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We are about to have the worst presidential campaign money can buy.
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Over the course of three days in March, the Supreme Court spent six hours hearing oral arguments about the most significant achievement of Barack Obama’s first term: the Affordable Care Act—or, as it is now called by both supporters and detractors...
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Even before the McCain-Feingold Law of 2002, federal law prohibited corporations from using their own funds (their “treasury funds”) to make direct contributions or expenditures in connection with any election for federal office. But McCain-Feingold...
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Casting aside sixty years of federal legislation and overturning rulings from 1990 and 2003, the Supreme Court has opened the door to an unregulated flood of corporate political advertising. Last month’s 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v.
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In the decades since the stirring successes of the 1960s civil-rights movement, opposition to discrimination has become a kind of benchmark social virtue, one embraced by all reasonable people of good will.
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Two years after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law—and two years before many of its provisions are scheduled to go into effect—the Obama administration’s most important achi
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It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a remarkable speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took direct aim at the conservatives' favorite theory of judging. Souter'...
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It was my privilege to serve as Justice John Paul Stevens’s law clerk during the tumultuous 2000 term, the year the Court inserted itself into the presidential election, halting the recount of votes in Florida’s contested race and handing the...
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The genius of American conservatives over the past thirty years has been their understanding that the most effective way to change the country is to change the terms of our political debate. On issue after issue, they have done just that. ...
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Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as i
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This year's elections may exacerbate the difference between our two political parties, but not in the way most people are talking about.
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This week's hearings over Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court will mark a sea change in the way liberals argue about the judiciary. Democratic senators are planning to put the right of citizens to challenge corporate power at the...
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Few recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been more vigorously contested, or hold more ominous implication, than Brown v.
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Almost all the shibboleths of Washington conventional wisdom took a hit in Tuesday's elections. Yet advocates of a single national political narrative clung to the difficulties of two incumbent Democratic senators to keep spinning the same old tale...
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On January 20, the day before the South Carolina primary, the Washington Post published a long story about how political polarization in that state was reflected in—and sharpened by—South Carolinians’ choices of news providers.
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When President Barack Obama said he judged “empathy” to be a desirable quality in a Supreme Court appointee, he set off a discussion that was as confused as it was contentious. What exactly is “empathy,” and how does it relate to the task of a judge...
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Brace yourself for several months of occasionally biting but essentially meaningless political theater over the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
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The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted.
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One of the many ways the Constitution’s framers showed their collective wisdom was by embedding the rule of law into the very framework of our system of government. Judicial review of popularly enacted laws keeps the majority accountable to...
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President Barack Obama has been in office for less than two years, and he has already been given the opportunity to fill two Supreme Court vacancies. As this issue of Commonweal goes to press, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Obama’s current nominee...
