogby poll in 2018 found that...
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Last Best Chance to Capture Supreme Court
President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are on the cusp of making history. With Trump having named two justices to the U.S. Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, they have an opening to elevate a third justice to fill the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thereby securing the constitutionalism of the...
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“Borking”
“Borking” is back. The eponymous activity first perpetrated on Judge Robert Bork when he was nominated for a seat on the United States Supreme Court is the practice of painting a proposed judicial appointee as consciously demonic, in order to excite particular interest groups to oppose his appointment. Some might oppose Borkees because of honest...
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Roe v. Wade and the Confusion of Sen. Collins
Neat! We know what the Supreme Court debate is all about—the debate, that is to say, over who shall take retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy’s seat. The debate is about abortion. Or so declares Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican moderate from Maine, whose vote could prove essential to confirmation of whatever nominee the White House puts...
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Republicans and DoMA
Republicans, including President George W. Bush, may have some explaining to do if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the Defense of Marriage Act. Suppose a lot of people were counting on you to accomplish something and there were two ways—one hard and one easy—to do it. Which would you choose? If you picked the...
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Supremely Uninterested
In every presidential election since 1992, complaints about subpar Republican candidates (George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney: The names speak for themselves) have been met with a common refrain: This is the most important election in our lifetime, because of the Supreme Court! Hold your nose and vote for...
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Delayed Decision
Homosexual couples in the Bay State are awaiting the unexpectedly delayed decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as to whether they have a constitutional right to be married. This question may not have occurred to the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but, as this issue goes to press, it is anybody’s guess how the court...
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Limits to Litigation
Gerald N. Rosenberg, an assistant professor of political science and an instructor in law at the University of Chicago, has some simple advice for activists who think a United States Supreme Court ruling is an end-all: not only are you wrong, but your money is better spent out of court than in court. In The...
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Back in the News
Partial-birth abortion is back in the news, and for the first time, there appears to be some hope for the pro-life side. Of all the extraordinary things that the United States Supreme Court has done in the past few decades, none matches its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion articulated a...
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Reining in the Feds
On June 26, 1997, the Supreme Court dodged the constitutional questions surrounding the Line Item Veto Act. In Raines v. Byrd, the Court claimed it had no jurisdiction and dismissed the complaint. Federal courts only have jurisdiction over a dispute if it is a “case” or “controversy.” An element of the case or controversy requirement...
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The Left Has Been Doing ‘Oppo Research’ on Conservative Justices for Years
Leftist “opposition researchers” are relentlessly concocting ethics complaints about the Supreme Court’s conservative justices to try to get them to resign or recuse themselves.
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Refusing to Do Something New
The Supreme Court attracts the most attention when it does something new, or does something so old that it seems new. For example, the Court’s decision last May declaring that Congress had no authority to enact the Violence Against Women Act under the guise of regulating interstate commerce received plenty of media attention. And since...
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“Gay Marriage” in California: Back in the Docket
In modern America, the absurd is forced on everyone with the full coercive powers of an omnipotent state—all in the name of “rights.” Same-sex “marriage” first was “legalized” in 2003 when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court drove matrimony off Chappaquiddick’s Dike Bridge and let it drown. In October 2008, Connecticut’s Supreme Court did the same....
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Down With the Presidency
The presidency must be destroyed. It is the primary evil we face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us am harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank...
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No Longer a Constitution?
What is the relationship between the U.S. Constitution and the current struggle against the perpetrators of jihad against the West? Should the masterminds of, and participants in, the suicide bombings of September 11 and other terrorist acts be protected by the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions? In several important decisions by the U.S....
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The Court in Quandary
When the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s preliminary injunction against President Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from certain countries, it cited Trump’s statements about Islam as its rationale. American Muslims challenging the ban had alleged injury of two types: First, the Muslim plaintiffs felt marginalized by the President’s characterizations; second, they...
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DOMA’s Fifth Column
In February, President Obama directed the Department of Justice to stop defending Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Immediately, many conservatives decried the announcement. Curt Levy of the Committee for Justice described Obama’s decision as “outrageous” and a “power grab that . . . would allow him to undermine any duly enacted...
