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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

Beyond Sanctions

Posted on September 20, 2010
This article first appeared in NR?s October 4 issue. The U.S.-led financial-sanctions campaign currently under way against Iran is biting, but it isn't enough. To change the Iranian regime's nuclear calculus, the administration and the international community need to act urgently to pressure Tehran along multiple lines...

An Electoral Loss -- for D.C. Schoolkids

Posted on September 20, 2010
For the past three years, Washington, D.C., has been the front line of the battle between teachers' unions and education reformers. Against staunch and strident opposition, Michelle Rhee, the schools chancellor appointed by mayor Adrian Fenty in 2007, has relentlessly implemented controversial reforms...

Christine, Sarah, and the Flavors of Right Winning Women

Posted on September 20, 2010
Carly?s prudent, authentic style. Christine O'Donnell was ecstatic on election night. The winner of the Republican senatorial primary in Delaware was happy and beaming and passionate -- a natural in front of television cameras -- as she celebrated her unconventional win...

Democrats at War: Public-Employee Unions vs. Gentry Liberals

Posted on September 20, 2010
Will the party remain a coalition or become a special-interest group? My subject today is the civil war raging in one of our great political parties, as highlighted in recent primary elections...

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Beltway Powers and Principalities

Posted on September 19, 2010
Ralph Reed pulls back the curtain on politics. This week, Ralph Reed, chairman and CEO of Century Strategies and chairman of the Faith & Freedom Coalition, is author of the new political thriller, The Confirmation, about a Supreme Court–confirmation fight...

There Oughtn?t Be a Law

Posted on September 18, 2010
The burqa ban won?t save France, and preemptive capitulation won?t save us. République française has banned the burqa. Along with the face-covering veil (the niqab), the burqa is the garment with which Muslim women conceal their bodies from head to toe...

Top Guns

Posted on September 18, 2010
Three young representatives suggest a way forward for the House GOP. ‘The confidence that was placed in us was blown,' says Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, the House's No. 2 Republican. 'We are not under any illusion that this election is turning on the fact that people are pining for Republicans...

Can Afghan Voters Save Their Nation?

Posted on September 17, 2010
This weekend?s election is threatened by violence and fraud, which could do great harm to America?s interests. On Saturday, Afghans will head to the polls for their fourth election in six years...

A Pope?s Legacy

Posted on September 17, 2010
How John Paul II kindled the fire of evangelism. George Weigel, distinguished senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center and a frequent National Review Online contributor, brings his monumental biography of Pope John Paul II to completion with a new volume, published earlier this week: The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II -- The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy...

The Forgotten Man Raises His Brush

Posted on September 17, 2010
An artist protests Obama?s abuse of the Constitution. A man, crestfallen, is sitting on a bench in front of the White House, contemplating his country's future. At his feet lie the causes of his distress: tattered dollars, representing a weak currency, and scraps of paper, symbolizing an abused Constitution...

The Buckley Rule

Posted on September 17, 2010
O?Donnell?s victory could hamper the GOP?s ability to stop the Obama agenda. Tuesday in Delaware was a bad day not only for Republicans but for conservatives. Tea partier Christine O'Donnell scored a stunning victory over establishment Republican Mike Castle...

The Na�vet� of Nuclear Disarmament

Posted on September 17, 2010
Note to Obama: Nuclear weapons have helped stabilize the world. One of the many words that sound so attractive, to people who do not think beyond the word, is 'disarmament.' Wouldn't it be better to live in a world where countries were not armed to the teeth, especially when they are armed with nuclear weapons? Of course it would...

The Chastened Rebels

Posted on September 17, 2010
The House Republican ?Young Guns? are determined not to blow their second chance. Saying boosterish things about the Republican party is part of Virginia congressman Eric Cantor's job description...

D.C. Voters Betray Their Kids

Posted on September 17, 2010
A reformist mayor and his innovative schools chancellor are defeated. Amid all the good news from primary season -- the surging grassroots rejection of leviathan government being the theme -- there was one tragedy...

A Convenient Excuse

Posted on September 17, 2010
The assumption that every offense could cause violence insults Muslims. Is Michael Bloomberg to blame for the deaths of the 18 Muslim men in Indian-controlled Kashmir who rioted over reports that someone in America burned the Koran? Let's think it through...

Harry Reid?s Illegal-Alien Student Bailout

Posted on September 17, 2010
A law that supposedly benefits students really benefits Democrats. The so-called DREAM Act would create an official path to Democratic voter registration for an estimated two million college-age illegal aliens...

