Scalia (1936-2016)

We mustn't pretend that Justice Nino
was anything but, you know, what he was

UPDATE: Noah passes along a totally to-
the-point thought for the day (see below)

Futurama Wiki

by Ken

It happens every time an American officeholder dies leaving behind a record of evil: Amid the conventional pieties about the great sorrow, the great evil gets lost in the shuffle. In the case of that giant blowhard Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court justice whose sudden death came as such a shock today, it's especially important not to let the subject pass through with the usual pieties.

In a word, Nino Scalia was a monster, and leaves behind an almost unbroken 30-year career of judicial mayhem -- adjudicating and bullying his fellow justices to adjudicate according to the diseased perversions of his social and political philosophy.

It's all the more important to call Justice Nino on his record because of the pretense he was allowed to maintain that he was a judicial "originalist," that his decision-making process was based on the "original intent" of the framers of the Constitution. Like just about everything this blowhard blew, it was a lie. His opinions were almost always formed in his far-right-wing ideological cauldron, and then dressed up in language pretending to claim knowlege of framers' "original intent," which was always twisted to support his ideologically based opinion.

Justice Nino devoted untold energies in those 30 years on the High Court to transforming the U.S. into the stinking hellhole of his mind: a world of unchallenged privilege for already-overprivileged white male Christians. Justice Nino always got to decide who had what kinds of rights and how much of them; the "originalist" trappings were simply grafted on. When push came to shove, as in the far-rightists's preposterous misreading of the Second Amendment to guarantee a non-existent right of all citizens to own guns, our Nino could not only ignore the "original intent" but ignore the plain language of the amendment, which states clearly that it relates to maintaining militias.

So on matters of government power and economic privilege, we were asked to believe that the framers' original intent was always to favor the power and privilege of the ruling orthodoxy. In matters of civic rights too, the operative concern was for the most restrictive orthodoxies -- as long as it wasn't right-wing orthodoxies that might be restricted.

Finally, some thoughts on a few specific issues:

JUSTICE NINO'S LEGAL "BRILLIANCE"

We're still hearing about how brilliant Justice Nino was, and what a brilliant writer, and all I can say is, once again: WTF? As writing, his Supreme Court opinions were barely a step above gibberish -- thuggish, assaultive, take-no-prisoners gibberish, mind you, but gibberish still. I suppose you could say he was a master of sophistry -- phony-baloney arguments dressed up to sound like simple logic. But I don't get how this passes for brilliant legal argumentation.

Hardly a word of his bombastic blithering ever made actual sense except as shameless bullying, substituting raw prejudice and aggression for argumentation. If any of his opinions had been submitted as a freshman English composition, it would have to have been graded somewhere between a peak of D-minus and a closer-to-typical F-minus. All the self-confidence in the world doesn't make logic-free, ad hominem ranting minimally acceptable argumenation.

THE SUPREME COURT SUCCESSION

I know there's already outrage being voiced at Republican leaders' bald statement that they won't consider an Obama nomination. This is certainly cheeky, but the reality is that as our system has evolved, there isn't much chance of Senate consideration of a Supreme Court nomination that's made in the final year of a presidential term, even though the Constitution doesn't offer any such proscription. But it is the reality, isn't it?

FOOTNOTE: IF THE SHOE WERE ON THE OTHER FOOT

I always like to play this little game, If the Shoe Were on the Other Foot. Of course if it was a Republican president faced with a Supreme Court vacancy in February of the fourth year of his/her term, any attempt by Democrats to interfere with his/her constitutional responsibility to name a replacement would be greeted with choruses of right-wing outrage and cries of "tyranny!"

But for right-wingers nowadays, hypocrisy is considered not just "no foul" but a virtual obligation. If you aren't being hypocritical, it's assumed you aren't really trying.

It's sobering enough to consider that right-wingers now have effective control of the Supreme Court confirmation process, as long as there isn't a 60-vote majority against them, and there isn't ever going to be one. And that means that the Right has influence amounting to veto power over the Supreme Court appointment process, since the right-wingers have effective veto power over any nominee they can muster 41 votes against.

This explains, I think, why -- notwithstanding right-wing invective against "liberal Supreme Court justices" -- we haven't in fact had a liberal Supreme Court justice, as far as I can see, since the retirement of Thurgood Marshall in 1993, and probably won't ever have another. The best we can hope for is moderate justices as distinguished as John Paul Stevens (1875-2010) and David Souter (1990-2009) -- both great justices, I think, for the intrepidity of their support for authentic constitutional values, at a time when those values were being increasingly assaulted by the right-wing thug justices, but neither in any sense a liberal.

The same goes for the Court's current block of moderates: Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993-), Stephen Breyer (1994-), Sonia Sotomayor (2009-), and Elena Kagan (2010-), honorable moderates all. Godspeed to them all.

There is, of course, an opportunity here for the DSCC --

To campaign for Democratic Senate candidates to retake control of the Senate, arguing the importance of Supreme Court confirmations (and confirmation of other presidential appointees). Democratic control wouldn't change the grim reality of the power of the filibuster, but it would certainly make a difference whether the Judiciary Committee holding confirmation hearings is chaired by a D or an R.

Yeah, I know this is pretty hilarious. I just thought I'd mention it.

ADDITION BY SUBTRACTION: THE
IMMEDIATE POST-SCALIA COURT

My gut response to the prospect of the current eight-member Supreme Court configuration remaining in place for, probably, more than a year: This is probably as good as we're going to get -- a case of addition by subtraction. At least now none of the nightmares that were set to ensue with the old 5-4 majority can happen. (Presumably the Court is sitting on a stack of cases it thought it had "decided" by that majority. Sorry, guyz!) Of course not much good can happen in this configuration except insofar as Slow Anthony K (or just possibly Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts) is prepared to make it happen, but how is this any different from the situation we've been in?

Obviously there are a lot of cases where the remaining justices will have to try to finesse 4-4 splits, trying to see if there's any kind of decison for which either side can negotiate a fifth vote. This will be especially problematic where federal appellate courts dump conflicting rulings in the High Court's hopper. It will be a mess. But can anyone say that the history of the Roberts Court has been anything but a mess?


