O-B-A-M-A. On detainee rights, on gun rights, and now on abortion, in the space of a month he’s now come out with three positions that are in direct opposition to the type of Supreme Court justice he claims he’d appoint. Moreover, the three justices he’s singled out as his model justices would take the opposite view of what Obama claims to support, and enshrine it as a part of the Constitution.
Nifty trick liberals have. “Of course I support this commonsense position and decry the Supreme Court when it enshrines extreme leftists positions as part of our Constitution. Please avert your eyes from the fact that I will appoint justices who do the thing I decry.”
Of course, if you read the story, plainly NARAL hears the dog whistle. They back Obama despite his adoption of his heterodox position, because they know that what he thinks (or, really, what any of us think) won’t matter once there are a couple more Ginsburgs on the Court.
Apollo posted this at 1:33 AM EDT on Friday, July 4th, 2008 as We don't need no stinkin' Constitution, I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!
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Yesterday morning on NPR, this guy was discussing the results of Boumedeine. He was describing a future where the government had to go before a judge to justify every single person detained in a war: to prove that the detainee had some sort of belligerent connection, and to prove that the detainee was dangerous enough to justify locking up. He then said that the government would have to reaapear before the same judge periodically and justify not releasing the detainee.
To be clear, this applied both to people arrested on the street and to people captured on the battlefield. And, to be clear, this prospect made the commenter giddy.
The longer Boumedeine sets in on me, the more it becomes apparent that it may very well be the single greatest shift of power from one branch to another that our government has ever seen. It happened without a vote being cast, and there are those in this country who have allowed their dislike of the current president to lead them to cheering on the Supreme Court’s usurpation of war fighting powers.
For the first time, I’ll define a Supreme Court decision as scary. Both in its hamstringing of a legitimate war effort, and the in the inter-branch power struggle that will most assuredly result from it. If the judiciary insists on maintaining the unstated premise of Boumedeine - that they are supreme over the wartime decisions of the president regarding how to fight a war - they will lose.
The Founders defended the lack of limits placed on the federal judiciary by pointing out that it was naturally the weakest branch, controlling neither the military nor the treasury. Some on the court seem to remember how ill-prepared they are for a real fight with the other branches. That the wisdom of the Founders is lost on the current Court should come as no surprise.
Apollo posted this at 7:04 AM EDT on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 as We don't need no stinkin' Constitution, I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!, Liberty and/or Security
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This juxtaposition is almost as good as my “Darwin Fish/Save The Pandas” one that inspired much of our panda-hatred:
1) Hello, I am a judge who believes Ohio’s method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual because it causes excess pain.
2) I love mass-murderering commie thug revolutionary Che Guevara.
Like Jonah, I feel kinda bad for Obama for getting unnecessarily dragged into this.
Tom posted this at 1:57 PM EDT on Monday, June 16th, 2008 as Dirty Hippies, I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!
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I don’t know which is more encouraging: that McCain gave a wonderful speech on judicial nominations, or that he had Fred Thompson and Ted Olson on the stage with him.
On activism:
Quite rightly, the proper role of the judiciary has become one of the defining issues of this presidential election. It will fall to the next president to nominate hundreds of qualified men and women to the federal courts, and the choices we make will reach far into the future. My two prospective opponents and I have very different ideas about the nature and proper exercise of judicial power. We would nominate judges of a different kind, a different caliber, a different understanding of judicial authority and its limits. And the people of America — voters in both parties whose wishes and convictions are so often disregarded by unelected judges — are entitled to know what those differences are.
Federal courts are charged with applying the Constitution and laws of our country to each case at hand. There is great honor in this responsibility, and honor is the first thing to go when courts abuse their power. The moral authority of our judiciary depends on judicial self-restraint, but this authority quickly vanishes when a court presumes to make law instead of apply it. A court is hardly competent to check the abuses of other branches of government when it cannot even control itself.
One Justice of the Court remarked in a recent opinion that he was basing a conclusion on “my own experience,” even though that conclusion found no support in the Constitution, or in applicable statutes, or in the record of the case in front of him. Such candor from the bench is rare and even commendable. But it was not exactly news that the Court had taken to setting aside the facts and the Constitution in its review of cases, and especially in politically charged cases. Often, political causes are brought before the courts that could not succeed by democratic means, and some federal judges are eager to oblige. Politicians sometimes contribute to the problem as well, abdicating responsibility and letting the courts make the tough decisions for them. One abuse of judicial authority inspires more. One act of raw judicial power invites others. And the result, over many years, has been a series of judicial opinions and edicts w andering farther and farther from the clear meanings of the Constitution, and from the clear limits of judicial power that the Constitution defines.
