Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s media appearances in print publications.
Imagine the nation’s five biggest tobacco companies secretly arranging to milk consumers for billions in new profits by raising and fixing prices, colluding to maintain their respective market shares, and using carrots and sticks to get discounters and other small producers to raise their own prices enough to hold their combined market shares around 1 percent.
The abortion-rights lobby has not yet publicly embraced the view of Peter Singer, a Princeton University bioethicist, that because "the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either." Or that "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person [and] often it is not wrong at all." Or that "the life of a newborn baby is of less value … than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee." Or that "a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to live as others."
Sorry you missed the Vice President…. I know [you] will give $100K when the President vetoes tort reform, but we really need it now. Please send ASAP if possible.
Almost two-thirds of voters respond negatively when asked what they would think of a candidate who voted against "strengthening the prosecution of violent hate crimes motivated by prejudice against race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation."
A thousand points of pressure are being applied to the Scouts to yield to the emerging social consensus.
Here’s what Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., said in 1995 about group preferences and affirmative action:
After slamming big tobacco with an unprecedented $145 billion in punitive damages in a class action brought on behalf of sick smokers in Florida, jurors said their goal had been to punish the industry for its sins and "send a strong message for all companies in America that they can’t fraudulently represent anything to the public," in the words of the foreman, Leighton Finegan. He added: "For the past 50 years these companies have lied, hidden information, and burned documents, and that makes me angry."
"A democratic vote by nine lawyers."
That was one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s angry dissenting flourishes last month. He was talking about the Supreme Court’s decision on "the pure policy question" of whether the procedure that opponents call "partial-birth" abortion should be banned-as hundreds of elected officials in 31 states had tried to do until five Justices swept their laws aside. In another case, Scalia likened the Court to "some sort of nine-headed Caesar."
Dear me, must the man quarrel so? Can’t he see that most of us find "strict constructionists" boring and semantical contortionists rather appealing, at least when they come down on our side?
But to give Scalia his due, that time of year has come when some of us who like many of the laws made by the Justices pause to wonder how their brand of judicial review squares with the Constitution’s guarantee of a "republican form of government," which once meant leaving most of the lawmaking to elected officials.
Were I a lawgiver, I might issue decrees similar to the Court’s on school prayer, affirmative action preferences, Miranda rights, abortion rights, pornographers’ rights, nude dancers’ rights, gay rights, parents’ (vs. grandparents’) rights, HMOs’ rights, patients’ rights, and states’ rights. The majority does sometimes veer too far to the left, or to the right, for my taste, as in the 5-4 ruling on June 28 that women have a virtually absolute right to abort even what Scalia calls "a live-and-kicking child that is almost entirely out of the womb." And in the line of 5-4 decisions exempting states from federal regulatory laws such as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. But usually the Court seems fairly sensible. It’s not such a bad superlegislature, on the whole.
It may now be unconstitutional for a public school teacher or student leader to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class. Or at a football game. Or at a graduation. Or to recite the Declaration of Independence. Or to sing the national anthem.
Al Gore saw his opening, and he took it. Campaigning last Wednesday in Backlick, Ohio, the vice president unexpectedly tossed aside the top of a scheduled speech about energy and the environment and instead launched into a passionate lecture about the importance of the Supreme Court. All morning, Gore had been asking aides to inform him as soon as the court handed down its expected final opinions of the year. At about 11 a.m., just as Air Force Two was touching down in Ohio, he got the news he’d been waiting to hear: the justices had struck down laws in 31 states banning so-called partial-birth abortions, the controversial late-term procedure denounced by abortion opponents. But the vote was close–5-4–and the vice president couldn’t wait to seize the opportunity to raise doubts about George W. Bush. The vice president immediately reworked his speech. “The next president will nominate… perhaps four justices to the Supreme Court,” Gore warned in the new, improved text. “One extra vote on the wrong side,” he said, “would change the outcome, and a woman’s right to choose would be taken away.”
Gore’s warning was an exaggeration, to say the least. In fact, six of the nine current justices have supported fairly broad abortion rights. Still, Bush chose to downplay the decision, wary of being dragged into an abortion brawl that could put him on the wrong side of public opinion, sending moderate voters–especially women–fleeing. But he couldn’t avoid the matter entirely: Bush issued a terse statement saying he would “fight for a ban on partial-birth abortion.” Later in the week he cut a deal to keep the GOP’s hard-line anti-abortion plank in the party’s platform.