UPDATE: NOAH SHARES THIS TOTALLY
TO-THE-POINT THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"For some reason," he says, "I've been thinking of the attached quote attributed to Clarence Darrow's 1932 memoir."

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If you have to treat the right-wing thug-justices like regular people, I'm afraid I won't be able to serve on the Supreme Court

Justice Sotomayor with Prof. David Strauss, who moderated her 90-minute appearance yesterday at University of Chicago Law School

"'The public sometimes thinks the justices don't like each other because they read our opinions and see the barbs going back and forth,' she said.

"The reality, she continued, was captured in advice she received soon after joining the court from Justice David H. Souter, whom she succeeded. Justice Souter said the key to a pleasant life on the court was realizing that every justice was acting in good faith."

-- from "Sotomayor Reflects on First Years on Court,"
by Adam Liptak, in the NYT

by Ken

It seems fair to point out that Justice Souter got the hell out of there at the spring-chickenly (for Supreme Court justices) age of 69, and gave surprising indications -- surprising for someone who kept his thoughts to himself as much as he did while he was on the court -- that he departed less than completely thrilled with the temper of the place.

Nevertheless, I'm sure Justice Sotomayor isn't making this up -- that he really advised her that the key to a pleasant life on the Court was realizing that every justice was acting in good faith. You'll notice that I didn't put this in quotation marks, because these words weren't actually said by anybody except Adam Liptak, who's paraphrasing Justice Sotomayor paraphrasing Justice Souter. Nevertheless, as I say, let's assume it's not like the old children's game of "telephone," where all the players pass along the message they think they've just received, until at the end the beginning and ending messages are compared, and hilarity ensues.

I confess I would be interested in knowing what exactly Justice Souter said that has come down to us as the goal of leading "a pleasant life on the court, and what exactly he "realized" about his benchmates which has come down to us as "every justice was acting in good faith."

For the record, the point this Justice Souter's remark (whatever exactly it was) was intended by Justice Sotomayor to illustrate was "the misimpression that there is animosity among the justices" -- again a paraphrase rather than a direct quote, but Adam Liptak has been doing this a long time, so let's assume he got this too reasonably right.

"The public sometimes thinks the justices don't like each other because they read our opinions and see the barbs going back and forth," she said.

The reality, she continued, was captured in advice she received soon after joining the court from Justice David H. Souter, whom she succeeded. Justice Souter said the key to a pleasant life on the court was realizing that every justice was acting in good faith.

I don't know, there seems to me to be a certain intermingling of categories here:

* whether the justices like each other

* whether they respect each other's judicial temperaments

* whether they think their fellows are "acting in good faith"

Come to think of it, assuming Justice Souter actually said just that, about realizing his fellow justices were acting in good faith, what exactly does it mean? I'm assuming it means that they have sincere views on the Constitution and the law and they are making a good-faith effort to apply those views, er, sincerely. But did anybody really question that?

I can believe that Justices Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito that government was instituted among men for the purpose of having wildly overprivileged rich white men live lives as God's chosen privileged class, while everyone else eats dirt, or maybe wacko, anti-human extreme right-wing ideology, which is even less nourishing than dirt. In fact, I'm fairly sure they all do believe that. I also believe they're truly bad people.

Therefore I have to conclude that I would have little hope for a pleasant life sitting on a court with such people. And so with some reluctance I'm afraid I'm going to have to take myself out of the running for a seat. Oh, I realize the chances weren't all that great (and I realize it's pretty late in the game for me to be trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up). Still, just so there's no confusion, I want to make it clear that if I'm asked, I'm going to have to pass.

SOME THINGS JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR SAID
WHICH ARE LIKELY TO STICK WITH ME

Interestingly, these all come with actual quotations. Like this one:

She was asked if she had a special responsibility in cases concerning race, gender and class.

"I do think I have a special role on the court," the justice responded, "but not in the way that you think."

She said that she welcomed becoming a role model and noted that there had been "a tremendous uptick" in the number of Hispanic groups visiting the Supreme Court. Meeting with them, she said, is "a priority for me."

But she added that her background did not affect her judicial work. "I don't come to the process as a woman of color, saying that I have to come to a decision that will help a specific group of people," she said.

To borrow a phrase, good answer!

And Liptak immediately follows this with:

On the other hand, she said she disagreed with Chief Justice Roberts's approach to cases concerning racial equality. In a 2007 opinion in a decision limiting the use of race to achieve public school integration, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

That approach, Justice Sotomayor said, was "too simple."

"I don't borrow Chief Justice Roberts's description of what colorblindness is," she said. "Our society is too complex to use that kind of analysis."

(She also "expressed some skepticism about two of Justice Antonin Scalia's legal touchstones": trying to divine the original meaning of the Constitution, which he favors, and considering expressions of congressional intent in weighing statutory ambiguities, which he doesn't. By the way, I can't be the only one who's had occasion to speculate that when Justice Nino natters on about the original meaning of the Constitution what he really means, but is uncharacteristically reticent to say explicitly, is: The Constitution was written by rich white men to preserve this country as the privileged domain of rich white men, and as long as he draws breath he will do everything in his power to restore the country to that noble ideal.)

Then there's this:

She also recalled the advice she got after congratulating Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired last year, on one of his opinions even as she expressed doubts that she would ever be able to match the quality of his work.

"Sonia, I wasn't born a justice," Justice Stevens said, Justice Sotomayor recalled. "I've had many, many years. You have all the skills to be a great justice, but you have to develop them and grow into them."

Oh man, does that sound like Justice Stevens or what? An important part of life is figuring out who our role models are. No, I don't expect Sotomayor to develop into a "liberal" justice, any more than Justice Stevens was one. But given the reality that we may never have another actual liberal justice, the fully human, thinking moderates become that much more important.

Whereas those assholes Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito could spend another 100, 200 years on the court and all they'll develop into is bigger, stinkier assholes.


POSTSCRIPT: ABOUT JUSTICE KENNEDY

I notice that in the foregoing I seem to have given Justice K a free pass. It's not that I don't think he's an asshole. Is there really any question about that? I just don't think he's quite in a category with the others. Kind of confused, maybe, and maybe not all that bright, but a truly bad person? Not so much.

