A few days ago, U. S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy gave an interview with Ray Suarez of PBS. The interview is both illuminating (about Kennedy), and depressing. Here’s a link. Among other things, Kennedy discusses the Nazi-era rule requiring that yellow stars be worn by Jews, which Kennedy says was so awful as to be inconsistent with the “Rule of Law” — meaning that | Read More »
As you may be aware, the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will soon decide whether to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as constitutional, or not. This statute was signed by Bill Clinton (who has now “evolved” into not only an opponent of DOMA but also a denier of its constitutionality). One of the things that DOMA did was define what the word “marriage” means | Read More »
As the Washington Post reported yesterday, Republicans are filibustering an appeals court nominee, Caitlin Halligan. There’s only one way that I could ever support a filibuster like this, and that’s if the filibusterers are supporting a rule change to get rid of judicial nomination filibusters. These are awful for the country, but it’s understandable that Republicans would be doing it now, after Democrats started doing | Read More »
The way things are looking, the UN Security Council will slap more sanctions on North Korea, China will continue to ignore the sanctions, North Korea will continue to develop and proliferate nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, and Japan will soon go nuclear along with South Korea. It’s hard to put a smiley face on this. What would be nice would be if China finally agrees | Read More »
I’m grateful to Chris Green for responding to my criticism of his Equal Protection Clause theory. His comments clarify his theory, and help to focus this discussion. Incidentally, my previous blog post on this subject was directed only at pre-enactment history, because (1) the post-enactment history is much less important from an originalist point of view, and (2) the discussion is more manageable if we | Read More »
I disagree with some aspects of the equal protection jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court, but that’s a long story. This brief blog post is merely to explain why the overhaul proposed by Professor Chris Green is not the way to go. I hear that a fun way to waste time on the Internet is to take an ordinary English sentence and translate it successively | Read More »
Over at MSNBC, legal genius Nick Ramsey reports that the U.S. Constitution is our nation’s “organic” law. Abraham Lincoln said so. Ramsey concludes that it is a living document, contra Scalia. So now we know. The Constitution is organic. Here is how Dictionary.com defines the word: 1. noting or pertaining to a class of chemical compounds that formerly comprised only those existing in or derived | Read More »
In a recent blog post, Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin concedes that the “substantive due process” doctrine used by the U.S. Supreme Court to justify Roe v. Wade (and similar cases) was beside the point. But even while dismissing the Court’s rationale, Balkin says that those sex-related court decisions are valid anyway, because of two other clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment: the Privileges or Immunities | Read More »
I guess this harebrained idea is getting enough attention that some debunking is in order. The idea is for the U.S. Mint to manufacture a trillion dollar coin, deposit it with the Federal Reserve, and then draw the money gradually out of that fund. The key statute cited is 31 USC 5112(k): The Secretary may mint and issue platinum bullion coins and proof platinum coins | Read More »
According to President Obama: “He’d be the first person of enlisted rank to serve as Secretary of Defense….” Nope. According to the Navy: James Vincent Forrestal was born on 15 February 1892, in Matteawan (now Beacon), New York….World War I interrupted his career in finance, however, and he enlisted in the U.S. Navy as a seaman second class on 2 June 1917….President Harry S Truman | Read More »
The following numbers explain the current emergency. In January 2001, the national debt was $5.7 trillion. By January 2009, it had risen to $10.6 trillion. A year ago, it was $15.2 trillion. Now it’s $16.4 trillion. We are hitting the debt ceiling again. According to an article yesterday in the Washington Post: House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) … insisted that Republicans hold the line, telling his | Read More »
Georgetown Law Professor Louis Michael Seidman had a really awful op-Ed on December 30, 2012 in the New York Times (even by that newspaper’s low standards) titled “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution”. I say let’s give up on him, instead.
Why anyone thinks this guy is qualified to be a constitutional law professor boggles my mind. Maybe it’s time to give up on tenure, too.
Read More »Going off the fiscal cliff would be great in one respect: the annual budget deficit would immediately be cut in half. But this can be done in much less damaging ways, and hence the need for a deal. Seems to me that the GOP should be insisting on only one thing: that the deal be deficit neutral. In other words, the deal should still result | Read More »
I recently went to see the new movie Lincoln. It takes a few liberties with the exact truth, and so cannot be considered a documentary. But it doesn’t purport to be a documentary. I recommend the movie, which does seem to get the basic gist of history right, or at least arguably right. As with the stuff you read on the Internet (especially Wikipedia!), don’t | Read More »
According to news reports, the murder trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will not be televised. That’s fine with me. Televising trials is usually a bad idea, and converts the whole thing into a circus. As long as members of the public can observe, and the transcript is available, that seems like plenty to me. There’s a reason why trials take place in courtrooms instead of | Read More »
As we approach the fiscal cliff, it would be nice if Congress and the president could strike a compromise that puts us on a sane fiscal path. But I’m not seeing it yet. The House of Representatives could show it’s serious about this in several ways. For example, they could adopt the Bowles-Simpson plan. They could raise eligibility ages for entitlements, adopt means testing for | Read More »
Seems to me that Israel should publicly offer to cede the Gaza Strip to Egypt, just like Israel ceded the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. If Egypt says no, then Israel will have a much freer hand to impose order on Gaza. If Egypt says yes, then Egypt will become responsible for doing that. This suggestion is not new. Daniel Pipes of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution | Read More »
Fair elections require fair information. Instead, the American people got BS from Candy Crowley of CNN and from Steve Kroft of CBS. This misinformation was sufficient to swing what was a very close election, in my opinion. Crowley, as moderator of the second presidential debate, intervened on Obama’s side to say that Romney was wrong, i.e. Crowley asserted that Obama had previously described (during a | Read More »
The Romney campaign is getting some heat for pointing out that Chrysler is sending some Jeep manufacturing to China. But I think there’s a valid point there, and people in Michigan shouldn’t buy the spin that Romney’s claim was without merit. Chrysler sold 33,463 jeeps in China this year, thru September. Chrysler hasn’t built any jeeps in China since 2009. And now Chrysler wants to | Read More »
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