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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

House Democrats Head for a Thumping at the Polls -- By: Michael Barone

Posted on July 29, 2010
Democratic spin doctors have set out how their side is going to hold onto a majority in the House. They'll capture four at-risk Republican seats, hold half of the next 30 or so Democratic at-risk seats, and avoid significant losses on target seats lower on the list...

Dear Mayor Bloomberg -- By: Clifford D. May

Posted on July 29, 2010
Your Honor: In regard to the proposal to build an Islamic center at the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack in Manhattan, I commend you for saying: 'Everything the United States stands for and New York stands for is tolerance and openness, and I think it's a great message for the world...

Elena Kagan?s War on Small Business -- By: John Berlau

Posted on July 29, 2010
Now that Congress has passed -- thanks to the peeling off of a bare minimum of Senate Republicans -- and President Obama has signed a financial regulatory bill with a massive scope and untold costs, and a bill extending unemployment benefits without paying for them, he and the Democratic leadership have two more big items to rush through before Congress's August recess...

The Incumbent Hunter -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on July 29, 2010
Joe Miller went rogue long before Sarah Palin. Miller, 43, grew up in Kansas, but came to Alaska 'by choice' in 1994, after taking a degree from Yale Law School and picking up a Bronze Star in Desert Storm. After a childhood of hunting and fishing, 'the can-do attitude, the rough living, the great outdoors -- it had a magnetizing pull,' he says...

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High Standards vs. Local Control -- By: Frederick M. Hess

Posted on July 28, 2010
During the past week, conservative educational icons have been sparring over whether the Right ought to embrace the new 'Common Core' standards developed by the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. The debate has gained urgency as more than 25 states have signed on in the past two months...

CIA Interrogations Have Their Day in Court -- By: Marc A. Thiessen & David B. Rivkin Jr.

Posted on July 28, 2010
In February, we wrote in the Wall Street Journal about a classified brief filed in federal court in which the Obama Justice Department argued for the importance and efficacy of the CIA interrogation program. Now a federal judge has reviewed the evidence and agreed...

A City Embroiled in Corruption -- By: Kevin Williamson

Posted on July 28, 2010
National Review Online has been hosting a lively debate on the meaning of the New Black Panthers Party voter-intimidation case in Philadelphia, and it has been a hoot. What's been missing, I think, is a sense of the context in which this drama has unfolded: the nearly unique electoral culture of the City of Brotherly Love, where polling places have been located in bars, vacant buildings, and the offices of Democratic politicians (state senator Vince Fumo, currently serving time in federal prison on a 137-count corruption conviction, had one in his office), where gushers of loosely distributed 'walking-around money' fuel voter turnout, and where campaigning for the wrong candidate can get you beaten with a two-by-four or slashed across the face...

Obama?s Real Problem -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on July 28, 2010
According to a popular myth, President Obama's declining poll numbers are a consequence of his failure to be liberal enough. On race, in the wake of the Shirley Sherrod mess, we are told he needs to appoint more African Americans and bring in more advisers from the black community...

Cut to Grow -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on July 28, 2010
The word 'austerity' has achieved ubiquity in 2010 almost as rapidly as 'stimulus' did in 2009 and 'bailout' in 2008. All three were ushered in by 'subprime,' 2007's economic buzzword. 'Austerity' implies pain, but all it means is balancing the budget, and most economists would agree that this need not be painful...

The New Journalism -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on July 28, 2010
‘The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as a national immune system, zapping scandal mongers and quashing wild rumors,' wrote former 'green jobs czar' Van Jones in Sunday's New York Times. This may be one of the most unintentionally hilarious lines in recent memory...

The Hill?s Hide-and-Seek Hypocrites -- By: Michelle Malkin

Posted on July 28, 2010
You know when a politician starts a sentence with 'frankly,' he's about to lie to your face. The same principle applies to campaign-finance legislation dubbed the 'DISCLOSE Act.' The voter's instinctive reaction should be: What are they trying to hide now? Drafted out of public view with left-wing lobbyists and rammed through Congress after bypassing committee hearings, this bum bill would have been better named the CLOSED DOOR Act...

Cry Racism! -- By: Tony Blankley

Posted on July 28, 2010
In the last fortnight: 1) The NAACP called the tea party racist; 2) Andrew Breitbart called the NAACP racist; 3) Shirley Sherrod called Republican opponents of Obamacare racists; 4) Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack called Shirley Sherrod racist; 5) many in mainstream media called Andrew Breitbart racist; 6) Howard Dean called Fox racist; and, 7) it was revealed that liberal journalist Spencer Ackerman proposed calling Fred Barnes and Karl Rove racist...

Obamacare?s Political Future -- By: James C. Capretta

Posted on July 27, 2010
July 1 was a milestone of sorts for Obamacare: It was the 100th day since the president signed the sweeping legislation into law. The Democrats who pushed it through to enactment in the most polarizing debate in years are hoping that the passage of time will be their salvation...

Yes, the Black Panther Case Is Small Potatoes -- By: Abigail Thernstrom

Posted on July 27, 2010
Almost a month ago, I published a piece in NRO titled 'The New Black Panther Case: A Conservative Dissent.' The main thrust of the article -- now forgotten by everyone, it seems -- was that the Obama Justice Department's enforcement of the Voting Rights Act was deeply troubling...

