"Every once in a while a great, conflicted country gets an insoluble problem exactly right. Such is the Supreme Court’s ruling this week on affirmative action. It upheld a Michigan referendum prohibiting the state from discriminating either for or against any citizen on the basis of race. 

"The Schuette ruling is highly significant for two reasons: its lopsided majority of 6 to 2, including a crucial concurrence from liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, and, even more important, Breyer’s rationale. It couldn’t be simpler. 'The Constitution foresees the ballot box, not the courts, as the normal instrument for resolving differences and debates about the merits of these programs.'"

"If foot-dragging were a competitive sport, President Obama and his administration would be world champions for their performance in delaying the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. ... 

"Last Friday afternoon, the time when officials make announcements they hope no one will notice, the State Department declared that it is putting off a decision on Keystone XL indefinitely — or at least, it seems, well past November’s midterm elections. This time, the excuse is litigation in Nebraska over the proposed route, because that might lead to a change in the project that various federal agencies will want to consider. The State Department might even decide to substantially restart the environmental review process . This is yet another laughable reason to delay a project that the federal government has been scrutinizing for more than five years.  

"The administration’s latest decision is not responsible; it is embarrassing. The United States continues to insult its Canadian allies by holding up what should have been a routine permitting decision amid a funhouse-mirror environmental debate that got way out of hand. The president should end this national psychodrama now, bow to reason, approve the pipeline and go do something more productive for the climate."

"Justice Sotomayor argues explicitly that Michigan’s voters would have been within their rights to, for example, lobby university authorities to adopt race-neutral admissions standards but that by adopting a constitutional amendment insisting on race neutrality, thereby transferring the decision from the education bureaucrats to the people themselves and their constitution, they 'changed the rules in the middle of the game.' Her opinion is legally illiterate and logically indefensible, and the still-young career of this self-described 'wise Latina' on the Supreme Court already offers a case study in the moral and legal corrosion that inevitably results from elevating ethnic-identity politics over the law. Justice Sotomayor has revealed herself as a naked and bare-knuckled political activist with barely even a pretense of attending to the law, and the years she has left to subvert the law will be a generation-long reminder of the violence the Obama administration has done to our constitutional order. 

"The Court came to the right decision, but its fractured conclusions and the rigorous political activism of its left wing are alarming."

"Our problems from the ACA have only just begun. Excessive regulations for health insurance, such as fixing prices and profit margins while requiring bloated coverage that most people never wanted, and then minimizing the fundamental considerations of risk in pricing insurance, is a recipe for increasing premiums and reducing coverage choices. Major insurers all across the country are already declining to participate in the exchanges or limiting their offerings to plans that severely restrict choice of doctors and exclude many of America’s best hospitals. These trends are certain to worsen after the expiration of the administration’s ad hoc deadline delays. 

"Longer term, even if Obamacare doesn’t lead to an overt single payer system run by the government -- the admitted preference of the president and leading Democrats -- the future is quite predictable unless this law is drastically revised. Just as in the United Kingdom and all systems where everyone is 'insured' by government-defined health insurance, we too will soon be plagued with problems unheard of in our pre-Obama system. It’s only a matter of time until we see unconscionable waits for care, overt restrictions on access to tests, drugs, and treatments, worse treatment outcomes -- all proven by the data and the facts from floundering nationalized health systems, as we see reported in the news all over the world."

"Democratic rhetoric is becoming ever more desperate and overheated as we approach the November midterm elections. ... 

"What is going on? Increasingly, journalists who cover the White House are concluding that the smears are part of a conscious strategy to distract voters from Obamacare, the sluggish economy, and foreign-policy reverses; the attacks are intended, the thinking goes, to drive up resentment and hence turnout among the Democratic base. 

"Major Garrett, the CBS White House correspondent, has talked with White House aides who confirm that the administration is working from the theory of 'stray voltage,' as developed by former White House senior adviser David Plouffe. 'The theory goes like this,' Garrett wrote. 'Controversy sparks attention, attention provokes conversation, and conversation embeds previously unknown or marginalized ideas in the public consciousness.' ... 

"The White House, of course, denies that deliberate deception is its strategy. But they’ve been caught too often in the web of their own cynicism."

“On this glorious day, we remember our brave men and women in uniform who are separated from their families by great distances. We pray for their safety and strength, and we honor those who gave their lives to advance peace and secure liberty across the globe.  

"Happy Easter. May God bless you, and may God bless our great Nation.”

"[I]t’s true that six months after that catastrophe, people can actually sign up for ObamaCare. It’s also likely true that the program’s worst possible fate — in which it literally collapses on its own because its overall insurance pool holds far more sick people than healthy people — has been avoided. 

"But the idea that, by meeting their obligations under the law, those 7 million signers-up have thereby indicated their support for ObamaCare, or their approval of it, or have ensured its success, is simply delusional."

"Strangely, many of the same people who insist that Mr. Bundy must be made an example of for the sake of the rule of law protest at the same time that it is not only impossible but positively undesirable for the federal government to deploy federal resources to rectify the federal crime of jumping the federal border. ... 

"The relevant facts are these: 1) Very powerful political interests in Washington insist upon the scrupulous enforcement of environmental laws, and if that diminishes the interests of private property owners, so much the better, in their view. 2) Very powerful political interests in Washington do not wish to see the scrupulous enforcement of immigration laws, and if that undercuts the bottom end of the labor market or boosts Democrats’ long-term chances in Texas, so much the better, in their view. 

"This isn’t the rule of law. This is the rule of narrow, parochial, self-interested political factions masquerading as the rule of law."

"Since taking office in 2009, President Barack Obama has formally proposed a total of 442 tax increases, according to an Americans for Tax Reform analysis of Obama administration budgets for fiscal years 2010 through 2015. 

"The 442 total proposed tax increases does not include the 20 tax increases Obama signed into law as part of Obamacare. 

"'History tells us what Obama was able to do. This list reminds us of what Obama wanted to do,' said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform."

"A veteran Justice Department lawyer says that Attorney General Eric Holder has politicized the department in a way he hadn’t seen before. In short, 'Holder is the worst person to hold the position of attorney general since the disgraced John Mitchell.' 

"Now in his sixth year as attorney general, Holder has increasingly tilted the department in an ideological direction. ... 

"Of course, when you call Holder out on his biases and selective enforcement, he cries racism. ...   

"Congress is angry at Holder not because of race, but because justice is only reserved for his Democratic allies.

"His only respect for the law is his belief that he and President Obama are above it."