Category Archives: Blog Posts

This Congress, Your Honor?

Last week in the oral argument for King v. Burwell, Donald Verrilli got a good laugh from the audience in response to a hypothetical posed by Justice Scalia. See page 54, line 9 of the transcript. We noted this LOL moment in episode 51 (airing Tuesday), and I got to thinking, “There should be a Twitter bot that reads oral arguments and links to laugh lines.” So I accidentally pulled an all-nighter putting one together. Meet @LOLSCOTUS.

Right now, it’s working through the back catalogue, but it should catch up with current arguments pretty soon. Above, you’ll find a tweet pointing all the way back to 2002.

President Obama: A Transformative President?

During his campaign for president in 2008, then-Senator Barack Obama caused quite a stir when he said that his goal was to be a transformational president akin to Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy rather than a caretaker president in the mold of Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon. As Obama put it, he wanted to be a president who “changed the trajectory of America.” Five-and-a-half years into his term, we can now begin to consider whether he has lived up to his own lofty ambitions. Has the 44th President of the United States changed the trajectory of American history? While we do not yet have definitive answers to this question, we can at least begin to ponder President Obama’s place in history, evaluating his greatest successes and his most bitter failures (Note: This is not a question of the President’s electoral or policy victories and defeats, but rather an analysis of his presidency from the perspective of its historical impact).

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