1990—After nearly 34 years of liberal judicial activism on the Supreme Court, Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. announces his retirement. As Jan Crawford Greenburg describes it in Supreme Conflict, “For conservatives, Brennan’s retirement gave George H.W. Bush the chance of a lifetime.… It was that rare moment when a conservative president was positioned to replace a liberal giant.… It would give conservatives a dramatic opportunity to cement their majority and firmly take ideological control of the Court.” But “the president did not want the kind of bruising fight over the Supreme Court that Reagan was willing to endure.” Five days later President Bush nominates … David H. Souter to fill Brennan’s seat.
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Questions for Those Who Believed Jussie Smollett
By Kyle Smith
The “we reported the Jussie Smollett case responsibly” contention has been blasted to smithereens. Twitter accounts and headlines in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times reported as fact Jussie Smollett’s wildly implausible allegations, and many other journalists did so as ...
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Stephen Miller’s Own Words Show the Weakness of the Trump Legal Argument on the Wall
By David French
One of the first rules of effective litigation is that you don't want your client to make statements out loud that reveal the weakness of your legal case. On Sunday morning, Trump adviser Stephen Miller violated that rule. In a remarkable exchange with Chris Wallace, he demonstrated the extraordinary weakness of ...
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McCabe and 60 Minutes Avoid Discussing Why Russia Factored in Comey’s Firing
Andrew McCabe is a good witness and he made a favorable impression, at least on me, in his 60 Minutes interview with Scott Pelley. Pelley and his editors did a great job highlighting McCabe’s down-to-earth likability. Unlike Jim Comey, a career prosecutor and corporate lawyer before he became FBI director, ...
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How the Democrats Went Nuts in Three Months
The Democrats swept to power in Congress by campaigning in a way that has been successful for Democrats for generations. “Republicans will take away your health care,” they said, after having focus-grouped it. Now we are preparing for a 2020 campaign in which Donald Trump and Republicans can as easily ...
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Regular Order
Jussie Smollett’s story has always sounded a little . . . extraordinary.
Smollett, who appears on the television series Empire, says he was attacked on the streets of Chicago at 2 a.m. by two men who shouted racial and homophobic abuses at him, beat him, doused him with bleach, and fastened a noose around ...
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Pat Caddell: The Pollster Who Foresaw and Helped Shape Trump’s Victory
By John Fund
Pollster and political analyst Pat Caddell died from a stroke on Saturday at the age of 68.
Few people had more to do with Donald Trump’s amazing victory in 2016. The Washington Post concluded that Caddell “first wrote the instruction manual” for Trump when, entirely on his own, he conducted polls ...
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