Correction appended below. —- Scott Lemieux weighs in at The Week, writing that, although “Supreme Court voting is too complex to be explained by any single factor,” the “attitudinal model” – which posits that “Supreme Court votes are explained by what judges consider desirable policy” – “still contains a good deal of truth.” — Amy […]
I’m encouraged any time government functions. We’re a very philanthropic society. We always want people to have safety nets. Medicaid is meant to be a temporary measure to provide benefits for people who are in difficult circumstances. It’s not meant to be going on forever. — Scott Brown, when Politico reporter Kyle Cheney asked him […]
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 […]
The problem we have in this country is not income inequality. It’s opportunity inequality. — Chris Christie, today And since there’s no causal relationship whatsoever between income inequality and opportunity inequality, this is sure to be a winning political message in 2016. Christie made the comment “at a ‘fiscal summit’ hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which […]
It’s not every day that a law professor has his book quoted by the Supreme Court, and so the University of Baltimore‘s Michael I. Meyerson was understandably intrigued when his 2012 work about the Framers’ views on religion made it into Monday’s decision on public prayer. But the plug from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the […]
For citizens against the prayers, the decision sets dangerous church-state precedent. For the town of Greece, court’s ruling is a victory for religious freedom. — Brett Harvey, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented the town of Greece, in Town of Greece v. Galloway, at the U.S. Supreme Court, writing as a guest in […]
In an era in which corporations have been trying every possible stratagem to cut employee benefits (see our look at the Obamacare employer mandate earlier today), a new threat to retirement benefits has just arisen. The source of the threat is the Supreme Court, which earlier this month agreed to rule on when or whether employers can […]
It is a familiar phrase on college campuses, often meant to serve as conversational kryptonite, the final word in an argument to which there is no response. “Check your privilege.” But Tal Fortgang, a Princeton freshman from Westchester County, had a response. – At Princeton, Privilege Is: (a) Commonplace, (b) Misunderstood or (c) Frowned Upon, […]
Bill Gardner at The Incidental Economist offers a rather decorous, mild reply to the people making [the argument that guaranteed health insurance is an assault on America’s freedom]. I’d put it more forcefully: the pre-ACA system drastically restricted many people’s freedom, because given the extreme dysfunctionality of the individual insurance market, they didn’t dare leave […]
I grew up in the city of Chicago in the fifties and sixties. When I was going into the military, I saw the west side of Chicago burning as I returned my then girl friend back to her home. It is still hard to believe this type of discrimination would happen today as it happened […]