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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

Obama Can?t Play Center

Posted on November 17, 2010
Clinton?s map won?t get Obama where he needs to go. Should Obama pull a Clinton? This has been a burning question inside the Beltway ever since the polls showed the Great Shellacking bearing down on the White House...

Voting Present Beats Losing

Posted on November 17, 2010
With enemies like Michael Moore and Bill Maher, Obama needs fewer friends. Obamism was repudiated in the midterm election. Not since 1938 has the Democratic party lost so many House seats. The losses of state legislatures and governorships were as bleak for liberals...

Congresses Compared

Posted on November 16, 2010
From the November 29, 2010, issue of NR. Next year in Washington is not going to be a replay of 1995. The analogy is on everyone's mind in the capital. Many Republicans worry that President Obama will win the public-relations war against Speaker-to-be John Boehner as handily as Bill Clinton bested Newt Gingrich...

I Shouldn?t Be Writing This

Posted on November 16, 2010
NRO is the beating heart of conservatism, but it?s also a major drain on my productivity! I don't know why I've agreed to suggest that you dig into your pockets and support NRO. It's completely against my interest...

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Obama Caves on Civilian Trial for KSM

Posted on November 16, 2010
It turns out indefinite detention isn?t so bad after all. Let's review the state of play, shall we? Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama blasted the Bush administration's decision to treat al-Qaeda terrorists as enemy combatants and detain them without trial at Guantanamo Bay...

The Happy Meal Banners and Their Ilk

Posted on November 16, 2010
The Left prefers coercion to results. What are we to make of Nancy Pelosi's hometown's measure to ban Happy Meals? Shall we say that the San Francisco board of supervisors got a little carried away in their zeal to prevent childhood obesity? Or is it about time someone staged an intervention to shake Americans out of their sickening (literally) eating habits? Well, maybe, but not this way...

The Liberal Mind Rejects Sad Facts

Posted on November 16, 2010
Reality may cause sadness and pain, but it is reality nonetheless. I recently devoted my biweekly column in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles to analyzing why most Jews believe that people are basically good despite the fact that this belief is neither rational nor Jewish...

A Second Look at George W. Bush

Posted on November 16, 2010
The most important judgments of the Bush presidency are still a long way off. How is George W. Bush two years after his presidency? As resolutely himself as ever -- as upbeat, folksy, and profoundly at peace with the biggest decisions of his presidency as ever...

End Deficit-Reduction Commissions

Posted on November 16, 2010
They just provide political cover to the politicians who created the deficit. Another deficit-reduction commission has now made its recommendations. My own recommendation for dealing with deficits would include stopping the appointment of deficit-reduction commissions...

Oklahomans Say No to Sharia

Posted on November 16, 2010
The state is right to prohibit judges from citing the Sharia in their rulings. As Americans learn more about Islam, the aspect they find most objectionable is not its theology (such as whether Allah is God or not) nor its symbolism (such as an Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan) but its law code, called the Sharia...

Tea in 2012

Posted on November 15, 2010
From the November 29, 2010, issue of NR. Amid all the recriminations about the electoral ineffectiveness of some Tea Party–backed candidates, it's easy to lose sight of a central fact: It's doubtful that, without a newly emboldened grassroots movement, Republican politicians would have been able to create enough momentum against Obama to produce the landslide of November 2...

Wielding the Budget Knife

Posted on November 15, 2010
The Bowles-Simpson ?illustrative list? is only that ? an illustration. But it will give novice legislators an appropriate starting point. While nearly every Republican candidate running this cycle highlighted the need to cut spending and reduce the deficit, very few offered much in the way of specifics...

The Threat of New START

Posted on November 15, 2010
New START logic: Russia poses no military threat, but we need New START immediately to protect us from the Russian military threat. When the New START treaty was signed in early April 2010, Obama- administration officials were eager to rush the treaty through the Senate ratification process...

Merkw�rdigeliebe, Before He Changed It

Posted on November 15, 2010
The Democrats? Strange Love that dares not speak its name So here I am, holed up in Maerose Prizzi's palatial pad in Pacific Heights, reliving the last scene of Paul Muni's second-greatest film and loving every minute of it...

Sea Life Flourishes in the Gulf

Posted on November 15, 2010
The Great Oil Spill Panic of 2010 will go down in history as mass hysteria on par with the Dutch tulip bubble. The catastrophists were wrong (again) about the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. There have been no major fish die-offs...

