Well…I really didn’t plan on writing a second day about the courts but the actions of the judges appointed by repubs have gotten to the point where someone has to say something….after Obama a went on record saying he believed that the ACA should and would be upheld and if the supreme court struck it down it would need a very good reason…and not the “broccoli” defense that Scalia put forth in oral arguments…a republican appointed appeals court judge, Jerry Smith, had the gall to demand that the justice department and by extension, Obama, explain his comments in a written response to the judge…nevermind that the president gets to express his opinion about the political ramifications of court cases….this judge doesn’t have the power to request anything from the executive branch. I just marvel at the audacity of the repubs these days who spent the last 3 years decrying the “overreach” of the courts, and then cheer when one of their own vastly oversteps his power to score political points with the fox news talking points of the day. This just shows the rot that has permeated the “modern” repub party where the traditions of the separate branches of government and the checks and balances that are outlined in the constitution are just to be ignored when they sense a political advantage can be gained….and this rot has reached all the way to the supreme court and the right wing judges who are poised to impose their warped view of justice on the American people….geez…
Tag Archives: Supreme court
Activist judges and the right…
Well…I find it funny how things flip and flop in the political arena, especially when it comes to “activist judges” that the right seems to decry until the judges are the conservative bloc on the supreme court. I don’t even know why the right calls themselves conservatives anymore…that used to mean a reverence for the institutions and traditions of the country including hundreds of years of legal precedence know as “stare decisis” that they now want ignored by the court to further their radical right wing agenda. That is not conservatism, it is radicalism cloaked in the robes of Scalia, Roberts, and the others that blatantly lied about their reverence for the traditional role of judges…to find the facts in relation to the law leaving politics outside of the courtroom….but these “justices” see their roles as co-equal legislatively to the congress and are ready to ignore the constitution to further the goals of the tea party whose rise has done more to coarsen the political discourse and ruin the art of compromise on which democracies function. I hope the Roberts court does throw out the ACA….then we can get to where we need to be in healthcare…poised to go to a single payer system whose purpose will be to provide affordable care for all Americans…not profit for a few…geez…
It’s about the social contract…not healthcare…
Well…just another short one on the arguments that happened on the ACA in the Supreme Court and the fact that I think that people are missing the point of the whole thing….I can understand why some on the right don’t want to be “forced” to buy healthcare under the new law…but, how many of them are already forced to by the fear that a health problem will bankrupt them? What’s the difference between the two? How many of them have ever canceled their insurance in the name of freedom? You can probably count them on one hand. But, this whole argument has never been about healthcare to me….it is whether or not we we still have a social contract where we work for the common good of the society and where, sometimes, in that society we have to make compromises that will benefit the whole while placing a small burden on each of us as individuals. That is what the individual mandate is…a small burden for the majority of us that will help the 50 million people who can’t afford the peace of mind that comes with being insured….but, those on the right, including the debate audience that when asked about an uninsured person needing care to save his life and chorus sung out “let him die” are actively tearing down the social contract that has served this nation so well over the past 200 plus years….what kind of a country will we have left when those on the right get what they want…back to the days of “I’ve got mine, everyone else can go to hell” that prevailed in the early 20th century….I’m glad I’m getting older and won’t be around to see it if the right wins…geez…
The law and ACA…
Well…don’t know how long this one is going to be but I did want to comment on the supreme court and the ACA…aka Obamacare and the arguments that have been going on this week….one of the things that strikes me is how the conservatives have strayed from the traditional role of the court; deciding on whether a law is constitutional or not…with the questions that have come back from Alito et al…I can see the worst kind of judicial activism at work…where they are trying to set policy and write law when that is not their job, and I can see the ignorance of the roles of the three branches government that these conservative justices are showing. It is not their job to look at policy and implementation of laws and the effect of those policies, but that is what those on the right on the court have been doing during the arguments, usurping the traditional role of the legislative branch to write laws and placing themselves as equals to that lawmaking. We can see from the decisions that this court has made in Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and now the ACA that the conservative justices feel they are only there to further the right-wing conservative agenda…ignoring precedent that reaches back to the founding of this nation for crass political advantage….now that we have seen this worst kind of judicial activism, it should make you realize that the court needs to be reformed…and the only way to do that is to re-elect Obama and hope that just one of the conservatives leaves the court so a justice who has respect for the law can replace him…geez…
Who cares what the supreme court does on healthcare?
Well…I have been kind of interested in the implementation of the new healthcare law since it would allow me to buy insurance again that I can’t afford now…but, that’s not I want to talk about right now…I really want to talk about the political implications of the supreme court taking up the case for the individual mandate before the fall elections. Some of the pundits on the right think that no matter what the decision is, they have a winning issue for the general….but I see it differently…let’s take the either/or of the decision and see where that will take us. So, if the court rules against the individual mandate, I see the immediate result that the dems will be able to use the decision to connect it to the conservative debacle of Citizens United and say that this is an activist court that is not in the mainstream of American life…on the other hand, if the court upholds the law…the dems can say “see, I told you the law was legal” and hammer the repubs on their ignorance of the law and then start to shift the conversation back to the benefits of the law that the people will like once it is implemented….if a political novice like me can come up this off the top of my head…I’m sure we’re going to be able to deflate this issue quite easily in the fall…
The Supreme Court finally got one right…
Well…I was shocked and pleasantly surprised when the Supreme Court ruled to uphold the fourth amendment’s sanction against police searches without the use of a warrant this past week. This case stemmed from a police action in DC where a suspects car was tagged with a GPS unit without the use of a warrant (actually, the warrant they had obtained had expired) so they could track his movements for weeks on end. The court got it right to throw this case out and support the overturning of the suspects conviction, stating that the use of the GPS unit was a “search” that was covered under the fourth amendment….I have not had much to applaud from the Robert’s court that gave us “Citizens United”, and has been the type of activist court the the repubs howl about…but, this one time, they got it right…now they need to extend this protection to other intrusions that come from the tracking of cell phones without warrants that some police departments have started to use…
More nonsense from Scalia and Thomas….
