March 6, 2010
The news from the March 2 oral argument in the Supreme Court's biggest pending case was that the five conservative justices seem poised to make the Second Amendment right to bear arms applicable to state and local gun controls, as well as federal. In the process, they will strike down the unusually strict handgun bans in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill. -- probably in June.
But debate about the gun...
July 29, 2009
"Many conservatives oppose Judge [Sonia] Sotomayor's nomination because she does not appear to support originalism.... But when it comes to the race cases before the Supreme Court, too many conservatives abandon both originalism and judicial restraint [by claiming] that the Constitution's 14th Amendment mandated a policy of strict colorblindness by state and local governments.... The...
July 22, 2009
A Nexis search finds more than 50 mentions of "kabuki"-- a form of Japanese theater that has become journalese for empty, stylized ritual -- in news stories about the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearings on Judge Sonia Sotomayor.
The most common explanation for why judicial confirmation hearings have become such empty rituals is that the Senate's rejection of Judge Robert Bork in 1987...
March 17, 2007
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued the biggest gun control decision in decades on March 9, perhaps setting the stage for the biggest Supreme Court gun control decision ever. Rejecting the views of most other courts, Judge Laurence Silberman held for the 2-1 majority, "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms" -- not just...
March 7, 2007
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued the biggest gun control decision in decades on March 9, perhaps setting the stage for the biggest Supreme Court gun control decision ever. Rejecting the views of most other courts, Judge Laurence Silberman held for the 2-1 majority, "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms"—not...
January 19, 2002
It made news when hecklers booed Sacramento Bee publisher Janis Besler Heaphy so loudly and long-for suggesting that the government had gone too far in curbing civil liberties since September 11-that she could not finish her December 15 commencement speech at California State University (Sacramento). "Many interpret it as a troubling example of rising intolerance for public discourse that...
April 22, 2000
Chances are that most Senators have not really read the proposed Victims' Rights Amendment, which is scheduled to come to the floor for the first time on April 25. After all, it's kind of wordy-almost as long as the Constitution's first 10 amendments (the Bill of Rights) combined. And you don't have to go far into it to understand two key points.
The first is that a "no" vote would...
January 13, 1997
About 3 a.m. one night last April, after reading the two federal appellate decisions creating a new right to assisted suicide, and being pulled one way by concerns about judicial imperialism, and the other way by heart-rending anecdotes of people dying in excruciating pain-or blowing their brains out or jumping off bridges-because they lacked the more humane option of lethal medication, I settled...
December 5, 1994
"A few of the members, as happens in all such assemblies, will possess superior talents; will, by frequent reelections, become members of long standing; will be thoroughly masters of public business...The greater the proportion of new members and the less the information of the bulk of the members, the more apt they will be to fall into the snares that may be laid for them."
-James...
October 10, 1994
Having accused President Bill Clinton of preparing " a near-fatal blow to the framers' carefully crafted restraints on the president's war-making power" ["A Betrayal of the Constitution," Sept.19 1994, Page25], I write now to concede (with some relief) that the not-quite-invasion of Haiti ended up doing less damage to the constitutional fabric than I had feared.
I also respond...
September 19, 1994
In a sad display of Democratic hypocrisy-only cosmetically offset by a smaller dose of the Republican variety-President Bill Clinton is about to trash one of the Constitution's cardinal principles: its solemn reservation to Congress of the power "to declare war."
If this would-be imperial president fulfills his lawless (and foolish) vow to invade Haiti without first seeking a...
March 9, 1992
Justice Clarence Thomas's eye-catching February 25 dissent in a prison-beating case left one thing a bit unclear. Suppose that instead of just loosening a few of the handcuffed prisoner's teeth and mussing up his face while their supervisor was admonishing them "not to have too much fun," the two Louisiana penitentiary guards had gotten a little bit rough.
Suppose that they had broken...
July 22, 1991
The central vice of liberal judicial activism, conservative theorists have long contended, has been unwarranted interference with the rights of the people to make the laws through their elected representatives.
Now that Reagan and Bush appointees are firmly in command of the Supreme Court, will they practice the deference to elected representatives that their sponsors preach?
Perhaps. But the...
May 21, 1990
The battle over allocation of foreign-policy powers between the president and Congress, joined so publicly during the Reagan administration, has moved underground amid signs that neither branch learned much from the traumas of the late 1980s.
The Bush administration, bolstered by bold misreadings of the Constitution and its history, has issued sweeping claims of executive power that virtually...
January 6, 1986
An activist jurisprudence, one which anchors the Constitution only in the consciences of jurists, is a chameleon jurisprudence, changing color and form in each era.
The Constitution... is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.
If the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably...
