Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.
The three federal appeals court judges who gave California Gov. Gray Davis a new lease on life on September 15 delighted many a liberal law professor by purporting to follow Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court precedent that Democrats most love to hate.
After seven years of congressional struggle, hundreds of editorials, 1,638 pages of lower-court opinions, dozens of Supreme Court briefs, and four hours of oral arguments on September 8, the fate of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 appears to be in the hands of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
When the first President Bush signed the Civil Rights Act of 1991, many conservatives complained that it was a "quota bill," as Bush had said of an earlier draft. Congressional Democrats and liberal groups hoped that the legislation would, among other things, help provide access for racial minorities and women to job markets that had been traditionally dominated by white males.
One way to get elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, it appears, is to thumb your nose at the U.S. Supreme Court. That’s how an obscure circuit judge named Roy S. Moore got the job in November 2000. Now Moore has made an even bigger splash by clownishly defying (until recently) federal court orders requiring removal of the 5,280-pound granite monument to the Ten Commandments that he had installed in the rotunda of the state judicial building.
A civil-libertarian backlash against the USA PATRIOT Act is gathering steam. More than 140 cities and communities in 27 states have passed resolutions opposing it, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU itself has intensified its nonstop barrage, filing a lawsuit on July 30 challenging the constitutionality of one of the act’s most far-reaching provisions, and airing TV ads that warn of government spies secretly searching homes. Some librarians say they are destroying records to prevent the feds from tracking patrons’ book borrowing and Internet browsing.
"The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." So said President Bush during his July 17 press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when a reporter asked whether they had concerns about "not getting justice" for some 660 Muslim prisoners from 42 countries languishing in 8-by-8-foot cells at Guantanamo Bay.
President Bush’s pre-war exaggerations of the strength of the intelligence that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program and large stockpiles of biological and chemical arms were neither "lies" nor as far from being true as partisan critics suggest. His now-infamous assertion in his January 28 State of the Union address — that the British government "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" — would have been quite accurate had he crossed out "has learned" and inserted "believes." More recently, Bush could have repaired the damage to his credibility by taking responsibility for any overstatements or errors about details, while carefully explaining why the case for war was and remains strong.
Steve Hinkle, a student at California Polytechnic State University, was posting fliers around campus last November 12 that advertised a speech to be given the next evening. The fliers contained a photo of the speaker, black conservative Mason Weaver, and the words "It’s OK to Leave the Plantation," the name of a book in which Weaver likens African-American dependence on government programs to slavery.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor got her job through affirmative action. It was obvious to officials in the Reagan Justice Department, as they searched for a Supreme Court justice in the summer of 1981, that she lacked the usual qualifications for the high court. "No way," Emma Jordan, an assistant to the then Attorney General William French Smith, recalls thinking. "There were gaps in her background where she had clearly been at home having babies. She had never had a national position. Under awar
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor got her job through affirmative action. It was obvious to officials in the Reagan Justice Department, as they searched for a Supreme Court justice in the summer of 1981, that she lacked the usual qualifications for the high court. "No way," Emma Jordan, an assistant to the then Attorney General William French Smith, recalls thinking. "There were gaps in her background where she had clearly been at home having babies. She had never had a national position. Under awards, she had something like Phoenix Ad Woman of the Year." No matter. President Reagan wanted to appoint the first woman justice, so he named O’Connor.
Republican presidents have picked seven of the nine current Supreme Court justices. But as the Court demonstrated so dramatically last month by blessing both gay rights and racial preferences, the result has been nothing like the "conservative Supreme Court" the media often depicts.
