Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the restrictions that have been placed on corporate money in politics. The ruling may be one of the Court’s most critical decisions in an age which has seen one Presidential campaign accumulate almost a billion dollars in contributions. When the constitutionality of any far reaching federal law is opposed, it is a matter of national relevance, however, when a law affecting the foundation of the Democracy is challenged, such event should be arousing everyone’s notice and should be at the forefront of all news media outlets.
The case in front of the Supreme Court, Citizens v. Federal Election Commission, revolves around a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” produced by Citizens United. Based on Hillary Clinton, the film was banned for violating the McCain-Feingold bill which requires disclosure on funding sources, and stipulates that neither corporate or union treasuries can finance any “ad” pro or con just before a primary.
The 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), also known as the McCain-Feingold bill, was the last major piece of legislation passed to control the source of financing for Federal political campaigns. The bill eliminated soft money donations to the national party committees, and restricted the funding of political pronouncements, ads, etc., by corporations, or organizations such as unions and non-profit organizations.
The arguments and presentations beginning today in front of the Supreme Court, will address a question all voters should take a stand on. Are your rights to free speech the same as the rights of corporations or organizations? Corporations and organizations are not individuals, they do not have the inherent rights of the people, nor do they have the same privileges. They are vehicles created and used by society for diverse purposes. Voters should seek to minimize their further influence on the political process and on the political landscape.
You will hear and read arguments whining that the government is treating organizations big and small, unfairly by prohibiting election advocacy, and is in effect imposing censorship. Some suggest that such treatment of organizations provides them less protection in the eyes of the law than is provided to individuals. The suggestion that organizations should be equal to individuals under the law twists the interpretation of the Constitution beyond common sense, and ignores the fact that current laws provide organizations with rights and privileges not available to individuals. Let’s not let anyone convince us that organizations are “persons.” Read the rest of this entry »
Greetings from Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada where I am visiting my folks. I’ve been following the Sotomayor confirmation hearing via the blogs when I can, haven’t seen any of it on TV, but what I’ve read on the blogs is pretty much what I expected. She is pulling an Obama flip-flop on her earlier views to get into power. Here is a liberal law professor’s views:
I was completely disgusted by Judge Sotomayor’s testimony today. If she was not perjuring herself, she is intellectually unqualified to be on the Supreme Court. If she was perjuring herself, she is morally unqualified. How could someone who has been on the bench for seventeen years possibly believe that judging in hard cases involves no more than applying the law to the facts?
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Perhaps Justice Sotomayor should be excused because our official ideology about judging is so degraded that she would sacrifice a position on the Supreme Court if she told the truth. Legal academics who defend what she did today have no such excuse. They should be ashamed of themselves.
Actually I don’t think there is an either/or here. She is both intellectually and morally unqualified. Here’s Ed Whelan on another flip-flop:
Judge Sotomayor’s exchange with Senator Schumer on foreign and international law (available towards the end of this transcript) is either incomprehensible or disingenuous.
As I have documented, Sotomayor has defended freewheeling resort to foreign and international law while positing an unintelligible distinction between “use” of foreign or international law and “consider[ing] the ideas that are suggested”by international and foreign law. Among other things, she said that Justices Scalia and Thomas, in “extensively criticizing the use of foreign and international law in Supreme Court decisions,” misunderstand that imaginary distinction. She stated that she “share[s] more the ideas of Justice Ginsburg in thinking or in believing that unless American courts are more open to discussing the ideas raised by foreign cases and by international cases that we are going to lose influence in the world.” And she spoke approvingly of recent instances—Roper v. Simmons and Lawrence v. Texas, specifically—in which the Court “looked … to foreign law to help us decide our issues.”
But today Sotomayor seemed to say virtually the opposite.
So the Sotomayor confirmation hearings begin and we now get to see if the Republicans will just roll over and wag their tail, as they have proven to do over the years, or actually grow a pair and take her and her racist beliefs head on. Technically it won’t matter, since she has the votes anyway, but during the tenure of the last Democrat President we got Ginsburg and Breyer. Two horrible, ultra-liberal, justices and how many Republicans voted no on them? 3 and 9 respectively.
With Sotomayor there is no reason for any Republican to vote yes on someone who doesn’t value the Constitution and on someone who is obviously a activist judge. But apparently they’re hoping to get 23 no votes out of 40 Senators.
