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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

A Farewell to 2010

Posted on December 28, 2010
A poem to commemorate an eventful political year. Farewell to a glorious two thousand ten When tea stimulated the voters, who then — No longer content to be ruled by their betters Who'd made them a nation of destitute debtors — Went straight to the polls and kicked out the big spenders With some GOPers among the offenders...

2011 Predictions

Posted on December 28, 2010
An NRO Symposium What might happen in the upcoming year? We asked a few of National Review Online's sages to prophesy the events of 2011. JOHN DERBYSHIRE Domestic affairs: 2011 will be the year that the full scale of our fiscal crisis becomes clear, even to politicians...

What Do Women Want?

Posted on December 28, 2010
The three qualities that the fairer sex looks for In my previous column, I offered an answer to the question: What do men want? I made the case that what men most want from the woman they love is to be admired...

The Rule of Sebelius

Posted on December 28, 2010
Obamacare represents the triumph of bureaucracy over republicanism. The text of Obamacare is dry and legalistic, except when it summons the majesty of the King James Bible to intone imperiously, 'the secretary shall ...

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Political End-Runs

Posted on December 28, 2010
Progressives consider the Constitution, and our elected representatives, disposable nuisances. The Constitution of the United States begins with the words 'We the people.' But neither the Constitution nor 'we the people' will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end-runs around both...

Obama OK in 2012?

Posted on December 27, 2010
The Dems? midterm shellacking hasn?t doomed the president?s reelection. On the day after Boxing Day, it's worth noting that Barack Obama is down but not out. You could tell as much from the contrast between his petulant post-election press conference and his peppy pre-Christmas press conference...

Tea Party Burlesque

Posted on December 27, 2010
Wanting more ‘It's a quarter after one, I'm a little drunk, and I need you now.' It shouldn't come as a surprise that a year that included that chorus line in one of its hottest country-music hits would end with a controversy over a Dancing with the Stars country gal going a few steps too far...

The ACLU?s Unholy War on Catholic Hospitals

Posted on December 24, 2010
Will a federal emergency-medical-treatment law be rewritten to mandate that all hospitals provide abortions? Ho, ho, ho! Just in time for Christmas, the American Civil Liberties Union has launched a new salvo against people of faith...

The Obamaites? About-Face

Posted on December 22, 2010
Like Orwell?s farm animals, we have awakened to see the new commandments on the barnyard wall. Californians have been experiencing ten days of the wettest, snowiest weather in recent memory. In the usually arid San Joaquin Valley, flooding is ubiquitous...

Implementing Repeal

Posted on December 22, 2010
Lifting ?don?t ask? should be a step-by-step process. Now that Congress has decided to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the armed forces, the military faces the real challenge: implementation...

Nixon, Kissinger, and the Times

Posted on December 22, 2010
A newspaper?s long struggle against its b�te noire. It ill behooves the New York Times to become quite so sanctimonious about the latest Nixon tapes, which reveal some comments by the former president and Henry Kissinger about Israel, Russia, the Jews, and other groups...

Internet Access Is Not a Civil Right

Posted on December 22, 2010
Net neturality is the Obamacare of the Web. When bureaucrats talk about increasing our 'access' to X, Y, or Z, what they're really talking about is increasing their control over our lives. As it is with the government health-care takeover, so it is with the newly approved government plan to 'increase' Internet 'access...

Change Has Come to Congress

Posted on December 22, 2010
The advocates of big government are now singing a different tune. A new Congress begins two weeks from today, and if the American people sense that change is coming, they're right. We got a preview last week when the president signed a bill that extends current income-tax rates for the next two years...

The Would-be GOP Kings

Posted on December 22, 2010
With a heavy heart, I winnow the field down for you. Who among us can contain their excitement? The GOP presidential-primary season has begun! By my count, there are 24 people who are beneficiaries of nontrivial presidential buzz: Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, John Thune, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence, Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, David Petraeus, Ron Paul, Jeb Bush, John Bolton, Bob McDonnell, Jim DeMint, Chris Christie, Herman Cain, Gary Johnson, Judd Gregg, Marco Rubio, and Rick Perry...

FCC Regulators Turn Their Eyes to the Internet

Posted on December 21, 2010
These net-neutrality rules are a blast from the obsolete past. The FCC is poised to take a significant step today to regulate Internet providers in the name of so-called net neutrality. If it does, its action will say a lot about what's wrong with an agency that was created in 1934 to regulate telephone and telegraph monopolies...

