RARELY DOES President Clinton encounter a political actor as demagogic as he is, so you could say he finally met the enemy he deserves in his fight with the National Rifle Association. The NRA fired first last week with a TV ad in which president Charlton Heston called on the president to stop…
Is crime dead as a national issue? Ever since the nation's crime rates began their historic surge in the 1960s, crime has been one of a handful of social problems that have reliably dominated presidential campaigns. The current contest, however, is shaping up as the first in 40 years in which crime…
The ideological fog that often blurs coverage of the judiciary seems particularly thick as the Supreme Court convenes this week for a new term. The press routinely describes Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, Bill Clinton's two nominees to the Court, as "centrist," or "moderate." In…
Clarence Thomas is conservatism's man of the decade and everything his enemies feared he would become. After taking some of the hardest, lowest blows ever delivered by the Left, he could easily have crumbled or compromised when he joined the Supreme Court in 1991. Instead, he held his ground. Eight…
The Smithsonian should give Dale Watson a fellowship, if only to make up for the money and stardom that have eluded him. The iconoclastic thirty-six-year-old from Austin, Texas, has emerged as a leader of the traditionalist backlash against today's country music. But rebellion in defense of…
WHEN THE AMERICANS with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990, advocates for the law spoke of common-sense accommodations for the disabled, like wheelchair ramps and braille elevator buttons. Instead, the ADA has served a different social mission: highlighting the myriad of ways in which a litigious…
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A VAGUE, sweeping civilrights law is put at the disposal of antisocial citizens famous for the variety, multiplicity, and shamelessness of their lawsuits? We may be about to find out. On April 28, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument on whether the Americans with Disabilities…
Roger M. Smith
FEW NEWS ITEMS ARE SURER TO GAIN approving attention from the media elite than social-science studies that challenge traditional childrearing practices. So it was that on August 15, newspapers nationwide trumpeted the findings of one Murray A. Straus, sociologist at the University of New Hampshire…
J. Harvie Wilkinson III
AT FIRST GLANCE, the concept of victims' rights seems to offer the closest thing yet to a consensus on the problem of crime. Here at last is ideological common ground, which explains why a proposed constitutional amendment writing victims' rights into our nation's charter has attracted wide…
Whether or not one believes that America is suffering a crisis of runaway judicial activism, there is at least a broad consensus on this point: The Supreme Court led by Chief Justice William Rehnquist has significantly weakened the protections enjoyed by criminal suspects and convicted prisoners.…
Anyone glumly anticipating another four years of Clinton judicial appointments and continued expansion of criminals' rights can find cheer in a little-noticed initiative just adopted in Arizona. Despite a fierce opposition campaign run by injudicious judges and lawyers and abetted by a hostile…
"The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body." So said Thomas Jefferson -- with fitting pugnacity -- and who would take issue with him these days, given the horrendous troubles afflicting American cities? One need not…
Whatever happened to the homeless? Not so long ago they haunted Americans at almost every turn. In our largest cities, aggressive panhandlers blocked the sidewalks by day and street people dozed on the bus-stop benches and steam grates by night. On our living room TV sets, their grievances were…
FEW ASPECTS OF THE NATION'S criminal justice system seem more nonsensical to the average person than the fact that incarcerated criminals do no work. With more than one million offenders behind bars -- the vast majority of them young men in their prime work years -- America asks its prison inmates…
In a crime-beleaguered age that cries out for both tougher crime control and greater personal responsibility, the new book by New York Judge Harold J. Rothwax carries a title that is sure to be greeted with public approval -- Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice (Random House, 238 pages, $ 22).…
Much ink and anguish have already been devoted to chronicling the shortcomings and deprivations of the variously described collection of troubled souls known as Generation X. This Xer's letter may add little to the outpouring of self-analysis other than further evidence of this generation's…
In recent years, the alarming increase in violent crime rates has proved resistant to the best efforts of police and politicians. These trends have also given us reason to reconsider the tried and true crime-control strategies that once kept American streets safe. In particular, it is time that…
In recent years, the alarming increase in violent crime rates has proved resistant to the best efforts of police and politicians. These trends have also given us reason to reconsider the tried and true crime-control strategies that once kept American streets safe. In particular, it is time that…