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.
Cover Story – The Rehnquist Court
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Justice William Brennan Jr. was in an animated mood, even for him. It was May 27, 1987, toward the end of the Supreme Court’s first term since Justice William Rehnquist’s 1986 promotion to chief justice. The Senate vote had been 65-33, amid bitter attacks — even charges of perjury — from liberal groups.
Opening Argument – Lloyd Cutler: The Last Superlawyer
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
There will never be another superlawyer on the scale of Lloyd Cutler, who died on May 8 at age 87. This is not to deny the possibility that someone, somewhere may replicate the dazzling array of talents that made Cutler the pre-eminent lawyer-statesman of his generation: intellectual brilliance, wisdom, public-spiritedness, eloquence, genius for grasping the interests of everyone around the table, and passion for forging consensus solutions to hard problems.
But even if more such people walk among us, the political and legal environments that enabled Cutler to be Cutler no longer exist.
This is a man who served every Democratic president since LBJ and every Republican president since Ronald Reagan; who won the trust and friendship of the best and brightest leaders in both major parties; who represented corporate titans and civil-rights groups; who moved effortlessly between private and public sectors; who tackled national problems as diverse as the race riots of the 1960s, the Iranian hostage crisis, the vast, unsecured nuclear stockpiles in Russia, and faulty intelligence on weapons in Iraq.
The snarling partisanship, pervasive mistrust, intellectual shallowness, and TV-driven demagogy that permeate today’s Washington would make it all but impossible for a Lloyd Cutler to work his magic now. He was in his element when steering small groups of serious, moderate-spirited leaders who wanted to make the system work, and who were moved not by flash or fiery rhetoric or poll numbers, but by intellectual rigor. Such leaders have become an endangered species.
NewsHour: NewsHour Remembers White House Counsel Cutler and Lawyer John Pickering – May 9, 2005
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JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, remembering Lloyd Cutler, counselor to presidents. The Washington lawyer died yesterday at 87. I said he was 84 in the News Summary earlier. That was wrong.
We get some insight into Lloyd Cutler’s life and career from Stuart Taylor, columnist for the Legal Times and senior writer for National Journal Magazine. Back in 1977, Stuart was fresh out of law school and a new associate at Lloyd Cutler’s law firm here in Washington. He has since written often and extensively about Mr. Cutler. Welcome.
STUART TAYLOR: Nice to be here, Jim.
JIM LEHRER: What’s the most important thing all of us should know about Lloyd Cutler?
STUART TAYLOR: He was a great lawyer in a time when lawyers could be called great, not just slick or good and when great lawyers could also be great statesmen, when being a great Washington lawyer, a super lawyer, as he and others were called, meant serving the country not just serving a bunch of corporate clients. He served a bunch of corporate clients. The list goes on and on and he served them well.
But he also was in and out of government as you mentioned. He had jobs with six presidents. He worked across party lines. He was a democrat and not a conservative democrat, I’d say, a little bit liberal for a democrat. But he worked with Republicans all the time on all kinds of things and had their respect. In today’s Washington, I’m not sure anyone could do that.
But as you mentioned earlier, six presidents, his greatest headliners were president — he was counsel, White House counsel to each of our last two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But he also served in commissions and various other capacities for the first President Bush, for President Reagan, for the second, the current President Bush. He was, when he died he was at least ex-officio a member of the commission investigating weapons of mass destruction.
Opening Argument – Filibusters: Two Wrongs Won’t Make Things Right
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Like testosterone-crazed teenage drivers locked in a game of chicken, Democrats and Republicans seem on course toward a collision that could do grave damage to our democracy’s distinctive blend of majority rule and minority protections.
Opening Argument – Does the President Agree With This Nominee?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown is the most interesting of President Bush’s judicial nominees blocked by Democratic filibusters. So a look at her speeches and judicial opinions may shed light on what the fuss is all about.
Opening Argument – How the Republicans Lost Their Majority
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
November 9, 2008 — The Republican Party’s stunningly swift swoon from controlling the presidency, the House, and the Senate to losing all three is rooted in what conservatives saw not long ago as their greatest triumph.
Opening Argument – PATRIOT Act Hysteria Meets Reality
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
"When the Bush administration says it wants to make permanent the freedom-stealing provisions of the PATRIOT Act, they’re telling those of us who believe in privacy, due process, and the right to dissent that it’s time to surrender our freedom."
So screams the first sentence of a recent fundraising letter from the American Civil Liberties Union. This and countless other overheated attacks — from conservative libertarians and gun-rights activists as well as liberal groups — have scared some 375 local governments and five states into passing anti-PATRIOT Act measures, while sending earnest librarians into a panic about Big Brother snooping into library borrowers’ reading habits.
But consider what the ACLU says when it is seeking to be taken seriously by people who know something about the issues: "Most of the voluminous PATRIOT Act is actually unobjectionable from a civil-liberties point of view, and … the law makes important changes that give law enforcement agents the tools they need to protect against terrorist attacks."
That’s right: That was the ACLU talking, in an April 5 press release. To be sure, the release goes on to stress that "a few provisions … unnecessarily trample civil liberties, and must be revised." Well, perhaps. And with 16 provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act scheduled to sunset on December 31, it is surely time to give the entire 342-page, 156-section law the careful scrutiny that it has not received from most of the legislators who passed it in October 2001.
Opening Argument – What Terri Schiavo’s Case Should Teach Us
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
Right-to-life conservatives and right-to-die liberals have about exhausted their rhetorical arsenals, with the former calling the latter secularist killers and the latter calling the former hypocrites, theocrats, and (gasp) tramplers of states’ rights. Meanwhile, many in the media who gleefully trumpeted how Terri Schiavo’s case had turned rule-of-law conservatives against right-to-lifers have noticed with disappointment that it also had turned disability-rights activists, and liberal lions Jesse Jackson and Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, against the right-to-die crowd.
Opening Argument – Moderate Republicans Should Not Go ‘Nuclear’ — Yet
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The constitutional argument advanced by Senate Republican supporters of the so-called "nuclear option" to end Democratic filibusters of President Bush’s judicial nominees — which is that any nominee who has majority support must be confirmed — is weak.
Opening Argument – Revisiting Iraq, and Rooting For Bush
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
I was guardedly in favor of invading Iraq, because I believed our president’s confident claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his collaboration with Al Qaeda.