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Sure, the election makes things even worse for the federal judiciary, but we knew that going in, didn't we?

by Ken

On the most obvious level, if this White House couldn't get its judicial nominees confirmed by the Senate with a majority ranging, at least theoretically, from 58 to 60, what do you suppose the odds are now? Especially now that the Party of No has proof positive that Obstruction Works™. Basically, the administration's way of standing by its picks has been more or less like an especially craven trick-or-treater's: ring the doorbell and then run like hell. At least the trick-or-treater maybe has that trick up his sleeve. At the slightest sign of confirmation opposition, the Obama White House's Rahm-tested technique is to cut and run for dear life, and if anybody asks, we never heard of the poor bastard.

Then when it comes to the higher-level judgeships, the Obama administration has been so cowardly that it's scary to imagine those people going into truly "defensive" mode. It goes without saying that Supreme Court Justices Sotomayor and Kagan represent infinite-orders-of-magnitude upgrades over anything we could have expected to come out of a McCranky administration, or than we can expect to come out of, God help us, a Romney or Palin or Beck administration. These are perfectly competent legal people, and I wish them long and honorable service.

At the same time, as far as we can tell, they represent considerable pullbacks to the legal center from the justices they replaced, Souter and Stevens. Partly this is the apparently standard Obama "negotiating" strategy of setting an initial negotiating position by splitting the difference and then giving away whatever is left. Partly it reflects the president's apparently basic right-of-center orientation. Do we have any reason to believe that anyone in a position of decision-making power wanted a justice more committed to the traditional liberal understanding of constitutional values?

Meanwhile, the confirmation process has become worse. It's now totally under the control of the Right. No, they didn't put up much of a fight, but then, why should they have? Sotomayor and Kagan were replacing justices who were already outside their sphere of influence. In all likelihood would be less pesky from the right-wing standpoint than their predecessors were in their very different ways, but the fact is that as long as the High Court's hard-core extremist majority holds, the minority justices are pretty much irrelevant, except insofar as each of them, because they have actual principles, will occasionally be picked off to support the extremist majority.

REMINDER: IT WASN'T LIBERAL JUSTICES
THAT SOTOMAYOR AND KAGAN REPLACED

I think it's important to restate at every occasion that we're not talking about replacing liberal justices. As much as I respect the sitting centrists on the current Court, there hasn't been a liberal jurist among them since the retirements of William Brennan (1990) and Thurgood Marshall (1991).

The reality for the present and foreseeable future is that no liberal can ever again be considered for the Supreme Court.

So while the truly loathsome creatures who occupy the Republican seats on the Senate Judiciary Committee (my goodness, what a bunch!) now have the confirmation process entirely on their terms; the ground rules are now fixed and unchangeable:

(1) No candidate farther left than dead center can ever again be given consideration of any sort, whereas no limit of rightwardness exists.

(2) No nominee can be confirmed without pinky-swearing allegiance to the right-wing booby-mantra of "just applying the law," thereby guaranteeings that anyone who comes out the other end of the process must by definition be either a liar or a legal ignoramus, because anyone with the legal qualifications to, say, watch The Good Wife, let alone sit on our highest court, has to know that "just applying the law" is literally meaningless.

It still seems to me that the next Supreme Court justice to need a replacement is going to be Justice Ginsburgs. The fact is that no meaningful change in the Roberts Court can be hoped for until once of the extremists justices depart, and there seems no immediate prospect of that. When it happens, though, the new rules of selection and confirmation are going to come into play, savagely.

Of course the judicial arbiters of the Right have now made it crystal clear that with judicial appointments, as with everything else in American political life, lying is not only permissible but mandatory, as long as the lies are right-wing ones. The previous two nominees, John Roberts and Sammy Alito, blithely lied their way through their kid-gloves confirmation proceedings. Far from "just applying the law," they have set out to systematically rewrite the Constitution.

Most of us have had a general sense of the extremist block on the Court, apparently now under the personal management of Chief Justice Roberts, has gone about its work of writing a new Constitution. We've seen, in such well-publicizied instances as the gun rights cases and the Citizens United decision legitimizing unlimited corporate cash for election-buying, the broad strategy: deciding what portions of the Constitution or exististing judicial precedent -- which Roberts and Alito swore to respect (ha ha!) -- they wish to rewrite, then finding the cases and instructing the litigators how the cases are to be argued, and of course then abandoning the old-fashioned principle of deciding cases on the narrowest legal grounds necessary for a decision.

Now, however, it turns out that this is only the public face of what Roberts et al. doing, and literally the least of it. My attention has only been directed to and Oct. 4 Slate piece by Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick, "Watch as We Make This Law Disappear," we've gotten a glimpse of the magician-like skills being perfected the the Roberts Court to perform their wholesale constitutional rewrite while keeping it mostly hidden, following the great insight developed by the right-wing think tanks that in much of our political life it's perception that matters rather than reality.

It's a piece that no one with any interest in our system of judicial review can afford to miss. We're going to need to talk about it, I hope over the weekend.

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Nat Hentoff wonders what we have to do to generate a little respect for the Bill of Rights

Governor Paterson seems more familiar with the
idea of civil liberties than a certain U.S. president.

by Ken

In the grand scheme of things, it's not the greatest blow struck for civil liberties, but it's still a blow, and these days there aren't many of those being struck, as Nat Hentoff (famous for, among many other things, a book called The War on the Bill of Rights) notes in his Village Voice column this week, "What Obama Could Learn From Paterson."

The Paterson in question is New York's brief tenured Gov. David Paterson, and the blow concerns the popular police practice of the stop-and-frisk. Governor Paterson signed a bill that prevents retention of records regarding stop-and-frisks that resulted in no further police action.

"In a democracy," Governor Paterson said, "there are times when safety and liberty find themselves in conflict. From the Alien and Sedition Acts [opposition to which gave Thomas Jefferson the presidency] to the Patriot Act, we have experienced moments where liberty took a back seat."

The police, you see, like to keep records of these citizen encounters because you never know, someday that information could prove useful in crime-stopping. The problem is that this allows the accumulation of records on citizens who are, as far as those encounters have revealed, completely innocent. And against the possibility of those records providing future information is the at least as great likely that they provide future misinformation.