Don?t Be a Grouch

Posted on November 15, 2010
There?s no billionaire here writing checks, just normal Average Joes and Janes like you. I am here to represent what Jonah refers to as 'The Suits.' Which isn't accurate because NR/NRO is so skeletal an operation that the proper term is really The Suit, singular...

Bush?s Decision Points

Posted on November 15, 2010
From the former president?s new book, we learn how narrowly we avoided disaster and achieved success in Iraq. George W. Bush is sitting on a hotel sofa in front of a south-facing window on a sunny November morning...

You Don?t Have to Be a Heartbreaker

Posted on November 15, 2010
There?s life out there for marriage! A case for some cultural ? country ? confidence. The election is over. If you're one of those odd people whose lives were totally consumed by politics, you can try re-engaging real life again...

Even Secretariat Understood Death Tax?s Cruelty

Posted on November 15, 2010
Taxing the bereaved produces little revenue, and many quarrels. Director Randall Wallace's Secretariat is a well-acted, exciting, and beautifully shot 1970s period piece about the Babe Ruth of thoroughbreds...

Obama Knocks Israel in a Budding Sharia State

Posted on November 13, 2010
The president criticizes the Jewish state in a Muslim state that bans Israelis. In fine Alinskyite tradition, Pres. Barack Obama is ready to say anything at any moment if it seems expedient. So it was that he spoke some months back of the 'unbreakable bond of friendship' between the United States and Israel...

A Tale of Two Europes

Posted on November 12, 2010
Looking for transcendence. November 9 marked the 21st anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet if the open-borders Europe of the Schengen agreement is no longer divided by concrete walls, barbed-wire fences, and sandy death-traps, 21st-century Europe remains deeply divided nonetheless...

Hard Money

Posted on November 12, 2010
In trying to prevent inflation and deflation, Ben Bernanke treads a perilous path. The U.S. economy is at risk of falling into either an inflationary or a deflationary spiral, which is a consequence of the Federal Reserve's having been either too loose or too tight...

Our Fight Needs You

Posted on November 12, 2010
Help us stop Obama?s plan for America. This is the hardest 'ask' we'll make all year. Urging you to give to Scott Brown back at the beginning of the year to stop Obamacare, asking you to believe in Marco Rubio when he was practically an asterisk in the Florida Senate race, making a last-minute plea for support to get Pat Toomey over the top, highlighting conservative congressional candidates worthy of your support -- all that comes naturally and easily...

The Obama Fabulists

Posted on November 12, 2010
It?s as if Bush had explained his nosedive in the polls by his failure to invade Syria and Iran or expand Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama was billed as a cool rationalist -- a sober and judicious intellectual so unlike the inattentive and twangy 'smoke 'em out' George W...

Korea: Too Green for Democrats

Posted on November 12, 2010
Obama discovers the downside of environmental regulation. The Bush administration negotiated and signed a free-trade agreement with South Korea in 2007, but enough members of Congress found the deal unacceptable that it was never ratified...

Why Obama Is Right about India

Posted on November 12, 2010
The U.S. needs India to counter a rising China. There has been much grousing about the expense of President Obama's India trip. This is silly and vindictive. The one thing this country owes its leader is to spare no expense in protecting him...

Throw Carol Browner Under the Bus

Posted on November 12, 2010
She is a dangerous woman whose ideological zeal has helped power the Democrats? war on prosperity. Energy czar Carol Browner needs to go the way of disgraced green-jobs czar Van Jones: under the bus and stripped of her unbridled power to destroy jobs and lives in the name of saving the planet...

A First Step on the Debt

Posted on November 12, 2010
The plan isn?t perfect, but it moves the deficit in the right direction: down. Nancy Pelosi is remarkably consistent. During the election campaign, she attacked Republicans for proposals to tackle the nation's fiscal problems...

Obamacare Hits the Most Vulnerable

Posted on November 12, 2010
The most important element of medical progress is scientific innovation. Everyone agrees that the burden of dealing with escalating health-care costs should not fall on the most vulnerable, right? Democrats in particular are always at pains to convince us that they are sensitive to the needs of the less fortunate...

Rebalancing the Economy

Posted on November 12, 2010
The U.S. needs domestic reform, not foreign scapegoats. America's economy is not performing for its people. As the recovery drags on at a snail's pace and unemployment remains stubbornly high, the public has grown increasingly impatient for answers and for solutions...

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