Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.
Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, some current professional golfers, the PGA, and Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins say that walking a golf course, and thus conquering fatigue, is an essential part of PGA Tour competition. Disabled golfer Casey Martin, many other pros, and New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson say otherwise.
Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he’s white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death-penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said: "I’ll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they’d sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."
The Supreme Court delivered a timely reminder of the social costs of our "war on drugs" with its May 14 decision rejecting a medical-necessity exception to the federal law criminalizing marijuana. Meanwhile, President Bush has moved toward abandoning his own best instincts and repeating his predecessors’ mistakes by endlessly escalating a $20 billion-a-year "war" that-as most Americans now understand-we have lost.
President Bush made a strategically smart move in the 15-year-old war of the judges by announcing on May 9 a slate of 11 nominees carefully balanced both to please conservative activists and to disarm mainstream Democrats whose help he will need to avoid partisan gridlock.
A 5-4 Supreme Court decision on April 24 left standing a silly Alabama policy that makes life unnecessarily difficult for some foreign-born Americans by requiring that they take their driver’s license exam in English. More important, the Court’s decision made it harder for many other potential plaintiffs to sue for possible violations of a key provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars public and private programs that receive federal financial assistance (as most do) from discriminating on the basis of race or national origin. The four more-liberal Justices, in a dissent by John Paul Stevens, called the decision "unfounded in our precedent and hostile to decades of settled expectations." The New York Times said that it "substantially limited the effectiveness" of the act’s ban against discrimination." The Washington Post called it "retrograde."
As George W. Bush passes the 100-day mark, he faces an unusual problem for a new President: Time is already running out on his ambition-advertised during last year’s campaign-to make the Supreme Court more conservative.
Congress and the President have a chance this year to show that they care as much about avoiding the execution (and imprisonment) of innocent defendants as they do about punishing the guilty ones. They can adopt the Innocence Protection Act, a bipartisan proposal co-sponsored by death penalty supporters and opponents who agree that you can be tough on crime without punishing innocent people. The bill would give prisoners expanded access to possibly exculpatory DNA evidence. It would also deliver-if only in capital cases-on the Supreme Court’s long-broken 1963 promise to provide indigent criminal defendants with competent trial lawyers.
One of the toughest issues ever to face the Supreme Court is back on its doorstep, propelled by a deepening split among lower federal courts, and seemingly destined to produce a climactic ruling by 2003: Does the Constitution, which bars virtually all governmental discrimination against African-Americans and some other minorities, nonetheless permit universities to discriminate in their favor (and against whites and Asians) in order to choose student bodies that look more like America than they did in 1950 or 1960?
Most Americans have an instinctive (if self-serving) feel for why it would not be a good idea to pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. As victims of one of history’s great crimes, the slaves themselves surely deserved reparations. So, in principle, do the many living victims of the century of legal apartheid that followed slavery. But while the legacy of slavery still plagues us, the passage of 138 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and 37 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act has changed the landscape utterly, making it impossible to decide with any pretense of fairness which of today’s African-Americans should receive compensation and who should pay.
Public financing of congressional campaigns? Free TV time for politicians? Forget it, says the conventional wisdom-
