Judiciary

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.

The late Antonin Scalia was a "good soul" personally but had a backwards, outdated "ideology," Chris Matthews asserted on his February 16 Hardball program. Of course, in the process, Matthews both confused Scalia's philosophy of legal interpretation with "ideology" and misnamed it as "originalist" when in fact Scalia repeatedly took pains to describe his philosophy as "textualism."

The “big three” networks ABC, CBS, and NBC all made sure to weigh in Tuesday night on President Barack Obama’s comments hours earlier about his desire to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and spun them as Obama “plan[ning] to follow the Constitution” against “the Republican roadblock” in the Senate. 

The View’s Whoopi Goldberg on Tuesday furiously denounced fellow co-host Joy Behar for suggesting that the family of Antonin Scalia might know of a conspiracy theory to kill the justice. Goldberg went ballistic at her fellow panelists on the show for speculating on such possibilities, condemning, “We don't actually know what happened! This just happened over the weekend. Let's hold off before we…

Few in media can rival Rachel Maddow's ability to project earnest indignation over the apparent perennial willingness of Republicans to engage in politics. On her MSNBC show last night, Maddow twice mentioned the possibility of a constitutional crisis in the wake of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's death, since President Obama says he intends to nominate a judge to fill the vacancy and…

Liberal MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell on Tuesday played mind reader and asserted that the late Antonin Scalia would want Barack Obama to appoint his replacement. This claim is false. One would only have to ask Antonin Scalia.