This week, a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing asks the question, "what should America do about gun violence?" As usual, the primary focus is on guns rather than those who misuse them, but unfortunately both President Obama's and Sen. Dianne Feinstein's proposals will do little to keep guns out of the...

Convention week is a good time to reflect on campaign spending and the controversies over the Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The battle-lines around that controversial decision have been clearly drawn along partisan lines -- so clearly, in fact, that it seems increasingly impossible...

Aaron Sorkin's new HBO show The Newsroom is dishing out and receiving a lot of criticism. The Newsroom is Sorkin's latest attempt to cleanse the demons from our national character through fast-talking characters fighting for their principles. This time, however, rather than just obliquely commenting on the political...

The sordid history of crony capitalism in America was highlighted in Hettinga v. United States, a recent opinion by Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Contrary to popular belief, that history didn't begin when big businesses...

The challenge to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, has come a long way since then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi incredulously asked "are you serious?" in response to a reporter's question on its constitutionality. As oral arguments before the Supreme Court near, the Court should show Pelosi just how...

In the past week, many commentators have used the second anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee to reiterate their critiques of the controversial decision. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Public Citizen's Robert Weissman, for example, write that the decision "poisoned...

Economist Jeffrey Sachs has joined the critics who, over the last year or so, are dismissing libertarianism as a simple-minded philosophy. In "Libertarian Illusions," Sachs takes libertarians to task for "championing liberty to the exclusion of all other values." "Libertarians," Sachs writes, "hold that individual liberty should never...

If you were running for office and you knew that for every dollar you spent the government would give a matching dollar to your opponents, would this affect your decisions on how, whether and when to spend money on getting your message out? And if you had three opponents who...