Joel Mathis

When President Trump announced his shortlist for the Supreme Court during the 2016 campaign, it was a clear signal to conservatives to get on his bandwagon, filled as it was with Federalist Society-approved names. Now that his re-election prospects are sketchy, Trump has released a new shortlist . It worked the first time, after all. The interesting thing about the 2016 list is that it still had the quality of being -- for Trump -- subtle. Unless you pay enough attention to the endless ideological maneuverings to control the courts, the names on the list (and its FedSoc provenance) might not've meant much to you. But if you were aware of those things, invested in those fights, and conservative, the list was a good reason to think Trump might not be a squish on issues important to you. This time around, though, Trump is taking no chances with subtlety when it comes to motivating the base. It's one reason he's even more plainly appealing to white racism during this campaign.

A few years back, President Obama earned sneers from conservatives when he said "empathy" is a quality he looks for in making judicial nominations. I thought about that today when reading about Justice Sotomayor's dissent in a police evidence case . Essentially, the court ruled that evidence can sometimes be used against defendants even if that evidence was gathered by police illegally. Sotomayor was cranky. From TPM: She was joined in most of her dissent by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who also joined a dissent penned by Justice Elena Kagen). But, in the final portion of Sotomayor's dissent, she said she was "[w]riting only for myself, and drawing on my professional experiences." There, she expounded upon the "severe consequences" the unlawful stops in question have, including being "degrading" and causing "indignity."  "Although many Americans have been stopped for speeding or jaywalking, few may realize how degrading

There's a lot to unpack in George Will's column today about Vanderbilt University's decision to withhold recognition from the Christian Legal Society, a campus group that (naturally, given its orientation) wants to ensure that only Christians can be in its leadership. I think Will goes wrong by starting to compare apples to oranges. Will must be quoted at length: In 1995, the Supreme Court upheld the right of the private group that organized Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade to bar participation by a group of Irish American gays, lesbians and bisexuals eager to express pride in their sexual orientations. The court said the parade was an expressive event, so the First Amendment protected it from being compelled by state anti-discrimination law to transmit an ideological message its organizers did not wish to express. In 2000, the court overturned the New Jersey Supreme Court’s ruling that the state law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation requir

Philly's court system is a mess. Lots of people get charged, but not so many ever make to a plea or a trial: They go underground instead. In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, former prosecutor Walter Phillips provides the solution: Trials in absentia ! One way the city's Common Pleas judges could address this problem - without any expense - would be to take the unified stance that trials will go on even in the absence of such defendants. The trouble is that many Philadelphia judges just won't call the bluff of absent defendants and follow the law that allows trials to go forward in their absence. A variety of reasons have been advanced for their timid stance: fear of reversal, the awkwardness of forcing defense attorneys to make fundamental decisions without consulting their clients, and just plain lethargy. This would seem to violate Constitutional guarantees that a defendant can confront the evidence and witnesses against them. But Phillips waves those concerns awa

Radley Balko notes that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is refusing to hear the habeas corpus petition of a man who has established his innocence in the sex crimes for which he was convicted. Why the rejection? Because the dude filed his petition after the deadline. Balko: By the panel’s reckoning, adherence to an arbitrary deadline created by legislators is a higher value than not continuing to imprison people we know to be innocent. The circuit court's decision is horrifying -- but its logic isn't that surprising. Why? Because that's the exact same logic that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has used. Remember this? This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is "actually" innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based o

Lyle Denniston has been covering the Supreme Court for a half-century -- first as a newspaperman in Baltimore and Boston, and now for the invaluable  SCOTUSblog . He joins the podcast this week to give an overview of the Supreme Court's term, a look at the Elena Kagan confirmation hearings, and a preview of what hot topics the court will be wrestling with next. Click here to play the podcast.

