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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

Anybody but Steele

Posted on December 15, 2010
Say what you will about him -- Michael Steele plays by nobody else's rules. He shocked the political world on Monday night by announcing he'd run for reelection as chairman of the Republican National Committee. We admire his pluck, but not his judgment...

No Labels, No Debate

Posted on December 15, 2010
?No Labels? is a party of parliamentarians. ‘I don't really know what will come out of it,' an attendee told me at the founders' meeting of 'No Labels' on Monday. 'But it sounds good.' And thus a movement was born...

Elite Guilt Begat Obamacare

Posted on December 15, 2010
It?s all part of <i>The Pathology of the Elites</i>, says Michael Knox Beran. Michael Knox Beran, a frequent contributor to National Review and National Review Online, is the author of a number of books, including The Last Patrician, on Robert Kennedy, and Jefferson's Demons...

The U.N. at Cancun

Posted on December 15, 2010
Global reduction of carbon-dioxide emissions is going nowhere unless China and India sign on. This year's installment of the U.N.'s annual holiday party has come and gone from Cancun, with little to show for it except the massive carbon footprint of thousands of attendees -- official delegates of member nations, plus representatives of Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, and their ilk...

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They Just Hate Rich People

Posted on December 15, 2010
The rich work longer and pay more taxes, but the Left hates them all the same. If the debate over the tax deal between President Obama and congressional Republicans has shown anything, it is that the American Left really hates the rich...

GOP Frosh Tackle the Tax Deal

Posted on December 15, 2010
The freshman class isn?t sure what to think about the tax compromise. With the Senate voting overwhelmingly on Monday to proceed on the proposed tax deal, all eyes are on the House, where many Democrats (and not a few Republicans) have already expressed their displeasure with the deal...

Big Daddy Biden, &c.

Posted on December 15, 2010
One of the raps against George W. Bush was that he treated our allies badly: He was arrogant toward them, insensitive, cloddish. Of course, this was a bad rap: He handled our alliances -- and our other relationships -- well, as I argued at length. I thought of the rap against Bush the other day when I read what the current vice president, Joe Biden, said about our Afghan allies: 'Daddy is going to start to take the training wheels off in October -- I mean in next July, so you'd better practice riding...

The Dems? Lame-Duck Land Grab

Posted on December 15, 2010
The extreme preservationists have run amok. It?s time to fence them in. Environmentalists hate sprawl -- except when it comes to the size of their expansive pet legislation on Capitol Hill. In a last-ditch lame-duck push, eco-lobbyists have been furiously pressuring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D...

Behind Bill Clinton?s Smile

Posted on December 15, 2010
The ex-president is enjoying Obama?s comeuppance You've got to give Barack Obama credit. His learning curve gets steeper and steeper, but he continues to climb. 'I'm going to let him speak very briefly,' Obama said Friday before making the fateful decision to allow a smirking Bill Clinton a none-too-brief moment in front of the cameras...

Cuccinelli, Victorious

Posted on December 14, 2010
The man behind the individual mandate?s judicial defeat talks to NRO. On what was surely one of the busier days of his life thus far, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli spoke with National Review Online about his state's victory yesterday in the first ruling to find a portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unconstitutional...

The Amputated Mandate

Posted on December 14, 2010
For supporters of Obamacare, Judge Henry Hudson's decision yesterday that the individual mandate is unconstitutional was a firebell in the night, to borrow Jefferson's phrase. They had dismissed arguments that the mandate is unconstitutional as ravings from the right-wing fringe, but here is a well-reasoned, 40-page decision from a federal district-court judge saying the mandate does indeed exceed the federal government's powers...

Money Rules

Posted on December 14, 2010
To control inflation, the Fed should target nominal income. Monetary policy has always been the Achilles' heel of conservative economics. We've repeatedly seen conservative policymakers work hard to create a successful free-market economy, only to have their efforts undone by a devastating period of deflation...

A Dangerous Gap in Our Defenses?

Posted on December 14, 2010
An EMP attack is a terrible threat, but countering it is affordable. For several days in early November, a series of U.S. government agencies were either unable or unwilling to explain what had produced a vapor trail that had illuminated the Southern California skies...

The Ethanol Idiocy that Will Not Die

Posted on December 14, 2010
Bipartisan common sense is no match for the inertia of a government subsidy. When Al Gore drops an environmental fad, it has truly reached its expiration date. In his wisdom, the Goracle recently acknowledged what almost all disinterested observers concluded long ago: Ethanol is a fraud...

Sorkin Called Sarah Palin an ?Idiot??

