Sandra Day O’Connor rebukes the incitement to violence against judges that’s current policy for the right.
Archive for the 'Supreme Court' Category
I remain unconvinced of the value of a filibuster - though I certainly don’t believe the hype about its negative consequences (What, Republicans may finally start saying mean things about Democrats?). But this factoid shows how spineless the Dems have become:
Had everyone who opposed Alito backed a filibuster, he wouldn’t be a Supreme Court Justice today.
It instead they voted for him before they voted against him.
Kevin Drum is asking what the confirmation of Alito means for the emerging liberal blogosphere.
Certainly I think it speaks volumes that Washington - that is the elected Democrats and the insular consultants who feed on their failure - still sees blogs as an ATM and not yet a part of their message machine. I think it’s clear that blogs are the liberal version of talk radio (you get more mileage out of getting something on Atrios, Dailykos, etc. than you would on Air America right now, for instance) and if Democratic politicians were remotely interested in doing something more than add some bling bling to their campaign coffers, they’d really work the blogosphere (John Kerry, this means you, who all of a sudden “discovered” blogging last week).
But I think the failure to even present a remotely coherent case against Samuel Alito falls squarely on the head of the legal eagles on the progressive side. The primary reason for groups like People for the American Way, Alliance for Justice, etc. to exist is to be the front line of defense for Supreme Court nominations. These guys were around a long time before anyone had a freaking clue what blogging or the internet were.
It speaks volumes when you fail at your organization’s primary mission. Not that their mission was to stop Alito - I don’t know that that was ever possible simply because we didn’t have the numbers - but that Roberts and Alito both sailed through the process unassailed. The Republicans had Progress for America and the Committee for Justice (among others) on their roster - and the left just got rolled.
Why? For the same reason the national Democrats have been getting rolled - they’re fat and dumb and playing the game by the rules of the ancient. An election is a contest of each party’s ability to get the faithful energized and the swing vote convinced. Something like a supreme court nomination, the intracacies of which bore the heck out of Joe America (for good reason) are supposed to be the kind of thing that a political movement can rally around.
Somehow I don’t think the progressive legal infrastructure has been girding up all these years in order to produce the Phil A. Buster cartoon.
It’s amazing how broken the whole thing is. Time to take a match and burn the danged thing down.
I feel bad for Samuel Alito. No, not because of the right-wing “you made Alito’s wife cry” nonsense, but because he was second choice to Harriet Miers. That’s going to eventually be a historical footnote, but damn.
It’s almost ironic
The Bush administration is mounting an aggressive effort to counter a Knight Ridder story that described Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as a committed judicial conservative.
The administration’s response - delivered separately Tuesday by the White House and the Justice Department - reflects its determination to defend Alito and its sensitivity to the “conservative” label for him.
The attack came after Senate Democrats circulated Knight Ridder’s assessment of Alito’s judicial record for possible use against him at his confirmation hearings next month.
Looks like a smoking gun
Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. was an architect of the Reagan administration’s failed 1985 attempt to have the high court consider overruling Roe v. Wade, according to a memo from the period released today.
Alito, then assistant to the solicitor general, urged his boss to use a case before the court to “make clear that we disagree with Roe v. Wade and would welcome the opportunity to brief the issue of whether, and if so to what extent, that decision should be overruled.”
Poll finds public support for Alito lags behind Roberts
Early support for Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is considerably weaker among such key groups as evangelicals, Republicans and the wealthy than it was for John Roberts, an AP-Ipsos poll found.
The survey put public sentiment for Alito closer to the level of early backing for the failed nomination of Harriet Miers.
Our first in the Alito nomination reminds the American people how we came to this nomination a complete capitulation by President Bush to the demands of the radical right of his party. The ad reminds the American people that the right-wing Alito is nominated to replace the far more mainstream conservative Sandra Day O Connor, the swing vote who safeguarded many of our most precious rights and liberties.
There won’t be any hearings until January 9.
Harriet Miers gave money to Hillary. Hillary Clinton.
What’s the sound of 1,000 freepers wailing? Listen.
I gotta say, I’m enjoying watching the Cons beat up on each other over the Miers nomination. Based on what I’ve seen so far, Miers is in way over her head, but the hearings may clear away some of the questions.
I am curious about what backroom deals the White House struck with James Dobson, and hope he is brought up to the Senate to testify.
Miers espoused progressive views as elected official, records show
In what appear to be some of her only public statements about a constitutional issue, Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers testified in a 1990 voting rights lawsuit that the Dallas City Council had too few black and Hispanic members, and that increasing minority representation should be a goal of any change in the city’s political structure.
It just gets better.
Recent Comments