Doug Kendall

Fifty-eight years ago today, the Supreme Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, striking down racial segregation in public schools and signaling the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow era. While Brown's status as an iconic victory for civil rights remains unquestioned, there...

Rank and file members of the tea party have no idea what the Constitution they purport to revere actually says. Don't believe this? Watch this damning video produced by Constitutional Accountability Center's Brooke Obie, who was at the Court with a video camera for oral arguments over the Patient Protection...

As the Supreme Court's conservative majority stands poised at the edge of a cliff -- debating whether or not to strike down the Affordable Care Act and pick a very large fight with Congress and a sitting President -- two conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the...

In the lead-up to next week's historic, six-hour Supreme Court argument on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), the press and commentariat remain focused almost exclusively on the challenge to the ACA's minimum coverage provision (which requires many Americans to obtain health care insurance or...

In justifying his threat to obstruct the confirmation of every single Obama judicial nominee in response to the President's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) had the chutzpah this weekend to lecture President Obama about the fact that the "Constitution is...

Do we need a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. FEC? Should opponents of the ruling pressure the Supreme Court to reverse course, and also seek changes in the composition of the Court through the appointment process? The answer is yes. That is the...

President Obama announced today that he will use his constitutional authority under the Recess Appointments Clause to install Richard Cordray as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three commissioners to the National Labor Relations Board, despite Republican efforts to prevent this by keeping the Senate in pro-forma...

As the work of the debt-reduction Super-Committee approaches its climax (or anti-climax) next week, the oversized role of tax lobbyist Grover Norquist has dominated the conversation, including this page one story in today's Washington Post, which confirms that a growing, bipartisan collection of Members of Congress is backing...

November 8, 2011 will be remembered as the day conservatives broke with the tea party. It's too early to know whether this is a short term separation or the beginning of a long-term divorce, but one thing's already clear, yesterday was a tea party disaster, both with political losses and...

This week, the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, also known as the "Super Committee," will hold as many as two public meetings in advance of their late-November deadline for action. Many questions loom over the Super Committee's work, but perhaps the biggest is whether the stripped-down process...

Tea partiers have a complicated relationship with the Constitution. They frequently profess their love for the document, yet they also seek to fundamentally alter it, for example by eliminating birthright citizenship and by inserting a crippling balanced budget amendment. However, one section of the document that...

Representative Michele Bachmann's historical blind spots have been well-documented over the past few months. At a recent speech courting New Hampshire primary voters, Bachmann mistakenly placed the first battle of the Revolutionary War in New Hampshire instead of Massachusetts. While a relatively simple mistake, it was curious coming...

A year ago, the U.S. Supreme Court's October 2009 Term featured not only the Court's blockbuster ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but also a success rate for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce reaching 81% (or 13 wins in 16 cases) (PDF). This focused...

University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey Stone and I have both come to Huffington Post many times in recent years to talk about the U.S. Constitution, how to respond to attacks by Tea Partiers and other conservatives on our Nation's founding charter, and how the Constitution is a...

Judicial independence depends upon the public's confidence that the federal judiciary is something more than a third political branch. Correspondingly, judicial independence has never been more imperiled than it is today, for at least two reasons.

One is that for the first time in the modern era, with the retirement...

When I was growing up, my mom warned me each fall about Halloween candy with a hidden razor blade. As a parent, the thing I'll be most scared about this fall is the prospect of Tea Partiers coming to my child's school dressed up like James Madison to "teach" the...

Last Monday, State Senator John McComish (R-AZ) was at the Supreme Court to hear arguments in McComish v. Bennett -- a challenge he brought to Arizona's Clean Elections Act, which provides public financing for candidates accepting limits on campaign fundraising activities. On Thursday, McComish had to admit that...

In the first big campaign finance case since the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion last year in Citizens United v. FEC, the Court will hear arguments on Monday in McComish v. Bennett. McComish is a critical test for the Roberts Court. Will it tolerate, or will it...

One hundred and fifty years ago this week, Abraham Lincoln gave his first inaugural address as president of the United States. While many Americans remember the Gettysburg Address, or even Lincoln's second inaugural -- both of which are inscribed inside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC -- fewer...

Yesterday, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson ruled that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The organization I run, Constitutional Accountability Center, will be dissecting this monstrously wrong opinion in detail over the days and weeks ahead.

For now, I wanted to...