If the election of 1996 turned out to be an even bigger snore than most citizens anticipated, the fall of the year was nevertheless enlivened by a dangerous outbreak of something resembling actual cogitation on the American right. Given the mentally paralytic cast of the Dole-Kemp campaign and much of the party that nominated it,...
1627 search results for: Supreme+Court
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Puppets and Their Masters
A naked boy runs down a crowded Italian street, chased by an angry old man. Grabbing the boy by the back of the neck, the old man shouts: “Just wait till I get you back home.” The crowd quickly takes sides against the old man, and when the carabinieri arrive, they take him off to...
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The Coming Slap in the Face
In June 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Kelo v. City of New London, depriving property owners of rights that virtually everyone has always assumed they had. Very soon—before you can say “sequel to Lawrence v. Texas”—the Supreme Court will no doubt take up the issue of same-sex marriage. You think...
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Antonin Scalia’s Flexible Constitution
Who is to decide? This question animated Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who died of natural causes in mid-February. He was the longest-serving member of the current Supreme Court. Nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was known for his acerbic wit and fidelity to the text of the Constitution, as understood by those who ratified...
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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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Recent and Permanent
When the people’s fundamental law is ignored by the legislature, the remedy is typically to elect new representatives to set things right. If the people’s fundamental law is transgressed by the courts, the correction is often not so easy. Many judges are appointed for life and never have to face the electorate. Others are appointed...
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Joe Biden, 20 Years Ago, Blocked the Potential First Black Female on the Supreme Court
Joe Biden repeatedly blocked the path of Janice Rogers Brown when she was being considered for the Court.
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Will Justice Amy Star in ‘The Five’?
By nominating Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, Donald Trump kept his word, and more than that. Should she be confirmed, he will have made history. Even his enemies would have to concede that Trump triumphed where his Republican predecessors—even Ronald Reagan, who filled three court vacancies—fell short. Trump’s achievement—victory in the...
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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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Alone Among Strangers
At the moment the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of states to enact parental consultation abortion statutes, the abortion-advocacy organizations went into high gear. The Hodgson v. Minnesota and Ohio v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health decisions “endangered teens,” they claimed, and NOW President Molly Yard charged that the Court had “thrown down the...
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Promoting Agendas
William J. Brennan, Jr., has retired from the Supreme Court. In three decades on the nation’s highest court Brennan did more, perhaps, than any other American politician except for Lyndon Johnson to promote the agenda of the liberal left: the antiwhite racism of the “Jim Snow” system, radical feminism, the reduction of the authority of...
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Jefferson’s Cousin
From the June 2002 issue of Chronicles. There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work...
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Tribunals for Terror
When President Bush signed an executive order on November 13 that authorized the trial of non-U.S. citizens on charges of terrorism before special military tribunals, the response from the political right was almost—though not quite—unanimously supportive. Not only did the attorney general himself enthusiastically defend the tribunals, so did such luminaries as the conservative movement’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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A Hard Case
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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SCOTUS v. U.S.
By the time you read this, nine Americans may well have declared the United States a nonentity. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court was supposed to decide on the constitutionality of Arizona’s SB 1070, the now-famous law that sought to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the state. The Obama administration struck quickly after...
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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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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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Roberts Left a Loophole in the Affirmative Action Decision
Chief Justice John Roberts' rejection of the racial discrimination of affirmative action is one of his greatest Supreme Court rulings. But unfortunately he left in a giant loophole that will allow colleges to continue to privilege blacks and Hispanics over Asians and whites.
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Jefferson’s Cousin
There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
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SCOTUS’s Unanimous Decision and the Pandemic of Trump Derangement Syndrome
That things could get ugly and fast explains why it was imperative for the Supreme Court to rule as it did in the Colorado ballot case—and to do so unanimously.
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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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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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Slouching Towards the Gulag
The Trump “hush money” verdict should serve as a wake-up call to all freedom-loving Americans. If the best-known man in the world can be railroaded in a rigged kangaroo court, any of us could be.
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Taking God Out of School
The Pledge of Allegiance, as this issue goes to press, is illegal for children in the public schools of Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington state to recite, because it contains the words “under God.” Two out of three judges on a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...
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Sociological Balderdash
The Supreme Court’s recent Casey decision on abortion is a memorable example of sociological balderdash. The joint decision began, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt,” to which Justice Scalia fired back in his dissent, “Liberty finds no refuge in this jurisprudence of confusion.” Scalia’s observation becomes painfully clear when one reads the...
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The Living Constitution and the Death of Sovereignty
As this is written, the United States and its NATO allies are bombing the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that jellied armed forces have been unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States is not formally at war without an express...
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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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Americans’ Right to Own Firearms
While it allows many controls, the Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees to every responsible, law-abiding adult the right to own firearms. To the political philosophers who influenced our Founding Fathers, arms possession by good people was crucial to a healthy society. Thomas Paine foreshadowed current gun-lobby slogans (e.g., “When guns are outlawed, only outlaws...
