Salon.com > Cass Sunstein

The horrible prospect of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:27:00 +0000

A media consensus has emerged that the retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, the 90-year-old Ford-appointee who became the leader of the Court's so-called "liberal wing," is now imminent. The New York Times' Peter Baker has an article today on Obama's leading candidates to replace Stevens, in which one finds this strange passage:

The president’s base hopes he will name a full-throated champion to counter Justice Antonin Scalia, the most forceful conservative on the bench. . . . The candidates who would most excite the left include the constitutional scholars Harold Hongju Koh, Cass R. Sunstein and Pamela S. Karlan.

While that's probably true of Koh and Karlan, it's absolutely false with regard to Sunstein, who is currently Obama's Chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. From the beginning of the War on Terror, Cass Sunstein turned himself into one of the most reliable Democratic cheerleaders for Bush/Cheney radicalism and their assault on the Constitution and the rule of law.

Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 13:16:00 +0000

(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the Government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.

The tax breaks that ate America

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:27:00 +0000

Here's the latest bold new idea for reconciling the costs of national defense with the need to avoid adding to federal deficits or raising taxes. A bipartisan coalition of "New Democrats" and moderate Republicans has proposed buying weapons for the U.S. military through the IRS rather than the Pentagon. Here's how it would work. Instead of being paid to deliver planes, missiles and tanks, defense contractors would receive "weapon supply tax credits" (WSTC). The defense contractors would be able to reduce the taxes they owed the federal government by the prices of the weapons they delivered. Because the tax credit would be refundable, if the prices exceeded a firm's annual tax liability, the IRS would send a check to the firm in the amount of the difference. In this way, the federal government could finance a massive military buildup -- and because tax credits aren't counted as part of the federal budget, for official purposes the cost of the buildup would be zero!

I had you going there for a minute, didn't I? The "weapons supply tax credit" is a joke. It was proposed some years ago by the late David Bradford, a Princeton economist who worked in the Ford and George H.W. Bush administrations. Bradford's purpose was to ridicule the growing reliance of Congresses and presidents on tax credits and other so-called tax expenditures as an alternative to ordinary spending programs funded by ordinary taxes.

Glenn Beck, Republican strategist

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:31:00 +0000

Something strange has happened to rank-and-file Republicans since President Obama took office. These past few months, standard-issue gray lawmakers have sounded like fire-and-brimstone demagogues. Conspiracy theories and over-the-top legislation to fix imaginary wrongs are flying wildly around formerly mainstream GOP circles.

It turns out that like so much of what ails the world today, this can be traced back to Glenn Beck. Some fifth-term Iowa senator might be railing against death panels, but it's really Beck's voice you're hearing. With his show on Fox News, Beck has successfully positioned himself as the weirdo right's ambassador-at-large to the rest of the world. When the patron saint of the Tea Parties lets his freak flag fly, seemingly normal right-wing functionaries have been known to line up and salute. Republicans parrot Beck's crackpot notions and pet issues routinely -- sometimes running with his manias the morning after he first airs them.

The Internet is making us stupid

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:20:00 +0000

Freedom of choice is not always good for democracy. This observation is at the heart of University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein's book "Republic.com 2.0" (an update of "Republic.com" in 2001), which argues that our country's political discourse is fracturing in the information age. Sure, the Internet has been a boon to democracy in all sorts of ways, Sunstein acknowledges -- but if new technology gives us unprecedented access to information, it also gives us more ways to avoid information we don't like. Conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views, and never the twain shall meet.

Sunstein's career has bridged the political divide. As an attorney in the Justice Department's Office of the Legal Counsel, he was an advisor to both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He once clerked for the liberal Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and now teaches at the University of Chicago, known for some of its right-leaning faculty. In his free time, Sunstein advises Barack Obama, a former law school colleague.

Is the Bush administration … right?

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:27:00 +0000

By late last week, the fight between the Bush White House and Congress over the firings of nine U.S. attorneys seemed to be leading toward possible contempt charges for some former administration officials. The Bush administration had previously asserted executive privilege over certain documents and witnesses sought by Congress in its investigation of the firings, even directing former White House counsel Harriet Miers to disobey a subpoena ordering her to appear before Congress. Democratic legislators were left with the option of certifying a citation of contempt of Congress to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia in hopes of compelling Miers and former White House political director Sara Taylor to testify fully.

On July 19, however, the Washington Post revealed that the Bush administration was unafraid of contempt citations. Should Congress certify a contempt citation to U.S. attorney Jeffrey Taylor's office, it would be Taylor's duty under federal law to bring the matter before a grand jury -- but the White House will direct him not to.

Courting disaster

Mon, 12 Sep 2005 21:14:00 +0000

Imagine this: One day in the not-so-distant future you wake up to discover that the constitutional rights you've always enjoyed have been drastically scaled back -- or eliminated altogether. The United States you live in no longer respects an individual's right to privacy. The state of Utah has established Mormonism as its official religion. And many provisions of important environmental, civil rights and labor laws have been struck down as unconstitutional. And all this is not only perfectly legal but actually sanctioned by the Constitution.

Such is the bleak scenario that University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein imagines in the introduction to his book "Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America." And it's not so far-fetched. With two vacancies on the Supreme Court, conservatives have a chance to dramatically shift the bench to the right. And if it were to become dominated by more fundamentalist justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the "federalist revolution," as it is called in American jurisprudence, will result in a radical transformation of the Constitution and the concept of liberty as we know it.

FDR’s unfinished revolution

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 20:46:00 +0000

Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1944 State of the Union address was "messy, sprawling, unruly, a bit of a pastiche and not at all literary." It wasn't even delivered in the conventional sense. Too ill to appear before Congress, Roosevelt sent copies of the speech to Capitol Hill, then read it aloud over the radio from inside the White House.

No one much remembers the speech today, and the country hasn't come close to living up to the ideals Roosevelt set forth in it. But if University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has his way, Americans someday will come to think of the address as the greatest of the 20th century and -- like the Declaration of Independence -- a model for a more perfect union.

In the 1944 speech, Roosevelt proposed a Second Bill of Rights. Unlike the original, which contained mostly "negative" rights -- the right to be free of government restriction on speech, the establishment of religion, searches without warrants and convictions without trials -- Roosevelt's Second Bill of Rights promised "positive" guarantees for all Americans.