Why Liberalism Is Dangerous -- By: NRO Staff

Posted on July 27, 2010
In early June, George Will devoted one of his syndicated columns to a favorable discussion of my book, Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State. Three weeks later, Michael Lind of the New America Foundation devoted his weekly column in Salon to attacking Will for endorsing Never Enough and thereby supporting 'the Orwellian project of rewriting American history in order to demonize liberalism...

The No-Matter-What Tax Increase -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on July 27, 2010
Editor's note: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246.White House economic adviser Christina Romer is off-message...

How Smart Are We? -- By: Thomas Sowell

Posted on July 27, 2010
Many of the wonderful-sounding ideas that have been tried as government policies have failed disastrously. Because so few people bother to study history, often the same ideas and policies have been tried again, either in another country or in the same country at a later time -- and with the same disastrous results...

Russia Spies, America Apologizes -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on July 27, 2010
Arriving at a biker's convention in Ukraine on his Harley Davidson trike, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin offered a few observations on his recent celebratory meeting with the ten Russian sleeper agents deported from the United States. 'They had a very difficult fate,' the former KGB colonel noted sympathetically...

Why the Left Hates Conservatives -- By: Dennis Prager

Posted on July 27, 2010
Of all the recent revelations to come out of JournoList, an e-mail list consisting of about 400 liberal/left journalists, perhaps the most telling is the depth of their hatred for conservatives. That these journalists would consult with one another in order to protect candidate and then President Obama and in order to hurt Republicans is unfortunate and ugly...

The Small Business Lending Fund: Son of TARP -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on July 27, 2010
With the signing of the Dodd-Frank Act into law last week, the Treasury Department's authority to tap into the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) came to a sudden and largely unheralded end. But at the same time, a bill was progressing through the U...

From the NFL to the GOP -- By: Jesse Naiman

Posted on July 26, 2010
Former University of Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr remembers first meeting Jon Runyan when he was in high school. Carr, then an assistant coach, went to Carman-Ainsworth High School in Flint, Mich. 'He was so tall,' Carr remembers, 'that when he left class to meet me, he had to duck under the doorway...

The Losers? Congress -- By: The Editors

Posted on July 26, 2010
November remains a political eternity away, but the Democrats foresee a thrashing for themselves. But they are not a party to take 'No' for an answer, even from the electorate, and so they plan to make the most of their losses, relying on their defeated and retiring candidates to pass the remains of their controversial and destructive legislative agenda in a post-election 'lame duck' session -- call it the 'Quitters' and Losers' Congress...

Change of Service -- By: John J. Miller

Posted on July 26, 2010
‘I once scraped paint off the floor of this ship,' says Ilario Pantano. He stands inside a cavernous hangar within the USS Intrepid, the decommissioned aircraft carrier that sits in the Hudson River as a floating museum. The floor and walls that he knows so well are covered in a dull industrial gray...

Rule by Decree -- By: Mario Loyola

Posted on July 26, 2010
The same week that the burning Deepwater Horizon rig collapsed through its pontoons and sank to the bottom of the sea, Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post admiringly observed that Obama accomplishes 'usually by executive action' those priorities that he can't achieve through the normal political process...

The Underfunded 20 -- By: Jim Geraghty

Posted on July 26, 2010
‘We learned in 2006 that money isn't everything,' says Rep. Pete Sessions, the Texas Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee and who is perhaps the man most responsible for whether the GOP wins the House this fall. 'Environment can play a bigger role than money...

Revolutionary Father -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on July 26, 2010
American politicians give speeches on 'dialogue' with Islam. In the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, Macram Gassis does it. And he does it through action: Life-endangering charity and clarity. Gassis is the Catholic bishop of El Obeid, which includes Darfur, and is less than 2 percent Catholic...

Signs of Life from the Private Sector -- By: Michael Barone

Posted on July 26, 2010
Grass somehow manages to grow up through small cracks in the sidewalk. Similarly, the American private sector somehow seems to be exerting itself despite the vast expansion of government by the Barack Obama administration and congressional Democrats. Case in point: the announcement last week by four oil companies -- Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell -- that they are setting up a $1 billion joint venture to design, build, and operate a rapid-response system to contain offshore oil spills as deep as and deeper than BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster...

Eight Problems with the New START -- By: Mitt Romney

Posted on July 26, 2010
My criticism of the New START treaty generated both praise and disparagement. Sen. Richard Lugar's thoughtful critique of my position deserves further discussion. 1. New START does limit U.S. missile-defense options. First, New START's preamble not only references missile defense, it accedes to Russia's insistence that there is an interrelationship between strategic offensive weapons and missile defense...

Rauf?s Dawa from the World Trade Center Rubble -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on July 24, 2010
Feisal Abdul Rauf is the imam behind the 'Cordoba Initiative' that is spearheading plans to build a $100 million Islamic center at Ground Zero, the site where nearly 3,000 Americans were killed by jihadists on 9/11. He is also the author of a book called What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America...

Should France Ban the Burqa? -- By: NRO Symposium

Posted on July 23, 2010
On July 13, France's lower house of parliament voted 335 to 1 in favor of a law that would prohibit wearing the burqa, or any other clothing 'intended to hide the face,' in public. If the ban becomes law, will it liberate women or inflame religious extremism? Are burqa-ban proponents' concerns for national identity and national security outweighed by opponents' concerns for religious tolerance? National Review Online asked the experts -- including Raymond Ibrahim, Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes, James V...

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