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Federal Judiciary

Bench Memos - National Review Online

Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

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Last Entry: April 01, 2011 at 05:00:54

Politics vs. Gold

Posted on September 28, 2010
Why the Left snuck more restraints of the sale of gold into Obamacare. One of the many slick tricks of the Obama administration was to insert a provision in the massive Obamacare legislation regulating people who sell gold...

Cut Us Loose? If Only!

Posted on September 27, 2010
Mr. President, meet Americans, a self-reliant people. When touting his policy successes, President Obama tends to lapse into 'we' speak. You know, 'we're building wind turbines and solar panels and bio-diesel plants' or 'we want to invest in ...

How O?Donnell Can Do It

Posted on September 27, 2010
She is behind, but she has the right message. By the numbers alone, Delaware is a tough state for GOP candidates. Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than 100,000 in a state with only 620,000 voters...

BP Spill: Numbers vs. Hysteria

Posted on September 27, 2010
Contrary to accusations by the media and environmental groups, the Coast Guard used worst-case scenarios from the start. The controversy over whether the Obama administration and BP conspired to hide the size of the Deepwater Horizon spill still has legs, even though, as we reported in early August, the final official numbers, up to 62,000 barrels a day, were devastating to BP...

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Rocking the Boat on Education

Posted on September 27, 2010
A review of <I>Waiting for Superman</I>. David Guggenheim, the man behind An Inconvenient Truth and Obama's 2008 DNC bio-infomercial, has just released another film — this one a stabbing indictment of teachers' unions and a plea for more charter schools, titled Waiting for Superman...

Staying on Target

Posted on September 27, 2010
The NRA does not endorse conservatives; it endorses Second Amendment supporters. A lot of gun owners are conservatives, and a lot of conservatives are gun owners -- but the interests of the two don't always line up perfectly...

The Great U-Turn

Posted on September 27, 2010
This article first appeared in the October 4 issue of NR. Admirers and detractors of the United States agree on one point: This country is unusually resistant to the social consensus and set of structures broadly known as 'social democracy' or 'progressivism...

GOP Battle Cry: Repeal Obamacare, Cut Spending

Posted on September 27, 2010
The Pledge combines good conservative policy and good Republican politics. On Sept. 27, 1994, 367 Republican House members and candidates stood on the steps of the Capitol and endorsed what they called the Contract with America...

Michelle Obama Keeps Her Promise

Posted on September 27, 2010
Hope-and-change moves on. ‘Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.' Michelle Obama told us that on the campaign trail in 2008, and it is fair to say that her campaign promise has been kept...

The Dog That Didn't Bark

Posted on September 27, 2010
Poverty is Up, Crime is Down. Is That Possible? The poverty rate in the United States, reports the Census Bureau, increased to 14.3 percent last year, up from 13.2 percent in 2008, bringing the number of Americans living in poverty to its highest level since 1994...

TARP Again?

Posted on September 27, 2010
Small businesses and banks don?t want any part of Obama?s new $30 billion program. President Obama is crowing about his small-business bill, signed into law on Monday. 'It was critical that we cut taxes and made more loans available to entrepreneurs,' he said...

Empty Promise

Posted on September 25, 2010
When it gets down to brass tacks, the GOP has no brass. ‘It's just hortatory.' That's what judges are wont to tell litigators who try to get courts to order some course of action based on the preamble of a law...

Yet Another Side of Bob Dylan

Posted on September 24, 2010
A prominent American historian tackles the Man from Hibbing. Bob Dylan in America, by Sean Wilentz (Doubleday, 390 pp., $28.95) Since the death of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 2007, no one has seemed likelier to assume Schlesinger's spot among our intelligentsia than the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz...

Unintended, But Not Unforeseen

Posted on September 24, 2010
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, is to the law of unintended consequences what Newton's apple was to the law of gravity: the illustration that bonks us on the head with its obviousness. Practically every week since its passage has added a new dimension of mirth to Nancy Pelosi's punchline for the ages, that we had to pass the bill to find out what is in it...

Burma: The Next Nuclear Rogue?