A Bullish Tea-Party Revolt

Posted on September 17, 2010
<I>Free-market</I> power is heading to Congress, and that?s great news for stocks and the economy. This past week I gave a speech to a group of investors. The organizer of the event e-mailed me the night before, asking that I please try to be optimistic...

Targeting Chet Edwards

Posted on September 16, 2010
The Democratic congressman tries to hold on to one of the most conservative districts in the state of Texas. In a well-known scene in the film There Will Be Blood, oil prospector Daniel Plainview, played by a fervid Daniel Day-Lewis, points inquiringly at a plot of land on a map and, seemingly vexed, asks, 'What's this? Why don't I own this?' This year, as the GOP surveys the political landscape and maps out its plan to win back the House in November, a lot of Republicans are pointing at the Texas 17th congressional district and asking the very same questions...

Cry Islamophobia!

Posted on September 16, 2010
And let slip the dogs of culture war. We Americans should be ashamed! What an intolerant, bigoted, hateful lot we are! Or so we are being told by our political and media elites. Lawrence Wright, in The New Yorker -- yes, The New Yorker -- announces: 'Culture wars are currently being waged against Muslim Americans across the country...

When Policies Flop, Political Enthusiasm Wanes

Posted on September 16, 2010
The GOP?s larger primary turnout indicates a charged base. Two sets of numbers tell you a lot about an important difference between election year 2008 and election year 2010. In 2008, 37 million Americans voted in Democratic presidential primaries and just under 21 million voted in Republican presidential primaries...

Rethinking George Bush?

Posted on September 16, 2010
The American people are warming to Bush and cooling to his successor. Former president George W. Bush left office with the lowest approval ratings since Richard Nixon. So, for nearly two years, Pres...

The Evolution of the Term ?Conservative?

Posted on September 16, 2010
What political labels mean changes over the years. Among the many words that don't mean what they say, but which too many of us accept as if they did, are those staples of political discussion, 'liberals' and 'conservatives...

Merrily We Don?t Roll Along

Posted on September 15, 2010
David Axelrod doesn?t like the ending of this Obama biopic. When you take a pitch meeting in Hollywood, you're generally pretty sure who's going to be in the room. First, of course, there's you -- or, in this case, me, since 'you' don't have access to Fox or Warner's the way I do...

?A Nation of Dodos?

Posted on September 15, 2010
Liberals turn against the American public. On the old Mary Tyler Moore Show, pompous anchorman Ted Baxter once ran for the Minneapolis City Council. After his not unexpected drubbing, he gave a concession speech in which he proclaimed, 'The voters have spoken, and if that's what they want -- the hell with them...

Comes a Horseman

Posted on September 15, 2010
From the Sep. 20, 2010, issue of NR. Franklin Roosevelt's clash with the Supreme Court is one of history's greatest legal dramas, but it has generated an unfair and misleading mythology. In this legend, the Court greeted the New Deal with a blast of reactionary decisions in 1935 and 1936 -- invalidating, among other things, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) -- to which Roosevelt retaliated by threatening to pack the Court with a new, more loyal majority of justices...

Obama?s Washington Animal Farm

Posted on September 15, 2010
If you make more than $250,000 a year, you?re greedy and undeserving ? unless you?re addressed as Mr. President. Since the moment he announced his presidential candidacy, Barack Obama has waged a tireless, now four-year-long spread-the-wealth campaign against the more affluent...

The Deadly War against DDT

Posted on September 15, 2010
In its two decades of widespread use, DDT saved more lives than any other man-made chemical. A remarkable new documentary tells the story of how political and ideological forces combined to ban a widely and safely used chemical, DDT, leading to a surge of malaria deaths in developing countries like Kenya, Indonesia, and India...

Fast times in New Jersey, &c.

Posted on September 15, 2010
I don't know about you, but I'm addicted to Chris Christie videos like some people are addicted to porn. I could watch them all day. I particularly like it when he confronts schoolteachers: because no one ever confronts schoolteachers (except maybe unruly, pugnacious, or precocious kids)...

You Can?t Rule on Personality Alone

Posted on September 15, 2010
Despite his charisma, Obama has failed to build an enduring voter coalition. ‘Surely the Lord sent Jimmy Carter,' the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s father proclaimed at the 1976 Democratic convention, 'to come on out and bring America back where she belongs...

The Danger of Catchwords

Posted on September 15, 2010
How buzzwords used unthinkingly poison our political debate. Words are supposed to convey thoughts, but they can also obliterate thoughts and shut down thinking. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, a catchword can 'delay further analysis for fifty years...

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