Reagan and the Law

Ed Meese loves being attorney general, and the job is transforming him. “The guy is turning out to be a dynamo,” says a White House insider, “the most energetic Cabinet officer we’ve got. I didn’t think he had it in him.” Meese, you see, loves to enforce the law, especially against drug traffickers. He’s been on the drug scene in Miami, New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the southwest border, making the continent into a county—Alameda County, if you will, where Meese served as prosecutor.

Of a piece with his law-enforcement charter, Meese’s role as a point man (along with Education Secretary Bill Bennett) of the Reagan social and civil-rights revolution is likewise in full flower. “I would consider myself in the forefront of the civil-rights movement,” announced the attorney general on a late August Brinkley TV show, adding en passant that the Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision was “infamous,” and that the Warren Court was guilty between 1960 and 1969 of “wholesalely upsetting cases and inventing new law.”

JM

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John McLaughlin

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Ronald Reagan

Department of Justice

Ed Meese loves being attorney general, and the job is transforming him. “The guy is turning out to be a dynamo,” says a White House insider, “the most energetic Cabinet officer we’ve got. I didn’t think he had it in him.” Meese, you see, loves to enforce the law, especially against drug traffickers. He’s been on the drug scene in Miami, New York, Boston, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, and the southwest border, making the continent into a county—Alameda County, if you will, where Meese served as prosecutor.

Of a piece with his law-enforcement charter, Meese’s role as a point man (along with Education Secretary Bill Bennett) of the Reagan social and civil-rights revolution is likewise in full flower. “I would consider myself in the forefront of the civil-rights movement,” announced the attorney general on a late August Brinkley TV show, adding en passant that the Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision was “infamous,” and that the Warren Court was guilty between 1960 and 1969 of “wholesalely upsetting cases and inventing new law.”