Republicans came out firing at this morning’s confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, as Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, accused Sotomayor of being prejudiced.
Citing a controversial racial bias case in which a fire department discarded the results of a qualifying test when black firefighters scored too low, Sessions said Sotomayor was biased in favor of the minority employees. Read the rest of this entry »
Apparently, not enough justices on the court who decide their cases on the basis of race!
Court rules for white firefighters over promotions
By MARK SHERMAN The Associated Press
Monday, June 29, 2009 11:19 AM
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.
New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.
The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide and make it harder to prove discrimination when there is no evidence it was intentional.
“Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer’s reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
More from our screwed up judicial system that makes you go “huh”? Do these guy in lower federal district courts (or Circuits, for that matter) pay *any* attention whatsoever to the SCOTUS?
…. For nearly two years, Mr. Padilla was held in complete isolation and denied all access to the court system, legal counsel and his family. He was subjected to mistreatment including, but not limited to extreme and prolonged sleep and sensory deprivation designed to inflict severe mental pain and suffering; exposure to extreme temperatures; interrogation under threat of torture, deportation or even death; denial of access to necessary medical and psychiatric care; and interference with his ability to practice his religion. In the year and a half Mr. Padilla remained in the Brig after he was granted limited access to legal counsel, much of this severe abuse continued.
Padilla’s attorneys’ argue that it was Yoo’s legal memoranda that provided proximate legal basis for his “severe abuse”.
Jim Manzi on the argument from the left that Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” comment is being taken out of context:
I’m not so sure it looks better in context.
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…Sotomayor makes the indisputable point that decisions made by judges are at least partially impacted by their biological characteristics and life experiences. Human judgment clearly plays a role in such decisions; hence the need for human judges, as opposed to “law interpreting algorithms” in the first place. A key point, of course, is that in the passage under consideration, she goes beyond this and asserts not just that her decisions would therefore be different than those made by a white male but “wiser.” What she doesn’t address is that if we take a relativist approach to making judgments, how can one judgment said to be wiser than another? What is the objective standard of wisdom to which she implicitly appeals when making her assertion?
This opens up what I think is the much more serious problem with her speech. She attacks an extreme position (a cartoon really): that there is literally no role for inherently subjective human judgment on the bench. That is, she disputes the cartoon of absolute objectivity. Fair enough. Of course, this is not exactly a new insight. It seems to me that a thoughtful jurist would then be compelled to find the limit condition to subjectivity, or else assert that there is no such limit. In other words, is anything asserted by any judge equivalently valid as an interpretation of the law as any other statement? Is there any such thing as law, really? Or is it all just rhetoric used in support of power politics? With no stopping condition the legal philosophy that refuses to accept the idea of objectivity becomes legal nihilism: The law is whatever those who have the loyalty of the armed forces say it is, or more precisely, act as if it is.
Completely valid arguments because if we go full circle on their being no absolute objectivity then there really is no law, only the dictates from those in power. I’m sure the left would love that when their guy is in power but I have a feeling they wouldn’t be too keen on the idea when a conservative is at the head of the table. Read the rest of this entry »
The Wall Street Journal got their hands on a recording of the Ricci v. DeStefano hearing that is much talked about when Sotomayor’s name comes up.
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During the audio you will hear Judge Pooler, Judge Sotomayor and the attorney for the firefighters, Karen Lee Torre. There are a few interesting snippets from the audio like when Judge Pooler asks of Torre why shouldn’t Hayden v. County of Nassau dispose of the Ricci case. Torre says in effect that in Hayden no one was hurt. Pooler says that no one was hurt in Ricci either at which point Torre interrupts and says:
No one was hurt? For heaven’s sakes, judge, if they didn’t refuse to fill the vacancies, these men would be lieutenants and captains. How can you say they weren’t hurt? They’re out $1,000 a piece. Half of their marriages were strained by this. They spent 3 months of their lives holed up in a room like I was and you were when we took the bar exam.
Torre also does an outstanding job of detailing why throwing out an exam in favor of an easier one would cost lives: Read the rest of this entry »
In 2001, President George W. Bush nominated former Justice Department lawyer Miguel Estrada to a seat on the federal courts of appeals. In that instance, as today, the nominee was was a Hispanic with a compelling story and impressive qualifications. And some of the very people who are today praising Sotomayor spent their time devising extraordinary measures to kill Estrada’s chances.
