U.S. Supreme Court

Before MSNBC’s Hardball host Chris Matthews compared President Barack Obama to Martin Luther King Jr. with a biblical delivery, Matthews expressed on Tuesday some bitterness that “the Supreme Court intervened in our electoral process” back in 2000 to which conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt promptly swatted him down. 

MSNBC's Thomas Roberts has repeatedly flaunted his liberal bias over the years, but he took it to a new level in a recent ad that celebrated the Supreme Court's 2015 decision legalizing same-sex "marriage." Roberts held up his hand with a ring on it, and gushed, "It's a victory — I've got the ring to prove it. Recognizing this is a constitutional right to Americans whether you're gay or straight…

As he’s been known to do from time-to-time, Fox News Channel (FNC) anchor Shepard Smith flashed his liberal tilt on Wednesday afternoon in reading a simple news brief about the Supreme Court putting a stay on North Carolina’s voter I.D. law by lamenting that, in his book, such laws are intended to discourage minorities from voting. The 33-second news brief started off fairly innocent with Smith…

Once upon a time, the right had (some) reason to complain about media bias, acknowledges Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, but these days, not so much. According to Marshall, when conservatives back in the day “went about creating their own counter-establishment,” what they built wasn’t a normal mirror image, but a funhouse-mirror image. For example, "Fox News [was] the supposed antidote to…

On the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell offered an baffling and exhaustive defense of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s outburst against Donald Trump by pointing to the first Chief Justice’s gubernatorial election record and opining that if Ginsburg is forced to recuse herself from any election-related cases, Catholics should recuse themselves from any…

Plenty of liberals who detest Donald Trump nonetheless thought Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s recent blasts at Trump were “ill-advised,” as Ginsburg herself eventually admitted they were. Some left-wingers, however, were down with RBG and believed that it was ridiculous to criticize her for getting political. Daily Kos writer Armando asserted that the SCOTUS “has acted politically through out [sic] its…

On Monday, CNN's breaking news coverage of the Supreme Court striking down Texas's sanitary regulations on abortion clinic clearly slanted towards the pro-abortion side. Pamela Brown twice touted the "huge win for abortion rights activists," and later underlined the "big win" to a pro-abortion legal analyst. Jake Tapper trumpeted the "seismic decision by the U.S. Supreme Court," and hinted that…

Moments after the Supreme Court handed down a ruling on Monday morning that struck down a pro-life Texas law, MSNBC Live host Thomas Roberts brought on none other than former Democratic Texas State Senator and liberal hero Wendy Davis to discuss how she “was fighting back tears” seconds before her live shot and inquired about “where those pink sneakers are” from her 2013 filibuster for abortion.

Omar Mateen claimed at various times to be aligned with terrorist groups including ISIS, Hezbollah, and the al-Nusra Front. Tim Dickinson does not consider any of those bloodthirsty outfits “the greatest threat to our homeland security today.” That description, Dickinson argues, best fits the National Rifle Association. “The NRA's unhinged gun advocacy,” he wrote in a Wednesday article, “has…

Conservative Paul Ryan and liberal Lithwick agree that Donald Trump’s recent digs at Gonzalo Curiel were racist, but disagree about their significance. Ryan considers the attacks peculiar to Trump, while Lithwick sees them as of a piece with the Republican party’s “wider assault on the judiciary in the Obama era.” Lithwick even wondered rhetorically, “Do Trump’s smears of Judge Curiel differ all…

A few months back, some maintained that Ted Cruz was ineligible for the presidency because, in their view, he wasn’t a natural-born citizen of the United States. In a Thursday article, Jeb Lund made an even more extreme argument about Cruz, suggesting that he isn’t even a full-fledged person. Specifically, Lund opined that both Cruz and his would-be running mate, Carly Fiorina, are “spectacular…

Eight Is Enough was a popular television series in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Dahlia Lithwick hinted in a Saturday article that a show about Republicans’ sour attitude toward the current Supreme Court situation might be called Eight’s Not Enough, with the key role played in absentia by Antonin Scalia. Lithwick theorized that for Republicans, “the 2016 term was meant to be the Supreme Court’s…

Confirmation, HBO’s new “fact-based dramatization” of the October 1991 Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill clash, reminded Jill Abramson, a former New York Times Washington bureau chief, managing editor, and executive editor, of “more recent congressional proceedings” that featured both “a lone woman witness” and copious Republican misogyny. “Hillary Clinton was the star of this show trial, the Benghazi…

If judicial review means that the U.S. Supreme Court is a de facto super-legislature that can in effect supersede actual legislatures, that’s fine with Washington Monthly blogger Martin Longman. In a Wednesday post, Longman acknowledged that certain SCOTUS rulings over the past several decades have been politically motivated, but argued that those were appropriate remedies for the “deplorable and…