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By Aatish Taseer
$16.00
By Karen Elliott House
$28.95
$18
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AP / Alex Brandon
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On Thursday, Supreme Court hopeful Elena Kagan observed the nominee tradition of making the rounds on Capitol Hill by dropping in on key senators from both sides of the aisle, and it seems she made some key gains—even Scott Brown might vote to confirm her!
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By Joe Conason — The Kagan nomination reminds us that Barack Obama is the first president raised on feminist principles.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Brace yourself for several months of occasionally biting but essentially meaningless political theater over the nomination of Solicitor General Kagan to the Supreme Court.
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Since conservative pundits are slacking in their duty of tearing apart Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan before she can clinch her lifetime position, Stephen Colbert is on hand to step in and grasp at straws, literally, in an effort to besmirch her sparkling reputation.
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By Ruth Marcus — Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has—or had, anyway—the right vision of what confirmation hearings for the high court should be.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Famed gay blogger Andrew Sullivan wants to know why no one else is publicly asking whether husbandless Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan likes girls even though “we have been told by many that she is gay.”
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The Salon writer debates Obama’s latest Supreme Court pick on “Democracy Now!” and explains why he thinks Elena Kagan could very likely move the court to the right.
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White House / Chuck Kennedy
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By Ruth Marcus — The first woman to be dean of Harvard Law School. The first woman to be solicitor general. But: the fourth woman, if Elena Kagan is confirmed, on the Supreme Court.
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Flickr / Berkman10_220 (CC-BY-SA)
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Much will be pored over and found and reported on Elena Kagan in the coming months. Right now the important bit is this: She’s Elena Kagan, former Harvard Law dean, current U.S. solicitor general and President Obama’s choice to sit on the highest court in the land. Oh, and Thurgood Marshall called her “Shorty.”
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Stuart Whatley — Perhaps the most enervating element of the BP-Deepwater Horizon disaster is its eerie familiarity—the sheer, inexorable predictability of it all.
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AP / Charles Dharapak
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By Ruth Marcus — When John Paul Stevens leaves the Supreme Court bench this summer we will have lost a legal giant as well as a voice of reason and respect for democracy.
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Wikimedia Commons / U.S. Congress
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Sen. Charles Schumer is looking to put a check on corporate campaign financing, contesting the notion—promoted by the Supreme Court earlier this year—that big corporations have a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of cash on political campaigns.
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By Ruth Marcus — Term limits could be a big improvement for the Supreme Court. Life tenure is a relic of a time when life was a lot shorter.
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Flickr / blhphotography
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Pointing to the First Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday nixed a federal law from 1999 that made the creation, possession or sale of depictions of animal cruelty illegal, despite the Obama administration’s request that the top court consider the animal rights angle in its decision.
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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By Stuart Whatley — When the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United v. FEC ruling in January, it did more to sound the alarm on special interest money in politics than any campaign finance reformer could have dreamed.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Stanley Kutler — Imagine Eliot Spitzer without the baggage. Throw in an impeccable résumé and a knack for busting Wall Street and you’ve got the man Obama should nominate to the Supreme Court.
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By Ruth Marcus — In the age of Twitter and video-chats, the court apparently still finds that allowing the public to hear audio of its proceedings would be overly intrusive.
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By Joe Conason — A serious debate on “constitutional issues” might reveal our fundamental differences: Republican extremists would use the Supreme Court to prohibit every social and political advance since before the Civil War.
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Bob Englehart, The Hartford Courant —
Posted on Apr 12, 2010
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By Ruth Marcus — Here is an unsettling thought for those who waited eight years to have a Democratic president appointing judges: Barack Obama could well end his first term with a more conservative Supreme Court than the one he inherited.
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Wikimedia Commons
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Liberal Justice John Paul Stevens has announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court. The 89-year-old will step down when the court’s term ends in June or July, giving President Barack Obama the opportunity to make his second appointment to the high court.
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Historian Stanley Kutler puts the health care legal challenges by 14 state attorneys general in their proper historical context: The attorneys may be hoping for an assist from a radical and conservative Supreme Court, but such a decision would overturn centuries of law going back to John Marshall in 1821 and earlier.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems determined to use an attack on health care reform to bring us back to the 1830s.
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The attorneys general of Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and Virginia are suing over the health care reform bill, citing state sovereignty and alleging federal overreach under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Ruth Marcus — The chief justice is a big crybaby. To listen to John Roberts, you’d think that mobs of pitchfork-waving Democrats had accosted a handful of trembling justices.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle.
