sift test 2

In this week's Sift

• Immigration.
• The Sift Bookshelf: The Miscellaneous Shelf.
• Short Notes

 

Immigration

Obama’s speech

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UU General Assembly

 

The Sift Bookshelf: The Miscellaneous Shelf

I usually review the same kinds of books other political blogs do: something recent and relevant to an issue of the day. Well, it's summer, so the heck with that.

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Short Notes

More and more people -- the NYT, for example -- are starting to notice that judicial activism is a conservative vice, not a liberal one. I had an unusual experience while at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Minneapolis: I saw a play about somebody I know.

Everybody knows that the Supreme Court banned government-sponsored prayers in public schools sometime in the 1960s. Church-and-state legal wonks know that the key case was Abington School District v Schempp, which started when Ellory (now Ellery) Schempp -- then 16 years old -- read from a Quran rather than a Bible during the assigned Bible-reading time in homeroom. (Ellery has never been a Muslim; he designed his protest to show how the law had established Christianity as the official religion.)

But only a handful of people know that Ellery and I now go to the same church: First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts.

Anyway, the play: It’s called “One Step Braver” by Nick Schweitzer. Schweitzer says he wrote the play to be performed by and for high school students, to show how a determined teen-ager can change the world. There’s also a book about the case.

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Bonddad gives a primer on the lagging employment picture.

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Republicans hate to be called racists, but they rarely miss a chance to make some racially coded or racially clueless statement. Why on Earth would they turn the Kagan hearings into a denunciation of Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice and the lawyer who won Brown v Board of Education?

Of course, they claim, their problem with Marshall wasn’t his race, it was his “judicial activism”. So TPM decided to drill a little deeper on that:

After the hearing broke last night, TPMDC asked three of the top Republicans on the Judiciary Committee which of Marshall's opinions best exemplified his activism. And while two of the three were careful to praise Marshall the man, none of them could name a single case.

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