With Thursday’s 13-to-5 vote endorsing the nomination of John Roberts to be chief justice of the United States, the Senate Judiciary Committee was acknowledging the obvious — Roberts’ sterling credentials and seemingly bottomless legal knowledge. Some of the "yea" voters also rightly were taking Roberts at his word, however incomplete that might have seemed, that he would rule by the law and not by ideology or personal religious views. Time will tell whether senators’ trust was misplaced, but for now, Roberts seems an excellent nominee and deserves easy confirmation in the full Senate next week.
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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30 Comments
Dearest Rhonda,
Now that we’ve pretty much got a moderate to lead the court, it’s time to nominate a conservative!
Hank
Can somebody explain why Supreme Court justices receive a lifetime appointment (unless they resign of course)? Does that apply to all federal judges? And what about Kansas Supreme Court judges?
The US Constitution defines terms (or lack of them) for Supreme Court Justices. The intent was to make them autonomous..not answerable to voters or public opinion, but answerable only to the strict interpretation of the law. Thus the “checks and balances” idea of the Constitution. It doesn’t always work, but is a cool idea.
Unfortunately, the law is not easy to interpret..it is not black and white, but almost all gray.
Being fairly new to Kansas, I have no clue about the state court. Several other state Supreme courts have defined term limits.
More specifically, article 3, section one of the Constitution says in part that justices:”shall hold their offices during good behaviour..”
That line has been held to mean there is no term limit, since there are specific terms spelled out for the other two branches of the federal government. Yes, that also applies to other federal justices.
Still no clue on Kansas tho, sorry.
The Dems are in disarray. Don’t know what they’re for, or against.
On this one, Jiminy is right. A sad day for the Democratic Party, a sadder day for America.
Oh the contrary, there is a real need for more moderates. The extreme of either side has done too much damage to this country.
At the end of the day, we are all Americans. That is what is important not which side you stand on. It is time for the moderates to stand up and return the Neo-cons and the liberals in their place. It has become apparent that they can not do the job.
Huh, R.D. Liebst. And what liberals in power are the ones who need to be ‘returned to their place’? The Supreme Court doesn’t HAVE any liberals.
Everything that made the 20th century great was accomplished by liberals: the New Deal, Civil Rights for African-Americans, the GI Bill.
I fail to see how these policies and initiatives in any way ‘damaged the country.’
CF
If Ruth Ginsberg, who believes that a 13 year old girl has a constitutional right to cross state lines and have an abortion without parental consent, is not a liberal please explain to me what your definition of a liberal is.
If Stephen Breyer, who feals that foreign legal precedent should hold sway over what our Constitution means, is not a liberal, you have me confused.
When you used the term ‘liberal’ were you talking about the classic libertarian type liberal or the progressive socialist type liberal who tend to be members of the Democrat party today?
You must mean the classic definition because the prog. soc. demo. liberals were the ones fillibustering all of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation in congress for decades.
Please clear this up for me if you could.
Heckler,
So ‘progressive socialist type’ liberals like Hubert Humphrey were the ones filibustering civil rights for decades? If you’re going to run that Wingnut revisionist history, you can kiss my white ass, Heckler. Guess that Wingnut Kool-Aid has more sinister effects than just turning your tongue red.
The filibusterers weren’t progressives: they were Dixiecrats. And once Civil Rights passed, most of them (Thurmond, Helms) migrated to the Republican Party.
This is the point where you gleefully start shrieking ‘Robert Byrd!’ And here’s where I say: big deal. Byrd has repudiated his earlier racist votes time and time again, and his voting record backs it up.
If I can accept that George Wallace changed, Heckler, you should have the intellectual honesty to do the same for Robert Byrd. The African-American voters of his state agree with me, not you.
Of course, this whole line of attack is just designed to distract from the GOP’s use of anti-black racism to consolidate its base. It’s the Rove strategy: go after your opponent’s weakness and turn it into a strength. ‘Liberals are racists!’ In the wake of Katrina, we’ll see if that line of attack works for you, Heckler. God knows y’all need SOMETHING to shift blame away from the GOP’s political uses and abuses of African-Americans.
CF
You didn’t answer my question about Ginsberg and Breyer.