Born in Honduras, Estrada came to the United States at 17, not knowing a word of English. He learned the language almost instantly, and within a few years was graduating with honors from Columbia University and heading off to Harvard Law School. He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, was a prosecutor in New York, and worked at the Justice Department in Washington before entering private practice.
Estrada’s nomination for a federal judgeship set off alarm bells among Democrats. There is a group of left-leaning organizations — People for the American Way, NARAL, the Alliance for Justice, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the NAACP, and others — that work closely with Senate Democrats to promote Democratic judicial nominations and kill Republican ones. They were particularly concerned about Estrada.
In November, 2001, representatives of those groups met with Democratic Senate staff. One of those staffers then wrote a memo to Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin, informing Durbin that the groups wanted to stall Bush nominees, particularly three they had identified as good targets. “They also identified Miguel Estrada as especially dangerous,” the staffer added, “because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment. They want to hold Estrada off as long as possible.”
It was precisely the fact that Estrada was Hispanic that made Democrats and their activist allies want to kill his nomination. They were determined to deny a Republican White House credit, political and otherwise, for putting a first-rate Hispanic nominee on the bench.
Apparently being dirt poor is only a virtue if you are a Democrat!
Shortly after President Obama announced his nomination of Sonia Sotomayer to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by retiring Justice Souter the “news” media chirped in cheerful chorus the line about Sotomayor’s “compelling life story.” With all the gushing going on in the liberal media over Sotomayor’s modest upbringing it’s no wonder they didn’t find the time to explore her background and inform readers and viewers about Sotomayor’s controversial views and decisions.
Conservatives may recall how the “news” media ignored the dirt poor story of Clarence Thomas or the immigrant to greatness rise of Miguel Estrada, whom President Bush nominated to the Federal Bench and Democrats filibustered.
Slublog writing at Hot Air contrasts the treatment Sotomayor received from the NY Times editorial board to that given Clarence Thomas:
NYT: Political considerations, life experience only good if we like the results by Slublog Hot Air
May 27, 2009
The New York Times editorial board has nothing but praise for Judge Sonia Sotomayor today, plus a frank acknowledgment of the politics at play:
If Judge Sotomayor joins the court, it will be a special point of pride for Hispanic-Americans — as it was for Jews, blacks and women before them to see one of their own take a seat on the highest tribunal in the land. It will also bring the paltry number of female justices back to two. And as Democratic Party strategists have no doubt calculated, the selection could give Mr. Obama and his party a boost with a key voting group.
Jeffrey Rosen has written a few times about Obama’s SCOTUS nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, and her “compelling” life story. Compelling? Whatever….so is Justice Thomas’ story. That didn’t help him a whole lot during confirmation tho.
What’s even more interesting is the view of her from those who have worked with her:
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to a range of people who have worked with her, nearly all of them former law clerks for other judges on the Second Circuit or former federal prosecutors in New York. Most are Democrats and all of them want President Obama to appoint a judicial star of the highest intellectual caliber who has the potential to change the direction of the court. Nearly all of them acknowledged that Sotomayor is a presumptive front-runner, but nearly none of them raved about her. They expressed questions about her temperament, her judicial craftsmanship, and most of all, her ability to provide an intellectual counterweight to the conservative justices, as well as a clear liberal alternative.
The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was “not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench,” as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. “She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren’t penetrating and don’t get to the heart of the issue.”
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Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees. It’s customary, for example, for Second Circuit judges to circulate their draft opinions to invite a robust exchange of views. Sotomayor, several former clerks complained, rankled her colleagues by sending long memos that didn’t distinguish between substantive and trivial points, with petty editing suggestions–fixing typos and the like–rather than focusing on the core analytical issues.
Some former clerks and prosecutors expressed concerns about her command of technical legal details.
The ones he did find who had a favorable opinion of her almost all brought up the fact that she doesn’t wilt like a flower under heavy pressure. Read the rest of this entry »
President Barack Obama talks with Judge Sonia Sotomayor after announcing her as his choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, May 26, 2009. Obama nominated Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, selecting a woman who would be the court’s first Latino. Obama’s choice of the liberal Sotomayor, a 54-year-old judge on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, was unlikely to change the ideological balance of the high court because Souter, 69, was part of the panel’s liberal wing.
