Last week, the Senate recessed without confirming a single federal judge, a sad reminder that right-wing obstructionism has become so widespread that the World's Most Deliberative Body can no longer complete even the most basic tasks. And such obstructionism is not only a disaster for the nation, it is also...

Yesterday's hearings on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court predictably turned to attempts by the senators to suss out her position on Roe v. Wade. While this controversial opinion is certainly important, Americans--especially women--should be much more concerned about a recent line of cases dealing...

In 1986, an ambitious young United States Attorney named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was denied a seat on the federal bench because of his own deep-seated hostility to the very notion of civil rights. As a federal prosecutor, Sessions conducted a tenuous criminal investigation into voting rights advocates that...

Noted global warming denier James Inhofe, who once insisted that the United States base its foreign policy on the book of Genesis, announced on the Senate floor yesterday that he will filibuster the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Seventh Circuit. Judge Hamilton, a highly regarded district...

Justice Thomas is an odd duck. Unlike the four other conservative members of the Supreme Court, Thomas makes no bones about his desire to repeal the New Deal and the Civil Rights Era and return America to the utopian days of the Hoover Administration:

In a series of...

After a career spent driving trucks, Ed Gilleon developed a dangerous aortic aneurysm, and surgeons implanted a device known as a "AneuRx stent graft" to prevent his largest blood vessel from rupturing. Within months, Gilleon started experience tremendous pain as the device dislodged and migrated down his...

If you were unfortunate enough to read the National Review yesterday, you would think that President Obama has a stealthy plan to turn America in to Gomorrah. Obama's new judge supports abortionists! He's in league with the ACLU! His nomination is payback for ACORN!

In other...

When a jury ordered Don Blankenship's company to pay $50 million to one of its competitors, Blankenship had a plan; rather than pay the money, Blankenship decided to buy a judge. An unknown lawyer named Brent Benjamin was in the midst of a quisical election campaign against incumbent West Virginia...

Early this month, the White House floated Mark Gitenstein as a potential nominee to head the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Policy, the office of DOJ responsible for selecting new federal judges. Gitenstein, to his credit, has a truly heroic record on civil rights and civil liberties--including his...

Over a quarter of a million heart patients were implanted with Sprint Fidelis leads, wires connecting the heart to a device that slows dangerously fast heartbeats. In many patients, however, the leads were defective and electrocuted them from the inside. Fractures in the leads caused these patients to suffer painful...

As the Huffington Post's Sam Stein recently reported, three days after Bank of America accepted $25 billion in TARP funds, it hosted a conference call with movement conservatives and business heavyweights in order to organize opposition to a piece of pro-union legislation. But Bank of America's anti-worker crusade is...

Note: A version of this post appeared at my personal blog, Overruled.

Debbie Dantz worked at an Applebees, a job she desperately needed to take care of her two teenage daughters and a terminally ill father. It was not a high paying job, but because Dantz couldn't afford...