Category Archives: Atlantic

Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s The Atlantic media appearances.

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Congress Should Censure Gonzales

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Atlantic

What’s Congress to do when the president insists on keeping an attorney general who is so manifestly unequal to the demands of his job and so incapable of giving accurate answers to simple questions that even the president’s partisans want him out?

Impeaching Alberto Gonzales, as some are starting to suggest, would be overkill. It would make no sense to put the nation through the agony of an impeachment trial to get rid of one ineffectual, hopelessly uninformed presidential lapdog. But this does not mean that members are powerless to do anything beyond groaning at a Bush spokeswoman’s fantastic claim that Gonzales is “doing a fantastic job” and looking for reasons to skip town to avoid the next installment of his cloddish testimony.

The House or Senate—or, better, both—should adopt a resolution censuring Gonzales, or (as Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has suggested) stating its lack of confidence in him.

Although unusual, a vote censuring an executive branch official would be both constitutional and supported by precedent. To be sure, the Republican House leadership argued in December 1998 that it would be unconstitutional to take a floor vote censuring President Clinton. But this was just a pretext for a politically driven determination to deny moderate Republicans any less-drastic alternative to voting for impeachment.

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“Hate Crimes” and Double Standards

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Atlantic

Consider three criminal cases.

No. 1: Christopher Newsom and his girlfriend, Channon Christian, both students at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, were carjacked while on a dinner date in January, repeatedly raped (both of them), tortured, and killed. His burned body was found near a railroad track. Hers was stuffed into a trash can. Five suspects have been charged. The crimes were interracial.

No. 2: Three white Duke lacrosse players were accused in March 2006 of beating, kicking, choking, and gang-raping an African-American stripper, while pelting her with racial epithets, during a team party.

No. 3: Sam Hays bumped against Mike Martin in a crowded bar, spilling beer on Martin’s "gay pride" sweatshirt. Martin yelled, "You stupid bastard, I should kick your ass." Hays muttered, "You damned queer" and threw a punch, bloodying Martin’s lip.

Now the quiz.

Which of these would qualify as a federal case under a House-passed bill—widely acclaimed by editorial writers, liberal interest groups, law enforcement officials, and many others—expanding federal jurisdiction to prosecute "hate crimes"?

Bonus question: Why have the interracial rape-torture-murders in Knoxville been completely ignored by the same national media that clamor for more laws to stop hate crimes—the same media that erupted in a guilt-presuming feeding frenzy for months over the far less serious Duke lacrosse charges, which were full of glaring holes from the start and turned out to be fraudulent?

The answers.

The interracial Knoxville rape-murders would probably not qualify as hate crimes. The reason is that although the murderers were obviously full of hate, it cannot be proven that they hated their victims because of race. (Or so say police.)

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“Rape” and the Navy’s P.C. Police

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Atlantic

This is a story about a 23-year-old African-American midshipman who has limitless potential to serve his country but now faces a grave risk of seeing his Navy career derailed because of a bogus rape charge by a white woman whose violations of Navy rules were worse than his.

Lamar Owens Jr., the star quarterback, captain, and MVP of the Navy football team through the 2005 season, was resoundingly acquitted of rape last July 20, after the evidence presented to a military jury of five naval officers showed clearly that his sexual encounter with a female midshipman six months before was consensual and that the rape prosecution was a travesty.

More broadly, this is a story about how overreaction to the bad old days when real rape victims were not taken seriously has fostered a politically correct presumption of guilt in many rape cases, leading to wrongful prosecutions of innocent men and, probably, the convictions of some.

In the now-infamous Duke lacrosse rape fraud, the falsely accused men are white, the lying accuser is black, and racial demagoguery has fueled the prosecution. In other cases, such as that of Lamar Owens, the races have been reversed and suspicions of racially selective prosecution muted. In most, the men and women have been of the same race.

Owens endured a court-martial that should never have been convened, in the face of powerful evidence of innocence, thanks to the "leadership" of the Naval Academy’s superintendent, Vice Adm. Rodney Rempt. He has led a much-publicized crackdown on sexual assault and harassment, but has badly overshot the mark.

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A Right to Keep and Bear Arms?

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Atlantic

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued the biggest gun control decision in decades on March 9, perhaps setting the stage for the biggest Supreme Court gun control decision ever. Rejecting the views of most other courts, Judge Laurence Silberman held for the 2-1 majority, "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms"—not just to have guns when needed for service in now-defunct state militias. On this basis, the majority struck down the District of Columbia’s uniquely broad ban against having either a pistol or an operational rifle, even at home for self-defense against intruders.

The decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, is right and should be affirmed. And contrary to a widespread myth, confirmation by the justices that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms would not invalidate reasonable gun control laws.

To put my own biases on the table: I don’t hunt or own a gun. I support reasonable gun controls but consider the D.C. law unreasonable. I had never fired a pistol until a recent vacation trail ride, when I missed a large target with all six shots. This amused my 19-year-old daughter, who scored five out of six.

Now to the Second Amendment. It states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

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The Supreme Court: Place Your Bets

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Atlantic

A year after conservative Justice Samuel Alito succeeded liberal-leaning Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a disagreement between two of the nation’s best legal journalists about how much President Bush has transformed the Supreme Court prompts this challenge to Court-watchers:

What will the legal landscape look like in 10 years? Make your predictions and place your bets.

In a widely acclaimed book full of revelations about behind-the-scenes battles over the Court, Jan Crawford Greenburg, now of ABC News, says that after decades of disappointment, conservatives have finally won the day. The appointments of Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts will produce a "profound and lasting alteration," Greenburg writes in Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court. They and their allies will now engineer "one of the most fateful shifts in the country’s judicial landscape in a generation … with repercussions as yet unimagined," she predicts.

"I’m not holding my breath," retorts Benjamin Wittes in The New Republic Online. Wittes, an author and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution who until recently wrote the nation’s smartest legal editorials for The Washington Post, highly recommends Greenburg’s book (as do I) for its "genuinely spectacular" reporting. But he dissents from her view that Bush has set the stage for an era of conservative hegemony.

To advance this intriguing discussion, I offer specific predictions below and invite others to offer theirs.

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Choosing the Next Attorney General

by Stuart Taylor, Jr

The Atlantic

This is not a prediction that Alberto Gonzales will be driven from office because of the incompetence and untruthfulness recently manifested by the botched firings of eight U.S. attorneys and the multiple misleading and inconsistent explanations thereof. Even if President Bush’s buddy hangs on until 2009, the Senate should henceforth reject any attorney general nominee whose only outstanding qualification is his or her relationship with the president. Democrats who want to run Gonzales out of town should also pledge that they will never again support a nominee of either party who is as ill-qualified as Gonzales is or—for that matter—as Robert F. Kennedy was in 1961.

Hindsight shows that RFK turned out to be a pretty good AG in many ways. (Approving FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. was not among his better ideas.) But as of 1961, his main qualification was that he was the president’s brother.

The Justice Department, which employs 110,000 people, is entrusted with advising the president and other federal officials on the limits of their powers; safeguarding our civil liberties; evenhandedly enforcing laws on terrorism, national security, civil rights, the environment, white-collar crime, antitrust, and narcotics; choosing judges; and running the FBI and the federal prison system.

Its prosecutors have “more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America,” as then-Attorney General (and later Justice) Robert Jackson said in a famous 1940 speech to an assembly of U.S. attorneys.