Opinion Forum

Supreme Court, EPA and Overreach

January 10th, 2012

By Dan Miller Oral arguments were heard at the Supreme Court today in Sackett, et al., v. EPA, challenging actions by the Environmental Protection Agency to keep Michael and Chantell Sackett from building their home on land belatedly declared damp by the agency. Construction screeched to a halt upon the order of three agents of [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: Clean Water Act, EPA, home, property, Sackett, Supreme Court, wetland
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

SCOTUS to Review Arizona Immigration Law Case

December 13th, 2011

By Dan Miller Today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from the Ninth Circuit decision of April 11th holding the then new Arizona immigration statutes unconstitutional due to federal preemption. Of some interest, Justice Elena Kagan will not take part in the Arizona case, presumably because of her work on the issue when [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: 9th Circuit, Arizona, Constitution, decision, immigration, Law, Supreme Court
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

SCOTUS Grants Review of ObamaCare

November 14th, 2011

By Dan Miller By an order issued today, the Supreme Court granted several petitions for certiorari in cases challenging the constitutionality of the insurance mandate and other aspects of ObamaCare. Here is the only article I have found that provides a useful analysis of what the Court actually did. Among other things, it says Setting [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: federal, insurance, Kennedy, mandate, Obamacare, state, Supreme Court
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

ObamaCare, the CLASS Act and the Insurance Mandate

October 17th, 2011

By Dan Miller The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports law (a.k.a. CLASS Act), claiming to provide long term care for us old geezers without burdening the country’s budget, unraveled last week and the Obama Administration put it into suspended animation announcing in a Friday news dump that it would not work financially. President Obama, [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: CLASS, costs, individual mandate, Obamacare, Supreme Court
Categories: Economics, News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

ObamaCare Is Likely To Die a Painful Death

October 8th, 2011

By Dan Miller Is the Supreme Court likely to draw and quarter the president’s signature legislation? You betcha. On September 28th, the Obama administration filed a petition for certiorari with the Supreme Court seeking review of the ObamaCare decision rendered by the Eleventh Circuit on August 11th. That decision held the mandatory insurance provisions of [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: 2012, appeal, election, individual mandate, Obamacare, Supreme Court
Categories: Law, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

11th Circuit Should Send ObamaCare to Supreme Court

March 10th, 2011

By Dan Miller On March 8th the federal government, in compliance with an order issued by Federal District Judge Vinson in Florida on March 3rd, filed a notice of appeal with the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. Prior to that March 3rd Order, the federal government had been in rather obvious non-compliance. As [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: appeal, certify, Circuit Court, Obamacare, Supreme Court, unconstitutional
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (8) | Home

The Westboro Baptist Church Decision Has To Be Construed Narrowly

March 2nd, 2011

By Dan Miller I have done no more than to skim the Court’s decision, Justice Breyer’s concurrence and Justice Alito’s dissent in today’s Westboro Baptist Church decision. However, a few points I have not seen noted elsewhere may be worth making. Justice Roberts, for the majority, noted that “Our holding today is narrow. We are [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: 1st Amendment, decision, Supreme Court, Westboro Baptist Church
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (3) | Home

Supreme Court Upholds Gun Rights

June 29th, 2010

By Brianna Aubin Today, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of McDonald in the case McDonald v. Chicago, upholding the applicability of the Second Amendment to the States and giving the federal courts the power to strike down state and local gun control laws deemed unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. As a staunch supporter of [...]

Articles written by Brianna Aubin
Tags: 2nd Amendment, Jefferson, self-defense, states, Supreme Court, tyranny
Categories: History, News, Politics | Comments (26) | Home

Kagan Can Be a Justice, Though Never a Judge?