[U]ntil this law, masses of New Yorkers accused of nothing at all remained in [Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly's computer in cas -- who knows? -- they are somehow connected in some way to some kind of alleged crime. Warned Paterson: "It is not unreasonable that these individuals could be targeted in future investigations even though no evidence of wrongdoing was found during the initial stop that warranted further legal action."

Is this America? It defined New York City justice until Paterson frisked [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and Kelly about their knowledge of the Constitution or privacy. He found nothing. Paterson said: "Simply justice as well as common sense suggests that those questioned by police and not accused of a crime should not be subjected to perpetual suspicion."

Now Nat is at pains to point out that the new law doesn't affect the legality of the stop-and-frisk itself. As long as the cop has "reasonable suspicion" of legally dubious behavior, he's home free. But it's no small things that the PD doesn't get to hold onto all that raw data. And as Nat points out, "If Rudy Giuliani had somehow been elected governor, can you imagine his ever signing into law what David Paterson did on the basis of simple justice?"

President Obama certainly hasn't offered any serious opposition to the crush against American liberties made possible by the specter of terror.

As president, Barack Obama has not done anything to make the Patriot Act more American. Indeed, when Democrats on the Judiciary Committee tried, once Obama was in the Oval Office, to enact a few reforms, the president helped the Republicans block most of them.

Nat cites the ACLU's July 22 report, "Obama Administration in Danger of Establishing 'New Normal' With Worst Bush-Era Policies," which --

ends with the grim conclusion that "if the Obama administration does not affect a fundamental break with Bush administration policies," it will "create a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, and then it will have ratified rather than rejected the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever."

Nat quotes "much underrated" former Supreme Court Justice David Souter's retirement warnings about American's loss of our true identity. He knows all too well that civil liberties aren't exactly an easily sold issue with the American public.

Years ago, I was writing a profile of Justice William Brennan, which became part of my book, Living the Bill of Rights (University of California Press). I was in his chambers at the Supreme Court, and was unusually somber.

"How," he suddenly asked me, "can we get the Bill of Rights off the pages and into the lives of students?"

I haven't heard that question in all the raging dissonance of how to "reform" education—and end its sentencing of so many of the young to largely dead-end lives. Some real-life changes, however, are being made in a number of schools around the country that focus on the critical-thinking skills of one student at a time instead of the collective test scores of a class, or a whole school, or a state.

I don't yet know how many of these still few schools are also bringing the Constitution into students' lives so that, as they become active citizens, they'll insist on their loyalty to the Constitution rather than to whichever government is in power.

Governor Paterson, Nat says, "took a small step in that direction." These days that qualifies him as a civil liberties hero. Which is mighty scary.

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David Souter slices and dices the grand lie-slash-myth regarding the function of the Supreme Court

Justice Souter said a mouthful in his 30-minute

Harvard commencement address last week.

"[Former Supreme Court Justice David] Souter is right to say that 'the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.'

"Because these desires clash, courts are 'forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good thing and another one.' Souter's view admits that this is what judges do. Originalists pretend they're not choosing. Which approach is the more trustworthy?"

-- E. J. Dionne Jr., in a must-read WaPo column today,

"David Souter vs. the Antonin Scalias"

by Ken

It's not exactly news that right-wingers depend heavily on forcefully stated expressions of "commonsense wisdom" lore that is mostly or all bulldoody but that sounds good to the intellectually lazy and gullible. Sometimes the forceful staters actual believe their bulldoody, and then we have the stupid leading the gullible. More often the staters are knowingly hoodwinking those poor sods, so that we have the dishonest diddling the sheep.

And there you have modern conservatism: a coalition of the Stupids and the Dishonests. The categories, as I always like to point out, are far from mutuallyl exclusive.

It's a shame the Stupids and Dishonests among that unbelievably sad swath of humanity known as the Republicans of the Senate Judiciary Committee can't be persuaded to wear baseball caps or sweatshirts to identify their procilivites during the upcoming spectacle of the Elena Kagan Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Or maybe, while noble statesmen like Wee Jeffie Sessions -- a Stupid, for sure --are spewing their venomous bilge, they could perhaps raise their left hand while they're lying and their right hand when they jest plain don't know no better. It would make it easier for us to keep score.

One thing you know we'll be hearing a lot during the Kagan hearings is what has become the Universal Right-Wing Judicial Meme. I believe I've mentioned how much I hate that now-inescapable meme "meme," but if ever it was appropriate, it's here. You know the one: where the doody-brained right-wingers declare in their most portentous "fate of the republic" tones, "Judges shouldn't make law, they just apply the law-slash-Constitution."

Personal opinions and beliefs and philosophies, they will make clear, have nothing to do with this process. They contaminate it. Therefore, people who have personal opinions and beliefs and philosophies -- other than loony far-right ones, of course -- are disquallified from service on the High Court, or even lower federal courts that require SJC approval, unless they swear that none of this will ever come into play in their deciding. The job (let's all say it together) is just to apply the law.

This is of course 100 percent nonsense. Again, it can only be uttered by two classes of people: our friends the Stupids and the Dishonests.

The Stupids aren't smart enough to understand -- and the Dishonests have no interest in raising the issue -- that for a case to reach any appellate court, there's a strong likelihood that "applying the law-slash-Constitution" doesn't come into play, or there wouldn't be any need for the appeal. Oh, it's true that miscarriages of justice and blatant misreadings of law happen in lower-level courts, but it's safe to say that almost without exception these are weeded out in the lower-level appeals courts. By the time a case reaches the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals, the level just below the Supreme Court, whether it's come from within the federal court system or on appeal from state courts, it's a good bet that the opposing parties have conflicting views of what the law and the Constitution say, and/or that the law and the Constitution say conflicting things. After all, one of the categories of cases the High Court is most likely to accept for review is the kind where two or more circuits have reached opposite judgments by their differing processes of just reading the law-slash-Constitution. It's hard to imagine a case actually landing on the Supreme Court docket that could imaginably be so decided.

The notion that such cases can be decided by just applying the law-slash-Constitution is so obviously bogus that you wonder how it could possibly still be trotted out. Two reasons: First, as I noted, it sounds so utterly and indisputably reasonable; and second, there's such an abundance of Stupids who really don't get it (personally, I think most of them aren't so much Stupids as Lazies, who believe they're under no obligation to use their brains and nobody can make them) and Dishonests who have personal agendas that are advanced perpetuating this nonsense.

