Mark Joseph Stern

Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern hyped in a Wednesday item for Slate that "hard right" Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's "fingerprints are all over" the Trump administration, due to the fact that many of his former clerks now hold "high places" there. Litchwick and Sterm played up that Thomas's "once-fringy ideas are suddenly flourishing," and touted that he is "close buddies with Rush…

Clarence Thomas is known for speaking not softly, but rarely, when the Supreme Court holds oral arguments. Nonetheless, he carries a big stick in terms of influence on both the courts and the presidency, warn Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern. Thomas, who in Lithwick and Stern’s words had “spent his career teetering off the right edge of the federal bench,” now “finds himself at the center of…

Well now. The press has been raking President-Elect Donald Trump over the coals for proposing "consequences" for burning the American flag. It's especially rich to see leftists like Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post invoke the name of the otherwise completely despised late Antonin Scalia, who was considered the tie-breaking Supreme Court Justice in the 1989 case when the Court ruled that flag-…

Much like Phil Mickelson took a big early lead in the British Open, Esquire’s Charles Pierce has taken a big rhetorical-excess lead in early blogging about Donald Trump’s VP pick, Indiana governor Mike Pence, calling him a “very strange and completely unreconstructed wingnut” whose paper trail contains “a rich deposit of sweet crude crazy.” Kevin Drum of Mother Jones described Pence as "not…

Mark Joseph Stern argues that a crucial shortcoming of John Strand’s play The Originalist is its out-of-date portrayal of Scalia as “a principled conservative, a brilliant and complex man who resists partisan classification.” Nowadays, however, Scalia’s “ideology…looks less conservative than Republican…Twenty years ago Scalia was the unpredictable justice, the renegade who thought both flag…

Slate's Mark Joseph Stern could have been mistaken for the mother from A Christmas Story, after slamming the classic Looney Tunes cartoon franchise on Tuesday for its comedic gun violence. Stern hyped that "the antics of Bugs Bunny and co. were a lot more brutal than you remember," and bewailed the shorts' "blasé approach to gun suicide." The liberal website boosted the writer's article with…