We’ve been waiting for months for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump to release his list of potential Supreme Court appointees. Yesterday he actually came through on that promise. The would-be justices, in the (alphabetical) order in which they appear in the AP…
The Supreme Court issued a short, unanimous opinion in the contraceptive-mandate cases known as Zubik v. Burwell. There’s plenty of punditry out there for you to read so I’ll just offer three thoughts: This was the biggest punt in Supreme Court…
The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that no state shall “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Among lawyers, the buzzword we looking for in an equal protection case is “strict scrutiny,” because chances are that…
The near-unanimous Supreme Court decided today in favor of the farmers whose raisins the federal government wanted to take as part of a cockamamie New Deal-era regulatory scheme. The Court ruled 8-1 in support of Cato’s position that taking personal property is a compensable…
Today a narrow and unusual Supreme Court majority ruled that the DMV – of all government agencies! – is allowed to censor speech it considers to be “offensive.” To wit, the four “liberal” justices and Justice Clarence Thomas somehow found that the…
As the world awaits the Supreme Court’s rulings on Obamacare and gay marriage, pundits have engaged in a phony war that misses a larger story: the court’s rejection of the government’s extreme claims of unlimited federal power. Indeed, the Obama…
Ken Cuccinelli, Republican candidate for Governor in Virginia, has done the arithmetic and, as reported by Fred Kunkle of the Washington Post, says that his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, has made campaign promises totaling $14 billion in spending over four years, the length…
“CONSERVATIVE CRACKUP ON DEBT SHAKEDOWN,” screeched the headline on Huffington Post (October 9, 2013), a statement to which I took great exception. The unfolding disaster on the Hill is not conservative in the least. It seems to be a toxic…
As a mossback and fiscal conservative, I certainly believe in cutting the federal budget, reforming entitlements, and, yes, deep-sixing Obamacare at the earliest opportunity. But as I watch the unfolding drama (or is it melodrama?) on Capitol Hill, I find…