United States Court System

AP Images In an interview with MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, just hours after the Supreme Court of the United States’ (SCOTUS) decision on affirmative action, President Joe Biden held firm to his stance against expanding the Court.   During the interview, Wallace asked Biden if he worried “that without court reform, this conservative majority, is too young, and too...

The conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court has been busy in the final days before its summer break, and the decisions it handed down this week have heartened and made Congressional Republicans mostly happy and left their colleagues on the other side of the aisle mostly unhappy and in many cases angry.   Following the court’s historic decisions on June 29, upending...

Chalffy/iStock/Getty Images Plus On Wednesday, a federal judge blocked a new Kentucky law intended to shield children from so-called gender-affirming procedures, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, on otherwise healthy persons under the age of 18. Key provisions of Senate Bill 150 should have taken effect on Thursday, but U.S. District Judge David J. Hale, an Obama appointee, found that...

Commentary A couple of months ago, I wrote about various ways that both existing policies and proposed policies hurt a certain number of American citizens. Sometimes the hurt was by design; other times, an unavoidable consequence of the policy. Question: Are government policies that make citizens worse off justifiable? Is it naïve to hope for a government that has, as...

Foreign Affairs Pugachev’s Ghost We will not like what comes after Prigozhin’s surreal insurrection against Putin. (Photo by Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) Truth is always implausible, as Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in Demons, arguably his most reactionary tome. At the time of writing, the world saw the most bizarre twenty-four hours in Russia, even by Russian standards.  It started as...

rawpixel The courts continue to play a pivotal role in shaping immigration policy in America. On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, ruled that states do not have the authority to challenge the administration’s rules establishing migration deportation priorities.  The case arose from a suit by the states of Texas and Louisiana against the Department of Homeland...

arinahabich/iStock/Getty Images Plus Anti-gun zealots populating Illinois’ legislative bodies passed a bill into law in January called the “Protect Illinois Communities Act,” or PICA. It was passed despite the clear ruling from the Supreme Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen that the Second Amendment may only be contravened when a state can show that...

Commentary Marriage is an institution uniquely apt for the rearing and nourishing of children, an open-ended task calling parents to assume an attitude of love and commitment toward children. Conversely, divorce undermines the family unit and deprives children of an intact biological family. Karl Marx recommended the abolition of marriage in his Communist Manifesto, stating it would naturally bring with...

Movie star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has once again compared the Jan. 6 capital breach to Kristallnacht, the attack on the Jewish people that ultimately led to the Holocaust. Schwarzenegger’s comments came Friday during an episode of CNN’s Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace, when he defended his previous opinion that the two events were similar in that they...

Julian Assange’s legal options have nearly run out. He could be extradited to the U.S. this week. Should he be convicted, reporting on the inner workings of power will become a crime. High Court Judge Jonathan Swift — who previously worked for a variety of British government agencies as a barrister and said his favorite clients are “security and intelligence agencies” — rejected two applications by...

As mass shootings make headlines, one man who has spent years studying what it takes to get men to kill said it is clear that violent entertainment is a how-to manual for many killers. According to retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, violent media molds the character of its consumers just as military basic training conditions soldiers to kill....

My previous piece for The American Conservative concerned the mayhem postwar “urban renewal” wrought in Washington, D.C.’s southwest quadrant.. A conspicuous feature of that mayhem is the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development building designed by onetime Bauhaus luminary Marcel Breuer. Commissioned by Uncle Sam’s real estate developer and landlord, the General Services Administration (GSA), and completed...

Running Press Kids/Amazon.com “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.” — Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816 Every time I find out that there’s a book written to teach children about the Constitution, I anticipate an attempt to miseducate our most vulnerable...

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a lengthy, critical dissent in the high court’s ruling that struck down Alabama’s electoral map for congressional elections. In a 5–4 ruling (pdf) last week, the court found that a map drafted by state Republican lawmakers violated the provisions of the federal Voting Rights Act (VRA) that mandates that states not racially gerrymander districts. The...

A friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas says a highly publicized media report that accused the justice of violating ethical norms contained “old news” and failed to disclose that Thomas was cleared of accusations of wrongdoing “more than a decade ago.” Left-wing criticism of Thomas and the Supreme Court as an institution has escalated since the unprecedented leak last...

Luis Miguel “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In modern America, politics is often thought of as the art of subtlety. It’s seen as civilized and polite, conjuring images of smiling politicians kissing babies and helping little old ladies cross the road.  That’s the idealized concept we have of what...

YouTube Man firing gun with a pistol stabilizing brace Barely a quarter of a million of the estimated three million to 50 million pistol braces legally owned by American citizens have been registered with or turned in to the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), according to Erik Longnecker of the agency’s Public Affairs Division. In response to...

Commentary In Part I, I said China should not wake a sleeping elephant, that democracies are slow to react, but once aroused, their citizens united, those who attack them, Germany and Japan during WW II, soon wish they hadn’t. To this day the Persians wish they hadn’t attacked the Greeks at the plain of Marathon in 490 BC. Fearful of losing what they had...

The 18-year prison sentence handed down to Stewart Rhodes for storming the Capitol is a victory for democracy. But it is also fodder for an election campaign. Stewart Rhodes must go to prison for 18 long years. The founder of the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia whose name refers to keeping an oath to the U.S. Constitution — only according...

The Republican candidate for Arizona secretary of state who challenged the 2022 election results in court was ordered on May 22 to pay over $48,000 in fees related to litigation. Mark Finchem, a former Arizona state lawmaker, was ordered to pay the fees by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Melissa Julian, the order stated. Julian ordered Finchem to pay about...