Category Archives: Major Print Outlets

Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.

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Opening Argument – Falsehoods About Guantanamo

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"These are people picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan. They weren’t wearing uniforms … but they were there to kill." – President Bush, June 20, 2005

"These detainees are dangerous enemy combatants….They were picked up on the battlefield, fighting American forces, trying to kill American forces." – White House press secretary Scott McClellan, June 21, 2005

"The people that are there are people we picked up on the battlefield, primarily in Afghanistan. They’re terrorists. They’re bomb makers. They’re facilitators of terror. They’re members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban….We’ve let go those that we’ve deemed not to be a continuing threat. But the 520-some that are there now are serious, deadly threats to the United States." – Vice President Cheney, June 23, 2005

"These are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield. They’re terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama bin Laden’s] bodyguards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th 9/11 hijacker." – Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, June 27, 2005

These quotes are representative of countless assertions by administration officials over the past four years that all — or the vast majority — of the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are Qaeda terrorists or Taliban fighters captured on "the battlefield."

The assertions have been false. And those quoted above came long after the evidence of their falsity should have been manifest to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their subordinates.

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O’Connor’s Rightful Heir?

by Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Newsweek

When conservative Washington lawyers who argue before the Supreme Court talk about "the Greenhouse Effect," they don’t mean global warming. The Greenhouse in question is Linda Greenhouse, the longtime and esteemed Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times. The "effect" is to subtly push Supreme Court justices to the left. Unless a jurist comes to the court with very strongly held, or even fixed, conservative views, there is a tendency to be seduced by the liberal legal establishment that d

When conservative Washington lawyers who argue before the Supreme Court talk about "the Greenhouse Effect," they don’t mean global warming. The Greenhouse in question is Linda Greenhouse, the longtime and esteemed Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times. The "effect" is to subtly push Supreme Court justices to the left. Unless a jurist comes to the court with very strongly held, or even fixed, conservative views, there is a tendency to be seduced by the liberal legal establishment that dominates at elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. Those schools produce a disproportionate number of the law clerks who generally draft opinions for the justices, as well as the sort of professor routinely tapped as a source by Greenhouse, who is regarded as a legal scholar in her own right.

That, at least, is the view of conservatives like U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, who popularized the term some years ago. The chief "victim" of the Greenhouse Effect is usually said to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has drifted to the left since his appointment …

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Opening Argument – Bush and His Critics Miss the Point

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Libertarians and Democrats say that President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program is a clear violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Bush and some impressive intelligence professionals say that the program is a vital early-warning defense against Qaeda terrorists and thus an exercise of the president’s inherent constitutional power to defend the nation; this power, they say, trumps any conflicting provisions of FISA.

Both sides are right. But both are wrong to spend their time bickering over the legality or illegality of what Bush has authorized the National Security Agency to do. They should be focusing on how to amend FISA to provide independent checks on abuse of the NSA program without compromising its effectiveness in preventing mass murder.

"FISA is outdated and inadequate and urgently needs reform to make it effective against the jihadist threat," says Philip Bobbitt, a Texas law professor and defense expert who held a high position in President Clinton’s National Security Council and is writing a book on the war against terror.

"The critics are insisting on rules that fly in the face of the strategic realities," Bobbitt adds. "But when the president secretly decides a measure is unconstitutional, and neglects to say so (much less why), he sacrifices the legitimacy that comes from public understanding of his decision and undermines our system of public consent."

Bobbitt is exactly right, on all counts. As to Bush, the man never consults Congress when he can make a grandiose claim of executive power instead. He sometimes seems to have forgotten that the goal is "fighting terrorism, not avoiding oversight," as my colleague Jonathan Rauch detailed in the January 7 issue of National Journal.

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Opening Argument – Honest Nominees and Artless Dodgers

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"Judge Alito, in 1985, you wrote that the Constitution — these are your words — ‘does not protect a right to an abortion.’ You said [today] that those words accurately reflected your view at the time. Now let me ask you: Do they accurately reflect your view today? … Why can’t you answer the question?" – Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

"Because … the issue of abortion has to do with the interpretation of certain provisions of the Constitution." – Judge Samuel Alito

Again and again, Schumer and others pressed the question. Again and again, Alito ducked and dodged. The questions seemed fair. The answers seemed lame, evasive, even infuriating, to those of us who want straight answers. So how can I persist in my admiration of Alito? And how can I continue to credit the virtually unanimous views of people well acquainted with him that this is a man of extraordinary honesty and integrity?

The answer is that the confirmation process has been degraded to the point that I don’t think Alito or any other nominee of integrity — conservative, liberal, or moderate — could be confirmed if he or she gave direct and candid answers to every question about every issue.

Far-fetched? Let me explain.

Let’s start with the conservative Alito. Had he given Schumer a direct and candid answer, it would (I’d guess) have gone something like this:

Yes, I still believe that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion. And this is not an "outside the mainstream" view. It was the view of the vast majority of serious constitutional scholars when Roe was decided in 1973, including pro-choice liberals such as Archibald Cox and John Hart Ely.

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Opening Argument – The Case of Alito v. O’Connor

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Most analysts predict (and I agree) that if confirmed, Judge Samuel Alito will be more conservative than Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he would succeed on the Supreme Court. That’s why O’Connor was practically begged to stay on by liberal Democratic senators such as Barbara Boxer of California and Patrick Leahy of Vermont; moderate Republican senators such as Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine; and liberal groups such as the National Organization for Women.

