Reason Needs Your Money So That Damon Root Can Keep Pissing Off Supreme Court Justices!
Reason this week is asking you, our beautiful customers and loyal antagonists, to donate your hard-earned Bitcoin to our annual Webathon. Thanks to an anonymous challenge donation, you can double your money's effectiveness in the process, so that we can deliver even more of the hard-hitting libertarian journalism and analysis you've come to love. Like that from Senior Editor Damon Root.
What are Mr. Root's bonafides? Try this: How many other reporters do you know who are singled out for criticism by retired Supreme Court justices looking to bolster their own tattered reputations? That's right, former Justice John Paul Stevens mentioned Damon by name—twice!—in a speech defending the Court's indefensible decision in the Kelo v. City of New London eminent domain case. Apparently the ex-justice was not pleased about the fact that in Root's review of Stevens' memoir, he accurately described that 5-4 decision as an "eminent domain debacle." As George Harrison once sang, boo frickity hoo, John Paul!
Damon Root is so good about the Supreme Court, particularly the effects of the increasingly influential libertarian legal movement upon it, that he has a brand new book out on the subject titled Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. Here is what they're asying about it in the The Wall Street Journal:
Confident, competent telling. In particular, [Root] powerfully illustrates that Holmes, Brandeis and Frankfurter—the most overrated justices in our history—had not the foggiest notion of the Constitution.
A related fun fact about Damon: He can see the legal future clearer than Omen II.
In an August 2011 column on Obamacare, back when all the Smart People were predicting a legal rout at the Supreme Court, Root predicted that Chief Justice John Roberts "may very well uphold the health care law as an act of judicial restraint," which Roberts promptly did 10 months later. Seriously, almost nobody saw that coming. Except the craft beer–swilling, metal-loving, award-winning scribe with the goatee.
And for those of you who glaze over at the sight of grown human wearing comical robes, Root also serves up juicy historical profiles of forgotten and/or surprising libertarian heroes:
- Frederick Douglass, classical liberal
- Moorfield Storey, libertarian co-founder and first president of the NAACP
- T.R.M. Howard, Mississippi civil rights activist, entrepreneur, and advocate of armed self-defense
- Herbert Spencer, opponent of racism, sexism, and imperialism
Important final note: Damon is in no way related to Wayne Allyn Root. In case you were wondering.
