Tag Archives: Supreme Court

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NewsHour: The Florida Recount Supreme Court Case – November 28, 2000

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MARGARET WARNER: Late this afternoon, the Bush and Gore legal teams filed their briefs on Bush’s pending appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court. The court is set to hear arguments Friday morning. We asked two observers to read today’s filings, and brief us on them.

Jeffrey Rosen is a law professor at George Washington University, and legal affairs editor at the New Republic Magazine. Stuart Taylor is a legal affairs columnist for the National Journal. What we didn’t tell our viewers which was that we insisted you take a speed reading course because these just came out.

But, Stuart, the gist of Bush’s appeal was that the Florida Supreme Court had overreached when it extended the vote- counting deadline down there. What do you think were the strongest arguments that the Bush brief makes in support of that?

STUART TAYLOR: Just to give the gist a little more fully, the claim is that the Florida Supreme Court violated federal law, both an act of Congress from 1887 that was passed after the Hayes-Tilden problem, and Article II of the Constitution violated federal law by changing Florida law after the November 7 election in an effort by the Gore camp to change the outcome of the election, which the Florida state Supreme Court, the Bush camp argues, basically went along with.

Now the strongest points, I think, are the state court did say in its opinion that the state’s legislation on this was hyper-technical, and the seven-day deadline for completion of hand counts and the certification of the election results just seemed sort of silly to them and didn’t work in this instance because you needed more time for hand counts, and therefore, they were going to junk that and write their own rules.

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Legal Affairs – It’s About More Than Which Judge Has the Last Word

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of our greatest judges. A Kennedy Administration lawyer offered that quote a long time ago to square the language of the U.N. Charter with the U.S. naval blockade of Cuba in 1962. In the charter, the United States had undertaken a solemn obligation to renounce "the threat or use of force" except in "self-defense" against "armed attack." It took some fancy lawyering to classify unfired Soviet missiles in Cuba as an "armed attack." But it seemed a bad idea to wait for someone to fire them.

This may seem to digress from the topic du jour. But bear with me. Much as I might like to predict or opine who should be our next President, I don’t have a clue, and it may be all over when you read this. So this is an opportune time to stand back from the cacophony of lawyers, spinners, anchors, protesters, professors, and Palm Beach partisans. To get past the perishable pensees of the pundits (present company included), whose "characteristic flaw has been to exaggerate the importance of whatever is being pundited about," as Wall Street Journal pundit Holman Jenkins observes. To stop bouncing among skirmishes and survey the battlefield from above, as one might from a hot-air balloon. (Oops. Unfortunate simile. Make that a weather satellite, or a B-2 bomber.)

What brings Holmes to mind is the striking unhelpfulness of the words in our constitutions, statute books, and judicial precedents as a guide through our current constitutional conundrum, or crisis, or whatever. This at a time when "the selection of the American President is now dependent on a bewildering array of small judgment calls by local ballot examiners and big decisions by judges and state officials about whether they should be heeded," in the words of The Wall Street Journal.

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Legal Affairs – Dumb and Dumber: Courts and EPA Regulators

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

On Election Day the Supreme Court will hear arguments in one of its biggest cases in years. It’s arcane and complex. But you might want to know something about it anyway, because it could affect your respiratory system, your risk of getting skin cancer or cataracts, the view from your office, the jobs of industrial workers, and the prices of cars, electric power, and lots of other stuff.

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NewsHour: Supreme Court Politics – October 2, 2000

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RAY SUAREZ: For more on what’s at stake for the Supreme Court this presidential campaign we turn to two congressional spokesmen for the Bush and Gore campaigns: Republican Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Democrat Barney Frank of Massachusetts. They are both on the House Judiciary Committee.

Joining them are two Supreme Court watchers: Stuart Taylor, legal affairs correspondent for National Journal and Newsweek, and Anthony Lewis, a columnist with The New York Times. Representative Hutchinson, this is one of the longest periods of the stable membership of the court in American history. These nine men and women have been there for six years with no changes.