May 10th, 2010

By Dan Miller President Obama has selected Elena Kagan, the solicitor general of the United States, as his nominee to replace the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. From her official bio: Kagan came to Harvard Law School as a visiting professor in 1999 and became Professor of Law in 2001. While on the faculty, Kagan [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: confirmation, Elena Kagan, experience, nomination, Senate, Supreme Court
Categories: Law, News, Politics | Comments (9) | Home

Kagan for the Supreme Court

May 10th, 2010

By Tom Carter It’s reported that the President will nominate Solicitor General Elena Kagan to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. While Kagan, 50, has no experience as a judge, she’s a well-educated lawyer and a former law professor, law school dean, clerk to a U.S. [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: confirmation, Elena Kagan, nomination, Senate, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: Life, News, Politics | Comments (2) | Home

How to Judge a Potential Justice

May 2nd, 2010

By Dan Miller Lawyers are strange critters. Frustrations have long been expressed that decisions of the Supreme Court and of lower appellate courts, written by lawyers, are so damn long and complicated that only brother members of the world’s oldest profession can understand them. Shakespeare is credited with the phrase, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” [...]

Articles written by Dan Miller
Tags: confirmation, lawyers, nomination, Roe v. Wade, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

The Role of Justice Kennedy

April 11th, 2010

By Tom Carter There’s a good article in The Atlantic by Andrew Cohen, chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News. In Why Kennedy Owns the Supreme Court, Cohen discusses the increased influence Justice Anthony Kennedy is going to have on the Court once Justice John Paul Stevens retires. It has to do with [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: conservative, Kennedy, liberal, nomination, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

A More Conservative Court?

April 10th, 2010

By Tom Carter Now that Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens has officially resigned, effective at the end of this term, speculation is ramping up as to whom President Obama will nominate to replace him. As I noted in an earlier article, the question isn’t whether the President will nominate a liberal, but how [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: conservative, liberal, nomination, Obama, Senate, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Looming Supreme Court Battle

April 4th, 2010

By Tom Carter Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens has made it clear that he will retire either this year or next, probably sooner rather than later. His retirement will set the stage for a new partisan battle in Washington, and analyses of whom the President may nominate to replace him are already appearing [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: confirmation, federal judges, justices, nomination, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Failure of Local Gun Control

March 4th, 2010

By Tom Carter The Supreme Court is considering Chicago’s handgun ban in McDonald v. Chicago, which is likely to result in the law being invalidated and the Second Amendment being incorporated against the states. I strongly support gun control, particularly for handguns. It has to be done by the federal government because local controls simply [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: gun control, handguns, local laws, Second Amendment, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (15) | Home

Supreme Court Justice Clinton

February 11th, 2010

by Jason Gallimore Sources in Washington are saying that lawyers for the Obama administration are working behind the scenes to make plans for any possible US Supreme Court vacancies in the coming year. Justices Stevens and Ginsburg are rumored to be considering retirement, with age certainly being a factor. Progressives will be happy to see [...]

Articles written by Guest Author
Tags: Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton, nomination, Stevens, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (1) | Home

Term Limits and Pandora’s Box

February 7th, 2010

By Larry Ennis I think term limits are needed if we are to ever break up the logjam in national politics. However, the only recourse is to amend our Constitution. Such an action is very controversial. The chance of having something be made worse and not better is a genuine concern. Everyone knows or should know [...]

Articles written by Larry Ennis
Tags: amendment, Constitution, Supreme Court, term limits
Categories: History, Politics | Comments (5) | Home

Obama’s State of the Union

January 31st, 2010

By Tom Carter A number of the President’s critics have opined that he didn’t say anything new in the State of the Union Address and mainly tried to rally Democrats to support him. To the contrary, I think three important aspects of the address are pretty clear. The first is what he actually proposed. Politico [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Congress, DADT, health care, Obama, SOTU, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (6) | Home

Sotomayor and Scalia

July 21st, 2009

Richard Cohen is one of my favorite columnists, not because I always agree with him but because it’s usually interesting to see what he has to say. His column in The Washington Post on July 20 caught my attention because he compared Sonia Sotomayor, soon to warm a chair on the Supreme Court, and Antonin [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Scalia, Sotomayor, Supreme Court
Categories: Politics | Comments (0) | Home

Sotomayor Decision Overturned

June 29th, 2009

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today on Ricci v. DeStefano, an appeal of a decision of a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Sonia Sotomayor, now a Supreme Court nominee, was a member of the three-judge panel and joined in the decision that has now been overturned. As reported, The Supreme Court [...]

Articles written by Tom Carter
Tags: Law, Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor, Supreme Court
Categories: News, Politics | Comments (0) | Home

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