February 6, 2010
I have instructed my subordinates that suspected Al Qaeda terrorists captured anywhere in the world should be interrogated extensively -- with safeguards against abuse -- before any Miranda warnings or access to lawyers. This approach is legal and it may save lives. Although the specific evidence obtained might in some cases be inadmissible in court, the suspects will be prosecuted based on other...
January 9, 2010
Dick Cheney has it backward. The problem with President Obama's counter-terrorism policy isn't its (rather limited) divergence from the Bush-Cheney approach. The problem is Obama's emulation of one of the biggest Bush-Cheney mistakes.
That is relying too much on unilateral presidential power and judicial improvisation rather than seeking new legislation -- as two notable judicial opinions have...
September 26, 2009
President Obama is rightly concerned that our health care system leaves many Americans without insurance when they need it most and is hugely inefficient, with costs soaring toward crisis proportions unless something changes.
Few of Obama's Republican critics have signed on to any credible plan of their own to address these inexorably growing problems. Some have reneged on earlier support for...
July 20, 2009
Perhaps the most remarkable exchange during the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing came on Tuesday, when President Obama's nominee flatly repudiated his judicial philosophy.
This is all the more striking because it's a good bet that the Obama team knew it was coming. White House lawyers spent days prepping Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the hearings, and it was quite predictable that she would be...
June 5, 2009
Conservative critics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor may be digging themselves into a hole if they keep hurling the tired old "liberal activist" slogan at her. The reason is that her supporters can plausibly retort that these days, the Supreme Court's conservatives are as activist as the liberals, especially on racial issues.
But conservatives and like-minded centrists can win the political...
May 28, 2009
As has occurred with dispiriting regularity in recent decades, the current debate over filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court has been marred -- already! -- by a considerable dose of demagogy and false factual claims. It would be nice to see the media truth-squadding such stuff, without the usual double standards.
Take, for example, the wildly overheated denunciations of Judge Sonia Sotomayor by...
May 15, 2009
Barack Obama first explained his "empathy" test for choosing justices in voting against the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice in 2005:
What matters on the Supreme Court is those 5 percent of cases that are truly difficult... In those 5 percent of hard cases, the constitutional text will not be directly on point. The language of the statute will not be perfectly clear. Legal...
May 9, 2009
Many hope, and many others fear, that President Obama will choose a crusading liberal activist to energize the Supreme Court's progressive wing.
Such an appointee might push to expand racial preferences, abortion rights, and especially welfare rights for poor people; to strike down the law barring openly gay people from the military; to recognize gay marriage (which Obama has opposed); to end the...
April 11, 2009
Before 9/11, judges had no power to entertain writs of habeas corpus (petitions for release) by enemy fighters taken into custody by U.S. forces overseas.
Justice Robert Jackson spelled out this rule in a landmark 1950 decision, Johnson v. Eisentrager: "We are cited to no instance where a court, in this or any other country where the writ [of habeas corpus] is known, has issued it on behalf...
February 14, 2009
After many months of adoring media coverage and Democratic triumphalism, President Obama is now getting pasted by carnivorous columnists, angry activists, and House hotheads for every bow to bipartisanship, every deviation from liberal orthodoxy, and every tax-deficient nominee.
The problem is not that Obama is doing a bad job. For a new president beset with the most daunting combination of...
February 7, 2009
President Obama has tried to remain true to his campaign message of bipartisanship. But he's struggled to get everyone else to play along. Congressional Democrats, finally out from under the GOP thumb, want to enjoy their powers, while Republicans are already plotting their comeback. It'll only get worse with time, as firm decisions have to be made on issues that are loaded with ideology and...
January 24, 2009
Like a great many other Americans at this singular moment in history, I have rarely been so alarmed about the state of the world -- and have never been so hopeful about the promise of a new president.
Standing amid hundreds of thousands of celebrants between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument at the "We Are One" concert on Sunday, and watching Barack Obama's inaugural...
January 10, 2009
Dick Cheney, who will step down as vice president on Jan. 20, has been widely portrayed as a creature of the dark side, a monstrous figure who trampled on the Constitution to wage war against all foes, real and imagined. Barack Obama was elected partly to cleanse the temple of the Bush-Cheney stain, and in his campaign speeches he promised to reverse Cheney's efforts to seize power for the White...
November 15, 2008
What should Barack Obama do with the 250 men who are still locked up in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp? Of the many problems the new president will face, this is one of the most difficult, and one he must get right. Along with it, he must answer equally tough questions about how his administration will deal with suspected terrorists in the future: Where will they be held and what...
November 1, 2008
When John McCain and many other Republicans ask, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" there is an implication that maybe he is somehow sinister or extremist.
I don't believe that. But I do think that there are two very different Obamas. Both are extraordinarily intelligent, serene under pressure, and driven by an admirable social conscience -- albeit as willing to deploy deception as the...
October 25, 2008
An African-American candidate with left-of-center views and less than four years in the Senate appears poised to win the presidential election over a seasoned white war hero who was until lately a media darling.
And Barack Obama's favorability rating (53 percent favorable to 33 percent unfavorable) in a recent CBS News/New York Times poll was "the highest for a presidential candidate running...
May 10, 2008
Is Barack Obama--now closer than ever to winning the Democratic nomination--nonetheless at a political disadvantage because of white racism, or "racial fears," or "race-baiting," or racial "double standards," as some commentators have suggested?
The evidence indicates otherwise, as it pertains both to this election and more broadly to the perennial tendency of many...
April 26, 2008
"Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
So said British statesman Edmund Burke in his famous 1774 speech to the electors of Bristol. Similarly, James Madison wrote in Federalist 57 that voters should choose the candidates "who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue...
April 5, 2008
Weeks of brooding over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Michelle Obama eruptions have severely shaken the hope I expressed in January: "If Barack Obama can show he is tough enough and pragmatic enough to win the presidency and serve with distinction, it would be the best thing that could happen to America and the world."
What should we learn about Obama's judgment and fortitude from the...
February 23, 2008
"I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there's nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to...
January 26, 2008
Playing the race card is not really Barack Obama's style. Although happy to use his racial identity as an asset, he seeks to transcend it by getting beyond obsessing about racial grievances. This is not easy in a party that has long wallowed in the politics of group grievance. It is especially difficult when running against a woman who has so assiduously used the gender card while profiting from...
December 8, 2007
Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?
The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama's character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that "in kindergarten, Senator Obama...
February 3, 2007
Whether Barack Obama would be a better president than Hillary Rodham Clinton, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney is an interesting and debatable question. But it is beyond debate that an Obama win in 2008 would be by far the best thing that has happened to African-Americans, and to race relations, in more than 50 years.
Obama embodies and preaches the true and vital message that in today's America,...
