Hold Fast

Charles Pierce on today’s Supreme Court rulings and the larger American zeitgeist: We live in the unreality of the moment now. We have tolerated — nay, celebrated — nonsense in our public life for so many years that we are now both its victims and its accomplices. We have detached ourselves from the duties of [...]

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It seems pretty obvious to me that if you are upset or outraged with the ruling this week that the individual mandate in the healthcare bill is unconstitutional – a ruling made by a 20 year GOP activist now sitting for life on the federal bench – then you should care a hell of a [...]

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Josh Marshall writes: A year ago, no one took seriously the idea that a federal health care mandate was unconstitutional. And the idea that buying health care coverage does not amount to “economic activity” seems preposterous on its face. But the decision that just came down from the federal judgment in Virginia — that the [...]

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Elena Kagan was confirmed to the Supreme Court. That’s two women justices nominated and confirmed by President Obama. Kagan is clearly a mystery as far as how she will actually behave on the bench, so hopefully she turns out to be super liberal and forces everyone to marry a gay man, or something.

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Jack Balkin and Matt Yglesias are both talking about the merits of having a fixed term for a Supreme Court justice. Balkin suggests 18 years, Yglesias 9-12 years. I can see this making sense, as it would remove some of the political pressure of justices to, you know, wait until a like-minded President is in [...]

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Cenky Uygur has a must-read diary up on Daily Kos in which he lays out a very detailed critique of how the Kagan pick is a sign of the failures of the Obama presidency from a progressive perspective. Uygur makes a case that Obama simply isn’t doing enough to counteract the massive strides Bush and [...]

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I’m not a lawyer nor a legal scholar, but I can’t say that I’m excited about Elena Kagan’s pick to replace John Paul Stevens on the US Supreme Court. My biggest concern is that she is being given a lifetime seat – which for someone who is only fifty, could mean thirty years on the [...]

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James Oliphant of the LA Times has a disturbing piece highlighting the slow pace the Obama administration has gone about filling vacancies in the federal judiciary. Republican obstructionism has further slowed the pace of administration nominees reaching the bench. Combined, President Obama has had only minimal impact on the shape of the federal bench and [...]

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The New York Times has a profile piece of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. It’s worth a read, as Stevens will likely go down as one of the great jurists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The article closes with a line from Stevens’ dissent in Citizens United. The last line, in [...]

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Well, democracy, such as it is in the US, was nice while it lasted. The Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court says money is speech and corporations are entitled to free speech under the Constitution. I must have missed that part of the Bill of Rights. The only real question is why the Court is [...]

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