On Kelo v. City of New London, the infamous eminent domain case of 2005:
The year 2005 also brought the case of Susette Kelo before the Supreme Court. Here was a woman whose home was taken from her because the local government and a few big corporations had designs of their own on the land, and she was getting in the way. There is hardly a clearer principle in all the Constitution than the right of private property. There is a very clear standard in the Constitution requiring not only just compensation in the use of eminent domain, but also that private property may be taken only for “public use.” But apparently that standard has been “evolving” too. In the hands of a narrow majority of the court, even the basic right of property doesn’t mean what we all thought it meant since the founding of America. A local government seized the private property of an American citizen. It gave that property away to a private developer. And this power play actually got the constitutional “thumbs-up” from five m embers of the Supreme Court.
On his opponents:
For both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, it turned out that not even John Roberts was quite good enough for them. Senator Obama in particular likes to talk up his background as a lecturer on law, and also as someone who can work across the aisle to get things done. But when Judge Roberts was nominated, it seemed to bring out more the lecturer in Senator Obama than it did the guy who can get things done. He went right along with the partisan crowd, and was among the 22 senators to vote against this highly qualified nominee. And just where did John Roberts fall short, by the Senator’s measure? Well, a justice of the court, as Senator Obama explained it — and I quote — should share “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.”
These vague words attempt to justify judicial activism — come to think of it, they sound like an activist judge wrote them. And whatever they mean exactly, somehow Senator Obama’s standards proved too lofty a standard for a nominee who was brilliant, fair-minded, and learned in the law, a nominee of clear rectitude who had proved more than the equal of any lawyer on the Judiciary Committee, and who today is respected by all as the Chief Justice of the United States. Somehow, by Senator Obama’s standard, even Judge Roberts didn’t measure up. And neither did Justice Samuel Alito. Apparently, nobody quite fits the bill except for an elite group of activist judges, lawyers, and law professors who think they know wisdom when they see it — and they see it only in each other.
On many important issues — global warming, the proper size of the federal government, campaign finance, and immigration — I have serious issues with McCain. But when it comes to the four most important issues of this campaign (the War, the War, the War, judges) he’s excellent.
Tom posted this at 12:15 PM EDT on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 as I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!, Audacity of Hype
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John McCain, setting the record straight about Sam Alito:
“Let me just look you in the eye,” McCain told me. “I’ve said a thousand times on this campaign trail, I’ve said as often as I can, that I want to find clones of Alito and Roberts. I worked as hard as anybody to get them confirmed. I look you in the eye and tell you I’ve said a thousand times that I wanted Alito and Roberts. I have told anybody who will listen. I flat-out tell you I will have people as close to Roberts and Alito [as possible], and I am proud of my record of working to get them confirmed, and people who worked to get them confirmed will tell you how hard I worked.”
“I don’t get it,” McCain continued. “I have a clear record of that. All I can tell you is my record is clear: I’ve supported these guys. I went to the floor of the Senate and spoke in favor of them. It’s in the record, saying, ‘You’ve got to confirm these people.’”
John McCain has serious work to do to win votes from conservatives: campaign finance, pharma-bashing, global warming hysteria, etc. But can we please end this idiotic meme that McCain is weak on judges?
Tom posted this at 5:44 PM EST on Monday, January 28th, 2008 as I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!, Audacity of Hype
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Dahlia Lithwick:
Today’s oral argument in Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States is about nothing less than whether the Bush administration’s war on terror—endless in its geographic reach and indefinite across time—will become the instrument of the great writ’s demise.
Um, no. Here’s a nice statement of the questions the cases actually discussed. “The great writ,” as I have grown tired of hearing it called this week, has survived Edward II, Richard III, Henry VIII, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, James II, George III, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. I humbly submit that if George W. Bush intentionally set out to destroy Habeas Corpus he could not, if given 40 years in the presidency.
No, it seems to me the question is this: Is the American judiciary hell-bent on granting rights to foreigners captured by American servicemen fighting on foreign soil? If so, I suspect in future wars it will be easier to just shoot them on the battlefield rather than try to defend at their endless habeas hearings. Though I suspect it won’t much matter, since wars are petty things best managed by elderly men in black robes.
Apollo posted this at 3:17 AM EST on Friday, December 7th, 2007 as We don't need no stinkin' Constitution, I, For One, Welcome Our Judicial Overlords!
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