New York Times Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak filed a liberal pleasing analysis Tuesday, fervently insisting Chief Justice John Roberts is a staunch conservative, despite what ridiculous right-wingers may think. His reported opinion piece, based on voting analysis by law professors, strained to show Roberts as a loyal conservative Justice, but the evidence is hardly as cut and dried as Liptak's charged tone would suggest. Liptak has always trended left, as when he faulted the "terse" old U.S. Constitution as outdated for failing to guarantee entitlements like health care.
Adam Liptak
By Tom Blumer | August 30, 2015 | 10:42 AM EDT
The leftist press has despised Clarence Thomas ever since he fought off their attempt at what he properly characterized as a "high-tech lynching" to become a Supreme Court justice almost 24 years ago. It has worked to smear and discredit him ever since.
The latest such effort was posted online at the New York Times on Thursday and published in its Friday print edition. The online and print edition headlines at the piece by Adam Liptak, the paper's Supreme Court correspondent, made it appear as if the Times had discovered serious instances of plagiarism.
By Clay Waters | July 1, 2015 | 8:41 PM EDT
New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak weighed in on Tuesday's front page on two Supreme Court decisions, both favorable to conservatives. Yet in both cases Liptak led his coverage off by detailing the losing liberal arguments: "The move, which supporters of race-conscious admissions programs called baffling and ominous, signaled that the court may limit or even end such affirmative action."
By Clay Waters | August 5, 2014 | 5:43 PM EDT
The Supreme Court is still not moving fast enough to the left on social issues to please some liberals, and New York Times Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak is on it. His latest front-page report, "Justices’ Rulings Advance Gays; Women Less So," used a speech by liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his launch point. Not once did he question Ginsburg's liberal reasoning in his front-page article.
Liptak has previously described the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision as a defeat for women's rights, without specifying what right was being taken from women. He has also suggested the U.S. Constitution as old and outdated for failing to guarantee entitlements and health care for its citizenry.
By Clay Waters | July 4, 2014 | 12:53 PM EDT
There was loaded language right from sentence one in Adam Liptak's lead story for Friday's New York Times, "Birth Control Deepens Divide Among Justices."
Liptak, the paper's Supreme Court reporter, covered the emergency injunction issued by the Supreme Court on behalf of a Christian college in Illinois related to religious freedom and Obama-care. Briefly, the majority gave Wheaton College a reprieve from being forced to fill out forms to submit to insurers as an alternative way to deliver "free" contraception to employees/students under Obama-care. But Liptak managed to find a blunt violation of "women's rights" in that complicated tangle.
By Clay Waters | July 1, 2014 | 8:52 AM EDT
The Supreme Court on Monday delivered its verdict in the closely watched Hobby Lobby case, ruling 5-4 that the Christian-run craft store doesn't have to obey the Obamacare mandate that requires health care plans to pay for birth-control drugs that may induce abortion. Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion stated that requiring such closely-held corporations to provide such coverage violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Yet New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak's lead story Tuesday, under the banner headline "Court Limits Birth Control Rule," managed to quote liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in the second sentence.
By Clay Waters | April 23, 2014 | 8:31 AM EDT
Even though the Supreme Court voted 6-2 to uphold Michigan's ban on affirmative action, New York Times's Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak in his lead story in Wednesday's paper first quoted Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissent, the "most passionate and most significant dissent of her career."
Liptak also promoted liberal ex-Justice John Paul Stevens's tirade against money in politics in a Tuesday interview, with the reporter lamenting that the Citizens United case -- in which the Court made the pro-free-speech ruling that government can't ban election spending by corporations -- had become "a judicial landmark."
By Clay Waters | March 25, 2014 | 8:35 AM EDT
The Supreme Court today hears oral arguments in a highly charged case, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, which will decide whether private corporations under Obama-care have the right to exercise religious objections to covering certain forms of emergency birth control, like morning-after pills, that the company believes are tantamount to abortion. The chain of arts-and-craft stores is challenging the provision under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which sets a high bar on government regulation involving religious belief.
But New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak managed to get it wrong in his lead sentence in Tuesday's paper:
By Clay Waters | March 12, 2013 | 1:34 PM EDT
On the front page of Monday's New York Times, Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak presented readers with the proposition that "Smaller States Find Outsize Clout Growing in Senate." It's part of "Unequal Representation," a Times series "examining challenges to the American promise that all citizens have an equal voice in how they are governed."
But Liptak's analysis of the "disproportionate power enjoyed in the Senate by small states...on issues as varied as gun control, immigration and campaign finance" showed a lot of concern for the specifically liberal policies currently thwarted by the old inconvenient Constitutional arrangement.
Conservative Arguments Against ObamaCare 'Misguided, If Not Frivolous,' Suggests NYT's Court Reporter
By Clay Waters | June 29, 2012 | 1:16 PM EDT New York Times legal reporter Adam Liptak used his Friday lead (five other reporters contributed research) on Obama-care being upheld at the Supreme Court to take another crack at the argument by conservatives and libertarians, the so-called broccoli argument "as misguided, if not frivolous."
Conservatives took comfort from two parts of the decision: the new limits it placed on federal regulation of commerce and on the conditions the federal government may impose on money it gives the states.
By Clay Waters | June 12, 2012 | 1:43 PM EDT
Another Tuesday, another out-of-nowhere attack by New York Times reporter Adam Liptak on the Supreme Court, as it waits to hear a case important to liberals. With a vital decision looming on Obama-care, Liptak last week wrote a front-page story on the results of an unusual poll question from the Times asking people what they thought of the Supreme Court. Liptak linked the public's alleged disdain of SCOTUS to two conservative decisions, including Citizens United, a free speech victory loathed by the left and in the Times that allowed corporations and unions to donate unlimited amounts to campaigns.
Liptak devoted his latest "Sidebar" to another judicial side issue involving liberal opposition to the Citizens United decision: "Unsigned Opinions, And Citizens United."
As Obama-Care Decision Looms, NYTimes Fronts Odd Poll Saying Conservative Decisions Have Hurt SCOTUS's Status
By Clay Waters | June 8, 2012 | 3:22 PM EDT Is the New York Times trying to soften up the Supreme Court before its Obama-care ruling, which may come later in June and could see the law declared unconstitutional? An unusual poll conducted by the Times and poll partner CBS News and plastered on Friday's front page is food for thought.
Friday's off-lead by Adam Liptak and Allison Kopicki insisted, "Approval Rating For Justices Hits Just 44% In Poll -- Decline Spans 25 Years -- Role of Personal Views Is Seen in Survey on Supreme Court." Yet the paper buried the continuing strong opposition to Obama-care. So why did the Times lead off with the relatively obscure angle on Supreme Court justices?