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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

The New Immigration Debate

Posted on January 27, 2011
Does the Constitution really say that children of illegal immigrants are automatic citizens? While 2010's immigration debate centered on the controversial Arizona law, 2011's promises to be focused on a different -- and even more explosive -- topic: birthright citizenship...

Fixing Bathroom Tiles on the Titanic

Posted on January 27, 2011
Rearranging the deck chairs is too ambitious for this president. The other night, as I watched the State of the Union address, my mind began to wander to more important upcoming events, notably the centennial of Ronald Reagan's birth...

The Once and Future Senator?

Posted on January 27, 2011
George Allen talks to NRO. George Allen needs little introduction. He smiled on NR's cover in 2005, with the headline 'His Future Is Now: Sen. George Allen, first-string presidential talent out of Virginia,' and many Republicans saw a 2008 presidential bid in the cards...

Canada Stands Up to Iran

Posted on January 27, 2011
The theocrats do not succeed in intimidating our neighbor to the north. Last week, Canada's Free Thinking Film Society -- love that name -- was scheduled to screen Iranium, a new documentary about the regime that has ruled Iran since 1979, its drive to acquire nuclear weapons, and the dangers that poses to the West...

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Old Rules Won?t Determine GOP Presidential Candidate

Posted on January 27, 2011
Our politics have changed. The weakest part of our political system, by a considerable margin, is the presidential nominating process. It tends to exclude from consideration those with the greatest experience in areas that are uniquely the president's responsibility: foreign policy and military strategy...

Master of the Senate

Posted on January 27, 2011
From the January 24, 2010, issue of NR Mitch McConnell would not smile. The rest of the crowd, full of big-name Democrats and liberal activists, nodded and cracked grins as Vice President Joe Biden quoted Edmund Burke, the famed Anglo-Irish statesman, on the nature of compromise...

The Passing of the Old Order

Posted on January 27, 2011
And its beneficiaries aren?t going quietly. American reality has been turned upside down in just 20 years. Americans no longer count on their news to be filtered and shaped by the Associated Press or the New York Times...

Pence Out, Republican Presidential Field Open

Posted on January 27, 2011
How will the Indiana congressman?s decision affect the GOP primaries? Conservative insiders were not surprised by Indiana Republican Mike Pence's decision not to run for president in 2012, but all agree his bowing out leaves the GOP nomination --- in the phrase used again and again --- 'wide open...

Abdicator-in-Chief

Posted on January 27, 2011
Obama has not taken the deficit commission as seriously as he promised. It's been nearly a year since President Obama signed an executive order creating the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, or 'deficit commission' as it was more commonly known, and almost two months since that commission issued its final report, which boasted a politically onerous cocktail of bold spending cuts, comprehensive tax reform, and -- most important of all -- sensible solutions for reforming bloated entitlement programs...

The Assault on Belarus, Part III

Posted on January 26, 2011
Over the past few days, I have been talking about the situation in Belarus -- a very grim situation indeed. For Parts I and II, go here and here. Today we will have the final installment. Since that awful Election Day, and worse night, in December, Belarusians have been under siege...

A Welcome Omission

Posted on January 26, 2011
Obama declines to declare a War on Poverty. It is unrealistic to expect President Obama to give a Republican State of the Union address. But let's acknowledge this remarkable conservative achievement: Nearly every trace of what was once the core Democratic platform -- to wit, the fight against alleged racial and social injustice -- has been stripped from Obama's discourse...

Contested Ground, Not Common Ground

Posted on January 26, 2011
Obama is wrong about the role of government. President Obama spoke eloquently during his State of the Union address last night about civility and the search for common ground. And certainly a bit more civility would be a welcome change...

Dumpnik

Posted on January 26, 2011
Pima County Republicans hope to ride Sheriff Dupnik out of town. At a time when most of America was looking for answers in the Tucson shootings, trying to understand what mix of privation and perversion could drive an individual to shoot indiscriminately into a crowd of innocent bystanders, longtime Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik had his answers prepackaged and ready for prime time...

Is the Fix In at Justice?

Posted on January 26, 2011
Appointing Robin Ashton to oversee ethical standards is like choosing a fox to guard the henhouse. Announce bad news on a Friday afternoon, the rule in official Washington goes. Attorney General Eric Holder seems to have a new corollary: Make bad appointments over holiday breaks...