My point about civil rights is that it wasnt Republicans holding it up. To say that Liberals are solely responsible for the Civil Rights acts and voting rights acts is “revisionist history”. Democrats were a vast majority in both houses of congress but a higher percentage of Republicans voted for these things than did Democrats.
Democrats controlled Louisiana for 60 years. Why are all those people so poor? It should be paradise.
Back to judges, If Breyer and Ginsberg arent Liberals what are they? Talk about out of the mainstream, you look at what these people write and say, you’d swear they were from Sweden or someplace like it.
Democrats have to vote for this guy to have any credibility whatsoever. But watch what they do to the next judge if Bush nominates a strict constructionist. It’ll make what they did to Bork and Thomas look like a birthday party.
The Progressive/Socialist wing of the party knows that their entire agenda over the past 40 years has been possible only because of judges who have made decisions that have twisted the constitution into something the Framers wouldnt even recognize.
When you hear someone refer to the Constitution as a “living document” you know 2 things. They don’t like the constitution, and they know they can’t get the votes to change it so they have to depend on activist judges to twist it to their liking.
Heckler,
The only ‘activist judges’ I see are the ones hell-bent on overturning established precedent: Scalia, Thomas, and (possibly) Roberts. The Rehnquist court overturned more established precedent than any other court in history.
The ’strict constructionist’ judicial approach is an ideological fiction. Who KNOWS what the original intent of any of the framers was? To say that we can know this and then read it back into/upon them is a joke. If the Constitution isn’t living, it’s dead.
I’ll respond to your Breyer / Ginsburg question when I have a little more time at my disposal.
CF
“Seperate but Equal” was Established Precedent for FIFTY YEARS, it didnt mean Plessy V Ferguson was a good decision. I know that you would not argue that we should still honor that decision. Precedent means nothing on the Supreme Court and it shouldnt. Otherwise bad decisions like Plessy would live on forever.
JWink–Supreme Court justices have lifetime appointments, true. But they can be removed by impeachment, the same as what Ken Starr et al. tried to do to Clinton.
Clearly, Scalia and Thomas should have been impeached after they stopped the full and fair recount to insure Bush’s “victory” in Florida by 531 votes out of 6 million cast.
Bush v Gore will go down in history as the worst Supreme Court decision since Plessy v Ferguson. Most Americans don’t know, for instance, that because of that ruling, they no longer have a Constitutional right to vote.
Talk about “interpreting the Constitution,” hoo boy!
Heck,
I’ll give you credit. You been listening to the right-wing line faithfully for a long time now.
Let’s say that Bader Ginsburg and Breyer are as liberal as you can get, just for argument’s sake.
So that would make two liberals, two moderates (Souter and Breyer), two conservatives (O’Conner and Kennedy), and three reactionary bastards (Rinequist, Scalia, Thomas).
All but something like two of the justices were nominated by Republican presidents.
But that’s not good enough for you. Nope, you want them ALL like Scalia and Thomas.
Heaven help us if that ever happens.
Oops, I meant two moderates (O’Conner and STEVENS).
Galahad
The state of Florida had very clear laws regarding how recounts are to be done. For some unknown reason the Florida supreme court decided that the law didnt matter, that the votes could be recounted the way Algore wanted them recounted. All the US supreme court did was say,no if you are going to recount them you are going to recount them all, just like Florida law says to do.
A media consortium led by the New York Times, no bastian of conservatism, recounted all the votes state wide by 5 different standards. Gore lost, anyway they counted them.
Galahad it’s time to MoveOn.
Judges can only be impeached for personal conduct, I guess for breaking the law or coming to work drunk, but they can’t be impeached for making lousy decisions.
Souter and STEVENS.There, finally got it right.
(They really need an edit feature on this blog.)
Hehehe, nice re-write of history, there, Heck.
The Florida Court ordered a recount. The Supreme Court stopped it.
They gave it to Bush for pure partisan reasons.
End of story.
BTW, the media consortium found that Gore would have lost if they had recounted only part of the state. Had they recounted the entire state like the Florida court wanted them to do, Gore would have won.
Heck, it’s time for you to stop living in a right-wing fantasy and join the reality-based community.
Wishing doesn’t make it so . . .
