Welcome to my archives. This is a long list of most of the commentaries and longer articles I have written since 1989; the hundreds of articles I wrote for the New York Times from 1980-1988 can be found via the SELECTED MEDIA OUTLETS box. They are sorted by date, with the most recent posts first. If you want to find something specific, I would encourage you to use the search feature in the sidebar. It is powered by Google. It is fast and accurate.
Opening Argument – Choosing the Next Attorney General
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
This is not a prediction that Alberto Gonzales will be driven from office because of the incompetence and untruthfulness recently manifested by the botched firings of eight U.S. attorneys and the multiple misleading and inconsistent explanations thereof. Even if President Bush’s buddy hangs on until 2009, the Senate should henceforth reject any attorney general nominee whose only outstanding qualification is his or her relationship with the president. Democrats who want to run Gonzales out of town should also pledge that they will never again support a nominee of either party who is as ill-qualified as Gonzales is or — for that matter — as Robert F. Kennedy was in 1961.
Hindsight shows that RFK turned out to be a pretty good AG in many ways. (Approving FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. was not among his better ideas.) But as of 1961, his main qualification was that he was the president’s brother.
The Justice Department, which employs 110,000 people, is entrusted with advising the president and other federal officials on the limits of their powers; safeguarding our civil liberties; evenhandedly enforcing laws on terrorism, national security, civil rights, the environment, white-collar crime, antitrust, and narcotics; choosing judges; and running the FBI and the federal prison system.
Its prosecutors have "more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America," as then-Attorney General (and later Justice) Robert Jackson said in a famous 1940 speech to an assembly of U.S. attorneys.
Opening Argument – A Right to Keep and Bear Arms?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued the biggest gun control decision in decades on March 9, perhaps setting the stage for the biggest Supreme Court gun control decision ever. Rejecting the views of most other courts, Judge Laurence Silberman held for the 2-1 majority, "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms" — not just to have guns when needed for service in now-defunct state militias. On this basis, the majority struck down the District of Columbia’s uniquely broad ban against having either a pistol or an operational rifle, even at home for self-defense against intruders.
The decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, is right and should be affirmed. And contrary to a widespread myth, confirmation by the justices that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms would not invalidate reasonable gun control laws.
To put my own biases on the table: I don’t hunt or own a gun. I support reasonable gun controls but consider the D.C. law unreasonable. I had never fired a pistol until a recent vacation trail ride, when I missed a large target with all six shots. This amused my 19-year-old daughter, who scored five out of six.
Now to the Second Amendment. It states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
For decades, most courts and legal scholars have treated this as essentially a dead letter. Their reasoning goes like this: The amendment’s first clause means that its sole purpose was to guarantee each state a collective right to have self-armed private citizens available as a military force-in-waiting (militia) to fight off federal encroachments; therefore, the second clause protects no individual right; state militias long ago became defunct; so the Second Amendment is an inoperative historical anachronism.
A Right to Keep and Bear Arms?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued the biggest gun control decision in decades on March 9, perhaps setting the stage for the biggest Supreme Court gun control decision ever. Rejecting the views of most other courts, Judge Laurence Silberman held for the 2-1 majority, "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms"—not just to have guns when needed for service in now-defunct state militias. On this basis, the majority struck down the District of Columbia’s uniquely broad ban against having either a pistol or an operational rifle, even at home for self-defense against intruders.
The decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, is right and should be affirmed. And contrary to a widespread myth, confirmation by the justices that Americans have an individual right to keep and bear arms would not invalidate reasonable gun control laws.
To put my own biases on the table: I don’t hunt or own a gun. I support reasonable gun controls but consider the D.C. law unreasonable. I had never fired a pistol until a recent vacation trail ride, when I missed a large target with all six shots. This amused my 19-year-old daughter, who scored five out of six.
Now to the Second Amendment. It states: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Opening Argument – The Supreme Court: Place Your Bets
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
A year after conservative Justice Samuel Alito succeeded liberal-leaning Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a disagreement between two of the nation’s best legal journalists about how much President Bush has transformed the Supreme Court prompts this challenge to Court-watchers:
What will the legal landscape look like in 10 years? Make your predictions and place your bets.
