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“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms occur.”
—Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
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Brace yourself for several months of occasionally biting but essentially meaningless political theater over the nomination of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court.
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It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a remarkable speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took direct aim at the conservatives' favorite theory of judging. Souter'...
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More than any other recent U.S. president, Barack Obama has succeeded in puzzling the pundits.
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Is religious conscience special? And what kinds of claims (if any) does conscience warrant? These are two of the many questions Brian Leiter raises in his provocative book Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton University Press, $24.95, 192 pp.).
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For campaign operatives and cable-news anchors, it is a job requirement to insist earnestly, if overconfidently, that each upcoming election is historic, realigning, and game-changing. Most, thank God, are not.
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Casting aside sixty years of federal legislation and overturning rulings from 1990 and 2003, the Supreme Court has opened the door to an unregulated flood of corporate political advertising. Last month’s 5–4 ruling in Citizens United v.
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The months leading up to the 2012 election saw a wave of attempts by Republican state legislators to suppress turnout among likely Democratic voters.
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When the Washington Post reported in May that as a teenager Mitt Romney had bullied a fellow student in his high school, it struck me once again how much political jou
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On January 20, the day before the South Carolina primary, the Washington Post published a long story about how political polarization in that state was reflected in—and sharpened by—South Carolinians’ choices of news providers.
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"Lead from behind" may be a sound bite the Obama administration regrets, but debating from behind is clearly something President Obama is very good at. He got the first debate's wakeup call while Mitt Romney let the encounter in Denver mislead him...
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Last December, in the course of an interview on Meet the Press, President Barack Obama was asked about the shootings at Newtown, Connecticut. He reflected that “something fundamental in America has to change.” It was doubtless an aspect of the...
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The Supreme Court's decision upholding the health care law is not only a huge victory for President Obama, but also a moment of leadership for Chief Justice John Roberts. The court's mixed verdict could create problems, notably in its weakening of...
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Human nature and politics being what they are, Republicans will underestimate the trouble they're in, and Democrats will be eager to overestimate the strength of their post-2012 position.
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Here's where we have arrived as a country: We are so polarized that even compromise has become a partisan issue.
As the 2012 campaign closes, bipartisanship and "working together" are more in vogue than ever because the few voters still up for grabs...
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What a difference a week makes. In the first presidential debate, President Obama let Mitt Romney's attacks on him stand, and seemed disengaged. Vice President Joe Biden stayed in Rep. Paul Ryan's face for the entirety of Thursday's vice...
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In this week's debate, Mitt Romney has too much to do. President Obama has a great deal to lose. Romney's is the most difficult position. Obama's is the most dangerous.
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Victories often contain the seeds of future defeats. So it is -- or at least should be -- with the Senate's morally reprehensible rejection of expanded background checks for gun buyers.
The outcome is a test of both an invigorated gun safety...
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With Chief Justice John Roberts authoring the opinion, one in which he joined with the Supreme Court’s four “liberal” justices for the first time, the Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
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The genius of American conservatives over the past thirty years has been their understanding that the most effective way to change the country is to change the terms of our political debate. On issue after issue, they have done just that. ...
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Few recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have been more vigorously contested, or hold more ominous implication, than Brown v.
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Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as i
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The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year's best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to...
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The 2012 campaign began on Aug. 2, 2011, when President Obama signed the deal ending the debt-ceiling fiasco. At that moment, the president relinquished his last illusions that the current, radical version of the Republican Party could be dealt with...
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The cheering supporters at his victory rally may still be hoarse, and his inauguration is three frosty months away. But Barack Obama has already secured the most important achievement of his second term: Winning it.
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If a president finds himself in the role of a political scientist, he has a problem -- even when his political science lesson is 100 percent accurate.
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Over the course of three days in March, the Supreme Court spent six hours hearing oral arguments about the most significant achievement of Barack Obama’s first term: the Affordable Care Act—or, as it is now called by both supporters and detractors...
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This week's hearings over Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court will mark a sea change in the way liberals argue about the judiciary. Democratic senators are planning to put the right of citizens to challenge corporate power at the...
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Just when our politics seemed destined to freeze into a brain-dead brand of partisanship, party lines started cracking up.
It is common in politics to assume that whatever has been happening will keep happening. But a series of events last week...
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It was my privilege to serve as Justice John Paul Stevens’s law clerk during the tumultuous 2000 term, the year the Court inserted itself into the presidential election, halting the recount of votes in Florida’s contested race and handing the...
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Everyone knows what the Catholic Church teaches about abortion, right? It is an “intrinsically evil act.” Yet the answers of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan in the recent vice-presidential debate suggested, each in its own way, that knowledge of this...
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This year's elections may exacerbate the difference between our two political parties, but not in the way most people are talking about.
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Almost all the shibboleths of Washington conventional wisdom took a hit in Tuesday's elections. Yet advocates of a single national political narrative clung to the difficulties of two incumbent Democratic senators to keep spinning the same old tale...
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You don’t have to be a Republican to consider Barack Obama a less-than-ideal president. Indeed, disappointment with the president is rife among progressives.
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President Obama's re-election was at once a deeply personal triumph and a victory for the younger, highly diverse and broadly progressive America that
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President Barack Obama has been in office for less than two years, and he has already been given the opportunity to fill two Supreme Court vacancies. As this issue of Commonweal goes to press, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Obama’s current nominee...
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When President Barack Obama said he judged “empathy” to be a desirable quality in a Supreme Court appointee, he set off a discussion that was as confused as it was contentious. What exactly is “empathy,” and how does it relate to the task of a judge...
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In the decades since the stirring successes of the 1960s civil-rights movement, opposition to discrimination has become a kind of benchmark social virtue, one embraced by all reasonable people of good will.
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Even before the McCain-Feingold Law of 2002, federal law prohibited corporations from using their own funds (their “treasury funds”) to make direct contributions or expenditures in connection with any election for federal office. But McCain-Feingold...
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One of the many ways the Constitution’s framers showed their collective wisdom was by embedding the rule of law into the very framework of our system of government. Judicial review of popularly enacted laws keeps the majority accountable to...
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The United States Supreme Court now sees its central task as comforting the already comfortable and afflicting those already afflicted.
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Two years after the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law—and two years before many of its provisions are scheduled to go into effect—the Obama administration’s most important achi
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We are about to have the worst presidential campaign money can buy.
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Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court may make possible something that has yet to happen: an honest and complete discussion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
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Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.
He'd have a lot of things to do. He's a fine public speaker and teacher. He'd be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician -- and that's the...
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It's entirely appropriate that the week of our July Fourth celebrations should coincide with a moment when the Supreme Court's health care decision has prompted intense debate over the purpose of our government and what the Constitution allows it to...
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Nobody claimed it was the best of times. Either it was the worst of times, as the Republicans insisted in Tampa, or it could have been even worse, as the Democrats replied in Charlotte. Each nominating convention competed to present the more...
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The Declaration of Independence proclaims the nation’s adherence to the principle that all men are created equal. Abraham Lincoln repeated the claim at Gettysburg, as did the United Nations in its Declaration of Human Rights. But is it true? Anyone...
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Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history.
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To understand how Barack Obama sees himself and his presidency, don't look to Franklin Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. Obama's role model is Ronald Reagan -- and that is just what Obama told us before he was first elected.
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Many of the groups challenging the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act on religious-liberty grounds hang their hopes on one Supreme Court case: Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal.
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Gerald J. Russello, Steven P. Millies
Steven P. Millies
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On the evening of April 15—the day two bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than two hundred eighty—President Barack Obama vowed that those responsible “will feel the full weight of justi