Posted on September 24, 2010
For our sake as well as theirs, America must start assisting the brave opponents of the Burmese junta. Over the past decade, while America has struggled with intractable conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, ominous long-term changes in the international landscape have evolved into an ugly new reality...

The Beginner?s Pledge

Posted on September 24, 2010
This commonsense document will provide a sheet anchor for Republicans should they take power. The agenda item calling for pushing the elderly into the streets doesn't appear in the House GOP's new 'Pledge to America...

How Privileged Democrats Pay for Their Houses

Posted on September 24, 2010
Beneficiaries of special treatment in real-estate matters shouldn?t criticize Christine O?Donnell?s past troubles. Like millions of Americans, Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O'Donnell has had trouble covering her mortgage and other bills over the years...

Visigoths at the Gate?

Posted on September 24, 2010
Democrats demonize the tea party at their peril. When facing a tsunami, what do you do? Pray, and tell yourself stories. I am not privy to the Democrats' private prayers, but I do hear the stories they're telling themselves...

The GOP?s Ante

Posted on September 24, 2010
The ?Pledge to America? is not the sum total of the Republican agenda. It is the opening bid. On the political-gimmickry scale, the GOP's new 'Pledge to America' is worse than some, better than others...

Vietnam Sneaks Up on Obama

Posted on September 24, 2010
By failing to be decisive on Afghanistan, Obama recalls LBJ. At a CNBC town-hall meeting, President Obama responded appropriately to a supporter who mentioned, in passing, that his son had just been commissioned as a U...

The ?Bringing Home the Bacon? Campaigner

Posted on September 24, 2010
This Georgia Democrat didn?t get the memo that earmarks are so 2008. This year, boasting about securing earmarks and federal spending for one's district would seem like a pretty inept campaign strategy for any congressman...

Help Joe Miller

Posted on September 24, 2010
What does it take to earn the opprobrium of the Senate Republican caucus? Would running a write-in campaign against a Republican Senate candidate who won a fairly contested primary be enough to do it? If the offender is Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, apparently not...

Neverending Bad DREAM

Posted on September 23, 2010
Senate majority leader Harry Reid is a desperate man. Locked in a tight race with Republican challenger Sharron Angle, he wants to boost his support among Hispanic voters. So yesterday he tried to sneak the DREAM Act into the defense-authorization bill as an amendment...

How to Fix Medicaid

Posted on September 23, 2010
A new report offers some good ideas, but doesn?t go far enough. Medicaid is, first and foremost, a humanitarian disaster. Studies have repeatedly shown that the program fails so badly that indigent patients fare no better than, and often worse than, those with no insurance at all...

The Politics of Empathy

Posted on September 23, 2010
Many people vote in ways that express empathy toward their favored groups. Few things complicate political life as much as ideology does. On the one hand, ideologies are sets of beliefs that are too complex for many people to bother to develop...

Federal Funding for Human Cloning?

Posted on September 23, 2010
New legislation would fund research that creates human embryos. It's baa-ack! Just when you thought the political fight over federal funding of embryonic-stem-cell research (ESCR) was over, United States District Court Judge Royce C...

Leader Speaking Out

Posted on September 23, 2010
John Boehner pledges to lead a different kind of House. On the eve of the House Republicans' official release of their governing agenda for the 112th Congress, House GOP leader John Boehner of Ohio took questions from National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez...

Transitional Kindergarten Is a Bad Idea

Posted on September 23, 2010
The evidence shows that government-funded, large-scale early-education programs fail to deliver long-term educational benefits. California, thanks to a bill that's awaiting Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's signature, may be about to launch a program to provide 'transitional kindergarten...

GOP to Roll Over on Death Tax?

Posted on September 23, 2010
Full repeal of the death tax is an economic and political winner. On taxes, Republicans have held to the strongest position politically and economically: no hikes on anyone while the economy remains fragile...

An Oklahoma Blue Dog

Posted on September 23, 2010
Dan Boren is a Democrat in a conservative district, but he?s safe this year. During the 2004 elections, country singer Toby Keith -- he of 'we'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way' fame -- endorsed two candidates...

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