But amid the debate over Alito’s writings and decisions, some of the most telling signs of a right-wing agenda have received too little attention.

Affirmative action. The judge has repeatedly blocked or crippled programs designed to protect blacks against the continuing effects of American apartheid. One decision, which struck down a school board’s policy of considering race in layoff decisions, thwarted an effort to keep a few black teachers as role models for black students. A second blocked a similar program to shield recently hired black police officers from layoffs. A third blocked a city from opening opportunities for minority-owned construction companies by striking down its program to channel 30 percent of public works funds to them.

Voting rights. Making it harder for black and Hispanic candidates to overcome white racial-bloc voting, the judge has repeatedly struck down majority-black and majority-Hispanic voting districts because of their supposedly irregular shape. But the judge saw no problem with the gerrymandering of bizarrely shaped districts by Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled Legislature to rig elections against Democrats!

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Trashing Alito

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The San Diego Union Tribune

A sometimes subtle but unmistakable pattern has emerged in major news organizations’ coverage of Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination.

Through various mixes of factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics, some reporters insinuate that Alito is a slippery character who will say whatever senators want to hear, especially by "distancing himself" from past statements that (these reporters imply) show him to be a conservative ideologue.

I focus here not on the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of The New York Times’ editorial page. Nor on such egregious factual errors as the assertion on C-SPAN, by Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers, that in a study of Alito’s more than 300 judicial opinions, "we didn’t find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans … [who were] alleging racial bias." This, Henderson added, is "rather remarkable."

What is remarkable is that any reporter could have overlooked the at least seven cases in which Alito has sided with African-Americans alleging racial bias. Also remarkable is the illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language used by Henderson and Howard Mintz in a 2,652-word article published (in whole or in part) by some 18 newspapers. It makes the misleading claim that in 15 years as a judge, Alito has sought "to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation’s laws," including "a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires" for proving job discrimination.

The systematic slanting – conscious or unconscious – of this and other news reports has helped fuel a disingenuous campaign by liberal groups and senators to caricature Alito as a conservative ideologue.

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Opening Argument – Coercive Interrogation: Can Anyone Straighten Out This Mess?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

There is more than enough blame to go around for the disastrous damage done to our international standing and national security by the uproar over the use of coercive interrogation methods — all of them "torture," in the parlance of many critics — to squeeze potentially life-saving information out of suspected terrorists.

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Opening Argument – Alito: A Sampling of Misleading Media Coverage

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

A sometimes subtle but unmistakable pattern has emerged in major news organizations’ coverage of Judge Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination.

Through various mixes of factual distortions, tendentious wording, and uncritical parroting of misleading attacks by liberal critics, some (but not all) reporters insinuate that Alito is a slippery character who will say whatever senators want to hear, especially by "distancing himself" from past statements that (these reporters imply) show him to be a conservative ideologue.

I focus here not on the consistently mindless liberal hysteria of the New York Times’ editorial page. Nor on such egregious factual errors as the assertion on C-SPAN, by Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder Newspapers, that in a study of Alito’s more than 300 judicial opinions, "we didn’t find a single case in which Judge Alito sided with African-Americans … [who were] alleging racial bias." This, Henderson added, is "rather remarkable."

What is remarkable is that any reporter could have overlooked the at least seven cases in which Alito has sided with African-Americans alleging racial bias. Also remarkable is the illiterate statistical analysis and loaded language used by Henderson and Howard Mintz in a 2,652-word article published (in whole or in part) by some 18 newspapers. It makes the highly misleading claim that in 15 years as a judge, Alito has sought "to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation’s laws," including "a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires" for proving job discrimination.

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Opening Argument – Abortion Battles Without Much Effect On Abortions

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

You might think that something huge was at stake from the sound and fury accompanying the November 30 Supreme Court argument about New Hampshire’s restrictions on minors’ access to abortion, and the pending challenge to the 2003 act of Congress banning "partial-birth" abortion.

Abortion-rights advocates warn that any decision upholding restrictions on abortion in either case would jeopardize women’s health and set the stage for evisceration of Roe v. Wade. Anti-abortion advocates portray the lower-court decisions striking down these laws before they took effect as steps toward the destruction of the American family and the legalization of infanticide.

The reality is less momentous: No matter who wins, the decisions in these cases are unlikely to harm anyone’s health, to prevent anyone who is sure she wants an abortion from getting one, or to save many (if any) fetuses. As is usual in abortion battles, the interest-group hysteria and media hype overstate what’s really at stake.

Which is not to say that nothing is at stake. In the New Hampshire case, in particular, abortion-rights groups have leveraged legitimate concern over possible medical emergencies in fewer than one in 1,000 cases into decisions by federal district and appeals courts striking down the entire parental-notification law.

So for now, at least, clinics are free to perform abortions on any 13-year-old girls who walk through their doors, with no parental or judicial involvement at all.

Based on the comments at oral argument, at least five justices seemed sympathetic to the Bush administration’s quite reasonable suggestion that they uphold the parental-notification law except in the tiny number of cases where it would dangerously delay abortions in medical emergencies.