Bench Memos - National Review Online: Federal Judiciary

Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Federal Judiciary Blogs

OR PHONE (866) 635-1838 for Bankruptcy Help, (866) 635-6190 for Divorce,
(866) 635-2689 for Personal Injury or (866) 635-9402 for Criminal Defense

Find a Local Lawyer

Bankruptcy (866) 635-1838
Divorce (866) 635-6190
Personal Injury (866) 635-2689
Criminal Defense (866) 635-9402

Federal Judiciary

Bench Memos - National Review Online

Covering The Supreme Court -- from National Review Online

Post Frequency: 91/day

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

Our Reactionary President

Posted on February 22, 2011
President Obama is stirring up the forces of reaction. Or at least he wants to. He is their inspiration and their leader, the nation's most eloquent and powerful advocate of a government of the past. The man from 'hope and change' wants, to the extent he can, to perpetuate the bankrupt and bankrupting structures of 20th-century government...

Reckless Spending

Posted on February 22, 2011
Nothing more clearly illustrates the utter irresponsibility of Barack Obama than his advocacy of 'high-speed rail.' The man is not stupid. He knows how to use words that will sound wonderful to people who do not bother to stop and think...

What Madison Revealed

Posted on February 22, 2011
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist...

My Brother?s Eulogy

Posted on February 22, 2011
Author's Note: These are the remarks, as prepared, I delivered at my brother's funeral Sunday, February 13. My sincere thanks for the kindness and support both from my National Review colleagues and from our readers. When the funeral home asked me what Josh did for a living -- 'How should we describe him?' -- I was at a loss...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Why Thune Didn?t Run

Posted on February 22, 2011
He is a happy warrior in the trenches of the Senate. Last week, Sen. John Thune (R., S.D.) told National Review Online he was still considering a presidential run. 'It is a gut-level decision,' he said...

Fatted Leviathan

Posted on February 22, 2011
From the Feb. 21, 2010, issue of NR. The collapse of the housing market has been an object lesson for America. Households and banks borrowed too much on expectations of continuing appreciation in real-estate prices...

Walker Holds His Ground

Posted on February 21, 2011
Madison, Wis. -- Hundreds of protesters continue to occupy the capitol, and 14 Democratic state senators remain roosted in Illinois, stalling consideration of his budget-repair bill. But Gov. Scott Walker, a first-term Republican, tells National Review Online that he will not blink...

Claremont McKenna?s Pro-Islamist Professor

Posted on February 21, 2011
Claremont McKenna College is a nationally recognized leader in training Defense Department officials and State Department personnel (including numerous ambassadors). Professor Bassam Frangieh is head of Claremont McKenna's Arabic Department and Middle East Studies program, where he teaches tomorrow's diplomats about the Middle East, plans study-abroad programs -- and supports recognized terrorist groups, namely, Hezbollah and Hamas...

Gone, Wisconsin

Posted on February 21, 2011
The dirtiest words in a liberal's lexicon -- besides 'judgmental,' 'intolerant,' 'unfair,' and 'Constitution' -- are 'revanchism' and 'irredentism.' For years, I had no idea what these words actually meant, although like a good red-diaper baby, I threw them around a lot...

Ronald Reagan and the African American

Posted on February 21, 2011
Ronald Reagan, who narrowly lost the Republican party's presidential nomination in 1976, realized that his party needed to broaden its base into a durable coalition that would help its members win and maintain office at the local, state, and national levels...

The Governors Storm D.C.

Posted on February 21, 2011
As congressional Republicans mull whether to address the government's long-term fiscal problems -- House Republican leaders are being pushed by the 87 freshmen to do so, while some Senate Republicans are seeking some bipartisan accords with Democratic colleagues -- two Republican governors barreled into Washington with the message that the lawmakers better get moving...

Billy Ray Knows Best

Posted on February 21, 2011
Unfortunately, being called 'Mr. Hannah Montana' in a glossy-magazine headline is far from Billy Ray Cyrus's biggest problem. As many a headline has proclaimed, the once country, once Pax-network, once Disney-Channel star seems to be suffering from a brutally true-to-life 'Achy Breaky Heart...

?A Great and Mighty President?

Posted on February 19, 2011
Patrick Henry opposed the Constitution as vehemently as he opposed tyranny. Indeed, at the Virginia ratifying convention in June 1788, he argued they were the same thing. 'Besides the expenses of maintaining the Senate and other house in as much splendor as they please,' he railed, 'there is to be a great and mighty president, with very extensive powers -- the powers of a king...

Unequal Protection You Can
Believe In

Posted on February 19, 2011
Twenty-eight of these United States -- encompassing 164 million people, 53 percent of America's population, and 285 Electoral College votes -- are suing the federal government to stop Obamacare. This litigation challenges the constitutionality of Obamacare's mandate that individuals purchase health insurance...

Death to Apostates: Not a Perversion of Islam, but Islam

Posted on February 19, 2011
On NRO Friday, Paul Marshall lamented the Obama administration's fecklessness, in particular the president's appalling silence in the face of the death sentence Said Musa may suffer for the crime of converting to Christianity. This is in Afghanistan, the nation for which our troops are fighting and dying -- not to defeat our enemies, but to prop up the Islamic 'democracy' we have spent a decade trying to forge at a cost of billions...