In the minds of the Stupids and Dishonests, any judicial ruling that doesn't advance the interests of the rich and powerful and/or the guardians of the most rigid social orthodoxies is "judicial activism." However, when ridid ideologues lie their way through Senate confirmation hearings claiming that, scout's honor, they'll just apply the law-slash-Constitution, and show due respect for the Court's own precedents, and then once on the bench set out on a rampage of rewriting the Constitution and judicial precedent, that's apprentlly not judicial activism.

Of course the patron saint of the Supreme Court judicial-activism Stupids and Dishonests is our old pal the human blimp, Antonin Scalia. And last week at Harvard's commencement, though not mentioning him by name, retired Justice David Souter sliced and diced him.

You have to give the Harvard folks credit for snagging alum Souter (class of 1961) for the first commencement after his retirement from the Supreme Court. It's not that Supreme Court justices are unable to give commencement addresses while they're still serving. But give somebody in Cambridge credit for deducing that a newly retired Justice Souter might have some, you know, stuff on his mind.

I don't mind saying that I love Souter, though in an utterly platonic way. I think his service is easy to undervalue, consisting as it did of 19 years of quiet wisdom, diligence, and humility. And so I was delighted to read E. J. Dionne Jr.'s Washington Post column today about the speech.

At issue is "originalism," an approach to reading the Constitution whose seeming precision has given conservatives a polemical advantage over the liberals' "living Constitution" idea that appears to let judges say our founding document means whatever they want it to mean.

Justice Antonin Scalia, the court's leading orginalist, summarized his opponents' attitude toward the Constitution with four words: "You know, it morphs."

Now, thanks to Souter's commencement address at Harvard last week, Scalia's critics have fighting words of their own. Souter, who did not mention Scalia by name, underscored "how egregiously it misses the point to think of judges in constitutional cases as just sitting there reading constitutional phrases fairly and looking at reported facts objectively to produce their judgments."

The problem is not only that "constitutions have a lot of general language in them in order to be useful as constitutions," but also that the U.S. Constitution "contains values that may very well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony."
This means that "hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another."

And Souter found a splendid demonstration of what Dionne calls "the fatal flaw of originalism -- which he relabeled the "fair reading model": the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which in overturning legal segregation overturned the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson, which accepted "separate but equal" public facilities.

"For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision," Souter said.

"The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which Plessy was based had changed," Souter argued. "Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results."

Yes, the Supreme Court changed because the nation's understanding of race changed.

Souter notes that "the members of the court in the Plessy case remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant enormous progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery. . . . "

"Did the judges of 1954 cross some limit of legitimacy into lawmaking by stating a conclusion that you will not find written in the Constitution?" Souter asked rhetorically. "Was it activism to act based on the current meaning of facts that at a purely objective level were about the same as Plessy's facts 60 years before?"

Obviously, Souter doesn't think so. But while conservative scholars such as Michael McConnell have constructed ingenious arguments to show how originalism could accommodate Brown, it's hard to see judges guided by that doctrine reaching as boldly as the 1954 Warren court did.

Contrast Souter's view with Scalia's mocking reference to those who "think the Constitution is some exhortation to give effect to the most fundamental values of the society as those values change from year to year." Well, between 1896 and 1954, they did change.

Dionne makes a larger point. Originalism ignores a central reality of the Constitution: that the Founders can't have built in any "true meaning," since as historian Gordon Wood has noted, it's a product 'not of closet philosophizing but of contentious political polemics."

These aren't difficult concepts, but they're widely ignored. Give credit to the Stupids and Dishonests.

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As Master Rahm was just telling us at DWT about that next Supreme Court pick . . .

Justice John Paul Stevens -- a tough act to follow

"The complication here is that Stevens is the conscience of the court's liberal wing, and space he occupies now is not a space that any nominee simply fills. So growth capacity -- the potential to grow into a Stevens -- will factor in, too."

-- Marc Ambinder, in an Atlantic.com blogpost today,

"On SCOTUS, Obama's Not Looking for a Fight"

by Ken

Well, no wonder Mr. Ambinder is regarded as such a wise political sage! So, the president's not looking for a fight with his next Supreme Court pick, eh? I don't know whether to say "Gosh!" or "Golly!" 'Cause as we all know, looking for fights is what this administration is all about. (For the record, this is sarcastic, but even if you think of all the fights he's managed to find himself in with those of us to his political left, he hasn't really picked fights so much as he and his red-baiting buddy Master Rahm have goaded us into picking the fights.)

Happily, Mr. Ambinder isn't claiming any special knowledge, though when he notes that he, unlike Business Week (which cites "a White House official familiar with the deliberations" as the source for its list of three candidates who it claims are currently the subject of White House focus), hasn't had any names leaked to him, there does seem to be a note of indignation.

Business Week's three names, by the way, are: "U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan and federal appellate judges Diane Wood and Merrick Garland."

As it happens, no one has leaked any names to us at DWT either, which is surprising, given our closeness to Master Rahm Emanuel. So we know the same things everyone else knows:

* that, especially since the administration accepted the SCOTUS nomination framework now cemented in place by Republican obstructionists with the Sotomayor nomination, the nominee has to be, or plausibly pretend to be, a by-the-book, just-read-the-law kind of decider, preferably with a much smaller paper trail than Justice Sotomayor's;

* that the Senate Republicans will raise holy hell, whoever the nominee is, and will make a maximum effort of obstruction;

* that while the Court's philosophical balance is most unlikely to change, when it comes to replacing Justice Stevens, well, you're just not going to replace Justice Stevens's legal and moral authority.

JUST A REMINDER: THERE IS NO "LIBERAL BLOC" ON
THE COURT (BECAUSE THERE ARE NO ACTUAL LIBERALS)

Note that I refuse to refer to Justice Stevens's position as leader of a "liberal bloc" on the Court. Can we be serious for a moment, and acknowledge that there are no liberals on the Court? Just because you're not a screaming right-wing loon hell-bent on shredding the Constitution for the greater glory of the super-rich and powerful, that doesn't make you a liberal.

