Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.
"We are mindful … that `[a] core purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to do away with all governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.’ … Accordingly, race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time…. We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest [in racial diversity] approved today."
Conservative and liberal activists, lawyers, political junkies, and the media are abuzz with eager anticipation that this summer will bring the mother of all Senate confirmation battles, with the closely divided Supreme Court’s ideological balance at the tipping point. "It is almost certain," Time magazine forecast last month-with more confidence than evidence-"that by the end of June, when the Supreme Court adjourns for summer recess, at least one justice will have announced his or her retirement."
Some of the 762 mostly Middle Eastern men detained on immigration charges after the September 11 attacks "appear to have been arrested more by virtue of chance encounters or tenuous connections to a … lead rather than by any genuine indications of a possible connection with or possession of information about terrorist activity," concludes Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in his 200-page report, released on June 2, on the detentions.
President Bush may well have an opportunity to nominate someone to the Supreme Court. Here are some of the most talked-about candidates:
Republicans and Democrats are nearing the brink of nuclear warfare over President Bush’s judicial nominations. Unless both sides compromise, the damage to the government and the nation could be profound. Hostilities have raged on and off since the 1987 Battle of Bork, resulting in a downward spiral of partisan bitterness and recriminations. The latest and biggest escalation has been Senate Democrats’ all-but-unprecedented filibusters of professionally well-qualified Bush nominees who are simply too conservative for the Democrats’ taste. And now, as both sides prepare for a climactic battle in the event of any Supreme Court retirements, Republicans are threatening the so-called nuclear option.
Did the Bush administration deliberately mislead the nation and the world when President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others so confidently suggested, as their casus belli, that Saddam Hussein had hundreds of tons of banned chemical and biological weapons and a program to build a nuclear bomb?
"Last year when I ran for the Senate … I locked myself in a room with an aide, a telephone, and a list of potential contributors. The aide would get the `mark’ on the phone, then hand me a card with the spouse’s name, the contributor’s main interest, and a reminder to `appear chatty.’ I’d remind the agribusinessman that I was on the Agriculture Committee; I’d remind the banker I was on the Banking Committee. And then I’d make a plaintive plea for soft money-that armpit of today’s fundraising…. I always left that room feeling like a cheap prostitute who’d had a busy day."
"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything…. The definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be."
The Bush administration is in the midst of making momentous decisions about how to deal with the United Nations in the post-Saddam era. Those decisions will critically affect our chances of winning the peace in Iraq and of proving our claims that Saddam had an arsenal of banned weapons-claims on which President Bush has staked his credibility. And they will set the direction of America’s relations with the rest of the world for years to come.
International rules lose their validity when widely flouted or when superseded by new strategic realities. The U.N. Charter’s curbs on the use of military force had suffered both fates long before George W. Bush became president. America’s pattern of acting without Security Council authorization-justifiably, in at least some cases-dates back at least to the 1962 Cuban missile blockade and has marked U.S. military activities in Vietnam, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, and Nicaragua.