Can Health-Care Waivers Be Justified?

Posted on February 18, 2011
The power to waive or dispense with the law is dangerous, it cannot be delegated, and it is not cured by transparency. Although health-care waivers are unconstitutional, can they nonetheless be justified? The Department of Health and Human Services has granted almost a thousand waivers from part of the health-care law, and (as explained last week in these pages) the waivers are an unconstitutional exercise of the dispensing power...

Recovering the Spirit of ?49

Posted on February 18, 2011
Could there be a Gold Rush today? Think back to the 19th-century Gold Rush of the American Far West. Towns emptied, schools closed, churches went quiet, houses were shuttered. People rushed from all over the world to take a chance at striking it rich and making a better life...

Immortal Fannie, Immortal Freddie

Posted on February 18, 2011
The next bubble is built into our assumptions about housing ?investments.? Are Fannie and Freddie ever going away? Almost certainly not. Why not? For one thing, the law already requires that the government-sponsored enterprises be taken out of conservatorship and put into receivership, as Mark Calabria points out, because they have reached the point of negative equity...

A Deadly Domino Effect

Posted on February 18, 2011
Planned Parenthood?s mission creep. ‘The next movement was the sudden jerk of a tiny foot as the baby started kicking, as if trying to move away from the probing invader,' Abby Johnson writes in her new book, Unplanned, written with Cindy Lambert...

The New Wisconsin Idea

Posted on February 18, 2011
The cradle of American progressivism might yield the solution to states? budget woes. The old so-called Wisconsin Idea was that government would collaborate with experts drawn from the state's university system to craft progressive legislation...

Liberty, 21st Century?Style

Posted on February 18, 2011
The notion that we all crave personal liberty is fairly new. Finally, the national conversation about democracy is relatively mature and serious. Save for some TV-news anchors, just about everyone seems to understand that democracy is a tricky thing...

Apocalypse Now: Wisconsin vs. Big Labor

Posted on February 18, 2011
In bankrupt and near-bankrupt states, fiscal discipline can?t wait. Welcome to the reckoning. We have met the fiscal apocalypse, and it is smack dab in the middle of the heartland. As Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation...

Barack Obama?s Louis XV Budget

Posted on February 18, 2011
Unlike the French monarch, Obama is in denial of the coming deluge. Five days before his inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama told the Washington Post that entitlement reform could no longer be kicked down the road...

President Obama?s Pathetic Scalpel

Posted on February 18, 2011
It?s the spending, stupid. Well, now we have the answer to the question posed on November 2: Will President Obama, faced with an electorate infuriated by big-government overreach, pivot as Bill Clinton did in 1995 and become a centrist? By offering a budget that adds a gob-smacking $8 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years, the president has answered that question in the negative...

Raging Wisconsin

Posted on February 18, 2011
Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has put a sensible proposal on the table to improve his state's alarming fiscal situation -- and the Democrats, who are largely to blame for it, have run for the hills. Calling to mind a maneuver that Democrats in the Texas legislature pulled a few years back, Wisconsin's Democrats have fled the capitol, and in some instances have fled the state, in order to subvert the very democratic process from which their irony-immune party derives its name...

Lila Rose among Deadly Thorns

Posted on February 18, 2011
That's the scenario that has played out in multiple undercover videos released this month by Live Action, a group founded by 22-year-old Lila Rose. The videos include the complete footage of visits to seven clinics in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, and there is also audio from a visit in Washington, D...

Madison Madness

Posted on February 18, 2011
The Democratic/government-union days of rage in Madison, Wis., are a disgrace. Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan calls it Cairo coming to Madison. But the protesters in Egypt were pro-democracy. The government-union protesters in Madison are anti-democracy; they are trying to prevent a vote in the legislature...

The Padilla Decision

Posted on February 17, 2011
Lawfare loses. One of the greatest attempts to wage 'lawfare' against U.S. officials may now be at an end. Lawfare occurs when enemies of the United States attempt to use U.S. courts and legal protections to take action against those entrusted with defending the United States from national-security threats...

A Deformed Mouse of a Budget

Posted on February 17, 2011
Obama?s leaving the hard work to the Republicans. The United States seems to be enduring a prolonged Groundhog Day. No matter what happens, responses from the governing liberal establishment remain the same...

Facing Down the Unions

Posted on February 17, 2011
Tackling the public-employee unions may no longer be a political kamikaze mission. Over the past year, New Jersey governor Chris Christie has become a folk hero by striking back at greedy union demands, lambasting union leaders, and standing up for taxpayers...

Previous | Next

Related Law Bulletins

Relaxed Standard of Review Applies to Density Variances
The Appellate Division extended to applications for development se...

Review of Charles Fried
Here's my review, in Commonweal, of Charles Fried's recent book, M...

NSEERS - National Security Entry-Exit Registration System
NSEERS - NATIONAL SECURITY ENTRY-EXIT REGISTRATION SYSTEM Special ...

National Episcopal Church Gets Only Limited Intervention In Property Dispute
In Diocese of Central New York v. St. Andrews Episcopal Church, (N...