I assume that for the foreseeable future no liberal can even be considered for the High Court on grounds of confirmability. And it would be fairly silly to expect President Obama, who isn't a liberal and seems to have mostly contempt for liberals, to be looking for one.

William Brennan was a liberal. Thurgood Marshall was a liberal. Whereas Steven Breyer is . . . um, has anyone figured out yet what that guy is? And with all due respect to Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor, and to former Justice Souter, fine justices all, they never claimed to be, and aren't, liberals. In his recent NYT interview, Justice Stevens insisted to Adam Liptak that he's a conservative.

"“What really for me marks a conservative judge is one who doesn’t decide more than he has to in order to do his own job. Our job is to decide cases and resolve controversies. It’s not to write broad rules that may answer society’s questions at large.” (Liptak doesn't seem to have thought it worth pointing out the pointed jab at the new modus operandi of the Roberts Court, which seems to be to find cases that will enable you to rewrite constitutional law the way you want to and then decide those cases as sweepingly as you have to to achieve the desired result.)

The retirement of David Souter was hard for me, because he had come out of nowheresville to rise so serenely to the challenge of the job. I hope it's not necessary to repeat once again the circumstances of Justice Stevens's appointment, by Jerry Ford, at the recommendation of Attorney General Edward Levi. You have to know it hasn't escaped the attention of the right-wing loonies that Souter's appointment too came at the urging of a stinking Jew, New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman. Give the R's credit for learning from their mistakes, though -- you could hardly ask for a scummier succession of thugs than Nino Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, and Sammy Alito. That still doesn't make Souter a liberal.

What's interesting is how differently people are interpreting these same nomination "realities." Take the issue of confirmability. It's got that stalwart Democrat, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, so spooked, that he confided to Fox Noise his hopeJustice Stevens will stick it out another year, when perhaps the political climate won't be as poisonous. (That seems to me a dangerous assumption, and a confirmation battle in an election year strikes me as carrying risks of its own.) Whereas Ambinder seems to think that, provided the calculations are calculated properly, confirmation is no problem:

Politically, the White House wants to find an unimpeachable nominee who the American people quickly accept. Let Republicans make the noise they do and will -- which may excite their own base but won't really do much more than that -- and get the nominee confirmed quickly, and without and fuss. Kagan, Wood and Garland fit the bill.

Ambinder really earns those big pundit bucks with this divining of the administration's agenda in replacing Justice Stevens:

deally, he's looking for someone who can persuade swinger (uh, swing-ideological justice) Anthony Kennedy to change his mind on a set of issues, someone whose qualifications are beyond approach, who doesn't have a lingering paper trail of outrageous (i.e., conventionally liberal) viewpoints, and yet someone he trusts can subtly steer the court to the left. The complication here is that Stevens is the conscience of the court's liberal wing, and space he occupies now is not a space that any nominee simply fills. So growth capacity -- the potential to grow into a Stevens -- will factor in, too.

I think Justice Sotomayor was an admirable pick, but I don't think any of us kid ourselves that she is going to be, either judicially or personally, a counterweight to the "Let's get ready to rumble" loonies Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, and Alito. And now we have Master Rahm judging what potential nominees are going to grow into?

I assume he hopes they'll all grow into power-worshiping tools like Chief Justice Roberts.


POSTSCRIPT: WHO ASKED SENATOR SPECTER?

I can't resist passing on this wonderful note about our pal Arlen's self-injection into the SCOTUS situation, by Michael McGough on the L.A. Times political blog:

Sen. Arlen Specter has high hopes for Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens
April 5, 2010 | 11:29 am

Years ago, I mentally created a file called "Who Asked Him?" in which I lodged presumptuous comments by public officials and others. I just deposited Sen. Arlen Specter's suggestion that Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens not retire at the end of this term, despite Stevens' own media blitz suggesting that his days, and dissents, are numbered.

Not that we asked, but Specter (D-Pa.) told Fox News that he hopes Stevens won't step down this year because "gridlock in the Senate might well produce a filibuster, which will tie up the Senate with the Supreme Court nominee." He added, apparently in a rejection of the conventional wisdom that his former Republican Party will pick up seats this year: "I think that if a year passes, there is a much better chance we can come to a consensus." To quote Specter's preferred vote in the Clinton impeachment trial, that theory is "not proven."

Cynics would suggest that Specter himself doesn't want to be tied up by a Supreme Court confirmation at a time he is seeking reelection, the first time as a Democrat. Or maybe from the viewpoint of an 80-year-old senator, a 90-year-old Supreme Court Justice is just hitting his prime.

-- Michael McGough

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How do we thank Justice David Souter for his service?

"The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we're in, whatever we are doing, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed by what we do. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right."

-- David Souter, after being sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 1990

"'I have written the following reply,' Souter said dryly [in response to Chief Justice Roberts], as if preparing to read a dissent. A ripple of laughter went through the courtroom. 'You quoted the poet, and I will, too, in words that set out the ideal of the life engaged, "where love and need are one,"' Souter read. 'That phrase accounts for the finest moments of my life on this court, as we have agreed or contended with each other over those things that matter to decent people in a civil society.'"

-- Dana Milbank's Washington Post account of retiring Justice Souter's response to Chief Justice John Roberts' reading of a letter to Souter from his eight current colleagues as well as his longtime former colleague, retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor -- and the justice's parting words

by Ken

In his Washington Post piece Milbank went on to write:

Because of Souter's quiet ways (he uttered all of 200 words in his farewell yesterday), it's easy to forget how different the country would be today if this unmarried recluse from the North hadn't decamped long ago to join the court's liberal wing. Had he remained the conservative that President George H.W. Bush thought he was getting when he nominated Souter in 1990, there's every possibility that abortion would be illegal in the United States today, that the Ten Commandments would be displayed throughout schools and courthouses, and that the law of the land on any number of issues -- guns, terrorism, race -- would be different.

Before yesterday's session began, William Suter, the clerk of the Supreme Court, stood in the chamber in his tails and vest, giving a talk to a group of visitors. "Politics is over here," Suter said, holding up one fist. "Law is over here," he said, holding his other fist apart. Would that it were so. Everybody who has heard of Bush v. Gore knows that the justices have at times been as political as their counterparts across the street in the Capitol.

