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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

Mama Grizzly Reality TV

Posted on December 20, 2010
Taking on the sexual revolution?s most acceptable bias Mama, don't let your babies grow up to be stay-at-home mamas. That seemed to be the underlying bias recently on a popular daytime TV show...

Burr?s Surprising DADT Vote

Posted on December 20, 2010
Why the senator representing Camp Lejeune voted for repeal. In the end, the Senate's vote to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" went off without a hitch. Democrats, as expected, relished and rejoiced, while Republicans, resigned to the inevitable, didn't put up much of fight...

Advise, Don?t Consent

Posted on December 20, 2010
Senators cannot renegotiate a treaty, only reject it. President Obama is writing to the wrong people, and those wrong people are hopelessly confused about his power and their own. This is how bad agreements are born...

There They Go A-Caroling

Posted on December 18, 2010
From the December 20, 2010, issue of NR. There has been Christmas music ever since there has been Christmas. And there have been Christmas albums ever since there have been albums. Before albums, of course, there were single cuts...

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Republicans Still Haven?t Learned

Posted on December 18, 2010
No real tax cut, lots of deficit spending: You call that a deal? ‘If we've learned anything over the last two years, it's that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.' That's what Republican lawmakers proclaimed in their 'Pledge to America,' the campaign document spelling out their agenda in the 2010 midterm election...

Can Conservatives Win Back the Arts?

Posted on December 17, 2010
Despite the Left?s best efforts, conservative and American values are coming back into the culture. After years of declaiming against the Left's domination of our culture, I'm startled and delighted to discover that the tide is beginning to turn...

The Omnibus Falls

Posted on December 17, 2010
How Republicans defeated a $1.1 trillion bill As he stepped into a Capitol elevator late Thursday, bundled up in preparation for the winter winds, Sen. Mitch McConnell cracked a thin smile. For the low-key leader of Senate Republicans, good spirits were certainly in order...

Getting the Christmas Shopping Done

Posted on December 17, 2010
A little help Just after Thanksgiving, some National Review authors and friends offered their Christmas gift-giving recommendations here. Now, a second round, for those still looking for good book ideas...

The Tax That Wasn?t

Posted on December 17, 2010
Obama was right ? the individual mandate is not a tax. Prior to the passage of the health-care law, Pres. Barack Obama was at his most emphatic and condescending in insisting that the penalty for defying the mandate to buy health insurance is not a tax...

America, the Crab Bucket

Posted on December 17, 2010
There?s something fishy about Obama?s newfound love for business. No matter how soothing the White House's overtures to business leaders sounded this week, an inconvenient fact remains: Washington is gripped by crab-in-the-bucket syndrome...

?Tis the Season to Spoil Our Children?

Posted on December 17, 2010
We all know Christmas is too commercial. Here?s what to do about it. The advice columns are beginning to reflect the season. A dismayed mother wrote to the Washington Post, 'I love the holidays, but they bring out the greed in my children...

The New Comeback Kid

Posted on December 17, 2010
Obama?s comeback is occurring in his presidency a year ahead of Clinton?s. If Barack Obama wins reelection in 2012, as is now more likely than not, historians will mark his comeback as beginning on December 6, the day of the Great Tax-Cut Deal of 2010...

WikiLeaks What-Ifs

Posted on December 17, 2010
What if they had exposed state secrets through U.S. history? On Christmas night 1776, George Washington and his troops silently set out east from Pennsylvania and crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey...

Thrown under the (Omni)Bus

Posted on December 17, 2010
Obama and the Democrats hold the voters in contempt. The gold standard in contemptuous politics remains Emperor Caligula's appointment of his horse, Incitatus, to the Roman senate. Well, Harry Reid (D...

Reaganomics 2.0 in the Driver?s Seat

Posted on December 17, 2010
The new Tea Party GOP must maintain a message of economic growth. On a historic night this past Thursday, a new Tea Party Republican Congress completely transformed U.S. economic policy. Elections matter, and so do their ideas...

WikiLeaks Will Get Americans Wiki-Killed

Posted on December 17, 2010
Secrets help keep free people free. On Christmas night 1776, George Washington and his troops silently embarked east from Pennsylvania and crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey. They then pounced on snoring Hessian mercenaries at their barracks in Trenton...

