By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  September 18th at 07:06 AM  | 

Criticism of President Obama’s appointment of Elizabeth Warren to oversee the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) – the Dodd-Frank Act’s contribution to growing the federal bureaucracy – has focused on Obama’s end-run around the Senate confirmation process.  By making Warren the White House czar for the CFPB instead of the agency’s director, Obama allows her to “effectively run the agency” (quoting the | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  August 6th at 06:30 AM  | 

In an op-ed in the Daily Caller, I conclude that [B]elievers in the rule of law have several things to cheer in the Kagan confirmation battle. Republican senators mounted their strongest opposition in more than a century, sending strong signals to the White House about future Supreme Court picks, while teeing up important issues for this fall’s Senate races. The confirmation fight also saw the | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  July 21st at 02:07 PM  | 

In today’s Washington Post, cartoonist Tom Toles argues that the tea party movement reveals itself to be racist by “want[ing] to go back to the Constitution as it was written,” despite the document’s acquiescence in the continuation of slavery. Toles’s cartoon is a particularly hateful variant of a misleading, but all too common, argument that tries to vilify critics of a “living Constitution” and justify | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  July 14th at 03:17 PM  | 

It’s been pointed out that George Steinbrenner’s heirs saved about $500 million in estate taxes because of the timing of his death. Unlike every other year since 1916, there is no federal estate tax in 2010. In 2009, the estate tax rate was 45% and next year, without Congressional action, it will be 55%. The one-year tax-free gap is the result of Congress’s refusal in | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  June 28th at 10:21 PM  | 

Yesterday, RedState’s Erick Erickson broke the story that [T]he National Rifle Association’s management team has explicitly and directly told the NRA’s board they are prohibited from testifying about second amendment issues during the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings. …  [and] from coming out against Kagan in their individual capacity. Matt Lewis of Politics Daily and I added some details this morning.  Matt notes that [I]t appears | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  April 26th at 02:19 PM  | 

Now the AP is reporting that the protests against Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigration “intensified Monday as vandals smeared refried beans in the shape of swastikas on the state Capitol’s windows.” That’s on top of Friday’s riots by anti-crackdown protestors. I’m sure we’ll see Democratic politicians and liberal talking heads rushing to the airwaves to denounce the racist protestors responsible for the swastikas and to | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  December 15th at 07:37 AM  | 

It’s amusing to watch the swarm of enraged Democrats promising revenge against Joe Lieberman for his daring to oppose the Medicare buy-in.  Isn’t this the party that has spent the last year constantly ridiculing Republicans for supposedly demanding ideological purity in their ranks?  What’s particularly amusing is that the Democrats screaming bloody murder don’t seem to have the slightest self-awareness of the contradiction in their | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  November 17th at 01:20 AM  | 

This week, the Senate votes on President Obama’s nomination of District Court Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit.  Because of Hamilton’s fundraising activities for ACORN, his leadership positions with the Indiana branch of the ACLU, his statements supporting judicial activism, and most importantly, his rulings putting liberal ideology above the rule of law, he is the first and only Obama circuit nominee to draw | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  November 4th at 11:59 PM  | 

In April I blogged about Larry Sabato’s statement that, in the wake of the much-vaunted 2008 Obama realignment, “we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. And the Republicans are the half a party.”  Sabato was all over the tube last night and today, but I didn’t hear any mea culpas from him about what now seems like a | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  September 30th at 07:36 PM  | 

The Supreme Court announced today that it will decide, in McDonald v. Chicago, whether the Second Amendment applies to state and local gun laws. That puts the focus on the Court’s newest Justice, Sonia Sotomayor, and on President Obama’s future picks for the Court. Gun owners were alarmed by Sotomayor’s nomination to the Court, because of her “extreme anti-gun philosophy” and record on the Second | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  September 18th at 04:36 PM  | 

I used to respect Chris Matthews for being a liberal who was interested in both sides of an argument.  Over the last couple of years, as Matthews has become increasingly blinded by his crush on Barack Obama, my respect for the Hardball host has faded.  However, it was not until last night that I sadly realized that Matthews had become unhinged from reality.  I only | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  June 28th at 06:06 PM  | 

Recent admissions of extramarital affairs by Mark Sanford and John Ensign resulted in heavy media coverage and constant generalizations about Republicans’ hypocrisy concerning family values.  The mainstream media’s fascination with GOP affairs is likely fueled, not by a desire to “get” Republicans, but by a worldview that makes it difficult to view those who preach conservative social values as sincere. That said, it’s fair for | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  May 13th at 10:23 AM  | 

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admitted yesterday that he doesn’t have the 60 votes necessary to confirm Dawn Johnsen as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, because at least a few Democrats will vote against her. That should give President Obama pause as he considers his first Supreme Court nomination – all the more so because a President’s selection of judicial nominees | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  April 20th at 11:26 PM  | 

Since November, I’ve become accustomed to predictions that the Republican Party is on its way to irrelevance.  Nonetheless, I was disappointed to hear that sentiment voiced by University of Virginia professor and pundit Larry Sabato, who generally tries to provide a relatively objective analysis.  On MSNBC’s Hardball today, Sabato opined that “we’re on our way from being a two-party system to being a party-and-a-half system. | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  April 19th at 04:42 AM  | 

Conservatives pundits and media have been sounding alarm bells about President Obama’s nomination of transnationalism-touting Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh to be the State Department’s top legal adviser. But even Newsweek’s balanced piece on the Koh nomination (April 27 issue), which concludes that he should be confirmed, enumerates plenty of reasons to be alarmed.  Consider the following excerpts: Koh argues that American law should | Read More »

By: Curt Levey (Diary)  |  April 14th at 03:54 PM  | 

In his speech at Georgetown today (video here), President Obama relied on a superficially appealing but misleading analogy to defend his plan to tackle health care, energy and education reform while the nation is still mired in recession. Obama analogized critics’ arguments that the nation can’t afford to do everything at once to a parent’s decision about whether their children should attend college – i.e., | Read More »