But Souter refused to play his assigned partisan role in the court's battles -- and he defied the conservatives one final time yesterday. As the five other Reagan and Bush appointees formed a majority to say that New Haven, Conn., discriminated against white firefighters, Souter joined the two Clinton appointees and John Paul Stevens in a dissent accusing the majority of a "confounding" opinion that "misconceives one of our nation's principal civil rights laws."

It's been a busy day, and a contention-filled one, and so it's been left till now to say good-bye to a real American hero. A hero of mine anyway. A man who came almost literally out of nowhere. Had anyone besides New Hampshire home-state colleague then-Sen. Warren Rudman heard of Souter when Rudman recommended him to President George H.W. Bush to replace one of the great justices in the Court's history, retiring 84-year-old William J. Brennan? (The two NH pols went back a ways. In 1971 then-state Attorney General Rudman had picked Souter, an assistant AG, to be deputy attorney general.)

Naturally we all assumed the worst. Wikipedia reminds us:

The nine senators voting against Souter included Ted Kennedy and John Kerry from Souter's neighboring state of Massachusetts. These senators, along with seven others, painted Souter as a right-winger in the mold of Robert Bork. They based their claim on Souter's friendships with many conservative politicians in New Hampshire. Their allegations failed to influence the other 90 senators. The press called him the "stealth justice" and reported that his professional record provoked little real controversy and provided very little "paper trail." President Bush saw this lack of a paper trail as a positive for Souter, because one of President Reagan's nominees, Bork, had recently been rejected by the Senate partially because of the availability of his extensive written opinions on issues. Bush claimed that he did not know Souter's stances on abortion, affirmative action, or other issues. The National Organization for Women opposed Souter's nomination and held a rally outside the hearings to oppose his selection. The then-president of NOW, Molly Yard, testified that Souter would "end... freedom for women in this country." Souter was also opposed by the NAACP, which urged its 500,000 members to write letters to their senators asking for Souter's defeat. Despite this opposition, Souter won an easy confirmation compared to those of later Republican appointees.

Souter spoke of his admiration for the conservative Justice John Marshall Harlan II of the Warren court, as well as for liberal Justice William Brennan of the same court, during his confirmation hearings. The Wall Street Journal described the events leading up to the appointment of the "liberal jurist" in a 2000 editorial, saying Rudman in his "Yankee Republican liberalism" took "pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House chief of staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative. Then they both sold the judge to President Bush, who wanted above all else to avoid a confirmation battle." Rudman wrote in his memoir that he had "suspected all along" that Souter would not "overturn activist liberal precedents." Sununu later said that he had "a lot of disappointment" about Souter's positions on the court and would have preferred him to be more similar to Justice Antonin Scalia.

Well, I've learned a lot about Senator Rudman that I didn't know at the time. It was a great, history-making recommendation he made, and for 19 years we've been beyond fortunate to have this quiet, unassuming man serving on our highest court. It's generally reported that he became increasingly unhappy with the poinsonous partisan divide in Washington, which of course has become pretty hard to escape on the Supreme Court, and it's hard not to honor his feeling that he's had enough, just as it's hard not to honor his wish not to cling to his seat, but to retire still in relative good health to go back home to enjoy his retirement years.

Boy, will he be missed.

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Will Lindsey Graham Determine Who The Next Supreme Court Justice Is?

Obama will have to get the OK from Lindsey G or David Souter will never see New Hampshire again

Unless you were on a plane all night and this morning-- like maybe coming back to St Louis from Sri Lanka-- you probably already know that Justice David Souter is leaving the Supreme Court anytime after June that President Obama gets a nominee confirmed by the Senate. Souter, who has been a dependable vote against authoritarianism and against corporate absolutism, was appointed by George H.W. Bush, and his retirement will occasion the first appointment by a Democrat in a decade and a half. The Republicans have already hysterically announced their intention to filibuster whomever Obama picks unless he picks the kind of reactionary fanatic they find suitable. There are 40 Republicans. Can they prevent Souter from returning to New Hampshire? Can they force the always accommodating Obama to pick some kind of right-wing hack?

I suppose if there were 99 Democrats in the Senate, Harry Reid would still find a way to fail. With only 59-- assuming he will allow the GOP to continue to prevent Al Franken from being seated (and if, for whatever reason you decide to count solid Republican Arlen Specter as a Democrat)-- there is no doubt that Reid will guarantee that the balance on the Court will never be righted.

The current Senate has an organizing resolution that includes this Judiciary Committee rule, adopted on February 26, 2009 dealing with the Republican obstructionists' favorite tactic, the de facto filibuster:

IV. BRINGING A MATTER TO A VOTE

The Chairman shall entertain a non-debatable motion to bring a matter before the Committee to a vote. If there is objection to bring the matter to a vote without further debate, a roll call vote of the Committee shall be taken, and debate shall be terminated if the motion to bring the matter to a vote without further debate passes with ten votes in the affirmative, one of which must be cast by the minority.

In other words, the Senate is saddled with a rule that unless one of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee agrees, the nomination stays bottled up, presumably until Jeb Bush or Carrie Prejean is elected president.

Now imagine if you will-- and I know this is a stretch-- that Harry Reid wasn't the GOP's secret weapon. Imagine instead that he was the strong and resolute leader of a powerful Democratic majority and was a third or even a quarter the man Nancy Pelosi is. Then there'd be an easy way out of this mess. You see... by officially becoming a quasi-Democrat, not one who will vote like a Democrat but one who will caucus with them, Arlen Specter throws the Judiciary Committee off kilter. It currently has 8 Republicans including him (the ranking member) and 11 Democrats, reflecting the overall balance in the Senate.

