The Hill Column
Religion and the wrong defense of abortion rights | The Hill Column
It is commonly claimed that restrictions on abortion illegitimately impose some people’s religious beliefs on the rest of us. This is the wrong way to defend abortion rights. It implies that religious motives have no legitimate place in lawmaking. In fact, we all have normative commitments that we have trouble articulating – you could call them matters of…
Read MoreClimate change and the Supreme Court’s version of police abolitionism — The Hill Column
West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which in June gutted the Biden administration’s ability to reduce the electrical power industry’s carbon emissions, may be the Supreme Court’s most reckless and lawless decision (in an extremely competitive field). The court comes close to anarchism, crippling Congress’s capacity to protect the country from disaster and undermining the…
Read MoreThe neglected common ground on abortion — The Hill Column
Abortion is one of the most polarizing issues in American politics, made even more toxic by the Supreme Court’s decision to overrule Roe v. Wade. It doesn’t need to be. Pro-life and pro-choice people should be able to agree on policies that would actually reduce the abortion rate. To accomplish that, though, opponents of…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court and the new religious aristocracy — The Hill Column
The Supreme Court has effectively authorized schoolteachers to pressure their students to pray. Kennedy v. Bremerton held that football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to engage in what Justice Neil Gorsuch called a “short, private, personal prayer” on the 50-yard line after games. The court held that forbidding that prayer improperly discriminated on the basis of religion,…
Read MoreBiden’s gay rights/religious liberty opportunity — The Hill Column
Democrats need another political win — preferably one that appeals to wavering Republican voters. The fraught issue of gay rights and religious liberty offers an opportunity, one that could also help fix the toxic polarization of American politics. Sooner or later the extremists who now dominate the U.S. Supreme Court will confront that issue, and will almost certainly…
Read MoreOriginalism and the football coach’s prayer — The Hill Column
Amid the recent Supreme Court argument over a high school football coach’s demand to lead his players in prayer, the judges lost sight of one of the central purposes of the First Amendment’s prohibition on “establishment of religion” — a purpose that should be of particular concern to the court’s self-styled originalists. The justices’ questions…
Read MoreAkhil Amar and the Dobbs draft — The Hill Column
Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, in a prominent defense of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion overruling Roe v. Wade, argues in the Wall Street Journal that it contains “nothing radical, illegitimate or improperly political.” Amar supports abortion access but doubts that it is protected by the Constitution. He emphasizes that Roe was poorly reasoned. He thinks that…
Read MoreCancelling Russians is Putinist – The Hill Column
Russian artists and performers are being cancelled out of revulsion against the Ukraine invasion, including many who have denounced Russian President Vladimir Putin. These cancellations perversely presuppose Putin’s own collectivist vision of what nationhood means — a vision that has American fanboys, notably Donald Trump. Nations, strictly speaking, do not exist outside of people’s minds. In Perry Anderson’s famous…
Read MoreKetanji Brown Jackson’s originalism – The Hill Column
Constitutional originalists have been doing a victory lap after Ketanji Brown Jackson declared, in her confirmation hearing, “I believe that the Constitution is fixed in its meaning. I believe that it’s appropriate to look at the original intent, original public meaning, of the words when one is trying to assess because, again, that’s a limitation on my authority to…
Read MoreBad political philosophy can kill you – The Hill Column
Political philosophy sounds abstract and nerdy, but it is inescapable. If you have any political opinions, then you have a philosophy and are probably acting in accordance with it. Administrative regulations are even more boring. Recent developments in the administration of ObamaCare – are you bored yet? – show how much it matters. The…
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