Judiciary

With Donald Trump winning on Saturday night in South Carolina, the liberal pundits of MSNBC commenced their latest efforts to tie Trump’s views and questioning President Barack Obama’s religion to the rest of the conservative movement as Andrea Mitchell whined that the collective GOP “is looking for is anyone who will absolutely be crude and rude and take on Barack Obama.”

On Friday's CNN Newsroom, Jeffrey Toobin somehow thought it was necessary to point out that Justice Antonin Scalia's 120 Supreme Court clerks — many of whom were waiting for his casket to arrive at the Court — consisted of "an overwhelmingly white, male group." Toobin made this statement as the camera zeroed in on eight individuals who all appeared to be white. However, moments later, a different…

A story topic so enticing, they ran it twice. Apparently, not even dying is enough to deter media hostility – if you’re a conservative. Headline on page A6 in Thursday’s Washington Post: “Justice Scalia’s free stay at luxury ranch highlights judicial ethics questions.” Subhead: “Should judges socialize with people who could have cases before them?” (Online version: “Why Justice Scalia was staying…

Senate Republican plans to delay Barack Obama getting another justice on the Supreme Court could be driven by only one thing -- racism! Well at least that’s what the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin implied, when they collected a bunch of quotes from angry Obama supporters for a front-page February 18 story headlined: “Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor.”

Few people in modern history have fulfilled their oath to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" more than the late Justice Antonin Scalia. He was so well respected that the Senate voted 98-0 in 1986 to confirm him. These days it would be difficult to get a unanimous vote in support of Mother's Day. 

Chris Matthews gave guest Harry Reid (D-Nevada) a softball interview tonight wherein the Senate Minority :eader blamed Republicans on a lack of comity in the world's greatest deliberative body and insisted Democrats had always opposed extreme delay-and-deny tactics for presidential judicial nominations. Although this is patently false, Matthews didn't challege his assertions.

New England Cable News touts itself as "the nation's largest regional news outlet" and it just may have set a record this week for most double-takes by viewers watching one of its broadcasts. Among its offerings is a weeknight program on politics called Broadside, hosted by veteran journalist Sue O'Connell, who is also co-publisher of the South End News and gay-friendly Bay Windows.   

Leave it to the New York Times to turn a garden-variety partisan battle over the Supreme Court into a racial issue favoring the Democrats against Republicans: Thursday’s front page featured “Blacks See Bias in Delay on a Scalia Successor.” Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin, reporting from South Carolina, interviewed blacks suspicious of the GOP, given the party’s allegedly unprecedented…

On Thursday, both NBC’s Today and ABC’s Good Morning America censored any mention of the controversy swirling around President Obama’s decision to skip the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia scheduled for Saturday. To its credit, CBS This Morning offered a full report on widely criticized move.

Some analysts have pointed out that it’d be risky for Republicans to preemptively block anyone President Obama nominates to succeed Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, but that approach wouldn’t necessarily end when Obama leaves office. Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman believes that if in 2017 a Democrat becomes president but GOPers retain sufficient power in the Senate, they’ll just…

Following the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, the country mourned the loss of one of its greatest legal thinkers. Not surprisingly, Jessica Valenti of the leftist British newspaper The Guardian was quick to figuratively spit on his grave.

MSNBC's Chris Hayes is usually right less often than a stopped clock, i.e., fewer than two times a day. But he might get lucky if by some miracle he's right about something else today because of the matter discussed in this post. After the Obama administration announced that President Barack Obama will not attend Saturday's funeral for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a staunch Catholic,…

In a desperate attempt on Wednesday’s NBC Today to hype supposed divisions in the Republican Party over opposition to President Obama nominating a successor to Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, correspondent Andrea Mitchell enthusiastically proclaimed: “Even as a handful of Republican senators are now breaking with their leaders and saying the Obama nominee should at least get a fair hearing…

ABC’s Good Morning America and NBC’s Today on Wednesday avoided the uncomfortable fact that Barack Obama has totally flip-flopped on whether ideology should be considered for a Supreme Court nominee. Only CBS This Morning highlighted the hypocrisy and shifting positions of Democrats. Reporter Jan Crawford played a clip from 2006 in which then-Senator Obama was supporting a filibuster.