A theme in this blog has been that looking at the US Supreme Court only through the usual lens of party politics is a distortive lens: i.e. the Blue-Red Goggles (“BRGs” for short). If we put those BRGs aside, we can see a creative judicial process at work involving, for now, eight justices who are more three-dimensionally, more realistically ...
What does the Constitution actually say about the Supreme Court nomination/appointment process? After all, that is the main question, now that a nomination is made.
What process most upholds the Constitution?
Not: What process best serves a political party, or a President, or a Senator, or a candidate, or a nominee, or a future President. Those ...
Ideas of government matter in American history and recycle in different eras through different guises, styles and messengers. If we look past the obvious style/messenger/ personality differences between Silent Cal Coolidge and Non-Silent Donald Trump, we see some recycling going on. The Coolidge idea of democracy was summed up in his ...
On Saturday, after the sudden news of Justice Scalia's death, I watched two previous C-Span interviews with him, one just him and the other with Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The interviews showed two sides of Justice Scalia. In the just-Scalia interview, his earnest defense of his judicial philosophy of originalism/textualism caused the interviewer to ...
The idea of Originalism/Textualism is that the Constitution means no more or less than what it meant to those who originally wrote and ratified it. This is seen as a counter-approach to the “living Constitution” idea where the text ...
It was a visually memorable moment, the sculpture covered in a purple drapery which, when pulled away revealed another drapery ...
On January 11, the US Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, the issue being whether public teachers can be required (as a condition of employment) to join a union or pay it a fee for collective bargaining services. Plaintiffs say that violates the First Amendment because ...
Truth is, converting words into conceivable mental pictures makes them more likely to ...