REUTERS/Larry Downing
President Obama speaks to Judge Sonia Sotomayor after announcing her as his choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter in the East Room of the White House, May 26, 2009. REUTERS/Larry Downing
Richard Epstein rakes Obama over the coals for the reasoning behind his SCOTUS pic:
Evidently, the characteristics that matter most for a potential nominee to the Supreme Court have little to do with judicial ability or temperament, or even so ephemeral a consideration as a knowledge of the law. Instead, the tag line for this appointment says it all. The president wants to choose “a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.”
Obviously, none of these factors disqualifies anyone for the Supreme Court. But affirmative action standards are a bad way to pick one of the nine most influential jurists in the U.S., whose vast powers can shape virtually every aspect of our current lives. In these hard economic times, one worrisome feature about the Sotomayor nomination is that the justices of the Supreme Court are likely to have to pass on some of the high-handed Obama administration tactics on a wide range of issues that concern the fortunes of American business.
He spends most of the article on just one subject, one we should all be worried about with a Sotomayor nomination, the intrustion of government into business. We saw how Obama works with his bullying of AIG and the automakers, and there is definitely more of this kind of crap to come: Read the rest of this entry »
Will Republicans be able to oppose the first Hispanic woman for the court?
Obama played the race card, followed by the sex card and the liberal card today when he picked federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor as the nation’s first Hispanic Supreme Court justice on Tuesday.
Was his choice a person to serve ALL Americans on the court or one specifically selected to advance the rights and agenda of specific groups and ideology? You decided:
Curt posted the video of Judge Sotomayer declaring that courts are where “policy is made.” That will be news to the Senators who review her qualifications.
Sotomayer believes women are better judges. She said that women, particularly Hispanic women “would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male.”
Carrying that theme further she insisted that “gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging.” She went on to add that “I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society.” So much for equality before the law!
This is only the start of what we know about her and there will certainly be more to come, both good and bad, in the days to come. For Republicans in the Senate the question will be: does she have the judicial temperament and qualifications to serve on the court? If so, most will likely vote for her. If not, they must oppose her vigorously.
SCOTUS released their 5-4 decision in Ashcroft v. Iqbal today… with Kennedy writing for the majority opinion, and siding with the conservative side of the Supreme robed ones. (see opinion at at the bottom of this post)
Iqbal is a Pakistani Muslim who, in 2002, was detained for a year in NYC following the 911 attacks, and spent six of those months in solitary confinement. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy and fraud, and was deported to Pakistan after serving a 16 month sentence.
Iqbal then filed a lawsuit saying his Constitutional rights were violated based on discrimination of race, religion and national origin. Attorneys for Iqbal argued that “Ashcroft and Mueller personally crafted, approved and directed the implementation of these discriminatory policies.”
On Sept. 27, 2005, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York refused to dismiss all of the claims, noting that “the post-September 11 context” supported Iqbal’s assertion of petitioners’ personal involvement, and that “some of the defendants, in disclaiming responsibility, suggest that other defendants (who also disclaim responsibility) were personally involved.”
On June 14, 2007, a three-judge panel on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit also ruled that the lawsuit could proceed.
In asking the Supreme Court to review the case, the Bush administration argued that Cabinet-level officials should not be held liable for the actions of their subordinates.
In short, this is a lawsuit about “supervisory liability”. And while the SCOTUS opinion does, on the surface, appear to fall on the side of the officials responding to a national emergency, the majority opinion leaves open the possibility of remanding to lower courts, amending the “deficient” petition.
No one should be surprised that one of the judges on Obama’s short list to replace Souter said the following: (h/t Verum Serum)
“All of the legal defense funds out there– they’re looking for people with court of appeals experience. Because court of appeals is where policy is made. And I know, I know this is on tape and I should never say that because we don’t make law. [Laughs] I know. I know. [Laughter] I’m not promoting it, I’m not advocating it, I’m…y’know.”
Ha Ha….so funny Sonia
It’s hilarious to Judge Sonia Sotomayor, but she does acknowledge this is what she believes and even acknowledges she isn’t supposed to utter those words.
