Judiciary

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…

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…

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…

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…

On Tuesday night, the major broadcast networks refused to cover the latest news regarding the fight for religious liberty as Oklahoma’s Supreme Court ruled hours earlier that a Ten Commandments monument at the State Captiol grounds in Oklahoma City must be removed due to it being “obviously religious in nature” and “an integral part of the Jewish and Christian faiths.” While the networks ignored…

Friday’s gay-marriage mandate from the Supreme Court is merely the latest “landmark” decision on the slippery slope toward obliterating any definition of consensual deviancy. We haven’t defined deviancy down. We’ve shredded it. Now, it’s social conservatives who have become the focus of fear, violence, and discrimination for maintaining their deeply held religious views that homosexuality is a…

Last night I noted how Chris Matthews took as literal a hyperbolic statement that Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.) made regarding the Supreme Court. Tonight, the Hardball host repeated the attack on Jindal, sneering that it put him in the "clown car."

A cranky Lawrence O'Donnell on Monday lashed out at the "terrible" Antonin Scalia, deriding the Supreme Court justice for his "wacky," bad writing. O'Donnell wondered if the conservative is "now the Donald Trump of the Supreme Court?" O'Donnell hosted a panel discussion on Scalia's dissents over ObamaCare and gay marriage. The liberal host complained, "...These are just terrible bits that he is…

On Tuesday, CNN's Jim Acosta asked President Obama about "what some people are calling 'your best week ever.'" Acosta played up that "you had two Supreme Court decisions supportive of the Affordable Care Act and of gay rights. You also delivered a speech down in Charleston that was pretty warmly received." The correspondent then underlined that 'it seems that you've built up some political…

On Monday night, the networks showed scant interest in covering the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against the Obama administration and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the regulation of power plant emissions as NBC ignored the story completely with ABC and CBS combining to spend only 29 seconds on the decision. While ABC and CBS came together to spend just under 30 seconds on this story…

Does Chris Matthews not get hyperbole? Back behind the desk at Hardball tonight after a few days off, the MSNBC host didn't seem to get that presidential candidate Bobby Jindal was being rhetorically hyperbolic when he quipped that given how political the Supreme Court has become, he kind of wouldn't mind abolishing the high court.

On Monday's CNN Newsroom, anchor Carol Costello talked up the idea that it would be better for Republicans to just accept the recent liberal Supreme Court ruling bolstering same-sex marriage as she hosted a discussion with right-leaning CNN commentator Tara Setmayer and Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis. As Setmayer predicted that different GOP presidential candidates would put forth different…

On Friday, ABC's World News Tonight aired a completely one-sided report on the Supreme Court's ruling that legalized same-sex "marriage" in all 50 states. Terry Moran hyped how Justice Anthony Kennedy "wrote today's landmark opinion describing the stakes in this case in the loftiest terms." Moran failed to include any soundbites from social conservative opponents of the decision, and hyped how "…