Abolish the Vice Presidency?
Bruce Ackerman thinks the vice presidency is an anachronism from the political era of the Framers and ought be abolished. For two centuries, presidential nominees have used the office to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president's death ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on October 2, 2008 14:36
Supreme Court Justice Nominations
My colleague Tom Traina is looking ahead to the fall and scoping out some potential Supreme Court nominees for both Obama and McCain. He also points out that, as kind of a nature of the beast, you can't always predict what kind of Justice a nominee will turn into:Frequently, the appointment of justices is an attempt to fix a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 28, 2008 13:37
Obama: Citizen of the World
Greg Ransom: BARACK OBAMA IS A CITIZEN OF KENYA as well as a citizen of the United States, according the Rocky Mountain News and other sources. There's reason to believe that Obama is also a citizen of Indonesia. He calls himself a "citizen of the world", and in some sense, he is. That's a good line. Whether Obama is actually a ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on August 10, 2008 07:41
Janet Jackson Fine Overturned in Court
A federal court has thrown out the FCC's $550,000 fine against CBS for airing the Janet Jackson - Justin Timberlake "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Super Bowl. The U.S. government's campaign against television indecency was dealt a blow on Monday when a court overturned a $550,000 fine against CBS Corp television stations for airing a glimpse of pop singer Janet Jackson's ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 22, 2008 07:02
Conservatives for Obama II
When I saw the headline "Hunter: This conservative activist is backing Obama" on memeorandum yesterday, I was intrigued. Duncan Hunter, arguably the most conservative of the 2008 Republican presidential aspirants was endorsing a liberal Democrat?! When it turned out the "Hunter" in question was Larry Hunter, a fellow of whom I'd never previously heard, my interest waned. After all, ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 18, 2008 09:27
Heller Denied D.C. Gun Permit
Dick Heller, the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court decision that overturned Washington, D.C.'s 32-year-old ban on handguns and established that the 2nd Amendment provided an individual right to own guns, was denied a handgun permit by the District yesterday. He was among the first in line Thursday morning to apply for a handgun permit. But when he tried to ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 18, 2008 05:34
D.C. Bans Guns with Red Tape
The District of Columbia has made it legal for residents to own a handgun after being so ordered by the United States Supreme Court. But they're not making it easy. The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned Washington's strict 32-year-old handgun ban was among the first to arrive as the city started registering firearms. Dick Heller showed up early ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 17, 2008 11:51
Presidential Succession Crisis?
Bruce Ackerman has read a novel and heard unsubstantiated rumors and from these concocted a Constitutional crisis which he's convinced the folks at Slate to publish. New Yorker writer Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side, opens with a shocker. Apparently sometime in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan issued a "secret executive order" that in the event of the death of ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 15, 2008 18:04
Zoning Away the Constitution
Matt Yglesias points out that, the Supreme Court's historic ruling in Heller notwithstanding, DC residents still have no effective 2nd Amendment rights. As Rob Goodspeed explains it's all in the zoning. You can't legally buy a gun in DC because there are no gun stores here. And to sell a gun to an out-of-state resident, a gun shop needs to actually ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 14, 2008 12:36
Supreme Court as a Voting Issue
Dahlia Lithwick takes to the pages of FireDogLake to explain why, in her view, liberals are much less excited about the Supreme Court than conservatives: My own impression, having covered the past two presidential elections is that most liberals simply don’t vote with the composition of the Supreme Court in mind at all, or that it ranks somewhere in their top ...Posted in Outside The Beltway | OTB on July 7, 2008 16:00
