In March, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about the Affordable Care Act. The question before the Court is straightforward: Can the federal government require all Americans to purchase a product (health insurance) on the private market? But the question underlying the case is one of the most basic in American political life: How much government is too much?

We are about to have the worst presidential campaign money can buy. One state is showing us the way back to sane campaign-finance law.

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 achievement faces an uncertain prognosis.

Activist judges vs. health-care reform

I’m a 65-year-old African American. I was excited enough by the election of the nation’s first black president that I would have cut him a thousand miles of slack. But the last thing I expected was that I would watch him meekly accept humiliation by his political opponents. And the second last thing I expected was that I would go into 2012 looking at the upcoming presidential election as a lesser-of-two-evils affair.

The Supreme Court's preferential option for the rich

Few recent Supreme Court decisions have been more vigorously contested than Brown v. Plata, in which the Court affirmed a ruling requiring California to release prisoners to reduce overcrowding.

How not to settle the gay-marriage question

Conservatives have long decried “activist” judges who supposedly “legislated from the bench,” but the Roberts Court is hardly shy about breaking new legal ground.

It will take some time before a new array of justices on the Court rethinks the labored departure from precedent made by the majority in Citizens United. Meanwhile, much corporate mischief will have been done.

It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took aim at conservatives' favorite theory of judging. Souter's verdict: It "has only a tenuous connection to reality."

Those of us lucky enough to have worked for Justice Stevens never doubted his abilities as an impartial guardian. And we have taken comfort in his continued presence on the Court. No matter who replaces him, his departure is a loss for the institution and for the country.

Why Washington's conventional wisdom of impending Democratic catastrophe is one of the best things Obama's party has going for it.

How dirty a word?

This year's elections may exacerbate the difference between our two political parties, but not in the way most people are talking about. Republicans will end the year a more philosophically coherent right-wing party. But the Democrats will, if anything, become more ideologically diverse.

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.

Why President Barack Obama's next Supreme Court nominee is so important

Last month’s 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission did not surprise students of this conservative-leaning Court. Still, the Court’s privileging of the “rights” of artificial legal entities over the democratic needs of the American public remains indefensible.

Obama, Sotomayor, and the wisdom of John Noonan.