Fallout When you're Joe Wilson and you heckle the President you are required to quickly make an apology before turning around and stuffing your re-election coffer with all the monies pouring in from voters who consider you a hero. When you are a Supreme Court justice and you quietly mouth back to a President who has just called you out during his first official State of the Union address the result is a lot of intellectual heavy weights using to oped pages to wrestle over the role of the court (does everybody now want to be a cable news talking head at heart? and the appropriateness of the President challenging (threatening) it to their faces in one-sided public forum. (more...)

video There has been so much news in the last two weeks between Haiti, Leno and Conan, Tuesday's special election in Massachusetts (and its outcome) that it's easy to wonder whether the full impact of yesterday's Supreme Court decision, to lift the limits on how much U.S. corporations can spend on a political campaign, is getting lost in the mix. The decision, which ran straight down SCOTUS party lines (read more on Justice Stevens' scathing dissent here), and overturns century-old precedents, will have enormous ramifications on future elections, from local straight up to the White House. Enormous. (more...)

Lights! Camera! SCOTUS! All eyes this week are turned toward the confirmation hearing of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, President Barack Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court and the person who has added "Wise Latina" to our lexicon. Legal eagles from around the land have flocked to the nation's capital to breathlessly cover these hearings, or at least stream them live on C-SPAN so that various Senators can put on their best camera-ready outfits (smashing blazer, Kristen Gillibrand!) and invoke those twin American traditions - case law and baseball  - in sonorous, stentorian voices and, in the case of Chuck Schumer, voices that sound like my former rabbi. (more...)