BTW, how can you call the court “liberal” when only two of its members even approach liberal?
Seven to two is still liberal?
Galahad all I want is for them to make decisions based on 2 criteria, in order, 1. What does the constitution say, 2. What did the framers mean. (if it can be reasonably determined from what they said in speaches, newspaper columns, private journals etc.)If a decision cannot be made based on those 2 criteria it’s not up to them to decide. It’s a legislative matter.
It’s not their job to make law, it’s not their job to set societal standards.
I don’t think I called the court liberal did I? I think I only referred to 2 members of it.
In the Florida case Gores attorneys only wanted to recount specific districts, which was a violation of Florida law, and they wanted to count them by a different standard than was prescibed by Florida law. The Florida Supreme Court said sure, ignore the law, do what you want. The US Supreme Court said no, that violates the “equal protction” clause, you have to count the entire state using the same standard of what constitutes a legal vote.
MoveON.
Galahad
I do agree with you about the G.I. Bill, it created a whole generation of college graduates, whose children mostly became college graduates….etc. It was a case of teaching men to fish, not giving them fish.
Heckler….give ‘em hell!Regards,J
“Had they recounted the entire state like the Florida court wanted them to do, Gore would have won.”Just another Left Lie. Where do you come up with this crap, Galahad?
Heckler,Great posts, and your facts are accurate. I’ve seen Galahad dragged over this subject before, but he prefers the same old party line.
The failure of Gore to let the election happen in accordance with Florida law was as crass a political move as I’ve seen in my lifetime. True, our election processes are occasionally (or regularly, depending on your point of view) riddled with errors and fraud, so that the only way to have a certain win is to win BIG; but that does not mean the results of close elections ought to be dragged out for months while lawyers haggle. The Constitution has a strict timetable in order to avoid just that.
Nixon knew he could have challenged the Illinois results and probably could have wrestled the election from Kennedy, but he chose not to. Gore didn’t rise to that level of statesmanship.
The final facts of the Florida election are these: no legal count of the votes, done in accordance with Florida law within the timetable of the US Constitution, showed Gore to be the winner. Later recounts by media groups, including one led by the NYT, also showed that Gore lost. Odd how little press the NYT’s results got in the NYT.
Okay, here’s the evidence, well buried by the “liberal” media.
On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recounthttp://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.htmlalso from the CNN story
Inclusion of overvotesIn addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate’s name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of victory.
And in more user-friendly terms, this from commondreams.org:Gore and the Florida Supreme Court ignored overvotes – votes where mechanical counting registered more than one vote – on the assumption that there would be no way to tell which of the multiple candidates the voter actually intended to pick.
But as the consortium found when it actually looked at the overvotes, one often could tell what the voter’s intent was. Many of the overvotes involved, for example, a voter punching the hole next to a candidate’s name, and then writing in the same candidate’s name.
Since the intent of the voter is clear, these are clearly valid votes under Florida law. And Gore picked up enough of such votes that it almost didn’t matter what standard you used when looking at undervotes – whether you counted every dimple or insisted on a fully punched chad, the consortium found that Gore ended up the winner of virtually any full reexamination of rejected ballots.
So there are two main findings: The Supreme Court’s intervention probably did not affect the outcome of the limited recounts then under way, and more people probably cast valid votes for Gore than for Bush.
And from Slate.com
Everything the New York Times Thinks About the Florida Recount Is Wrong!It turns out the U.S. Supreme Court really did cast the deciding vote …By Mickey KausPosted Tuesday, November 13, 2001, at 1:18 AM PTSlate.Just when you thought the Florida recount story was settling down into a familiar bitter partisan dispute, the Orlando Sentinel has changed the story line again. The Sentinel, remember, was the paper that first uncovered the hidden cache of valid, uncounted “overvotes”—seemingly double-voted ballots that, as the massive media recount of Florida has now confirmed, were the key to a potential Gore victory, if only he had known it.
Gore got more votes than Bush. A half a million more votes.
All the spin in the world won’t eliminate the fact that your guy was not elected by a majority in 2000.
Galahad
If you don’t like the Constitution (the Electoral College) change it, there’s a process for doing that you know.
If someone is to stupid to follow the insructions for voting properly I for one don’t want them voting.