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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

Legislating Discrimination -- By: Hans A. von Spakovsky

Posted on December 22, 2009
What?s the worst bill ever seriously considered for passage by the U.S. Congress? Certainly both the House health-reform bill and Sen. Harry Reid?s health bill are leading contenders. Both proposals are obscenely expensive. Both limit our freedom to choose our families? health care...

Maximum Achievable Damage -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on December 22, 2009
Does anyone remember the TV show Supermarket Sweep? Contestants would compete with one another by careening through a supermarket and grabbing as many products as they could toss into a basket. The winner was the shopper whose cart carried the biggest price tag when the bell sounded...

Ben Nelson: Legislator of the Year -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on December 22, 2009
Too bad Barack Obama hasn?t followed through on his promises of legislative transparency. Then we all could have watched Harry Reid live on C-SPAN handing an oversized Publishers Clearing House-style $100 million check to Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson...

The Yield Curve Is Signaling Bigger Growth -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on December 22, 2009
What?s a yield curve and why is it so important?Well, the curve itself measures Treasury interest rates, by maturity, from 91-day T-bills all the way out to 30-year bonds. It?s the difference between the long rates and the short rates that tells a key story about the future of the economy...

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Five Reasons It Might Not Pass -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on December 21, 2009
Harry Reid got his 60. Ben Nelson resorted to the typical Washington expedient in such situations and bought into a few window-dressing compromises, in exchange for an enormous Medicaid benefit to his state. The Cornhusker Kickback joins the Louisiana Purchase as the latest evidence that there?s nothing like a hundred million or so in federal dollars to alleviate a senator?s deeply held concerns about the substance of Obamacare...

Spies in Plain Sight -- By: Carol Iannone

Posted on December 21, 2009
We?ve had Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames. Now another case of spying has emerged from the halls of our government institutions. And this one may raise a sardonic chuckle over how casual liberal sympathies and knee-jerk Bush bashing made a Communist agent seem normal among the elites in academia and our nation?s capital...

Rubio Rising -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on December 21, 2009
EDITOR?S NOTE:�This column is available exclusively through United Media. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact Carmen Puello at cpuello@unitedmedia.com. ?Wow.? That was the response of a cynical Florida Republican politico recently reacting to poll numbers showing former state speaker of the house Marco Rubio tied with Gov...

When Uncle Joe's your grandpa, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on December 21, 2009
On the radio in Moscow, a host denounced Stalin, saying the late dictator had approved the shooting of kids as young as twelve. He then said, ?What kind of bastard would say even one word in his defense?? Well, I?ll tell you who: Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, the dictator?s grandson...

Can Stupak Save the Democrats? -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 21, 2009
Pregnancy is not a disease. Hence abortion, in the vast majority of cases, is not health care. Contemporary liberalism is ideologically committed to denying this truth. Fifty-one percent of Americans contacted in a recent poll said that private health insurance should not cover abortion...

Obama Checked -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 19, 2009
President Obama could have given the global environmentalist movement the crippling deal it wants -- a binding commitment to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and a financial commitment to help developing countries do the same. And to be sure, he put these things on the table...

Don't Believe the Abortion Hype -- By: Kathryn Jean Lopez

Posted on December 19, 2009
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is demanding that Pres. Barack Obama?s health-care revolution not include subsidized abortion -- and the bishops are demanding honesty on the issue. At a high-level Washington, D.C., insider dinner recently, a fellow Catholic made a highly cynical, harsh, and scandalously inaccurate accusation: that in the current debate, the bishops? conference would trade abortion for immigration...

Climate Hypocrites -- By: Mark Steyn

Posted on December 19, 2009
The best summation of the U.N. climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia?s Herald Sun: ?Nothing is real in Copenhagen -- not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the ?solution.?? Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be underwater because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms...

The Ugly Truth about the Insurance Mandate -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 18, 2009
For Democrats, the Holy Grail of health care has always been ?universal coverage.? The words have flowed effortlessly out of their mouths so often that most of them probably long ago stopped thinking about what it would mean in practice if their dream were ever really implemented...

Cap and Trade and Tax and Spend -- By: Stephen Spruiell

Posted on December 18, 2009
Just before many of them left for Copenhagen, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats jammed a $154 billion ?jobs bill? through the House on a party-line vote. Over half of the bill has nothing to do with job creation: It consists of aid extensions for the unemployed...

Dead Wrong Durbin -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on December 18, 2009
Sen. Dick Durbin (R., Ill.) is the leading congressional advocate of the plan to ship the terrorists being detained at Guantanamo Bay to a prison in his (and the president?s) home state -- i.e., the scheme to redistribute federal taxpayer money to Illinois to buy a jail the state barely uses and should never have built...

Executive Omnipotence in Copenhagen -- By: Roger Pilon

Posted on December 18, 2009
As climate talks conclude in Copenhagen today, all eyes will be on President Obama -- the ?miracle worker? many hope will ?save the planet.? Regrettably, the underlying assumption here -- that the president is all-powerful -- is not that far-fetched...