In a widely acclaimed book full of revelations about behind-the-scenes battles over the Court, Jan Crawford Greenburg, now of ABC News, says that after decades of disappointment, conservatives have finally won the day. The appointments of Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts will produce a "profound and lasting alteration," Greenburg writes in Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court. They and their allies will now engineer "one of the most fateful shifts in the country’s judicial landscape in a generation … with repercussions as yet unimagined," she predicts.
"I’m not holding my breath," retorts Benjamin Wittes in The New Republic Online. Wittes, an author and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution who until recently wrote the nation’s smartest legal editorials for The Washington Post, highly recommends Greenburg’s book (as do I) for its "genuinely spectacular" reporting. But he dissents from her view that Bush has set the stage for an era of conservative hegemony.
To advance this intriguing discussion, I offer specific predictions below and invite others to offer theirs.
Choosing the Next Attorney General
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
This is not a prediction that Alberto Gonzales will be driven from office because of the incompetence and untruthfulness recently manifested by the botched firings of eight U.S. attorneys and the multiple misleading and inconsistent explanations thereof. Even if President Bush’s buddy hangs on until 2009, the Senate should henceforth reject any attorney general nominee whose only outstanding qualification is his or her relationship with the president. Democrats who want to run Gonzales out of town should also pledge that they will never again support a nominee of either party who is as ill-qualified as Gonzales is or—for that matter—as Robert F. Kennedy was in 1961.
Hindsight shows that RFK turned out to be a pretty good AG in many ways. (Approving FBI wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr. was not among his better ideas.) But as of 1961, his main qualification was that he was the president’s brother.
The Justice Department, which employs 110,000 people, is entrusted with advising the president and other federal officials on the limits of their powers; safeguarding our civil liberties; evenhandedly enforcing laws on terrorism, national security, civil rights, the environment, white-collar crime, antitrust, and narcotics; choosing judges; and running the FBI and the federal prison system.
Its prosecutors have “more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America,” as then-Attorney General (and later Justice) Robert Jackson said in a famous 1940 speech to an assembly of U.S. attorneys.
The Supreme Court: Place Your Bets
by Stuart Taylor, Jr
A year after conservative Justice Samuel Alito succeeded liberal-leaning Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a disagreement between two of the nation’s best legal journalists about how much President Bush has transformed the Supreme Court prompts this challenge to Court-watchers:
What will the legal landscape look like in 10 years? Make your predictions and place your bets.
In a widely acclaimed book full of revelations about behind-the-scenes battles over the Court, Jan Crawford Greenburg, now of ABC News, says that after decades of disappointment, conservatives have finally won the day. The appointments of Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts will produce a "profound and lasting alteration," Greenburg writes in Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court. They and their allies will now engineer "one of the most fateful shifts in the country’s judicial landscape in a generation … with repercussions as yet unimagined," she predicts.
"I’m not holding my breath," retorts Benjamin Wittes in The New Republic Online. Wittes, an author and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution who until recently wrote the nation’s smartest legal editorials for The Washington Post, highly recommends Greenburg’s book (as do I) for its "genuinely spectacular" reporting. But he dissents from her view that Bush has set the stage for an era of conservative hegemony.
To advance this intriguing discussion, I offer specific predictions below and invite others to offer theirs.
Opening Argument – The Case for a National Security Court
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
A front-page, February 20 federal appeals court decision moved another big "enemy combatant" case down the road toward an eventual Supreme Court decision, probably in June 2008. But the outcome, like the current situation, will be unsatisfactory no matter how the justices rule.
This problem is one that only Congress can solve: how to handle appeals by foreigners who are detained indefinitely as enemy combatants by U.S. forces abroad but who claim to be innocent civilians. Despite two new laws over the past 14 months, Congress has not yet devised a process that is either effective in catching and incarcerating bad guys or fair in the exacting eyes of world opinion.
The justices cannot solve this problem without unseemly gymnastics, because current law presents them with two bad alternatives. The first would be to uphold the sharp restrictions on federal judicial review of appeals by militarily detained terrorism suspects that Congress imposed in the October 2006 Military Commissions Act. That’s what a sharply divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did on February 20, in Boumediene v. Bush.
But as my December 16 column details, the MCA, even if constitutional, is neither fair to detainees nor credible to world opinion. It is thereby self-defeating, because it makes it harder to get other nations to help us get our hands on bad guys in the first place.
