Cape Cod Times letter. How can Larry Brown purport to draw lessons about racism from the shooting of Breonna Taylor in his Oct. 2 column without mentioning the important fact that the man with her fired first at police who had announced themselves? When police are fired upon, they usually shoot back, for their own…
Author: Brian R. Merrick
Former Massachusetts District Court judge and Visiting Scholar in the History Department at Suffolk University, free-lance writer, residing in Cape Cod, Mass. and Cape Coral, Florida
Replacing RBG
I have written frequently here of the Kabuki theater of Supreme Court nominations. Each Senate actor has a highly scripted role to play. There are different parts to be played by the Senate actors, depending on whether they in the Majority party in the Senate and whether they are in the nominating President’s party. Following…
“The Second Most Powerful Man in the World”
With good cause, historians have long lauded General George Marshall as the central military figure in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s prosecution of World War II. As “the Organizer of Victory” Marshall swiftly morphed the tiny U.S. Army (16th largest in the world in 1936) in the second largest and best-equipped in the world by war’s end….
After the ball is over 2 …. Things Trump can do on his way out the door.
There’s a column by Ralph Nader (yes, he’s still alive) in today’s Boston Globe about Nader’s paranoid ideas of things that Trump might do on his way out, when he loses the election. Nader’s solution is for Trump to resign, so that will give you an idea of the 86 year-old’s mental processes. There’s no need…
After the ball is over …. will Trump go home?
The chattering classes are all atwitter. “Will Trump go, if he loses the election?” It all depends on who says he lost. Some of his critics still maintain he really lost in 2016. If the Electoral College results, opened and counted by Vice President Mike Pence in the presence of a Joint Session of Congress…
The Demonization of William Barr
Expanded from a letter in The Boston Globe, June 20, 2020 The House Democrats unavailing efforts to smear Attorney General William Barr during his recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee were only the latest in a steady drumbeat of criticism of Barr by the Democrats. I have written previously of Attorney General Barr’s qualities….
Textualist Gorsuch and the Oklahoma Reservation
Wall Street Journal letter (This letter was in response to a Wall Street Journal editorial “The Tempting of Neil Gorsuch” criticizing Judge Gorsuch for joining the four liberal justices in ruling that much of eastern Oklahoma was still an Indian reservation. Congress had passed a law creating the reservation and never repealed or replaced it. Chief Justice…
In the Age of the Coronavirus
In spite of being quarantined for several weeks I have avoided writing here about the Coronavirus Covid-19. I am not trained in the subject of viruses and their prevention and treatment. I have, however, in these last weeks read a great deal about it, most of it written by people who don’t seem to know…
Whose Prosecutorial Discretion Is It, Anyway?
News outlets and social media are aflame with denunciations of Attorney General William Barr’s order to change the prosecutor’s sentencing recommendation to the judge in the case of Roger Stone, a gadfly Trump supporter. The excitement was created by the dramatic “resignations” of four Assistant U.S. Attorneys who had originally submitted a memo recommending a…
Schiff gives the game away
I have been afraid to turn the TV on these last few days, lest I encounter …. Adam Schiff. At one point though, half-listening, I thought I heard him say something so outrageous, I couldn’t believe it. I rewound the TV to see if I was mistaken. I wasn’t. In my last entry here, Undermining…
“Woke” Law
Boston Globe Letter . In the story about a lawsuit over an assault in a Boston University dormitory, the Globe reports that BU’s lawyers raised the argument of the student’s failure to use the sturdy door lock provided (“Dorm assault tests colleges’ supervision,” Page A1, Jan. 5). According to the article, “in response, Suffolk Superior…
Undermining Confidence in Elections
Letter in Cape Cod Times Columnist Larry Brown is quite right that “If we lose our confidence that elections are fair, democracy falls apart” (“2020 will be the year of tipping point choices,” Ideas & Opinion, Jan. 3) He is also certainly correct that Donald Trump in 2016 said that an election loss by him…
MonkfishOnCape 