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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

Patriot Games -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on March 11, 2010
On the campaign trail, vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was fond of saying ?It?s time to be patriotic? when asked about his running mate?s plan to let certain of the Bush tax cuts expire. But when the Senate passed a health-care bill that raised taxes on generous health benefits -- the kind that unions have acquired for their members through years of collective bargaining -- union backers in the House brought the process to a halt...

Less Exceptional Than You Think -- By: Conrad Black

Posted on March 11, 2010
It is with regret and trepidation that I take some issue with Richard Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru?s stimulating essay on American exceptionalism in the March 8 issue of National Review. I am afraid they exaggerate the pristine idealism of the founders of the United States, and the current state of the effervescence of its democracy...

Tiny Tims -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on March 11, 2010
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah) has made few friends in official Washington with his plan to empower federal agencies to fire employees who are habitual tax scofflaws. He has made a lot of enemies, and there are more of them than you?d expect: According to data from the IRS and the Office of Personnel Management, nearly 100,000 current federal employees are behind on their taxes...

Gone, Fishing? -- By: Frank Miniter

Posted on March 11, 2010
So Pres. Barack Obama?s ?Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force? has decided that the opinions of America?s 60 million anglers aren?t worthy of its consideration. This task force, headed by the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), was charged with drafting a national ocean policy of marine spatial planning to manage U...

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Resetting Our Reset Foreign Policy -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on March 11, 2010
Almost every element of Barack Obama?s once-heralded new ?reset? foreign policy of a year ago�either has�been reset or likely soon will be.Consider Obama?s approach to the eight-year-old War on Terror. Plans made more than a year ago to shut down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010 have stalled...

Obamacare: Cooked Books You Can Believe In -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on March 11, 2010
Wouldn?t it be nice if you could use a $100 bill to buy groceries and then deposit that same Benjamin in the bank to help pay your monthly credit-card statement? Regular Americans would call this either magic or fraud. Washington Democrats call this ?health-care reform...

High Marks -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on March 11, 2010
Through a change to House rules, Democrats in that chamber of Congress have banned earmarks that deliver funds and contracts to private, for-profit enterprises. Senate Democrats probably will ignore their colleagues? new policy, but House Republicans have just one-upped it, voting amongst themselves to forgo all earmarks, whether to businesses, local and state governments, or nonprofit institutions...

Three Things Liberals Can't Admit -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on March 10, 2010
President Obama said last week, ?Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everybody has said it.? It does feel as though we?ve been arguing over health care forever and keep circling back over the same ground. But Obama?s wrong...

Put Me In, Coach! -- By: Susan Konig

Posted on March 10, 2010
Here in New York, we are expecting a Cuomo coronation following the Paterson meltdown (which was preceded by the Spitzer meltdown). In Albany, you just can?t get good help these days. This has spawned a wealth of discussion on the perennial New York topic: With all these Democrats falling over themselves to lose the governorship, why are there no Republicans waiting on the bench? There are...

Obama: The New Nixon? -- By: Darrell Issa

Posted on March 10, 2010
Richard Nixon is back. Or so it seems from much recent press coverage and punditry. � In December, John Feffer of the Institute for Policy Studies argued in The Huffington Post that the current administration?s professed commitment to realism in international relations meant that Barack Obama is ?shaping up to be a true heir of Richard Nixon...

The Real Health-Care Plan -- By: The Editors

Posted on March 10, 2010
There is something poetic about the Democrats? plan to combine the health-care reconciliation bill with legislation that would make the government the ?single payer? in the market for student loans. From subsidies to a ?public option? to an outright government takeover, the history of American college-loan policy offers an instructive illustration of how the government can absorb an activity incrementally, claiming to cherish the benefits the private sector provides -- until it becomes inconvenient...

'Acceptable' Risk -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on March 10, 2010
Attorney General Eric Holder and others in the Obama administration have advocated trying Khalid Sheik Muhammed, and acquiring intelligence from Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in the criminal-justice system. The protections afforded individuals in the criminal-justice system generally exceed those afforded in the military system, so one might think terrorists would be put at an advantage if they are treated as criminals rather than enemy combatants...

Where Feminists Get It Right -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on March 10, 2010
In Cameroon, some mothers ?iron? their daughters? breasts to delay or prevent them from having sex. The procedure often involves grinding a very hot rock into the chest of the girl, but sometimes kerosene or hot plantain peels will do the trick. The practice, which permanently disfigures the girls, starts in adolescence because that?s when girls start becoming attractive to boys...

Artificial Stupidity -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on March 10, 2010
A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide -- a fancy chemical name for water...