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Are All Court-Created Rights Now in Peril?
Progressives are worried that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, all their other agenda-driven, court-created rights will fall as well.
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Courage in Profile
Like Richard A. Epstein’s earlier book Takings, dealing with the defense of property in the Fifth Amendment, his latest one combines legal study and economic analysis with megadoses of political and social theory. Though Epstein explores, for the most part, civil rights legislation aimed at the removal of job discrimination, he devotes the opening section...
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Kavanaugh and the Roe Dance
Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Trump for the blessed vacancy left by retiring justice Anthony Kennedy, author of the civilization-defying Obergefell opinion, supplied the heat necessary to cause the vaunted American melting pot to boil over and reveal its rancid contents. Those contents included the innocent limbs and brains of David Daleiden videos, eagerly devoured...
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Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas has created panic and confusion among conservatives. They want to support the three conservative justices who dissented from the Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down Texas’ sodomy statute, but they don’t quite know why. Justice Scalia, they say, must be wrong in thinking that a rational distinction...
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Corporate Rights
Tom Piatak’s contrarian view of the Citizens United Supreme Court decision (“Obama Versus the Supreme Court,” Vital Signs, May) is convincing and well stated. It is useful, however, to realize why conservative headline readers, those who probably did not peruse the actual decision or Justice Stevens’ dissent, are likely to think it a good ruling. ...
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Neither Law Nor Justice
A few weeks ago, I was listening to Radio Moscow’s Joe Adamov answering mail-in questions from his North American audience. One query came from somebody in Nova Scotia: How important was Stalin to the Soviet victory in World War II? Adamov’s answer went like this: Stalin’s contribution to the war effort had been nil. Before...
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Fall of a Titan
Pat Buchanan’s new book is another tour de force. Suicide of a Superpower builds on the prophetic warnings first articulated in such earlier books as The Great Betrayal; A Republic, Not an Empire; and, most importantly, Death of the West. The current work exhibits the most famous paleoconservative’s trademark word-crafting verve, encyclopedic knowledge of history...
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Trump’s an ‘Insurrectionist’—But Hillary Was Exercising Free Speech
When Republicans ask questions about the integrity of our elections it's insurrection. When Democrats do it, it's just politics.
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Truth Is on Trial With Kavanaugh
While we await the FBI’s seventh investigation into Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s background, some considerations: All four of Christine Blasey Ford’s witnesses to a party where he allegedly attacked her deny the party ever happened. The first narrative having run its course, the Democratic War Room spun out another dubious claim of sexual assault. The second...
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The States Fight Back
What if the states started to fight back against federal refusal to protect American borders? What if they started challenging, even nullifying, federal actions that promote illegal aliens coming and staying here? Despite the centralization of America since at least 1865, the 50 states retain a surprising amount of autonomy. And oddly enough, the flood...
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Supreme Court Chaos
Nietzsche got it wrong. God is not dead, but that other mainstay of popular sovereignty and constitutional government in this country, the rule of law, is either finished or on life support. For decades the finest minds in the law schools and on the bench have argued that several hundred years of legal tradition, in...
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The Price of Justice
In a case that ought to become a conservative rallying cry in the 1992 election campaign, the five commissioners in tiny Lincoln County, Georgia, went to jail last fall for what they saw as protecting the taxpayers’ money. In dignified single file, broken only by an occasional hug from a supporter and the “Bless You,...
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Tolerance, Finally
The implosion of the right-wing official opposition Alliance Party under its young evangelical leader Stockwell Day dominates the headlines of most of Canada’s papers and feisty tabloids: Will the “gang of eight” dissident Alliance MPs be hung out to dry? Will Stock get drummed out over some Zionist-sounding remarks that set the tender Canadian sensibilities...
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Turning Rights into Wrongs
How Democracies Perish was the subject, as well as the title, of an important book by Jean-Francois Revel. M. Revel is a hardheaded journalist who takes little interest in political theory, but he is a keen observer of the corruption into which the states of the West have fallen. When I had drinks with him...