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Judicial Tyranny: An American Tradition
The fiftieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education generated several articles in Chronicles outlining the noxious legacy of that dubious decision. But there were hundreds (if not thousands!) of other decisions by the judiciary that misinterpreted the Constitution, disregarded millennia of Western traditions and laws, and spat in the face of American voters....
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Do We Want a Federal Police Force?
Probably the last thing that would have occurred to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on his way to meet “Kristen” in Room 870 of D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel was that both he and the Emperor’s Club VIP were under FBI surveillance for federal crimes—prostitution and a financial crime called “structuring.” Traditionally, the enforcement of criminal law...
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Defense of Gay Marriage Act
At 11:30 a.m. on October 10, the Connecticut State Supreme Court legalized “gay marriage,” making Connecticut the third state, behind Massachusetts and California, to sanction the practice. In a 4-3 ruling that cannot be appealed, because it is based on an interpretation of the state constitution, Justice Richard N. Palmer opined for the narrow majority...
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Leave the Scalia Chair Vacant
It is a measure of the stature and the significance of Justice Antonin Scalia that, upon the news of his death at a hunting lodge in Texas, Washington was instantly caught up in an unseemly quarrel over who would succeed him. But no one can replace Justice Scalia. He was a giant among jurists. For...
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What the Founders Didn’t Count On
“I assert that the people of the United States . . . have sufficient patriotism and intelligence to sit in judgment on every question which has arisen or which will arise no matter how long our government will endure.” —William Jennings Bryan As citizens it is fitting that we engage in acts of civic piety...
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How Conservatives Can Finally Get Judicial Nominations Right
It is past time that conservatives actually play to win at the U.S. Supreme Court.
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Appointing Supreme Court Justices
Michael McConnell, to use the overworked metaphor, is the “poster boy” for the Senate Democrats’ attempts to frustrate President Bush’s promise to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Scalia and Thomas are the two current justices who have most closely embraced a jurisprudence faithful to the understanding of the Framers,...
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The Great Left-Wing Disinformation Operation Against the Supreme Court
A coordinated left-wing media smear campaign against conservative Supreme Court justices has one goal and one goal only: to delegitimize the U.S. Supreme Court, and to pave the way for ruinous policies that would irreparably damage, and ultimately destroy, that venerable institution.
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A Watershed for the Left
During the week of December 6, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments in Perry v. Schwarzenegger. In the original decision, U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker held that California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, violated the Due Process...
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A Dissenting Voice
Judge Danny Boggs of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is, for believers in the rule of law, a hero. Judge Boggs, in an extraordinary dissenting opinion published in May, revealed profound problems with the majority of his court’s approach to law in an affirmative-action case and pointed out that his chief...
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Metaphors Have Consequences
“The adulterous connection of church and state.” —Thomas Paine Is “separation of Church and State” a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution? Should it be? The answers of constitutional historians Daniel L. Dreisbach and Philip Hamburger fly in the face of conventional wisdom, embodied in such cases as Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe...
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Vagrancy Law
San Francisco’s municipal palace looks like the Wicked Witch of the West might live there, only there aren’t any flying monkeys. But several years ago, the monkeys set up housekeeping right out front. Supplied with food, clothing, tents, and other amenities by “community activists,” hundreds of wild-eyed tramps extorted money from passersby, drank cheap wine,...
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The Constitution: Hate Crimes’ Latest Victim
New federal hate-crimes legislation is on the way. Never one to miss an opportunity to expands its powers, the national government has capitalized on a perceived rash of hate crimes in order to increase federal jurisdiction, and the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 1999 (HCPA) will probably become law in the near future. When confronted...
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Once Again in the News
Gay marriage is once again in the news. This time, the rumblings come not from the Sandwich Islands, but the Green Mountains of Vermont. In a riding handed down right before Christmas, the state’s governing body, the Vermont Supreme Court, instructed the legislature to extend the benefits and protections of marriage to homosexual couples. The...
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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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Who’s In Charge of Clarence Thomas?
Liberals have never forgiven Clarence Thomas for refusing their patronage and their leash. As a Supreme Court Justice, he remains an unconquered American.
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Noncompliance
Noncompliance with the 1990 census was massive: the Wall Street Journal reported on May 21 that only 75 percent of the forms had been filled out and sent in, “down from 90 percent a decade ago.” That’s good. Passive resistance against such intrusions is the least we should expect of ourselves as citizens. Thirty years...
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Killing Due Process in the War on Terror
One striking feature of the U.S. Constitution is the number of procedural rights guaranteed to individuals accused of criminal behavior before they can be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The overall guarantee of due process of law contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments constitutes the basic foundation, but there are many other protections. ...
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Just One More Justice . . .
At the polls last November, conservatives and libertarians who vote according to conscience had two options: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party). Combined, these two garnered only 719,655 votes—a paltry amount compared with John McCain’s 59,082,002. For those who believe in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty, the 2008 election was...
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Just One More Justice
At the polls last November, conservatives and libertarians who vote according to conscience had two options: Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Chuck Baldwin (Constitution Party). Combined, these two garnered only 719,655 votes—a paltry amount compared with John McCain’s 59,082,002. For those who believe in smaller government, fiscal responsibility, and individual liberty, the 2008 election was...