Posts Tagged ‘US Politics’
Religion and the lawbreaking Supreme Court | The Hill – Column
Lawyers sometimes irritate other people with their persnicketiness about technicalities. But scrupulousness about legal detail is what gives courts their authority. It is big news if the Supreme Court ignores statutory limits on its own power. Since Justice Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court has repeatedly issued orders without legal authorization. This was particularly…
Read MoreThe phony rape exception to abortion bans | The Hill – Column
Now that the Supreme Court permits states to outlaw abortion, Republican state legislators are bitterly split over whether abortion bans should include exceptions in cases of rape. This is a pointless political fight. Laws forbidding abortion often force women to bear their rapists’ babies. If you don’t want to do that, don’t support abortion prohibitions. For many…
Read MoreForced Labor: Why the Thirteenth Amendment Protects Abortion Rights | Washington Monthly – OpEd
or centuries in America, a class of persons was regarded as a servant caste whose duty was to work for the benefit of others and not themselves. That duty was bound up with a complex legal structure that closed off avenues of escape to ensure they did the work they were expected to do. Their…
Read MoreThe Supreme Court’s squandered opportunity | The Hill – Column
In 2022 the Supreme Court threw away an opportunity to ameliorate the toxic polarization of America. After the unseemly gamesmanship that led to the appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, the new conservative majority should have looked for opportunities to, as Barrett said shortly after her confirmation, “convince you that this court is not comprised of a bunch…
Read MoreHow the Respect for Marriage Act will heal of one of America’s most toxic divisions | The Hill – Column
The Respect for Marriage Act (RFMA), which codifies protection for same-sex marriage, is about to be signed by President Biden. It protects hundreds of thousands of families, but it does more than that. It is a step away from America’s political polarization. That’s not just because Congress managed to get something important done on a bipartisan…
Read MoreThe continuing, destructive power of libertarianism | The Hill – Column
At a recent conference on conservative philosophy, I told another professor that I’d just written a critical history of libertarianism. “You’re too late,” he said. “After Trump, libertarianism is dead in American politics.” Would that it were so. The Libertarian Party is indeed in deep trouble, torn apart by factionalism. Despite the increasing ubiquity of communitarian, nationalist rhetoric, however,…
Read MoreThe Libertarian Party is collapsing. Here’s why | The Hill – Column
Only a few years after its greatest triumph, the Libertarian Party is collapsing, torn apart by an insurgency of alt-right sympathizers with racist tendencies. Libertarianism, the idea that state power must be absolutely minimized, relies on ideas of individual rights that seem flatly inconsistent with racism. And yet libertarian rhetoric has always had powerful attractions…
Read MoreReligion and Samuel Alito’s time bomb | The Hill Column
An irresponsible sentence that Justice Samuel Alito wrote eight years ago may now excuse religious people from nearly every legal obligation they have, so long as a hypothetical, nonexistent government program could substitute for it. That became clear this week when Judge Reed O’Connor declared in Braidwood Management v. Becerra that employers with religious objections may offer health plans…
Read MoreThe abortion emergency in the federal courts | The Hill Column
It is now notorious that the criminalization of abortion, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overruling of Roe v. Wade, doesn’t do much to lower the abortion rate but has had devastating effects on the ability of doctors to treat pregnancies that go wrong. Horror stories accumulate. Opponents of abortion have claimed that the press has exaggerated the…
Read MoreReligion 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…
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