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The Long March Through the Constitution
In the opinion of Marshall DeRosa, one of the contributors to this book, The transition from states’ rights to unitary nationalism, i.e., domestic imperialism, was the most significant development in American politics. This marks one of the worst fears of the framers coming to fruition, tyranny. That is a self-evidently correct judgment. It is also...
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Rehabilitating Felix Frankfurter
American law school faculty is often given to unwise and thoughtless hero worship, to which even Felix Frankfurter occasionally succumbed.
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Supremes Refuse to Normalize Sleeping Rough
Municipalities can ban homeless encampments from sidewalks, parks and other public areas. Sleeping in the rough is not a constitutionally guaranteed right.
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Supreme Court Did Not Place Trump ‘Above the Law’
Trump’s critics are angry because multiple politicized attempts to prevent Trump from holding office again have failed and seem likely to continue to fail.
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A Bush Nominee
Alberto Gonzales, President Bush’s nominee to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general, is, by all accounts, a skilled lawyer who has achieved a great deal since his humble beginnings as the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers. He also has compiled a track record that should trouble all those who wish to limit abortion, immigration, affirmative...
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Freedom From Monopolies
In June 2017, the European Union fined Google a record-breaking €2.42 billion for abusing the dominance of its popular search engine while building its online shopping service. Brussels found that Google illegally and artificially endorsed its own price-comparison service in searches. (In plain English, Google’s search results were biased in favor of its own services.) ...
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Aristotelian Worms in the Leviathan
Is there such a thing as the proper size of a political order? Westerners have inherited three visions of political size and scale: the Aristotelian polis; the Christian commonwealth; and the Hobbesian modern state. For Aristotle, the point of political order is the cultivation of human excellence. Since virtue cannot be learned except through apprenticeship...
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Our Platonic Guardians
In 1986, Justice William Brennan delivered an address in which he called for “state courts to step into the breach” left by what he discerned as a federal contraction of rights and remedies. In other words, those who wish to remake American society along radically egalitarian lines could no longer count on a sympathetic federal...
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The Grove City Horror Show
Civil rights activists called Rev. Jerry Falwell “hysterical” for claiming that the recently passed Civil Rights Restoration Act could require churches to hire a “practicing, active homosexual drug addict with AIDS to be a teacher or youth pastor.” His claim was dismissed as a ploy by a televangelist to squeeze more money out of a...
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Obama’s Idea of Justice
When you think about it, Sonia Sotomayor is the perfect pick for the Supreme Court—in Barack Obama’s America. Like Obama, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action, she thinks “Latina women,” because of their life experience, make better judicial decisions than white men, that discrimination against white men to advance people of color is what America...
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Is a Trump Court in the Making?
If Mitch McConnell’s Senate can confirm his new nominee for the Supreme Court, President Donald Trump may have completed the capture of all three branches of the U.S. government for the Republican Party. Not bad for a rookie. And the lamentations on the left are surely justified. For liberalism’s great strategic ally and asset of...
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Abortion Politics in the Age of Trump
Abortion politics has consumed my adult life, starting in 1972 when, at 17, I helped defeat the abortion-legalization Measure B on Michigan’s ballot. A few weeks later, on January 22, 1973—like December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy—the U.S. Supreme Court dive-bombed the country by erasing all state abortion laws—including in those...
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On Michigan
The article by former Michigan state representative Greg Kaza concerning the effect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the University of Michigan race-preference cases (“Michigan’s Race Factor,” Vital Signs, October) is dreadfully misleading. Kaza would have us believe that an important victory in the struggle against race-based preferences had been won. Quite the opposite...
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Master of Your Domain
With the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in Kelo v. New London, the truth of this column’s conceit—that Rockford, Illinois, is a microcosm of America—has never been more clear. One of the running themes of this column since shortly after it began in 2001 as a “Letter From Rockford” has been the abuse of the...
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Supreme Court’s Trump Ruling Highlights Divisions Between Justices
Following Monday’s ruling on the Colorado ballot case, the Supreme Court is likely to only hear cases that can be resolved with the support of the liberal justices, while avoiding those that expose the Court’s the political divisions.