Archive for Justice Antonin Scalia

Retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor: “I think there are many who think of judges as politicians in robes.”

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Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor spoke at the Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel on history, ethics and law. In that speech, she expressed her opposition to the election of judges, saying the following, per the Chicago Tribune:

“I think there are many who think of judges as politicians in robes. In many states, that’s what they are.”

No way! Whatever could have put that crazy idea into her head? Of course that wasn’t what GW Bush had in mind at all, right, when he and the GOP packed the courts with conservative judges; yet Republicans now refuse to so much as consider President Obama’s judicial nominees.

O’Connor prefers to think of judges as, you know, impartial and independent, fair and unbiased. How novel.

Instead, she said, people “seem to think judges should be a reflex of the popular will” and that judges “need to avoid sitting on cases if even a whiff of bias can be detected.”

Are you listening, Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito?

More at the link.

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George W. Bush’s Presidential Library Is a Fraud: He Was Installed in a Right Wing Putsch

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

Of Thursday’s dedication of the George W. Bush presidential library, NPR headlines an article that details how President “Obama’s Bush Library Speech Leaves Iraq And More Unspoken.” [...]

[I]t’s hard not to underscore that the George W. Bush presidential library is really a fraud.

After all, Bush was never elected president….

The coup was openly revealed in Scalia’s infamous stay of a state-mandated recount (Bush, by the way, as governor of Texas signed a bill that would have made a recount in Florida automatic if the vote were as close in Texas as it officially was in the Sunshine State) …  In short, Scalia is saying that if Bush lost after a recount it would hurt his reputation as president since the Supreme Court would install him in the White House no matter what the voters decided in Florida. (Remember that Al Gore won the national popular vote by more than 540,000 votes.) [...]

There is so much evidence related to the stolen election of 2000, all of which amounts to sophisticated voter theft strategies that would make a banana republic proud. [...]

Last week according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Bush said that he has no regrets about his presidency [...]

Thieves rarely have regrets unless they get caught.

It is ironic that President Obama praised his predecessor at the library dedication, when Obama’s State Department  is claiming that the Venezuelan election to replace Chavez is suspect.

Please read the entire post here.

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Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Alito “use their power against the very people they ought to protect”

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anti gay  run kids via Slap Upside the Head

Today’s L.A. Times letters to the editor, because our voices matter:

Re “Experts defend gay parenting,” April 6

With more than 40 years of experience in education as a teacher, school director, principal and headmaster, I find Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia‘s concern that the children of same-sex couples may suffer harm to be, at best, ignorant.

The children I’ve dealt with who were the product of same-sex relationships were healthy both physically and emotionally. Their parents were concerned and proactive with regard to their children’s development, and there was no discernible difference between their level of dedication and that of their heterosexual counterparts.

There is little doubt that children have a clear advantage when growing up in a nurturing and loving home. Scalia and his colleagues must understand that a positive home atmosphere can be achieved in a gay or straight setting.

Howard Karlitz

Marina del Rey

***

In expressing concern for the children of same-sex couples, Justices Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Samuel A. Alito Jr. asserted that there’s considerable disagreement among experts.

That these men dismiss “30 or 40 years of studies” by academics is astonishing. What happened to the blind eye of justice? It seems that these men allow their prejudices to affect their decisions.

That these justices have lifetime appointments is appalling enough, but that they use their power against the very people they ought to protect disgusts me.

Jimmy Garner

Palm Springs

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Cliff Notes: GOP has “pre-pubescent angst fueling vitriolic rage… Not a legislative or legal strategy. But it sure feels good.”

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 fight

My dear friend and mentor, Cliff Schecter, has a new post up; Cliff has given me permission to share his work with you, so I’ll give you the latest edition of what I call Cliff Notes.

He skewers better than a chef at Smokey Joe’s BBQ. He has comedic insights that rival those of our mutual friend, the hilarious Lizz Winstead. He’s sharper than the point on Sarah Palin’s pin head.

Here are a few excerpts from his latest, with permission. Please read the whole thing, because he has way more than I’ve included here:

Praise be to Judge Antonin Scalia, for he sees what the rest of us do not. The man for whom nasty, brutish and short is not simply a political formulation, but a mirror image, can look at hundreds of years of slavery, 100 more of legalised segregation and another 50 of daily discrimination and see “racial entitlement” in the basic right to vote in America. I guess it’s kind of like the right-wing-clown entitlement enjoyed by our current Supreme Court. [...]

Policy-wise, the GOP is an entity that literally lacks any new ideas, has no interest in governing, and has rejected all of its own policy positions [...]

You believe in global warming? Then they don’t, dang it! You accept that human beings didn’t ride saddleback on a brachiosaurus into the Battle of Little Bighorn? They have an App for that, the Creation Museum, where you can ride Noah’s Ark with your friendly Triassic-period imperial walker. You offer them way-too-friendly a deal on the budget? Then as Cartman from South Park says, “screw you guys… I’m going home”. 