Arlen Specter (R-PA)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Chairman Pat Leahy (D-VT)
Herb Kohl (D-WI)
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)
Russ Feingold (D-WI)
Chuck Schumer (D-NY)
Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Ben Cardin (D-MD)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
Ron Wyden (D-OR)
Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)
Ed Kaufman (D-DE)

In the good old days, the Republicans could always count on an asshole with a "D" next to his or her name-- a Schumer or Feinstein particularly-- to voted with the Republicans one some proto fascist loon Bush dug up from the bowels of the Federalist Society, which is how we got stuck with Jay "The Torture Guy" Bybee. Now far be it from me to say that the Senate Republicans don't have assholes on their team. It's just they're a different kind of asshole than a Feinstein or a Schumer. Where Feinstein and Schumer will go through any kind of contortion to show how nonpartisan they are-- and jump all over the opportunity to get on TV and brag how they're abandoning their party for some right-wing torturer-- the Republicans are all pledged to do what's ever necessary to make sure Obama fails as a president. It wouldn't matter who Obama nominates in the eyes of Kyl or Coburn or Cornyn; anyone he nominates is secretly a Muslim terrorist and a socialist and fascist who must be stopped.

If Specter's going to be counted as a Democrat, the Senate is going to have to adopt a new organizing resolution allowing Specter to be counted as a Democrat, which presumably means finding another committee for Ed Kaufman, the least senior member. But Reid doesn't have to do that. He could just let the Republicans howl all they want-- it's what they do anyway-- and refuse to get behind a new organizing resolution and keeping Specter on in the Republican seat. So far he's been voting down the line with them anyway, most recently today when he was one of a small handful of reactionaries to join the Republicans in making sure the banksters could continue throwing families out of their homes with impunity.

But Reid doesn't have the moxy of a Nancy Pelosi. So instead he'll put Obama in the untenable position of having to come to an agreement with the only Republican on the committee who might possibly agree to a compromise: Lindsey Graham. I hope you didn't just puke up your breakfast. If-- like me-- you think Ian Millhiser has the right idea about how to decide on a new Supreme Court Justice, you may well have. I guess the situation for Democrats-- real ones, not the ones owned by banksters in DC-- could be worse: Biden and Reid could accept another half dozen Republicans into the caucus and end any chance for anything ever happening to change the course. No wonder Limbaugh suggested Specter take some more with him!


UPDATE: White Men Never Get Ahead

Adam didn't invent this; it's in the new TIME

The Supreme Court currently consists of 5 white men, several with the most dubious imaginable credentials, one African-American generally considered a complete self-loathing Uncle Tom, and one elderly and infirm white woman. Because the name of one prominent woman judge of Hispanic heritage, Sonia Sotomayor, has been mentioned as a possible nominee, Republicans are going bonkers and complaining that white males never get a shot at anything. These people really are out of their minds; lucky for them there are dicks like Mark Halperin (above) and Limbaugh to whine for them in the public forum.


UPDATE II: Republicans Declare War On... Whoever

Right-wing pressure groups-- primarily those demanding more hard-line corporatists and pro-authoritarian nominees-- got on a conference call today and began plotting strategy. They are determined to sabotage anyone President Obama nominates. We'll be organized. We're more organized than ever before," said Jay Sekulow, the prominent conservative lawyer who heads the American Center for Law & Justice.

High Court, slashing Exxon Mobil tab, declares itself the Official Tool of CorporateAmerica, a wholly owned subsidiary of CheneyCo

"The new law made by the court should have been left to Congress."

-- Justice Ginsburg, dissenting from the made-up majority opinion that
punitive damages can't exceed actual economic compensation

With Justice David Souter of all people writing for the Roberts Court's CorporateAmerica majority, the Supreme Court voted today 5-3 to slash the punitive damages Exxon Mobil Corp. must pay to victims of the Exxon Valdez oil wreck -- previously halved to $2.5 billion by lower courts -- all the way down to $500 million, on the theory that the company can't be made to pay victims more in punitive damages than they were paid in economic compensation, according to the Associated Press.

Writing in dissent (along with Justice John Paul Stevens), both Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer registered the technical objection that, hey, bub, there's no such law, and law-making is kind of what, y'know, Congress is there to do. "The new law made by the court should have been left to Congress," Justice Ginsburg suggested.

Justice Souter seems to have been concerned that the courts not give up their traditional role as judge of punitive damages.

Justice "Slammin' Sammy" Alito, who recused himself from the case on the ground that he owns Exxon Mobil stock, was allowed by Chief Justice Roberts to carry his Exxon Mobil-colored pompoms to Court deliberations. "I'm sure I could have been impartial," Justice Alito said. "Actually, I think what would have been fair is if all those bird and bunny lovers had been made to pay Exxon Mobil $500 milliion in partial compensation for the $3.4 billion it's already paid out. Nino and Clarence [i.e., Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas] were all set to go for it too. I mean, accidents happen."

On a more personal note, Justice Anthony Kennedy was jubilant. "Oh man, this is sweet," he said. "Ever since Sandy O'Connor left, whenever we do crap like this, I'm usually the swing vote, and people jump up and down and curse me and my family. Personally, I think Soutie's been sniffing too much model-airplane glue. You know, for my last birthday he gave me a model he built, it's really great. Anyway, when he announced his vote, I told him, 'I'm buying lunch.' He got hysterical, 'cause if there's anyone cheaper on the Court than me, it's him."


NOTE: THE ABOVE ITEM PARAPHRASES SOME REPORTING
FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS AS WELL AS . . .

However, since we can't afford to pay the AP the rates they're now trying to charge bloggers -- more from each blogger, we have to think (even if you use only 50 of their golden words), than they paid the actual writer -- we've supplemented their material with stuff from, er, other sources.

Okay, the Alito and Kennedy quotes we made up. But can anyone prove that this isn't what they were thinking?


UPDATE FROM ALASKA: SENATE CANDIDATES MARK BEGICH
AND TED STEVENS HAVE VERY DIFFERENT VIEWS ON THIS

Ted Stevens continues taking massive campaign donations from Big Oil in general, and from Exxon in particular, and he continues voting for their very special interests. Mark Begich, the progressive seeking the bring sane representation back to Alaska, points out that "the thousands of Alaskans whose lives were devastated by this disaster are hurt, once again, by this ruling. What we're seeing today is another example of how Washington is out of touch with real people. The justices have sided with corporate America rather than with Alaska families who have suffered for nearly 20 years. Sen. Stevens continues to show he works hard for special interests, but where has he been when it comes to doing what's right for Alaskans? No more delays. Exxon needs to write those checks today."

If you'd like to see a senator representing Alaska's families, workers and consumers-- instead of another well-paid off shill for Corporate America, please consider giving Mark Begich a hand at our Blue America page.

-- Howie

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