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.