The most potent example is the rise and fall of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie as conservative heartthrob. [...]

Meanwhile, Antonin Scalia seems to size up any crowd he’s in and think to himself, what would a Morlock do? And then does it. [...]

The key to McCain, as I argued in my 2008 book The Real McCain (to the horror, the horror! of mainstream media back then… who these days have pretty much come to agree with this analysis) is that he legislates via anger. [...]

Whether calling his wife some really bad names, bum rushing fellow members of Congress or condescendingly and heartlessly lecturing a mother whose son was killed in the Aurora-Movie-Theatre massacre that he has “straight talk” for her, one thing you can count on is that McCain will bring the bitter with a healthy-helping of McNasty (his high school nickname). This is what allows him to survive his occasional maverick-ness on issues like immigration. Well, that and the fact he switches his positions every six years just in time for re-election. 

Pre-pubescent angst fueling vitriolic rage. Sure, it’s not a legislative or legal strategy. But it sure feels good.

Cliff Schecter is an author, pundit and public relations strategist whose firm Libertas, LLC handles media relations for political, corporate and non-profit clients. 

Follow him on Twitter: @CliffSchecter

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Cartoons of the Day- Scalia and the Voting Rights Act

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scalia1

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Via.

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Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sticking around

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A girl can dream

I’m not a subscriber, so the only info I can provide you on the New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin is what I can access and what Taegan has posted.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg turns eighty this month, and she can project the daunting stillness of a seated monarch.

Per Taegan, Justice Ginsburg tells  she intends to stay on the court “as long as I can do the job full steam.”

Said Ginsburg: “There will come a point when I — It’s not this year. You can never tell when you’re my age. But, as long as I think I have the candlepower, I will do it. And I figure next year for certain. After that, who knows?”

If only Justices Scalia, Alito, and/or Thomas would throw in the towel. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

how can i miss you if you won't go away

By the way, irony is not dead. Scalia said the following during the oral arguments on the Voting Rights Act:

Via Think Progress: Noting the fact that the Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed 98-0 when it was before the Senate in 2006, Scalia claimed four years ago that this unopposed vote actually undermines the law: “The Israeli supreme court, the Sanhedrin, used to have a rule that if the death penalty was pronounced unanimously, it was invalid, because there must be something wrong there.”

Scalia’s nomination sailed through the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate, winning confirmation by a vote of 98-0.

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Scalia Tips His Hat That Supreme Court Will Further Crack Down on Gun Control

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 (Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)

(Credit: Reuters/Yuri Gripas)

Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

In a little noted speech reported in the conservative Washington Examiner, the leading Supreme Court judge who regularly legislates from the bench, Antonin Scalia, signaled that he is ready to further rule in favor of more guns in more hands, with even fewer restrictions than now.

[...]

USA Today reported that Scalia teased Totenberg before an audience at the Smithsonian Associates:

Asked if the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is as unequivocal as the First Amendment’s right to free speech, Scalia said, “We’re going to find out, aren’t we?” — an indication he expects the court to hear a gun rights case in the near future.

“There are doubtless limits (on gun rights), but what they are, we will see,” Scalia said.

But as with his remarks this week contemptuously dismissing Congress’s repeated renewal of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) – and his claim that the VRA is nothing more than “racial entitlement” – Scalia is once again signaling his role as the radical right wing SCOTUS enforcer.  Scalia is a cross-breed between the Federalist Society and the Tea Party – sort of a brown shirt with a Harvard legal degree — in this case on assault weapons and big guns, Scalia apparently regards anything that can shoot a bullet as Constitutional, only drawing the line at rocket launchers that can bring down aircraft. How extreme is that?  It makes the NRA look like moderates.

The immoral limits of Scalia’s ideological fervor appear to have few limits.  More than once, BuzzFlash at Truthout wrote commentaries on Scalia’s astounding assertion: “Scalia Ruled That the Constitution Doesn’t Prohibit Executing an Innocent Man in Troy Davis Case.” As we observed in one of our columns:

Because it was during an appeal to the Supreme Court in 2009 on behalf of Davis that Scalia – and BuzzFlash is not making this up – actually wrote a dissenting opinion that there was nothing in the Constitution that prevented a state from executing an innocent man (or woman). [...]

If the Constitution doesn’t protect us from being executed even if we are innocent, then, Houston, we have a fundamental problem of human rights in America.

[...]

Scalia is a dangerous man. He should be in a loony bin for self-styled intellectuals who scorn all brains but their own (“I think, therefore it is the law” is his motto), where he would not be such an ongoing threat to the nation.

Please read the entire post here.

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