It’s rare for Supreme Court justices to rib their robed brethren in open court. But that’s what Justice Stephen Breyer apparently had in mind when he said recently that the court’s conservative bloc was advocating the very thing that conservatives have long reviled: judicial activism. Read the rest of this entry »

Sitting on a couch in a penthouse hotel suite just blocks from the White House, Ayad Jamal al-Din lets cigar smoke curl in lazy trails around his head as he considers the fate of his nation. “I am not hopeful that Iraq can yet fly alone,” he says. It is a familiar refrain that the 49-year-old cleric, a fiercely secular Shiite, conveys to anyone in Washington who is willing to listen. Read the rest of this entry »

When Postmaster General John Potter told U.S. News back in September that the best way to get the U.S. Postal Service back on its feet was to cut back service to five days, it seemed like a distant and not-too-pressing eventuality. But with the USPS on track to lose more than $7 billion next year and hundreds of billions more in the coming decade, Potter and the management team launched a reform campaign this week. It’s designed to win support in Congress and among the public for shuttering post offices, raising postal rates, cutting home delivery service to five days a week, and shrinking staff. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an old maxim in Washington that when politicians are either unable or unwilling to tackle a problem directly, they appoint a commission to give the issue more intensive study. So it was lastweek when President Obama created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, a bipartisan group of 18 souls charged with solving perhaps the country’s most vexing and pressing public-policy problem—red ink. Read the rest of this entry »

John Yoo’s book Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power is getting good reviews from historians. But Yoo is perhaps more accustomed to criticism, given that he coauthored some of the controversial Bush administration memos regarding the use of torture to interrogate suspected terrorists when he served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003. Yoo, currently a professor at the University of California-Berkeley law school, spoke with U.S. News about the history of presidential power, the “supersized executive,” and how the government should handle suspected terrorists. Excerpts: Read the rest of this entry »