Every few years, some Republican leader gets caught giving voice to a stubborn and persistent yearning for the racial dynamics of the era preceding the civil rights movement — a yearning that remains a foundational, defining ethic for at least some GOP members. In 2002 it was then-Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi, who at a…

About a week after 9/11, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case that began in a sleepy, college town in upstate New York. That case, Brown v. City of Oneonta, involved one of the most egregious cases of racial profiling in decades. An elderly woman in the upstate New York college town reported…

At a time when a group nostalgically calling itself the Tea Party is wreaking havoc on the political scene and people are walking around wearing tricorn hats and spouting Patrick Henry bromides, Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele has reminded us of the flaws in our original Constitution and in its framers. He has also undermined…

President Barack Obama’s pick of Solicitor General Elena Kagan to fill the seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens is widely regarded as the safest choice the president could make. She was just confirmed to her seat as the government’s counsel to the Supreme Court by a 61-31 vote last year. Seven Republicans voted in…

Police misconduct has been back in the news lately. Two incidents in particular may encourage the Obama administration’s Justice Department to take a more aggressive and comprehensive stance against police brutality and systematic coverups of police misconduct. Parents, college administrators and residents across the state of Maryland have been up in arms since videotape surfaced…

It’s not illegal or even unethical for the wife of a Supreme Court justice to consort with those on the political fringe, but to borrow a phrase recently deployed by Chief Justice John Roberts, it’s “very troubling.” Virginia Lamp Thomas has never made any secret of her affiliation with the right-wing of the Republican Party,…

I’ll admit that I also felt uncomfortable during this year’s State of the Union address when members of Congress stood up and cheered in support of President Obama’s criticism of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the case in which the court dismantled congressional efforts to curb corporate contributions…

With little fanfare, the FBI announced in an article in the Washington Post last week that it was closing its investigations into all but a handful of unsolved civil rights era murders. The head of the FBI team assigned to investigate these cold cases stated that “there’s maybe five to seven cases where we don’t…

It would be difficult to overstate the significance and revelatory import of the Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision in North Austin Municipal Utility District(NAMUD) v. Holder – the case that challenged the constitutionality of section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.  We learn that the conservative plurality on the Court (minus Justice Thomas) has a pretty…

Remember when being the president just meant that you were “the decider”? This was the golden age of George W. Bush, when it really seemed like anyone—anyone—could be president. If we’re honest, it is only the model of the George W. Bush presidency that enables so many people to imagine that Sarah Palin could run…