For these reasons the justices may well reverse the D.C. Circuit and strike down the relevant MCA provisions. Such a decision could, if written broadly, give every suspected terrorist captured anywhere in the world a historically unprecedented federal constitutional right to file a habeas corpus petition in federal district court demanding legal representation, release, a ban on interrogation, and/or nicer conditions of confinement. Such an outcome might (or, in these times, might not) satisfy world opinion.
Opening Argument – Irrational Sentencing, Top to Bottom
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The spectacle of former CEOs Bernard Ebbers and Jeffrey Skilling getting sent to prison for 25 and 24 years, respectively, reminded me a bit of Roman emperors throwing criminals to the lions and bears to gratify circus crowds. Yes, Ebbers and Skilling are world-class crooks. The first helped inflate WorldCom’s profits by billions of dollars. The second presided over the multiple frauds that caused the collapse of Enron, the largest corporate bankruptcy in history. They helped squander the nest eggs and kill the jobs of thousands of people.
But does this justify locking them up for longer than we do most murderers? (The average federal sentence for murder is less than 19 years.) Does it call for keeping Ebbers in prison until he is 87 and Skilling until he is 73? Those were the no-parole penalties specified by the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s guidelines, even if both men earn the maximum 15 percent reduction for good behavior.
To be sure, these are not the most egregious examples of the savage severity of our sentencing laws. Worse still are the long terms imposed on the scores of thousands of nonviolent, nondangerous drug offenders now rotting in state and federal prisons around the country.
But while we have become numb to the minimum drug sentences mandated by Congress since 1986 (which have driven up the sentencing commission’s guidelines as well), Ebbers’s and Skillings’s near-life-terms are fresh reminders of how wantonly our sentencing laws trash the lives of nonviolent convicts at the top and the bottom of the income scale.
Opening Argument – The Great Black-White Hope
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Whether Barack Obama would be a better president than Hillary Rodham Clinton, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney is an interesting and debatable question. But it is beyond debate that an Obama win in 2008 would be by far the best thing that has happened to African-Americans, and to race relations, in more than 50 years.
Obama embodies and preaches the true and vital message that in today’s America, the opportunities available to black people are unlimited if they work hard, play by the rules, and get a good education.
Electing a charismatic, intellectually supercharged African-American president who preaches hope and opportunity would do more than anything else imaginable to tell young black people what they need to hear: This land is your land. And more than any other, it is a land of opportunity.
This is not the message that African-Americans have been getting over the past few decades from the media or from the "leaders" aptly described in the subtitle of the fine 2006 book by NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It.
One thing we can do about it is to focus attention on can-do black leaders and thinkers such as Barack Obama, former Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., Colin Powell, Cory Booker, Donna Brazile, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Thomas Sowell.
Opening Argument – This Time, Let’s Get It Right
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
One of the first orders of business for the new Democratic Congress should be legislating better safeguards against mistaken incarcerations of terrorism suspects and attaching the language to a veto-proof defense spending bill.
This would not only avoid needless imprisonment of harmless innocents. It would also help win the war against Islamist terrorism by reassuring allies and potential allies abroad that we are the good guys — and that America is still a safe place to visit.
In the five years since 9/11, the Bush administration has grabbed and imprisoned suspected "enemy combatants" without due process in Peoria and Chicago as well as in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But we still don’t have a decent system for sorting out dangerous jihadists from harmless bystanders.
It’s time we got this right. And although the need for Congress to protect against the possibility of unwarranted electronic eavesdropping gets far more attention, the need for it to end the current reality of long-term imprisonment of innocent people is far, far more important.
The Bush administration, mistaking its own incompetence for infallibility, has shown such indifference to the risk of erroneous detentions as to draw a succession of Supreme Court rebukes while making "Guantanamo" an anti-American rallying cry around the world. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to claim sweeping power to seize foreign students, tourists, and other visitors anywhere in the U.S. and lock them up for years — even for life — without ever producing real evidence of involvement in terrorism.
Congress has made two well-intentioned efforts to straighten out this executive-detention mess. But by severely curbing judicial review of executive detentions, the December 2005 Detainee Treatment Act and this October’s Military Commissions Act have actually made things much worse.