The ?HealthStat? Seduction

Posted on January 26, 2011
The community-policing model of health care is at odds with any notion of limited government. If professional writing were the guild it often appears to be, Atul Gawande would be a scab. A surgeon and professor, Gawande also writes beautifully for The New Yorker about health care...

Cash for Education Clunkers

Posted on January 26, 2011
Government-run schools are a boondoggle. ‘We're going to have to out-educate other countries,' President Obama urged this week. How? By out-spending them, of course! It's the same old quack cure for America's fat and failing government-run schools monopoly...

Can-Do Collectivism

Posted on January 26, 2011
The president's speech last night wore a flag pin. But to paraphrase the president on another occasion, safeguarding the American experiment takes more than expressions of patriotism. President Obama made a Reaganesque joke about the ham-handedness of government...

The Balanced-Budget Amendment Returns

Posted on January 25, 2011
Two new proposals would mandate fiscal responsibility. Over three decades, Sen. Orrin Hatch has labored unsuccessfully for a Balanced Budget Amendment. The Senate last passed such a measure in 1982, only to be disappointed by a Democrat-controlled House...

God and Congress

Posted on January 25, 2011
The one thing you won?t see at the State of the Union tonight Tonight, when you tune in to the networks to watch President Obama give his State of the Union address, you will see four things: the president entering the hall, the president ascending the rostrum to be greeted by the vice president and the speaker of the House, the president giving his speech, and the reactions of members of the Congress and others in the hall...

What Would Clinton Do?

Posted on January 25, 2011
Some former speechwriters advise Obama to emulate his Democratic predecessor tonight. ‘The State of the Union address is a ghastly event,' Peter Robinson, a former Reagan speechwriter, tells me...

Obama?s Portfolio

Posted on January 25, 2011
Pres. Barack Obama doesn't talk about 'government spending,' he talks about 'investing in America,' which sounds more thrilling but amounts to the same thing. And the man who fancies himself our national investment guru will no doubt take tonight's State of the Union address to pitch us a bunch of new exciting financial opportunities, like some ephebic stockbroker just out of training...

The Headlines of 2011

Posted on January 25, 2011
Lawmakers should expect the unexpected. ‘Iran Conducts Nuclear Test.' Could we see such a headline in 2011? Yes, and America's leaders must prepare for this and similar possibilities, however unlikely they now seem...

Stop the Debt-Limit Doomsaying

Posted on January 25, 2011
Failing to increase the debt limit won?t wreak havoc. Democrats, left-wing advocacy groups, and the mainstream media are salivating over the debt-limit fight as a way to undermine the fiscal credibility of the newly elected Republican House majority...

The Assault on Belarus, Part II

Posted on January 25, 2011
Yesterday, I started a series on Belarus, a country that is going through a particular hell right now. Part I is here. I will begin Part II without fanfare or recapitulation. The dictator, Lukashenko, essentially made the trains run on time. He told Belarusians that other countries -- Ukraine, for example -- were experiencing chaos...

The 'Investment? Euphemism

Posted on January 25, 2011
It doesn?t help to call spending something different. Pres. Barack Obama hopes to be saved by a euphemism. He is wagering on the power of the word 'investment.' It sounds so market-oriented and cutting-edge in contrast to its more pedestrian, politically fraught synonym, 'spending,' especially the toxic 'deficit spending' that, to this point, has defined Obama's presidency...

New Heroes vs. Old

Posted on January 25, 2011
Let us once again honor innovators, not grievance-mongers. When I mention that my family used kerosene lamps when I was a small child in the South during the 1930s, that is usually taken as a sign of our poverty, though I never thought of us as poor at the time...

Hands Off My Dishes

Posted on January 25, 2011
Environmentalists lower our quality of life by government fiat. I began noticing the white coating, dull film, and simply unclean dishes a few weeks ago. Naturally, I suspected that other members of my clan were failing to place dishes on the racks of the dishwasher properly...

Ryan?s Rule

Posted on January 25, 2011
Under a new rule, Paul Ryan can set budget levels for 2011. All eyes will be on President Obama this evening as he delivers his much-anticipated State of the Union address. But it's a momentous day for House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R...

Agreeing to Be Agreeable

Posted on January 24, 2011
We could all just get along if only you would shut up. His Exalted Majesty Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Keeper of the Hoops, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago, is right...

Debt-Ceiling Debate

Posted on January 24, 2011
Republican lawmakers and presidential hopefuls debate the best approach to the debt ceiling. There has been a lot of discussion recently about how Republicans, fresh off their monumental victory in the midterms, should approach the impending vote to raise the federal debt limit...

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