When big companies threaten lawsuits to suppress the timely reporting of newsworthy information, media organizations often rush to the barricades waving the First Amendment as their banner.
The victim was black and unarmed; his assailants, four white cops. The publicity was intense. Public outrage was boiling. The state courts moved the trial out of the racially divided city, where convictions seemed likely, to a quieter, whiter town. And the jury’s verdict-not a single conviction-spread rage through much of the black community.
Bradley A. Smith is "unfit for the office," says Al Gore — so unfit that "this is the first time I’ve called for the defeat of a [Clinton] nominee." The President’s agreement to nominate Smith is "a betrayal of campaign finance reform," says Bill Bradley. Smith’s views are "extreme," and the nomination "reeks of the kind of backroom deal-making that turns Americans away from politics and government," says Common Cause. And even the nominator in chief says that Gore and Bradley "were right to condemn" Smith’s views (if not the nomination), because Smith "hates campaign finance reform."
At the center of this little storm is an earnest, articulate, libertarian, 41-year-old professor at Capital University Law School, in Columbus, Ohio. He was plucked from obscurity by Senate Republicans to fill one of three Republican slots on the six-member Federal Election Commission, because he is perhaps the most prolific scholarly critic of the wisdom and constitutionality of both current and proposed curbs on campaign contributions and spending.
Only the President can nominate people to sit on the FEC. But thanks to one of American government’s peculiar customs — enforced by the Senate leadership’s threat to hold the President’s judicial nominees hostage until Clinton gave them Smith — Clinton made the nomination on Feb. 9, ending many months of stalemate. Now Brad Smith is getting a taste of what nominees as diverse as Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, Lani Guinier, and Zoe Baird have experienced: the hazards of becoming a symbol in one of Washington’s ideological wars.
Vermont and its legislature are mired in furious debate over the state Supreme Court’s ruling two months ago that the legislature must "extend to same-sex couples the common benefits and protections that flow from marriage under Vermont law," either by allowing same-sex marriages or by creating comprehensive "domestic partnership" rights.
The death penalty is so politically correct these days that Hillary Rodham Clinton supports it. Her husband, the Democratic President, has championed curbs on death row appeals. So Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s Jan. 31 moratorium on all executions is an extraordinary event. Maybe even a turning point.
On the issues, Bill Bradley and Al Gore do not differ very dramatically. On the character front, however, they present a clear but complicated contrast: Gore’s intelligence and energy are marred by a persistent habit of distorting the truth-including both his opponents’ records and his own-sometimes to the point of flat-out falsehood. Bradley, on the other hand, seems pretty honest, albeit flawed by an above-it-all sanctimoniousness that made it seem jarring when he shifted belatedly, and half-heartedly, into attack mode.
By the Court On the face of it, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on campaign finance, handed down early this week, was a routine reaffirmation of the status quo-the Justices’ 1976 Buckley vs. Valeo precedent, an exercise in constitutional baby-splitting that once seemed elegant to some of us but that has, in practice, made an awful mess of things. But the Jan. 24 ruling touched off noisy celebrations among self-styled campaign finance law reformers who detest the status quo. This was partly spin on their part, of course. But the decision did reflect subtle movement in the reformers’ direction by some Justices, at least three of whom openly invited tighter campaign finance restrictions.
The pandering by George W. Bush and John McCain to Republican reactionaries who want to keep the Confederate battle flag atop South Carolina’s Statehouse is especially disheartening for those of us who hope for the emergence of more-creditable Republican alternatives to the Democratic politics of racial grievance, preference, and "Sharptonism."
Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker’s ugly remarks about foreign-born and gay people, and his reference to a black teammate as "a fat monkey," may have provoked a broader public debate about how to deal with bigotry than have all the college speech codes put together.
Can Congress authorize battered wives, rape victims, and other people harmed by gender-motivated crimes to file federal civil rights lawsuits against their assailants? That’s what Congress did in the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) of 1994, and that’s the specific question on which the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Jan. 11 in United States vs. Morrison.
The broader issue is whether the justices should expand states’ rights by striking down the VAWA provision, despite congressional findings that a federal remedy is necessary to combat discrimination against victimized women in state justice systems and to enable such women to participate fully in the economic life of the nation and in the interstate commerce that Congress is empowered to protect.
This may be the biggest states’ rights case since 1992, when the justices began breathing new life into the federalist principle that the national government has limited powers and may not unduly encroach upon the domain of the states.
It’s an easy case for many liberals, who support VAWA, and for many conservatives, who would love to see it struck down. It is likely to be a hard case for the two centrist justices whose votes will almost certainly determine the outcome: Sandra Day O’Connor-whose passions include both states’ rights and women’s rights-and Anthony M. Kennedy.
It’s certainly a hard case for me. Part of me wants the court to strike down the statute as an unwarranted, largely symbolic exercise in political correctness that will do little for victims of violence and even less for interstate commerce. But judicial restraint argues for upholding the statute as a (barely) plausible exercise of Congress’s necessarily broad power to regulate activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