Posted on December 14, 2010
Comparing shooting a caribou to a snuff film is the ranting of an immature and morally confused mind. On CNN recently, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, West Wing) called Sarah Palin an 'idiot...

Christmas Books

Posted on December 14, 2010
What to get for your loved ones this Christmas It is hard to come up with Christmas gifts for people who already seem to have everything. But there are few -- if any -- people who can keep up with the flood of books coming off the presses...

Pouring Cold Water on WikiLeaks

Posted on December 14, 2010
Press releases are more informative than diplomatic cables in the Arab world. Of all the WikiLeaks revelations, the most captivating may be that several Arab leaders have urged the U.S. government to attack Iranian nuclear facilities...

Are Democrats Delusional?

Posted on December 14, 2010
There is no rational basis for their apoplectic response to Obama?s tax deal. By any standard, the fury directed at President Obama by his own party this week has been jaw-dropping. Forget that the object of their rage was 'The One' who just two years ago sent thrills down the legs of everyone to the left of Michael Bloomberg...

?The Enemy Within?

Posted on December 14, 2010
From the December 20, 2010, issue of NR In the early 1980s, British prime minister Margaret Thatcher emerged victorious from a war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands that propelled her to a landslide victory in the 1983 general election...

New START Can Wait

Posted on December 13, 2010
The lame-duck Congress shouldn?t touch this dangerously ambiguous treaty. The New START treaty represents an obsolete approach to national security, a holdover from the Cold War when the Soviet Union was the primary threat to the United States...

Unbundle the Welfare State

Posted on December 13, 2010
From the December 20, 2010, issue of NR. The fundamental issue of political economy in the Western world has been the same for at least the past 200 years: drawing the right lines between government authority and individual initiative...

New START for Christmas

Posted on December 13, 2010
Obama needs at least nine Republicans to make his holiday wish come true. First he brokered a deal on tax cuts. Now President Obama is looking to do the same on New START, the nuclear-arms pact with Russia that sits atop his lame-duck congressional agenda...

Tax Fight on the Right?

Posted on December 13, 2010
Not all Republicans support the tax deal with Obama. Bill Clinton, more than most, knows how to stir up Republicans. After shambling into the White House briefing room on Friday for an impromptu Q&A, he noted that 'a lot of the hard-core conservatives think that Republicans gave too much' on the deal with President Obama to extend Bush-era tax rates...

Christmas Shopping with NRO

Posted on November 26, 2010
Our contributors offer their gift recommendations. Christmas-shopping season is on, and these National Review Online writers know some books that can help make your shopping season stress-free...

Travel, the TSA, and Teutonic Terminology

Posted on November 26, 2010
The first people to blame for this mess are the murderers. When it comes to understatements, 'the Germans have made some mistakes' is in a class by itself. But one thing they're great at is words...

The Irrelevance of START

Posted on November 26, 2010
It ignores the real nuclear danger. It's a lame-duck session. Time is running out. Unemployment is high, the economy is dangerously weak, and, with five weeks to go, no one knows what tax they'll be paying on everything from income to dividends to death when the current rates expire Jan...

Is Illegal Immigration Moral?

Posted on November 26, 2010
Dimensions the debate too often ignores. We know illegal immigration is no longer really unlawful, but is it moral? Usually Americans debate the fiscal costs of illegal immigration. Supporters of open borders rightly remind us that illegal immigrants pay sales taxes...

The Great Sweep of 2010

Posted on November 26, 2010
Even the Finns voted Republican this year. Some reflections on the revolution of 2010, based on extended examination of the election returns. GENTRY LIBERALS: The tsunami swept from the George Washington Bridge to the Donner Pass, but didn't wash away affluent liberals to the east and west of these geographic markers...

Time to Profile Terrorists

Posted on November 26, 2010
America must focus its finite capabilities on those who crave the destruction of planes. As Americans fly this Thanksgiving holiday, critics of new security measures are arriving at airports in kilts...

TSA Troubles

Posted on November 24, 2010
Pity the TSA -- but not too much. The agents of the Transportation Security Administration tasked with managing the array of scanners, screenings, and security protocols at the nation's airports are an inviting target for populist outrage. Airline travelers are apt to be already tense and unhappy by the time they get to the screening -- thanks to our clownishly incompetent airline operators -- and TSA does itself no good with over-the-top episodes such as the too-vigorous pat-down of a bladder-cancer survivor whose medical appliance was torn open in a particularly humiliating fashion by a thoughtless agent who ignored the poor man's pleas for caution...

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