No to Debit-Card-Fee Price Fixing

Posted on December 16, 2010
The benefits to consumers are a mirage. Lower prices! That was the promise of the Debit Interchange Fee Amendment, which gave the Federal Reserve the power to police the interchange fees in debit-card transactions and to regulate rate levels in a way that would make them 'reasonable and proportional to the processing costs incurred...

Catholicism, and the Oceans, Will Survive

Posted on December 16, 2010
2010 was a year of turmoil, and of triumph. The year now ending has been one of immense alarm followed by serenity's sudden rushes to the head. It is hard now to remember the hysteria generated by the tawdry and often appalling scandal of clerical abuse of young men in the Roman Catholic Church, between February and July...

The Transies and the Treaty

Posted on December 16, 2010
Transnational progressives would rather be congenial than be right. Here is what you need to understand about the Republican party's transnational progressives, folks like Condoleezza Rice, John McCain, Richard Lugar, and Lindsey Graham: They proceed from the premise that it serves our national interests to be willing residents of a Potemkin and reliably anti-American village called the 'international community...

Man without a Country

Posted on December 16, 2010
The 9/11 attacks reminded some Americans how much they loved their country ? and drove others away. As politics began to fill the sky above New York City on Sept. 11, 2001, I was strolling vaguely in the direction of my last class of the day an ocean away, in Geneva, Switzerland...

Designing a Better Tax System

Posted on December 16, 2010
Our present tax system punishes investment and distorts incentives. A VAT has dangers, but it also holds great promise. Tax hikes, in one form or another, are simply unavoidable. That's the blunt message conveyed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, chairmen of the Obama deficit commission, in their much-ballyhooed portfolio of budget recommendations...

New Radio Copps?

Posted on December 16, 2010
The FCC commissioner supports troubling new regulations on the airwaves. ‘What we have had in recent years is an aberration in which we've had no oversight of media.' So says FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who is now advocating the institution of a quadrennial 'public-value test' for broadcasters...

The Whip Dude

Posted on December 16, 2010
From the December 20, 2010, issue of NR On Election Night, as dusk settled upon the city, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, as ever, was relaxed. His thick salt-and-pepper hair was brushed back; the sleeves of his starched white shirt rolled up...

Up from Maddox, &c.

Posted on December 16, 2010
The other day, we had Gary Johnson in the offices of National Review. He's the libertarian ex-governor of New Mexico who's running for president. At least, he looks to be doing so. Early in our conversation, he said that he was a 'states person,' a 'states'-rights person...

Vanity Fair Game

Posted on December 16, 2010
The true story of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame is very different from both the Hollywood and the mainstream-media versions. Filmmakers get to take dramatic license. Reporters really shouldn't...

Holbrooke Thought Highly of Himself ? for Good Reason

Posted on December 16, 2010
Richard Holbrooke was America?s best diplomat. Reading Masters and Commanders, Andrew Roberts's magnificent account of British and American leaders in World War II, I was struck by how many of them, working very long hours and under great strain, were struck down by heart attacks while in their 60s...

In Defense of the Liberal Arts

Posted on December 16, 2010
The therapeutic Left and the utilitarian Right both do disservice to the humanities. The liberal arts face a perfect storm. The economy is struggling with obscenely high unemployment and is mired in massive federal and state deficits...

Reservoir Dogs

Posted on December 16, 2010
On the tax deal, centrist Democrats take one last swipe at their party?s progressive wing. Blue Dog Democrats hobble toward the tax vote defanged. While they were once loyal guardians against liberal excess on Capitol Hill, their ranks will soon have been culled by the midterms -- about half of them, 26 of 54, were defeated last month...

One Last Disgrace

Posted on December 15, 2010
The 1,924-page omnibus spending bill unveiled yesterday by Senate Democrats is the legislative equivalent of a middle finger, one that reminds us of how richly the Democrats deserved the shellacking visited upon them on Election Day. Rather than pass a simple 'continuing resolution' to fund government operations through early 2011, Harry Reid & Co...

Two Californias

Posted on December 15, 2010
Abandoned farms, Third World living conditions, pervasive public assistance -- welcome to the once-thriving Central Valley. The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California...

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