'Acceptable' Risk -- By: Bill Burck & Dana Perino

The Architect Is an Open Book -- By: Interview

Posted on March 09, 2010
Karl Rove -- the George W. Bush confidante who needs no introduction -- has written a memoir of his life in politics, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, which is released today. It includes an intimate look at Rove, his family -- which has come under attacks from his political opponents -- and his formation as a conservative...

Radicalizing Civil Rights -- By: Hans A. von Spakovsky

Posted on March 09, 2010
In his State of the Union address, President Obama mentioned the protections enshrined in the Constitution and said, ?No matter who you are or what you look like, if you abide by the law, you should be protected by it.? Obama followed this lofty rhetoric with a claim that his Justice Department ?has a Civil Rights Division that is once again prosecuting civil-rights violations and employment discrimination...

Why the al-Qaeda Seven Matter -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on March 09, 2010
My flight had been delayed, so I arrived late to a 2004 academic conference, a law school gab-fest exploring legal issues in the War on Terror. The professor giving the keynote address was well into his remarks when I sheepishly entered the rear of the hall, trying to muffle the creaky door...

Stimulus or Sedative? -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on March 09, 2010
Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said ?five,? Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. ?The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg.? That same principle applies today...

Beware of Democrats Bearing Gifts -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on March 09, 2010
The signs are all around us. Even as Barack Obama and the Democrats lower their heads and prepare to bulldoze a huge new entitlement through Congress, the results of profligate government spending are everywhere apparent. It requires a prodigious degree of ideological blindness to miss this...

The Case for Repeal -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on March 09, 2010
Even Nancy Pelosi?s harshest Republican critics don?t doubt her ability to wrangle votes. She again has a chance to pass Obamacare through the House in a bout of arm-twisting so intense it might violate the Geneva Conventions. If Pelosi somehow succeeds, Democrats will tell themselves they?ve finally attained a goal that has eluded them since Truman...

Why Democrats Don't Care about $9.7 Trillion in Debt -- By: Dennis Prager

Posted on March 09, 2010
As reported by the Washington Post: ?President Obama?s proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.? CNN adds, ?Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone.?The Post continues: ?The CBO [Congressional Budget Office] and the White House [are]#...

Disappointing First Leg in Education's Big Race -- By: Frederick M. Hess

Posted on March 08, 2010
Amid much fanfare, the president last year launched the Department of Education?s ?Race to the Top? (RTT). Funded with $4.35 billion in stimulus dollars, the competitive grant program urged states to comply with 19 federal priorities and dramatically expanded Uncle Sam?s role in school reform...

Obama's New 'Poverty' Measurement -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on March 08, 2010
This week, the Obama administration announced it will create a new poverty-measurement system that will eventually displace the current poverty measure. This new measure, which has little or nothing to do with actual poverty, will serve as the propaganda tool in Obama?s endless quest to ?spread the wealth...

Blanche: A Verb Meaning 'to Cook in Hot Water' -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on March 08, 2010
The quick read on Arkansas lieutenant governor Bill Halter?s bid for the U.S. Senate has been that Blanche Lincoln, one of the most endangered Democrats in the Senate, being caught as she is between the agenda of a liberal administration and the conservative electorate of her home state, will be forced to shift to the left in a bid to avoid a primary defeat...

Romney in the Wilderness, Waiting -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on March 08, 2010
New York -- Mitt Romney, sitting ramrod straight, is gazing up at the gleaming glass boxes on Park Avenue as we zoom through midtown Manhattan. It is lunchtime, and the streets are swarming with business folk -- attorneys with lattes, analysts with take-out sushi...

A Spanish 51st State? -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on March 08, 2010
Imagine that New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, citing his state?s ?unique linguistic and cultural heritage,? signed into law a bill with the following provisions: � 1)�� English and Spanish are the co-official languages of New Mexico, but government agencies, courts, and the legislature will operate in Spanish, with English translations available only upon request...

America the Exceptional, Again -- By: Rich Lowry & Ramesh Ponnuru

Posted on March 08, 2010
One feature of the American character, noted by Winston Churchill among others, is to respond with overwhelming force when seriously provoked. But while our essay on American exceptionalism has been attacked quite severely, the attacks are too weak to constitute a serious provocation, and thus no heavy artillery need be deployed...

Bernanke Finally Fingers Mark-to-Market -- By: Brian S. Wesbury & Robert Stein

Posted on March 08, 2010
Late last month, during testimony before Congress, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke made the following eye-popping statement: ?Commercial real-estate loans should not be marked down because the collateral value [the estimated value of the property on the market] has declined...

Thank You, Senator Bunning -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on March 08, 2010
?Well, that?s real courage.? If I had a dollar for every conservative I?ve heard say that -- sarcastically -- about Republican senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, I could easily buy lunch at the D.C. Caucus Room restaurant -- and keep the wine flowing. Senator Bunning was making headlines for filibustering a bill to extend unemployment benefits...

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