Scott Lemieux


Recent Articles

One Small Step for the Fourth Amendment

AP Images/Susan Walsh
Last week, Barack Obama delivered a speech announcing some reforms in response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency. As with most aspects of Obama's record on civil liberties, my response is inevitably mixed. The outlined reforms would certainly constitute a real improvement over the status quo, but they are also too narrow and limited. Some of these limitations reflect real political constraints, while others don't. To start with the good news first, Obama has announced that some checks and balances will be restored to the NSA's inquiries under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Under current practices, the NSA doesn't need to get judicial approval to query the database of metadata it collects; it can simply make queries if it makes a self-determination that the query was "reasonable." This self-enforced reasonableness standard is functionally indistinguishable from having no standard at all. Obama announced that he was ending this practice: the database...

Can States Protect Access to Reproductive Health Clinics?

The fate of Massachusetts's buffer-zone law doesn't look promising after yesterday's Supreme Court oral arguments. 

AP Images/Steven Senne
Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in McCullen v. Coakley, which concerns a challenge to a Massachusetts law creating a 35-foot buffer zone around health clinics. The Court upheld at least one form of buffer zone in the 2000 case Hill v. Colorado. But as the Prospect 's Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux noted in her comprehensive preview of the case, personnel changes to the Court put the buffer zone on much thinner ice. Two members of the 2000 majority (O'Connor and Rehnquist) have been replaced by justices much more likely to be hostile to the law (Alito and Roberts.) The oral argument generally support this head-counting—the question appears to be not whether Massachusetts will lose but how bad the loss will be. Workers at clinics and women seeking reproductive health care may pay a substantial price. The key issue in the case is whether the 35-foot buffer zone is constitutional as a "place, time and manner" restriction on speech. Speech that would otherwise be constitutionally...

A Farce in Cooperstown

Tearing to shreds the argument against putting Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens in the Baseball Hall of Fame—or letting Deadspin have their say in the matter.

AP Photo/Duane Burleson, File

No, Obamacare Wasn't a "Republican" Proposal

flickr/Ralf Heß
The filmmaker Michael Moore has, through his fine documentary Sicko and other public arguments, done a great deal to bring attention to the deficiencies of the American health-care system. His New York Times op-ed on the occasion of the first day of the Affordable Care Act's exchanges repeats some of these important points. However, his essay also repeats a pernicious lie: the idea that the Affordable Care Act is essentially a Republican plan based on a Heritage Foundation blueprint. This argument is very wrong. It is both unfair to the ACA and far too fair to American conservatives. Before explaining why a central premise of Moore's argument is wrong, let me emphasize our points of agreement. It is true that the health-care system established by the ACA remains inequitable and extremely inefficient compared to the health-care systems of every other comparable liberal democracy. Moore, unlike some critics of the ACA from the left, is also careful to note that the ACA is a substantial...

Polyamory, the Right to Privacy, and Religious Freedom

Last week, a federal District Court judge in Utah struck down a law used to prosecute members of polyamorous relationships. Predictably, some conservatives immediately brought up the slippery slope to legalized adult incest and legal " teen sex cults ." However, the decision is a very rational and straightforward application of core principles of the right to privacy and religious freedom. It is crucial to understand, first of all, that Judge Clark Waddoups's decision in Brown v. Buhman did not "legalize bigamy." The lawsuit was brought by the reality television star Kody Brown, who lives in a polyamorous relationship with four women but is only legally married to one. Brown did not even contest Utah's limitation of marriage to couples, and Judge Waddoups deferred to a Supreme Court precedent dating back to the 19th century holding that bans on bigamy are constitutional. Rather, the decision concerns an unusual, extraordinarily broad provision of Utah law under which "[a] person is...