Well….if you had any doubt of the outcome of the court challenges to the new healthcare law, all you have to do is take a look at who was dining with the the major challengers of the law. The other day, both justices Thomas and Scalia dined at a dinner that was sponsored by the law firm that will be challenging the law in court…yep, you heard it right, the justices that are supposed to be the most impartial and held to the highest standards of any court in the land are out rubbing elbows with not only the law firm that will be arguing in front of them but with trade associations who are financially backing the suit. Doesn’t this look like a conflict of interest to anyone else? This doesn’t even include that justice Thomas’s wife is a leading proponent of repeal and makes millions of dollars as a lobbyist for the repeal crowd. This isn’t even the first time these two have done something that is, by statute, not illegal, but still stinks of influence coming from the big money folks on the right…they have been regulars at the Koch brothers sponsored events for years…and I don’t care how much they protest that they will still be objective, all you have to do is read some of their opinions to see that the right’s machine has friends on the court. Geez….
Welcome to the Soviet Union…courtesy of the Supreme Court..
Well…as I sit here today, I am saddened, outraged, and stunned by the latest nail in the coffin of individual freedom here delivered by the supreme court over the past few days. It hasn’t been enough that this court has muted the individuals voice in politics by the Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate money to buy elections, then they allow employers to take away any rights the individual has in the workplace by not allowing lawsuits against egregious violations of many laws that were written to protect workers rights, now, they gut the fourth amendment by allowing police to create “emergencies” that allow them to enter anyone’s house without a warrant. This latest case that this wrong headed court has ruled on allows the police to bang on any door without cause and then if they hear any noise that the police construe to be “destroying evidence” can enter the house without a warrant…even if no one int he house is suspected of any crime. Yep, you heard it again, it’s more of the “trust us” baloney that you always hear from the police…guess how this one is going to be used? Any critic of police tactics that has the guts to speak out better watch out….the knock will be coming to your door soon and not getting to the door fast enough can be construed to be resisting arrest…someone please save us from ourselves….geez….
Let’s connect some dots…
Well…you know I’ve talked about the Citizens United case here before but with the new information that is trickling out of the blackout wall erected by the right, I feel there is enough to start to connect the dots on how our democracy has been hijacked by the unholy trinity of business, repubs, and the supreme court. Late in the day yesterday, the guest list from one of the Koch brothers soirees whose purpose was to plot strategy to regain control of congress was discovered. Guess who was on the list? Well.. Fox News, of course, and the RNC, and reps from the Citizens United group, but there were two people that were supposed to be kept secret: Justices Thomas and Scalia of the Supreme Court. Yep, that’s right, Supreme court justices at a political strategy meeting for the right-wing takeover of the Congress. Doesn’t anyone else see the conflict of interest here? Do you think it’s just coincidence that just a few months later, the Court overturned over a hundred years of settled law on the rights of corporations and the will of the people that the money of corporations could not be used influence elections?
Now, I’m not saying that the justices were bribed to make this decision, but, I do think their political leanings are affecting their judicial duty and they have become the most activist court in the history of the US. But it’s not activist for you and me, when cases come to them that deal with individual rights, they are all too willing to shred the fourth amendment and others; always deferring to their ideology instead of the law. We have become a worse nation for it…geez…
This has been troubling me…
Well….as I said in an earlier post, I am trying to lower the outrage quotient and try to be a more reasoned voice…in fact, the name that I proposed for this site was “A Reasonable Voice” but when my son was putting it together for me, he thought the title should be “Overeducated and Unemployed” and when I got a look at the first template, I had to agree. It also made me laugh…
I know this isn’t the topic that I promised but sometimes I have to write what is in my head or I’ll lose it…I promise the one on the political middle tomorrow.
There were a couple of articles in the newspapers over the last couple of days that made a connection in my brain that I haven’t seen anywhere else so here goes….of course, you know about the Supreme Court decision giving corporations the same rights as citizens to give money to political campaigns? Then today, I read that the profitability of corporations is back to where it was before the economic meltdown and they are sitting on “mountains” of cash but no one is investing to create more jobs. This could be a leap, but with the rights that corporations have been given as “citizens”, doesn’t that mean that they have responsibilities, too? And not just to their shareholders, but to the society as a whole? I’ve talked about the flipside of the people screaming and demanding their rights; that it has to be balanced with the responsibilities to this society.
I think it also points out the fallacy of the reliance on the private sector to create jobs where there is no check on their power to do whatever they please….using the Chinese model to wrestle more and more work out of the individual; thinking only of their bottom line and of the obscene bonuses that are granted to their ceo’s while they complain about “government interference”. If they are being interfered with, why are their profits the same as when the Bushies were running the show? Geez….