What should voters be thinking about this fall, as they consider who should be the next president and how that may change the court?

REP. ASA HUTCHINSON: Well, I think first they have to realize how significantly it could change the court — in the last term, I think there were 70 decisions, one-third of those were a 5-4 decision on a whole host of issues, from partial birth abortion to the case involving the Boy Scouts — 5-4 decisions.

And so if the next president would appoint one, two or three, then it could be a significant change in the tilt, the balance of the court. Governor Bush has indicated that he does not have any litmus test for those; he wants to make sure that they are well qualified, reflect his general philosophy.

If you look at his record in Texas, his appointees represent all walks of life. 50 percent of them were women and minorities. And so I think that’s how he would approach appointees to the United States Supreme Court.

RAY SUAREZ: And Congressman Frank, let me move to you, what would you ask voters to keep in mind about the makeup of the Supreme Court and who the next president will be?

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NewsHour: The Future of the Supreme Court – July 13, 2000

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MARGARET WARNER: Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court term ended with a burst of decisions on hot-button issues ranging from abortion to school prayer to whether the Boy Scouts could expel a gay scoutmaster. The fact that many of these cases were decided by a 5-4 vote prompted a flood of articles and editorials on how the outcome of this year’s presidential race could alter the balance on the court.

What’s more, both liberal and conservative groups are now trying to energize their supporters by arguing that this election could reshape the court for decades to come. For our own discussion of what’s at stake for the court in this Presidential campaign, we turn to Stuart Taylor, legal affairs correspondent for National Journal and Newsweek, and author of last week’s Newsweek cover story on this issue; Anthony Lewis, a columnist with the New York Times; C. Boyden Gray, former White House counsel in the Bush administration, now in private practice in Washington; and Ralph Neas, People for the American Way and author of a 75-page report on this topic called "Courting Disaster."

Welcome, gentlemen. Ralph Neas, in this report, you wrote that the court is just one or two votes away from can your tailing fundamental rights that millions of Americans take for granted. Is there really that much at stake in this election?

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Legal Affairs – How the ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court Leans to the Liberal Side

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

On July 2, when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the current Supreme Court is "centrist-left," many a Washington journalist (among others) sniggered. Hadn’t Hatch read the papers or watched any televised news within the past few days-or the past 25 years? Did he miss the recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, which called the Court "unblushingly conservative"?

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Judiciary – The Tipping Point

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Justice Antonin Scalia’s demeanor was charming, his delivery witty. But his message was serious, and some of his words were blunt. Scalia’s subject at an April 18 symposium hosted by Michigan State University in a Washington hotel was "judicial activism." The 64-year-old Reagan appointee’s main targets were "the liberal [Supreme] Court of the `60s and `70s"-which he said sometimes used "phony and disreputable" reasoning to distort the meaning of laws-and the U.S. Congress of more recent years, which he accused of "legislative activism." And his conclusions went to the fundament of our constitutional system.

Countering academic critics who have turned the old imprecation of activism against Scalia and his conservative colleagues, Scalia said that "the current Court is considerably less activist … than the Court of a few decades ago." He acknowledged that "conservatives are just as willing to play this game as liberals are now," and that "we are striking down as many federal statutes from year to year as the Warren Court at its peak." But he noted that the Court has been voiding fewer state and local statutes than it did in previous decades. And he stressed that most federal and state laws that have fallen lately have "involved attempts by a legislature to do something quite novel and often even downright bizarre." He lingered on "bizarre."

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Legal Affairs – Why You Can’t Sue Your Rapist In Federal Court

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

"The 1994 Violence Against Women Act provided (among other things) that victims of rape, domestic abuse, and other "crimes of violence motivated by gender" could file federal civil rights lawsuits against their alleged assailants. The measure was nothing if not popular. Championed by President Clinton and feminist groups, it sailed through the House and Senate.