“The law is good, if a man use it lawfully.” —1 Timothy 1:8 Richard Posner is one of the greatest judges never to have sat on the Supreme Court of the United States. A distinguished professor at the University of Chicago, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit for 25...
In The Respondent, Hollywood actor Greg Ellis reveals the tyrannical horrors of the family court system, designed especially to emasculate men.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision striking down the University of Michigan’s race-based undergraduate admissions policy ended a decade-long struggle started by university administrators and finished by conservative legislators and their grassroots supporters. On April 23, 1997, Michigan State Rep. David Jaye, a paleoconservative Republican from suburban Macomb County, sponsored an amendment to the...
The U.S. Supreme Court decision Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, issued last spring, upheld a 2006 citizen-approved ballot initiative in Michigan to amend the state constitution to ban reverse discrimination in public employment, contracting, and education, including at the University of Michigan. The ruling ends a quarter-century battle that began when David Jaye,...
I met Judge Robert Bork once, in the summer of 1989, when I was interning at Accuracy in Media. I was working on a feature story for the Washington Inquirer, AIM’s weekly newspaper, about the Smithsonian Institution’s use of tax dollars to fund the performance of Santeria and Palo Mayombe rituals on the Mall in...
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
“Republics exist only on tenure of being agitated.” —Wendell Phillips If anything might have transformed the presidential election of 2004 from a dull ritual of mass democracy into an interesting and perhaps even meaningful act of civic decision, it would have been the presence of Patrick J. Buchanan, whose wit and sharp conservative intelligence enlivened...
A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals surprised most conservatives and even a few liberals when it ruled that California’s recall election could not go forward on October 7 as scheduled, overruling a district judge and effectively overruling the California courts, which had rebuffed all legal challenges to the recall, and California...
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...
The term limit issue has been sweeping the country. Since 1990, voters in 15 states have used the petition and referendum process to impose term limits on their state legislators. Earlier this year in Illinois, term limit supporters filed 437,088 petition signatures from almost every county calling for a statewide referendum on term limits. The...
Republicans, after their comprehensive defeat on November 6, have been going through an identity crisis. Defeated Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown said, “We need to be a larger tent party.” A Republican aide adds, “We need candidates who are capable of articulating their policy positions without alienating massive voting blocs.” The Economist advised that, if the...
“As everyone knows, I made it clear that my first choice for the Supreme Court will make history as the first African American woman justice.” So Joe Biden promised. Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, however, Biden has refused to produce a list of Black female judges and scholars whom he would consider...
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. ...
In light of the Obamacare ruling today from the Supreme Court, in his post below Mr. Richert not only compares Chief Justice Roberts to Chief Justice Warren but compares Warren favorably to Roberts! I have no doubt Warren would have joined in Justice Ginsburg’s concurring/dissenting opinion and held that Obamacare passes Constitutional muster under any of...
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES On Writ of Certiorari to the Court of Appeals June 21, 2017 Justice Breyer delivered the Opinion of the Court. Sheila X is a single woman living in San Diego. Shortly after giving birth to a child, she received her Law School Admission Test scores. ...
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. ...
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.
Did anybody notice when Catholic Christianity ceased to be a religion in the United States? Not when it stopped being a popular or even a permissible religion, but when it became simply a nonreligion? I ask this because a recent court decision in California threatens to launch a legal revolution, in a way that would...
Did I read aright the piece on “Gay Marriage” by Prof. William J. Quirk (“What’s Next for the Imperial Judiciary?” News, January)? When he puts forth his solution, it turns out to be the passage of a bill that will give the “last word” to “[e]ach state’s high court.” But as he himself points out...
The Line Item Veto Act has been struck down by the Supreme Court. As I predicted in the February issue of Chronicles (“Reining in the Feds“), the Court (in Clinton v. City of New York) declared that the act violated the Constitution’s Presentment Clause, which commands that a bill passing both the House and the...
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review McDonald v. City of Chicago, a case that presents the watershed issue of whether the individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, established in 2008 in District of Columbia v. Heller, applies to states. Most Court observers agree that it appears very likely that the...
I met Judge Robert Bork once, in the summer of 1989, when I was interning at Accuracy in Media. I was working on a feature story for the Washington Inquirer, AIM’s weekly newspaper, about the Smithsonian Institution’s use of tax dollars to fund the performance of Santeria and Palo Mayombe rituals on the Mall in...
If it’s Christmas, then ’tis the season for creche suits, and this past December was no different. The Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against Gov. Wallace Wilkinson because the state constructed a Nativity scene on the front lawn of the Capitol in Frankfort. Children from the Good Shepherd School (Catholic)...
“Disheartening and demoralizing,” wailed Judge Neil Gorsuch of President Trump’s comments about the judges seeking to overturn his 90-day ban on travel to the U.S. from the Greater Middle East war zones. What a wimp. Did our future justice break down crying like Sen. Chuck Schumer? Sorry, this is not Antonin Scalia. And just what...
When he was governor of Texas, President George W. Bush presided over the execution of 152 murderers. Yet today, as if to turn the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas” on its head, El Presidente wants to stop the Lone Star State from giving the hot shot to a Mexican murderer and rapist. As disturbing as...
Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the Texas state comptroller, has become the new champion of American believers. Her office is charged with determining what groups qualify for exemption from state taxation (including sales taxes, property taxes, and other state levies) as religious organizations. My ancient Concise Oxford Dictionary defines “religious” as “Imbued with religion, pious, god-fearing, devout...
The name Learned Hand may not leap readily off the tongue if one were asked to list the conservative luminaries of the 20th century. Few people today outside the legal profession have any idea just how profound his influence as a jurist was and continues to be more than half a century after his death. His...
Former President Donald Trump questions the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. For half the country, this makes him a “sore loser” who promotes “conspiracy theories” and pushes “The Big Lie.” But when President Joe Biden in his recent press conference preemptively questions the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections, nine months before they even...
Abortion is on the rise in the United States—and has been since George W. Bush was first inaugurated President in January 2001. Current estimates of the number of abortions performed annually in America hover just above 1.3 million. What may astonish many of the “moral values” voters who reelected President Bush last November is that,...
In June, the Supreme Court greatly augmented executive power by holding that the president has the exclusive right to grant formal recognition to a foreign sovereign. This decision further pushes presidential power in the direction of royal prerogative through which monarchs enjoy the exclusive care over foreign affairs to the detriment of the people’s representatives....
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...
Some republicans object to using the term nuclear option to describe their plan to end filibusters on the Senate floor during confirmation hearings, but the image of total war is a fitting one for the possible direction of the “upper chamber” these days. The 11th-hour compromise between the squishes in both parties will only serve...
George Goldberg; Reconstructing America; Wm. B. Eedernabs; Grand Rapids, MI. Many years ago Leo Strauss remarked that the Supreme Court is more likely to defer to the contentions of social science than to the Ten Commandments as the words of the living God. Strauss was, of course, basing his observation on the use of social...
In February, five Supreme Court Justices voted in camera to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the issue of abortion back to the states, where it resided until 1973. Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett had all signed on to the majority opinion overturning Roe that had been drafted by...
“Her mind is shot.” That was the crisp diagnosis of Donald Trump on hearing the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the possibility he might become president. It all began with an interview last week when the justice was asked for her thoughts on a Trump presidency. Ginsburg went on a tear. “I can’t...
If Judge Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court will consist of six Catholics, two Jews and precisely one white Anglo-Saxon Protestant in the form of Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 89 years old and boasts of two important WASP insignia: inherited wealth and a bow tie. He also thinks that Shakespeare’s plays...
Judge John Roberts of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, whom President George W. Bush has nominated to take the place of retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, is what we used to call a “lawyer’s lawyer.” He comes from Harvard College, Harvard Law School, the Harvard Law Review, a...
The Oklahoma Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, has ordered a monument of the Ten Commandments removed from the Capitol. Calling the Commandments “religious in nature and an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths,” the court said the monument must go. Gov. Mary Fallin has refused. And Oklahoma lawmakers instead have filed legislation...
The Trump administration is going to prevail in the separation-of-powers battle royale against the obstinate lower courts.
If Trump loses outright on the immunity issue, he will have himself to blame. He had the opportunity to nominate three Thomas/Alito-esque stalwarts. He whiffed.
“If you look at Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil, you see that people want politicians that do what they promise,” said Spanish businessman Juan Carlos Perez Carreno. The Spaniard was explaining to The New York Times what lay behind the rise of Vox, which the Times calls “Spain’s first far-right party since the...
On October 15, 1905, Burton K. Wheeler stepped off a train at the Northern Pacific depot in Butte, Montana, thinking that he had seen more of the West than Lewis and Clark but wondering if his luck had run out. After looking up every lawyer in town (Wheeler had graduated from the University of Michigan...
Parents and children across America breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced that “A Charlie Brown Christmas” would air on public television after all. This classic favorite seemed ready to disappear like everything else in 2020 when Apple TV obtained the rights and planned to air the program on its streaming service, instead of...
Beach Blanket Bankruptcy would be a great name for a 1960’s-style surf movie about California’s state and local finances. Alas, although Frankie Avalon still is with us, the beauteous Annette has gone the way of fiscal solvency. Already in recent years, four Golden State cities have declared bankruptcy: Vallejo in 2008, and Stockton, San Bernardino,...
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court once again trampled on the rights of the states. The media took little notice. Since it became a state in 1912, Arizona has had a citizenship requirement for voters. In 2004, the people of the state, in an effort to combat voter fraud, enacted Proposition 200. This initiative requires...
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...
Public figures talk about globalization as if it were the Rapture. We are told that, unlike Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, we live in an era of international trade; so these days, we must worry more about what the world thinks and does. As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told the Southern Center for International Studies,...
Trump’s promise to end birthright citizenship will be a battle but it’s a battle America can’t afford to lose.
Democrats have led their supporters to entertain a fantasy of winning by disqualifying Trump rather than beating him, but the scenarios don't work, and lawfare only breeds strife.
Thirteen of the British colonies in North America declared their independence in 1776 as the only means of preserving the life, liberty, and property of what was then declared to be the American people. It was generally understood, in light of John Locke’s 1690 Second Treatise on Civil Government (widely recognized in the late-18th century...