New Antibiotics, Stat!

Posted on December 21, 2010
The drug makers are in a bind ? and public health is in danger. The development of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle, just when we need them most. As drug-resistant bacteria are on the rampage worldwide, we find ourselves in a most precarious situation — one not unlike the pre-antibiotic era, before penicillin, when staphylococcal and pneumococcal infections were the dominant pathogens...

The Age of Uncertainty

Posted on December 21, 2010
Our entrepreneurs have lost confidence in the federal government. Entrepreneurs fret daily over economic uncertainty. Case in point: Even with passage of the lame-duck tax deal, they still don't know what their tax burden will be two years from now...

Slow START

Posted on December 21, 2010
In their frenzied attempt to push New START across the Senate finish line before Christmas, Democrats are relying on a strange mix of calm reassurances and ominous warnings. To hear them tell it, the arms-control treaty would not in any way jeopardize U...

Thinking and Believing

Posted on December 21, 2010
The <i>King</i> is here . . . in a cloak-and-lager novel. David Downing, an expert on C. S. Lewis, is the author of a new adventure novel involving the Inklings, those famous writers of more than children's books, even! National Review Online's Kathryn Jean Lopez talked to him about Looking for the King and the literary and cultural legacies of the Inklings...

Obama?s Mitterrand Moment

Posted on December 21, 2010
The president could learn from the French prime minister?s U-turn. In 1981, Francois Mitterrand swept to power in France in a watershed election. He united the Left and fired the imagination of the country's youth, who danced in the streets on election night in a frenzy of revolutionary anticipation...

Fiscal Tomfoolery

Posted on December 21, 2010
Most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are. Random thoughts on the passing scene: Let's face it: Most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are -- and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart...

Will Mrs. Obama Downsize Your Kid?

Posted on December 21, 2010
Adding subsidies is bad policy ? and diminishes family obligations. The First Lady got a bit of a bum rap last week when some on the Right wrenched out of context her comment on the new school-lunch program...

What Do Men Want?

Posted on December 21, 2010
To be admired by the women they love It is said that the one question about men and women that even the great Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, could not answer was: What do women want? Whether or not Freud actually admitted his ignorance on this question is irrelevant...

Obama, Pragmatic Socialist

Posted on December 21, 2010
A response to <i>Slate</i>?s David Weigel. ‘Is the president still a Marxist if he cuts taxes?' That's the question posed by Slate's David Weigel in his critical review of my new book, Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism...

On Arms Control, Learn from Reagan

Posted on December 20, 2010
There is a right way to do a nuclear-arms treaty: the Reagan way. Much reporting and commentary casts the Senate debate over ratification of the New START nuclear-weapons treaty as driven by partisanship...

New Vaccines, Stat!

Posted on December 20, 2010
The vaccine makers are in a bind ? and public health is in danger. The development of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle, just when we need them most. As drug-resistant bacteria are on the rampage worldwide, we find ourselves in a most precarious situation — one not unlike the one we faced in the pre-antibiotic era, before penicillin, when staphylococcal and pneumococcal infections were the dominant pathogens...

U.S. Military Primacy: Worth Sacrificing For

Posted on December 20, 2010
The cost of defense cuts may be measured in lives. Advocates of cuts in U.S. military programs, including President Obama's Deficit Reduction Commission, argue that the defense budget must be reduced along with all other U...

The Republican Class War

Posted on December 20, 2010
From the December 31, 2010, issue of NR There is now a class divide in the Republican party. Mitt Romney, the leading establishment candidate for the party's presidential nomination in 2012, draws support from affluent, college-educated Republicans...

Bonhoeffer the Brave

Posted on December 20, 2010
A new look at a 20th-century hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life was more riveting than most of the novels written this year. And Eric Metaxas, in his new monumental biography of the Lutheran pastor who was executed at the Flossenburg concentration camp after his participation in a failed attempt to kill Hitler, tells Bonhoeffer's story with the fluidity of a novel...

Reid and Pelosi Back Down

Posted on December 20, 2010
They fought public opinion, and public opinion won. Elections have consequences. The consequences of the 2010 elections -- and one might add the 2009 elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and the January 2010 special Senate election in Massachusetts -- became clear as lights shined over the snow at both ends of the Capitol on Thursday night...

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