Joseph Lawler

From SCOTUS Blog: Setting the stage for a historic constitutional confrontation over federal power, the Supreme Court on Monday granted three separate cases on the constitutionality of the new federal health care law, and set aside 5 1/2 hours –…

Yesterday’s “60 Minutes” on CBS included a report on members of Congress profiting from privileged information. The report was based on a upcoming book by Peter Schweizer, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, and includes instances of Rep….

Following up on a number of high-profile newspaper pieces on the relative decline of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students in U.S. universities, Timothy Taylor explains that grade inflation might have a lot to do with the mass migration…

Here’s a Rorschach Test for conservatives: could the Obamacare suit turn out to be a bigger Supreme Court decision than Roe v. Wade?  Ilya Shapiro of the libertarian Cato Institute thinks so:  Indeed, this litigation implicates the future of the…

Yesterday Sen. Tom Coburn released a report, “Subsidies of the Rich and Famous,” detailing the ways in which the government transfers money to the wealthy. Based on his staff’s investigation into a number of different programs, Coburn estimates that the…

“The record the period before President Reagan was one of galloping socialism,” the great libertarian and Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote in a 2004 Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The Reagan years were ones of retreating socialism, and the post-Reagan…

President Obama will travel to Hawaii, stopping in San Diego for the UNC-MSU game on the USS Carl Vinson (Politico) Defense of Marriage Act repeal clears committee, but is doomed in the Senate (San Francisco Chronicle) Sen. Marco Rubio didn’t…

Looks like Newtmentum is underway: In a new McClatchy poll of Republicans, Newt Gingrich has overtaken Herman Cain to take second place behind Romney. The results look like this:  -Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, 23 percent; -Gingrich, the former…

Jon Huntsman got a chance to elaborate on his anti-big bank message during the CNBC debate:  Transcript:  With respect to the banks that are too big to fail, you know today we’ve got, as I mentioned earlier, six institutions that…

1. With Herman Cain’s recent setbacks, Newt Gingrich might have a chance to become the next co-frontrunner (with Mitt Romney). He certainly helped his case tonight, staying focused and scoring points on questions about health care and the economy. Although…