Moments before bringing on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for two casual segments of softball questions, Late Night host Seth Meyers took a shot at Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his monologue by comparing him to members of the KKK following Scalia’s comments on Wednesday about affirmative action.
U.S. Supreme Court
By Brad Wilmouth | December 10, 2015 | 11:46 PM EST
On Thursday's Legal View with Ashleigh Banfield on CNN, host Banfield joined CNN legal analyst Paul Callan and Joey Jackson of HLN -- sister network to CNN -- in deriding conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for recently referencing an argument against affirmative action in higher education admissions.
As HLN legal analyst Jackson called Justice Scalia's remarks "disturbing" and "offensive," Callan asserted that the conservative justice "sounded a little nutty," and Banfield declared that "I cannot believe I'm hearing those words from a Supreme Court justice."
By Brad Wilmouth | December 10, 2015 | 12:41 AM EST
Appearing as a guest on the 6:00 p.m. hour of Wednesday's MSNBC Live, Dorian Warren of the Roosevelt Institute -- a recurring MSNBC guest -- suggested that conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia believes blacks are "genetically inferior in terms of their brain power" as he gave his reactions to some of Justice Scalia's recent arguments against affirmative action in higher education admissions.
By Ken Shepherd | November 13, 2015 | 2:47 PM EST
The U.S. Supreme Court today announced it would hear a case involving a challenge to Texas's regulation of abortion clinics. In her four-paragraph story on the matter, however The Hill newspaper's Sarah Ferris failed to explain the perspective of defenders of the law.
By Curtis Houck | November 6, 2015 | 8:40 PM EST
On Friday night, two of the three major broadcast networks saw no interest in telling their viewers that the Supreme Court of the United States had decided to accept another major case on the future of ObamaCare as the high court will hear arguments pertaining to the law’s contraception mandate. Surprisingly, NBC Nightly News not only covered it, but offered a full, one-minute-and-21-second report from Justice correspondent Pete Williams.
By Tom Johnson | October 3, 2015 | 11:17 AM EDT
In recent years, some advocates of increased gun control have called for repeal or revision of the Second Amendment, but Adam Gopnik believes that either would be superfluous.
In a Friday article, Gopnik asserted that “the only amendment necessary for gun legislation…is the Second Amendment itself, properly understood, as it was for two hundred years in its plain original sense. This sense can be summed up in a sentence: if the Founders hadn’t wanted guns to be regulated, and thoroughly, they would not have put the phrase ‘well regulated’ in the amendment.”
By Matthew Balan | July 10, 2015 | 9:42 PM EDT
On Friday, ABC, CBS, and NBC's evening newscasts all ignored how the Obama administration issued the latest version of its abortifacient/contraception mandate under ObamaCare, which ignores multiple court rulings against it – including the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby ruling in 2014 – and again tries to force religious non-profits to fund drugs that they consider to be immoral. Instead, the Big Three programs all devoted over a minute and a half each to the ticker tape parade in New York City for the World Cup-winning U.S. national women's soccer team.
By Tom Johnson | July 3, 2015 | 4:35 PM EDT
Conservatives have an ideological fever, and the only prescription is to wait until their crazy ideas vanish. That’s the word from Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman, who opined in a Wednesday post that many on the right have suffered from a sort of “heat-fever” when confronted with President Obama and his policies.
Longman explained that “a fever is something that comes over you suddenly, causing addled thinking, hallucinations and other delusions, but which eventually breaks and goes away as quickly as it arrived...[T]he Obama Era has been marked by an unusual number of these outbreaks of mass insanity,” such as rage against the Affordable Care Act.
New Republic Writer Warns Left That Roberts Court, Obamacare Ruling Aside, ‘Is Still Plenty Conservative’
By Tom Johnson | July 2, 2015 | 9:17 PM EDT In the week since the Supreme Court upheld certain Obamacare subsidies, some on the left, applying the wisdom that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” have gratefully praised majority-opinion-writer John Roberts. But now liberals need to put their warm fuzzies for the chief justice behind them and guard against “complacency” regarding the court, advised Brian Beutler in a Tuesday article.
“Nothing inspires spasms of rage on the right quite like Obamacare, which explains why the conservatives feel as if Roberts has betrayed them on a Shakespearean scale,” wrote Beutler. Nonetheless, Roberts has established his right-wing bona fides on many other matters, including “affirmative action, voting rights, [and] campaign finance regulations,” and conservatives see the Roberts court as a “useful tool” in their effort to “litigate federal regulatory laws.”
By Tom Johnson | July 2, 2015 | 12:31 AM EDT
Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change. Last week’s Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and same-sex marriage. California’s new mandatory-vaccination law. What all these have in common, according to Michael Specter, isn’t merely that they’re correct, but that they’re manifestations of “rational thought.”
Three of those events, of course, were highly unpopular on the right (the vaccination issue is less ideologically clearcut) so it’s fair to say that Specter also sees them as defeats for the conservative movement, though he opines that the SCOTUS is “governed largely by conservatives” and that the pope certainly has some right-wing tendencies (“in many areas,” Specter snipes, Francis “adheres to tenth-century notions of justice”).
By Matthew Balan | July 1, 2015 | 4:48 PM EDT
On Wednesday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo again carried water for the left's social agenda as he interviewed Republican Congressman Steve King. When Rep. King contended that "no one who voted to ratify that Fourteenth Amendment gave...a thought" to the Supreme Court writing "same-sex marriage rights into that," Cuomo retorted that "you could say the same thing about race and anti-miscegenation laws." He later wondered, "How does this [decision] hurt you that it's fueling this outrage among conservatives and Christians?"
By Tom Johnson | July 1, 2015 | 11:19 AM EDT
Though both Jonathan Chait and Amanda Marcotte approve of same-sex marriage, they differed on Monday in their assessment of the case against it. Chait, of New York magazine, claimed that anti-gay-marriage arguments have been pitiful and consequently were doomed from the get-go. He declared that “preventing gay people from marrying each other serves no coherent purpose. Allowing them to marry harms nobody.”
Meanwhile, Marcotte argued in a Talking Points Memo column that same-sex marriage helps to “redefine…marriage as an institution of love instead of oppression,” and that the anti-gay-marriage forces are clinging to the idea that marriage is “about dutiful procreation and female submission.”