Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

What I Want Bernie Sanders to Know Before Tuesday’s Debate

A few weeks ago Mike Huckabee made minor news by telling an interviewer that slavery has never been made unconstitutional.  Or, to be precise, he told radio interviewer Michael Medved that “the Dred Scott decision of 1857 still remains to this day the law of the land which says that black people aren’t fully human.”  […]

Dear Greg Sargent: YOU may not know what Scalia and Alito were up to yesterday. But I do.*

The chief justice said almost nothing. — Supreme Court Appears Sharply Split in Case on Health Law, Adam Liptak, New York Times Okay, so how well did my predictions from three days ago hold up at the argument yesterday* in King v. Burwell? Well, I got the outcome right, but not the particulars of how it will […]

How the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell Debacle Will End [Addendum added]

I have known for the last five weeks—since January 27, to be exact—that the Supreme Court will uphold the Administration’s interpretation of the federal-subsidies provisions in the ACA when it issues its decision in the infamous King v. Burwell case whose argument date at the Court is Wednesday.  I also have known since then that […]

Enumerating the Silliness of the Wingers’ ‘Enumerated Powers’ Schtik

Reader Tony Wikrent posted the following comment this morning to my Sept. 20 post titled “Freedom!  Liberty!  And Being For the Little Guy.  As Brought to You By the Conservative Movement.”: Actually, it turns out that if you are against big government, you ARE against all government. I’m surprised that conservatives who spout the “enumerated […]

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Bond v. U.S. will be about separation of powers. But about separation of WHICH powers?

Update appended. 5/17 at 1:37 p.m. —- I’ve written several times in the last three-plus years about a Supreme Court case called Bond v. U.S. Actually, to be precise, Bond v. U.S. is two Supreme Court cases, although it’s only one lower-court case. This is not unusual, but the case itself is; both the facts and the […]

Ah, federalism. Which is in the eye of the beholders. The beholders being Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts … and the Koch brothers.

(Correction appended.) (Clarence Thomas in his separate concurrence]* adds that in his view the First Amendment religion clauses don’t apply to the states in the first place. And it only probably bars the establishment of a national church—leaving open the question for another day. — Let Us Pray:The Supreme Court gives its blessing for prayer […]

George Will Comes Out for Single-Payer Healthcare Insurance! Cool!

WASHINGTON — Someone you probably are not familiar with has filed a suit you probably have not heard about concerning a four-word phrase you should know about. The suit could blow to smithereens something everyone has heard altogether too much about, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (hereafter, ACA). … The four words that […]

Marco Rubio Says Farm Subsidies and Hurricane-Disaster Funds Should Not Be Federal Programs. Really. [Updated and typo-corrected.]

For a senator who likes to hold himself out as the future of the Republican brand, Marco Rubio has come up with a remarkably retrograde contribution to the party’s chorus of phony empathy for the poor: Let the states do it. All anti-poverty funds should be combined into one “flex fund,” he said in a […]

More On the Real Reason Healthcare Insurance Companies Are Now Encouraging Obamacare Enrollment

In light of some of the comments to my post yesterday arguing that that the real reason that healthcare insurance companies are now madly encouraging Obamacare enrollment is fear of a pro-public-option or pro-single-payer political juggernaut, I want to make clear that by single-payer I do not mean Medicare-for-all.   Single-payer would be, in essence, “the […]

The Affliction of Judicial Affluenza [Updated]*

I normally don’t post here about high-profile news stories on which I have nothing, really, to add to what has been reported extensively in news stories or argued in opinion pieces in the mainstream media.  So my first inclination when I saw an email from Dan Crawford yesterday suggesting that I post on the affluenza […]