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Stories tagged with “Stuart Taylor”

Yglesias

The Stuart Taylor Standard

By Matthew Yglesias on Jun 1, 2009 at 10:43 am

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A great catch from Scott Lemieux who takes a look into the archives to see how National Journal legal affairs columnist Stuart Taylor thought we should evaluate Samuel Alito:

Alito’s critics have similarly ignored much evidence that his 15 years of steady, scholarly, precedent-respecting work as a judge tell us more about him than a handful of widely (and misleadingly) publicized memos that he wrote more than 20 years ago.

But what about Sonia Sotomayor?

And some may see Sotomayor’s [innocuous] letter [written as an undergraduate] as evidence that she was predisposed to look for the worst, not the best, in the institution that had afforded her such opportunities. She now sits on Princeton’s Board of Trustees.

As Scott says “if I understand correctly, memos Alito wrote directly about important constitutional issues while applying for an important government job should be disregarded, but letters that Sotomayor wrote as a student are somehow important despite their utter lack of relevance to any discernible constitutional issue.”

Yglesias

Stuart Taylor Slams Sotomayor

By Matthew Yglesias on May 27, 2009 at 10:44 am

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In 2001, Judge Sonia Sotomayor delivered a lecture on diversity at the University of California in which she said she “hopes that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Stuart Taylor in National Journal takes a brave stand for whitey:

[U]nless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.

Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

Leaving aside the fact that this is an inane commentary on a strained reading of Sotomayor’s remarks, let’s take some time out for a political observation. I had assumed that the way this was going to go was that conservatives would complain that Sotomayor is too liberal, then progressives would try to imply that conservatives were opposing Sotomayor because she’s too Latina, and then conservatives would whine. Instead, though, a large proportion of conservative really do seem to want to more-or-less explicitly hang their hats on the idea that Sotomayor is too Latina for the Supreme Court and that she must be stopped to protect white male privilege.

Meanwhile, glancing at the National Journal masthead I’m able to note that at least one institution in America has resisted the temptation to hire a bunch of unqualified Hispanics.

Media

Stuart Taylor: Obama Should Conduct Illegal Surveillance

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 5, 2008 at 10:16 am

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A pretty stunning Stuart Taylor column in the National Journal:

Civil libertarians are rightly outraged by the brutality of some Bush administration interrogation methods; by Bush’s denial of fair hearings to hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo and elsewhere who claim that they are not terrorists; and by his years of secretly and perhaps illegally defying — rather than asking Congress to amend — the badly outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But the civil libertarians’ outrage does not stop there. Indeed, the prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists. This despite the paucity of evidence that any innocent person anywhere has been seriously harmed in recent decades by governmental abuse of wiretapping, surveillance, or data mining.

On these and similar issues, Obama will have a choice: He can give the Left what it wants and weaken our defenses. Or he can follow the advice of his more prudent advisers, recognize that Congress, the courts, and officials including Attorney General Michael Mukasey have already moved to end the worst Bush administration abuses — and kick the hard Left gently in the teeth. I’m betting that Obama is smart and tough enough to do the latter.

Kicking the term “Bush critics” around is a huge red herring in this context. Bush is going to be out of office on January 20th. If anyone conducts illegal (or “inappropriate” to use Taylor’s newspeak term) surveillance of anyone, it’s going to be Barack Obama. Similarly, nonsensical talk of giving “the hard Left” a gentle kick in the teeth is neither here nor there. For years now the sensible center has engaged in the weird conceit that dislike of illegal violations of Americans’ constitutional liberties is some kind of odd symptom of possessing unduly vocifierous dislike of George W. Bush. But the issue, of course, extends far beyond Bush. The issue is whether or not we’re going to have meaningful limits on the power of the federal executive to conduct surveillance. Taylor thinks we should be so petrified of the risk of terrorist attack that we say “no.” After all, being illegally wiretapped never killed anybody.

I, for one, don’t want to live in that country. We already saw in the middle of the twentieth century where unlimited surveillance power leads — to massive politically motivated abuse. And of course it’s true that nothing J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon ever did with their unlimited surveillance power ever “seriously harmed” anybody in the way that being killed by a terrorist harms you. But it still wasn’t a good idea to let them do that. American democracy can — and in fact has — survived a large-scale terrorist attack. But it can’t survive if the threat of terrorism is taken to mean that there should be no meaningful restrain on executive power.

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