House Divided
In the days before the election, there has been a boomlet of stories about politically mixed marriages. According to The New York Times Sunday Styles section, "In towns big and small across the country, couples and family members on opposite sides of the political fence are struggling to maintain amicable relationships as a highly polarized political season reaches its apex. " My wife and I were pleased to learn that we are part of an amusing social trend--she's a Republican and I'm a Democrat.
Supreme Mistake
Whether or not the Supreme Court decides the presidential election, the election will decide the future of the Supreme Court. And the first vacancy, which could come sooner rather than later, as Chief Justice William Rehnquist's surgery last week reminds us, is likely to provoke a partisan explosion that will make the battle over Robert Bork look like child's play. As Election Day approaches, liberal and conservative interest groups are trying to rally their bases with the same alarmist slogans they have been using for the past 30 years. If George W.
Rematch
It's November 2, and the presidential election looks close in Ohio. An army of lawyers are dispatched by the Bush and Kerry campaigns to scour all 11,614 precincts in the state for any hint of voting irregularities. Within hours, both sides have filed competing suits in state courts challenging the standards for counting provisional, absentee, and military ballots, as well as for the use of different voting machines.
Prevent Defense
The FBI's Strategic Information Operations Center, known as sioc, occupies more than 40,000 square feet on the fifth floor of the Bureau's headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was set up in 1998 as a clearinghouse for intelligence about terrorism collected throughout the federal government, and Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller camped out here in the weeks following September 11.
Divide and Rule
At the end of June, the Supreme Court issued three decisions repudiating the Bush administration's demand that the courts stay out of the war on terrorism. The decisions were simultaneously lauded as an example of judicial restraint and excoriated as the activism of an imperial judiciary. Cass R.
Home Front
At the Supreme Court last week, the lawyers for two American citizens being indefinitely detained as enemy combatants called the government's actions an unprecedented departure from America's constitutional traditions. "We've had a war on our soil before, and never before in this nation's history has this Court granted the president a blank check to do whatever he wants to American citizens," said Jennifer Martinez, representing the alleged dirty bomber, Jose Padilla. Law professors who filed briefs in the case were even more scathing.
Lincoln v. Lincoln
Yawn
ON MAY 17, by order of the state supreme court, the first same-sex couples in the United States will be legally married in Massachusetts. For many supporters of gay marriage, this is not only a cause for celebration; it is a manifesto for future litigation. Many people understandably see gay marriage as the great civil rights issue of this generation, and they are determined to extend it across the United States by any means necessary.
Quiet Please
This week, Justice Antonin Scalia sat out on the Pledge of Allegiance case and refused to recuse himself from a case involving Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force. On balance, both decisions were perfectly defensible. But the same bullying overconfidence, lack of self-discipline, and failure of judicial temperament that led Scalia to blurt out in advance his views on the Pledge case also marred his overly combative apologia in the Cheney case.
Judge Not
On December 18, two federal appeals courts rejected the Bush administration's claim that the president has the unilateral authority to identify citizens or aliens as enemy combatants and to detain them indefinitely, at home and abroad. The rulings were a clear sign that President Bush's sweeping claims that he can do whatever he likes in the war on terrorism without review by the courts or Congress are provoking a judicial backlash.
