Many on the political and legal left—including, perhaps most prominently, Glenn Greenwald—have routinely expressed their staunch disapproval of the Obama Administration’s handling of civil liberties in the realm of national security. Their bill of particulars is lengthy and spans his entire presidency; a small but notorious sampling of these charges [...]
Today’s national Civil Rights dialogue focuses largely on immigration, reproductive issues, and LGBTQ rights. Certainly, each of these issues critically requires our nation’s attention, but they should not be discussed to the exclusion of “old fashioned” racial discrimination. The African-American Civil Rights Movement is the foundation upon which these movements [...]
CR-CL’s Executive Editors for Online Content, Noah Kaplan and Matt Giffin sort through the issues that may point progressives away from voting to re-elect Barack Obama. Does being progressive mean voting for Democrats, or should progressives send a message to the president that we expect more?
Given the consequences of the Farm Bill, one might surmise that Congress spends a long time weighing costs and benefits before foisting it upon us. But in the parallel universe of Washington DC, that’s not quite how things work.
Prior to hearing the news of Thursday’s tragedy in Minneapolis, CR-CL’s Executive Editors for Online Content, Noah Kaplan and Matt Giffin sat down to discuss why the United States hasn’t seen any renewed vigor in the gun control debate following the multiple mass shootings over the summer. Noah and Matt also talk about the wave of Voter ID laws sweeping the country.
This summer, the Supreme Court quickly dispensed with a campaign finance law from Montana in American Tradition Partnership, even though the state argued that there was, indeed, a history of corruption that gave the state a compelling interest in limiting independent campaign expenditures. This decision did not speak explicitly about judicial elections, but a more recent decision of the 9th Circuit has invoked Citizens United to weigh in on a different speech issue concerning judicial elections, making the relationship between money, speech, law, and politics deliciously convoluted.
SAT Scores are down nationwide, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday. According to recent data from The College Board, the average SAT score for the class of 2012 was 1055, out of a possible 2400. College readiness is indicated by a minimum score of 1550. Thus, 57% of test takers [...]
Noah and Matt give their brief reactions to United States v. Alvarez, Miller v. Alabama, Arizona v. United States, and NFIB v. Sebelius. Noah and Matt take a look at Mitt Romney’s recently leaked closed-door comments. The discussion turns to the recent protests and violence in the Middle East over the YouTube video negatively depicting Islam.
If teachers are paid well, which in Chicago they are, then they should expect to perform their work the same way other professionals, e.g., lawyer, doctors, engineers, financial professionals, perform theirs. Teachers should expect to be hired to perform to a certain expectation of success, to be compared to the success of their peers at achieving those expectations, and to be fired if they consistently fail to meet them. The ultimate result would be the achievement of the one thing that all sides in this fight seem to agree that they are working, the best possible education for Chicago’s public school students.
Rather than condemning the profligacy of the State in providing basic human rights for its most marginalized, we must continue to demand positive rights for all. Demanding humane treatment of inmates is substantively necessary, but can also be strategically valuable because it is one of the few spaces in our jurisprudence that recognizes the language of positive human rights.
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