Ben Boychuk and I discuss the role of the Supreme Court in this week's column for Scripps Howard. My take: John Roberts' "balls and strikes" analogy is appealing, but it also has very little to do with how the Supreme Court works, or its role in American life. The Supreme Court, after all, only takes the hard cases -- the ones where questions of Constitutional law are still unsettled. The easy questions -- the ones where the bright lines of the law make it relatively simple to determine the "right" results of cases -- are left to the lower courts. But it's the Supreme Court's job to draw the bright lines. It must do so within the parameters of the Constitution, of course, but the job is still largely one of interpretation. "The Constitution is a pantheon of values, and a lot of hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another," retire

That's the question for this week's Scripps Howard debate between Ben Boychuk and me, asked in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling this week that criminal suspects must speak up to claim their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. My take: The Supreme Court's ruling boils down to this: Police get to assume you don't want your Constitutional rights. The Miranda warning -- the one you've heard cops say on TV a million times -- is now essentially meaningless. "Today's decision turns Miranda upside down," Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. "Suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so." Imagine if the government treated our other Constitutional protections this way. Federal agents would be free to shut down church services unless prayer was preceded by a pastor's public statement that churchgoers were exercising their First Amendment ri

I'd say that John Yoo's Inquirer column about Elena Kagan is fairly standard talking points stuff -- hates the military, loves her ivory tower, mean to Clarence Thomas -- except for one kind of weird point that he makes. He's critical of Kagan's now-famous decision to support efforts to keep military recruiters off the Harvard Law campus because of Don't Ask Don't Tell. Which is fine, except... I happen to agree that the president and Congress should allow gays to serve in the military . But Kagan announced her policy while the United States was fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. And she defied a federal law - the Solomon Amendment - that ordered schools to provide equal access to the military for campus recruitment or risk losing federal funding. Remember: John Yoo once suggested the president has the power to suspend even the First Amendment under his war powers, so it's no surprise that he criticizes Kagan for sharing his opinions -- but acting on those

Via Julie Ponzi , Jules Crittenden wonders why Barack Obama can't nominate "soccer moms who went to a state school" to the Supreme Court: I’d add that President Obama seems bent on packing the court with people who never had children, and would suggest that if you haven’t had your sleep disturbed for years on end; haven’t subjugated everything in your life to someone else’s interests … as opposed to subjugating everything to your career interests … and neve changed a diaper except, say, as a boutique experience; if you haven’t seen your hopes and dreams grow up, charge off in their own direction and start talking back to you; if you haven’t dealt with abuse of authority and human rights issues sometimes encountered in dealings with obtuse school officials, class bullies and town sports leagues; then there’s a high risk your understanding of life may be somewhat … academic. It’s a humbling experience, parenthood. As well as an inspiring one that gives life meaning. It

In this week's Scripps Howard column with my colleague Ben Boychuk, I say we don't know enough -- and won't know enough -- about Elena Kagan before she's confirmed to the Supreme Court. And I suggest we can solve this ongoing problem by forcing Supreme Court nominees to face American voters directly: Heck no, we don't know enough about Elena Kagan. Then again, we didn't really know enough about John Roberts or any other Supreme Court nominee of recent vintage. That's the way the game is played: Smart nominees shut their mouths, still their pens and aim for an air of patriotic inscrutability. Barring scandal, they end up confirmed anyway -- and only then do we find out what they really believe. Kagan will probably be no exception. Americans deserve to know more about the thinking and philosophy of the nominees who receive lifetime appointments to one of our nation's most powerful institutions. It's time to start putting our Supreme Court nominees

This Ralph Reed -- remember him? -- post at The Corner , about Elena Kagan's radical tendencies, deserves a thorough fisking. But there's one point in particular that I found interesting. And by "interesting" I mean "dishonest." In response to questions during her confirmation as solicitor general, Kagan argued the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, like freedom of speech, enjoys “strong but not unlimited protection.” This is a dangerous view of the law when it leads to the creeping erosion of the Bill of Rights. Why is this dishonest? Because if you check what Kagan said at her solicitor general hearings, it's clear that she was citing DC vs. Heller , the 2008 case that upheld gun rights. This is a fuller and untruncated quote of what she said : Once again, there is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides

When I was 21, it's fair to say that I was to the left of my evangelical Mennonite college campus on the question of homosexuality. It's not that I didn't think homosexuality was sinful -- I did, and thought the Bible fairly clear on that point; I just felt that my fellow Christians were making too big a deal about it. I've ... changed quite a bit since then. I've left the church, so "sin" doesn't really enter the equation for me; I've been -- for the past few years -- as vocal a proponent of marriage rights for gays as I know how to be. The person I was at 21 was aiming at the person I am at 37, to be certain, but the distance between here and there is considerable. All of which brings me to this: You'll be hearing a lot over the next few days about Elena Kagan's undergraduate thesis on the "sad" demise of socialism in early 20th century New York City, a kind of knowing "proof" of her (and by extention, President