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Flickr / taberandrew
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The U.S. Supreme Court may be ready to change the scope of the Second Amendment, as five of the top court’s justices (guess which ones?) have signaled their opinions about American citizens’ rights to bear arms and appear ready to take steps that could override some local and state gun rules, with Chicago as a potential starting point.
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In this interview with Vermont Public Radio’s Neal Charnoff, “Empire of Illusion” author and Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges emphasizes what makes his book’s argument different from that of the stereotypical elder who disapproves of emerging artistic and cultural forms: “I’m not attacking culture, I’m attacking corporatism,” he tells Charnoff. (continued)
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Original image: Flickr / LukaIsntLuka
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A progressive communications firm in Maryland is planning on sticking it to the Supreme Court by running for Congress. After all, if corporations have the same rights as individuals, why can’t they run for office?
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White House / Pete Souza
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It was his third address to a joint session of Congress in less than a year, and it had all the usual gestures toward bipartisanship, but Barack Obama’s big speech was not without sizzle. The president shamed Republicans for obstructing, Democrats for giving up and the Supreme Court for auctioning off our democracy.
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Wikimedia Commons / The Supreme Court Historical Society
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Granted, Sandra Day O’Connor is retired from the U.S. Supreme Court, to which she was a Ronald Reagan nominee, but during a law school conference Tuesday at Gerogetown, the former justice still made concerned noises about the top court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The only proper response to the distortion of our political system by ideologically driven justices is a popular revolt of a sort deeply rooted in the American political tradition.
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By Ruth Marcus — In opening the floodgates for corporate money in election campaigns, the Supreme Court did not simply engage in a brazen power grab. It did so in an opinion stunning in its intellectual dishonesty.
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By Chris Hedges — Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost.
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AP / Alex Brandon
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In his weekly radio address, President Obama showed his dismay at the Supreme Court’s decision to remove corporate campaign finance limits, warning of a pending deluge of special interest money into our democracy—a subject he knows quite well as he continues to fight for health care reform.
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abcnews.go.com/WN/DianeSawyer/
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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday to loosen corporate restrictions on campaign finance didn’t sit well with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an international human rights coalition of 56 European nations, but somehow we doubt that the top court’s conservative justices are going to lose sleep over that particular critique.
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AP / Lauren Victoria Burke
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By John Dean — The conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, none of whom has been elected to anything, ever, has given a monumental victory to special interests.
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supremecourtus.gov
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On Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts explained the U.S. Supreme Court’s campaign finance ruling, which eliminated restrictions on corporate funding for political candidates and causes, by basing it on the First Amendment, stating that the American government doesn’t have the right to “prohibit political speech, even if the speaker is a corporation or union.” (continued)
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AP / J. Scott Applewhite
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Many fear that a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court may be an omen on how the court might rule if the legal battle over Proposition 8 arrives in Washington. The 5-4 decision ruled that Internet streaming of the Prop. 8 trial in San Francisco would cause a hostile public climate toward anti-gay marriage advocates.
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supremecourtus.gov
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Bad news for anyone hoping to keep tabs on the Proposition 8 trial via YouTube: On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a ruling by a federal judge to allow streaming video coverage of the trial contesting the ban on gay marriage in California. The top court’s decision holds only until Wednesday, however, so stay tuned.
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Original: Flickr / CarbonNYC
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Ted Olson and David Boies, who argued opposite sides of Bush v. Gore, have teamed up to legalize gay marriage by way of the Supreme Court. They are a few wins, appeals and years away from getting there, but the two lawyers are off to a hot start. (continued)
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As the country awaits a key Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance law, several recent lower-court decisions have rolled back longstanding restrictions on political ad spending, a possible boost for Republicans in this election year.
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AP / Kent Gilbert
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While Manuel Zelaya, Honduras’ ousted president, remains at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, prosecutors have charged three military chiefs with abuse of power in connection with the country’s coup d’é tat last year.
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AP / Shakil Adil
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Pakistan’s Supreme Court dealt a blow to many in the country’s ruling elite Friday by reopening corruption cases against “thousands of politicians,” according to The New York Times, and calling for dozens of those officials to appear before the courts. Included on the list was President Asif Ali Zardari, but his position grants him immunity against prosecution.
Posted on Dec 18, 2009
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By Ruth Marcus — Law students may debate whether Congress has the right to mandate health insurance, but in the real world, it’s not a big worry.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Stanley Kutler — The opposition’s decision to stall and oppose President Barack Obama’s judicial nominations smacks of hypocrisy, and further draws into question the majority’s ability to govern.
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Truthdigger of the Week: Medea Benjamin
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