Tangled Webb -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on December 18, 2009
In Congress?s upper chamber, a Virginia fox may be the one to deliver the knock-out uppercut to Obamacare. Quiet, cunning, and independent, Sen. Jim Webb (D., Va.) has been on the sidelines for much of the Senate?s health-care debate. Instead of ranting, like Bernie Sanders, Webb has been mulling legislative language in his office for weeks...

The Tree-Ring Circus Continues -- By: The Editors

Posted on December 18, 2009
The Copenhagen climate summit has devolved into an international farce, an episode of Carbon-Police Squad! as ridiculous as anything directed by David Zucker. In the run-up to the summit, hacked e-mails from Britain?s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) depicted the scientists behind the alarmism as a cabal of bickering egotists and corner-cutters...

Global Wealth Can Heal the Planet -- By: Jonah Goldberg

Posted on December 18, 2009
As the Copenhagen climate summit comes to a close, it seems fair to say that rarely has a gathering of so many doing so little gotten so much attention. But Copenhagen does have its uses. For starters, it reminds us that environmentalism continues to be a cover for uglier agendas...

One Cheer for Howard Dean -- By: Rich Lowry

Posted on December 18, 2009
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.Keith Olbermann is ready to go to jail over it...

A $2.5 Trillion Self-Contradiction -- By: Deroy Murdock

Posted on December 18, 2009
The Senate?s Obamacare bill is a 2,076-page, $2.5 trillion self-contradiction. It largely would accomplish the exact opposite of what President Obama himself has promised and preached.?The plan I?m announcing tonight,? Obama told a joint session of Congress last September 9, ?will slow the growth of health-care costs for our families, our businesses, and our government...

Giving Thanks for Life -- By: Mona Charen

Posted on December 18, 2009
Mia?s story is good holiday fare. That must have been what the Washington Post editors were thinking when they put her smiling face on the front page. Whether they considered the deeper implications is not so clear, as we shall see.Mia Fleming is a 20-year-old college student who was adopted as an infant...

An Anniversary of Sorts -- By: Charles Krauthammer

Posted on December 18, 2009
Twenty-five years ago this week, I wrote my first column. I?m not much given to self-reflection -- why do you think I quit psychiatry? -- but I figure once every quarter-century is not excessive.When editorial-page editor Meg Greenfield approached me to do a column for the Washington Post, I was somewhat daunted...

Without Bipartisan Support, Bernanke Should Withdraw -- By: Larry Kudlow

Posted on December 18, 2009
Helicopter Ben Bernanke passed his reconfirmation vote in the Senate Banking Committee this week. But he passed by 16 to 7. Most of the Republicans voted against Bernanke, as did one Democrat, Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon. The reconfirmation now goes to the floor of the Senate, where it?s going to be held up for a while...

Stossel Comes Alive -- By: Robert Costa

Posted on December 17, 2009
John Stossel is hepped up. In a cramped studio at Fox News in midtown Manhattan, with three minutes until showtime, the former ABC reporter is bouncing from producer to producer. He eyes the low-hanging lights, rushes past the skinny hipster holding cables, and grabs coffee from an intern...

Take Control, Congress -- By: Bakst & Cordato

Posted on December 17, 2009
Congress is still debating whether to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to address global warming, but unelected bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency have in essence declared that, as far as global warming is concerned, not only is the science settled, so is the politics...

Gitmo Does Not Cause Terrorism -- By: Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted on December 17, 2009
So we?re going to shut down the detention center at the U.S. naval base on Guantanamo Bay and move the 200-plus terrorists detained there to a seldom-used civilian correctional center in Thomson, Ill. And we?re doing it, the Obama administration and Sen...

Save the SEALs -- By: Clifford D. May

Posted on December 17, 2009
What can the Navy brass be thinking? On December 7, Pearl Harbor Day, a Navy SEAL -- one of an elite band of highly skilled and extraordinarily brave American warriors -- faced arraignment. The charge: He punched a terrorist. To be precise, he punched a terrorist suspect -- Ahmed Hashim Abed, the alleged ringleader behind the killing, burning, and mutilating of four American contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, in March 2004...

Our Flip-Flopping Wars -- By: Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 17, 2009
We don?t hear all that much about Iraq these days, do we? The war at one point almost tore apart this country. Public anger sent George W. Bush?s approval ratings plummeting. And the outrage over our losses helped elect vocal anti-Iraq War candidate Barack Obama...

The rude reality of Iran, &c. -- By: Jay Nordlinger

Posted on December 17, 2009
Every now and then, reality breaks through dreamland, as in this bit of news: ?Iran on Wednesday test-fired an upgraded version of its most advanced missile, which is capable of hitting Israel and parts of Europe, in a new show of strength aimed at preventing any military strike against it amid the nuclear standoff with the West...

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