07-14-2009

Whitehouse

The Senator from Rhode Island, not the place.  His opening remarks at today’s confirmation hearings of Judge Sotomayor summed up the hypocrisy of right-wing legal “philosophy” extraordinarily well.  Here is our favorite part:

I particularly reject the analogy of a judge to an ‘umpire’ who merely calls ‘balls and strikes.’ If judging were that mechanical, we would not need nine Supreme Court Justices. The task of an appellate judge, particularly on a court of final appeal, is often to define the strike zone, within a matrix of Constitutional principle, legislative intent, and statutory construction.

The ‘umpire’ analogy is belied by Chief Justice Roberts, though he cast himself as an ‘umpire’ during his confirmation hearings. Jeffrey Toobin, a well-respected legal commentator, has recently reported that ‘[i]n every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.’ Some umpire. And is it a coincidence that this pattern, to continue Toobin’s quote, ‘has served the interests, and reflected the values of the contemporary Republican party’? Some coincidence.

For all the talk of ‘modesty’ and ‘restraint,’ the right wing Justices of the Court have a striking record of ignoring precedent, overturning congressional statutes, limiting constitutional protections, and discovering new constitutional rights: the infamous Ledbetter decision, for instance; the Louisville and Seattle integration cases; the first limitation on Roe v. Wade that outright disregards the woman’s health and safety; and the DC Heller decision, discovering a constitutional right to own guns that the Court had not previously noticed in 220 years.

It would have been tempting to devote today’s post to the NY Times retrospective on Sarah Palin, which is fun and juicy reading, but at the end of the day, probably irrelevant to the future of the Republic.  If you don’t look to Sarah Palin for your entertainment reading, we’ll sum up the piece for you with the money quote:  “Feuds begat feuds.”

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