Can Jeff Flake-- And Perhaps Mitt Romney-- Bring The Cult To A Grinding Halt?

Incipient tyrants and fascists always seek to destroy media and the judicial system before their authoritarian assault begins in earnest. One would have to have been in a coma for the past 19 months not to have noticed Señor Trumpanzee's attack on the mainstream media. He's also been remaking the judicial system by rushing through the worst judges every nominated in recent history. And he's still on the attack against the judiciary. This tweet was from yesterday:

I'm guessing that every Republican politician noted how effortlessly Trump disposed of Mark Sanford, a tepid congressional critic, a couple of weeks ago-- all it took was one tweet on primary day and Sanford was upended by a relatively unknown self-funder in a moderate South Carolina district. That was a warning shot across the bows of any Republicans who were thinking of separating themselves from Trump, his regime and their fascist agenda.

Over the weekend, Mitt Romney wrote an OpEd for the Salt Lake Tribune, Where I Stand On The Trump Agenda. "I will," he wrote, "support the president’s policies when I believe they are in the best interest of Utah and the nation. I have noted, the first year of his administration has exceeded my expectations; he made our corporate tax code globally competitive, worked to reduce unnecessary regulations and restored multiple use on Utah public land. In addition, I am pleased that he backed away from imposing a 35 percent tariff on all foreign goods."

But I have openly expressed my disagreement with certain of the administration decisions such as the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); I want more markets open for Utah and American goods. I also oppose broad-based tariffs, such as those proposed on steel and aluminum, particularly when they are imposed on our allies. I agree, however, with narrower penalties levied on companies or nations that employ unfair trade practices, such as China.

I have and will continue to speak out when the president says or does something which is divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions. I do not make this a daily commentary; I express contrary views only when I believe it is a matter of substantial significance.

Meanwhile, Trump can't do much to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake. Flake, who's been far more of a critic of Trump's than Sanford, decided to retire, so he won't be facing a primary, a primary that will now result in one of three Republicans who are each polling behind Kyrsten Sinema, the putative Democrat in the race.

On Sunday, Flake told ABC-TV's George Stephanopoulos that he and what he called a "number of senators" are serious about blocking Trump's lousy judicial nominees if his headlong rush into a trade war, among other things, isn't stopped. Flake: "I do think that unless we can actually exercise something other than just approving the President's executive calendar, his nominees, judges, that we have no reason to be there. So I think myself and a number of Senators, at least a few of us, will stand up and say let's not move any more judges until we get a vote, for example, on tariffs."

Flake is on the Judiciary Committee which only has an 11-10 Republican majority. If he starts voting with the Democrats on Trumpy-the-Clown nominees... the Judiciary Committee will come to a grinding halt.

No light
No people
No speak
No people
No cars
No people
No food
No people
Stopped
Short
Grinding halt
Everything's coming to a grinding halt

Flake told Stephanopoulos "The Mark Sanford loss clarified something if it wasn't clarified before. You can't, as a Republican these days, stand in-- in-- you know, in opposition to some of the president's policies or-- or not condone his behavior and expect to win a Republican primary. That's the reality and then we're seeing that played out."

Yeah, Corker was right-- it's a fucking cult! Academic cult expert and author Janja Lalich: "The people around Trump, and the Republicans in Washington, absolutely kowtow to him, either out of fear they're going to anger him, or out of adulation. That behavior is very typical of a cult... I think you have to look at the effect of Trump's behavior and language on his base. He readily ridicules and chastises people. He readily pushes people aside if they're not worshipping him. We've all seen the videos of his aides praising him to high heaven. That's the kind of adulation cult leaders expect and demand... Cult leaders constantly need to rev up their people. That's one of the challenges of being a charismatic leader. You have to keep people enchanted with you. Him holding these rallies is both a recruitment technique and a way to keep his followers happy. He's showing him in their presence-- being there for them, talking to them, relating to them. All of that helps to solidify their cult membership, so to speak. It reinforces the idea that they're a special group of people following this very special man. With Trump, it's not a religion, but there's the same kind of fervor."

Trump is happily making these pronouncements and expecting everyone to go along with him, and he's not getting much flack. Most of his followers have bought into his fear-mongering, which creates an us vs. them mentality that is typical of a cult.

...Separating the cult from the rest of the world is pretty much what all cults do. That doesn't mean you have to live in a compound. It just means that, in your thinking, you're part of this special elite, separate from the unworthy... Once you internalize that, you're done for.

Don't forget to vote tomorrow if you live in New York, Maryland, Colorado, Oklahoma or Utah. Try bringing some friends along. I doubt Flake-- or even Romney-- is going to stop Trump or turn the GOP away from their dedication to fascism and their ugly new cult. But you know who could? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DuWayne Gregory, Michael DeVito, Jeff Beals, and Dana Balter in New York, Levi Tillemann, Saira Rao and Emily Sirota in Colorado, Tom Guild in Oklahoma and Maryland's Ben Jealous.

Peeking ahead to the Trumpification of the federal judiciary

The Brookings Institution's Russell Wheeler points out that when it comes to judicial nominations, "The president doesn't always get exactly who he wants." I guess that should make us feel better.

by Ken

My attention was grabbed by the story hawked in yesterday's washingtonpost.com "Post Most" which began:

Trump to inherit more than 100 court vacancies, plans to reshape judiciary

By Philip Rucker and Robert Barnes

Donald Trump is set to inherit an uncommon number of vacancies in the federal courts in addition to the open Supreme Court seat, giving the president-elect a monumental opportunity to reshape the judiciary after taking office.

The estimated 103 judicial vacancies that President Obama is expected to hand over to Trump in the Jan. 20 transition of power is nearly double the 54 openings Obama found eight years ago following George W. Bush’s presidency.

Confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees slowed to a crawl after Republicans took control of the Senate in 2015. Obama White House officials blame Senate Republicans for what they characterize as an unprecedented level of obstruction in blocking the Democratic president’s court picks.

The result is a multitude of openings throughout the federal circuit and district courts that will allow the new Republican president to quickly make a wide array of lifetime appointments.

State gun control laws, abortion restrictions, voter laws, anti-discrimination measures and immigrant issues are all matters that are increasingly heard by federal judges and will be influenced by the new composition of the courts. Trump has vowed to choose ideologues in the mold of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon — a prospect that has activists on the right giddy. . . .

The post goes on to quote some of those giddy right-wing activists, and to take note of the considerable anger on the other side, Democrats furious over Republicans' abusive handling of Obama judicial nominations, leaving federal court from the Supreme Court on down undermanned, in many states critically so. There is, for example, the 4200-word statement issued this month by Pat Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee,

saying that by blocking [Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick] Garland, Republicans had committed “the most outrageous act of obstruction and irresponsibility” that he had seen in his 42 years in the Senate.

Speaking more generally about circuit and district court vacancies, Leahy added: “Despite the fact that there are dozens of qualified, consensus nominees pending on the Senate floor right now, we will finish this Congress having confirmed just 22 judicial nominees in two years. That is the lowest number since Harry Truman was president.”

Naturally, Judiciary Committe Chairman Chuck Grassley considers the only relative statistic that Obama got three more judicial appointments confirmed in his eight years as president than George W. Bush did, 329-326. And no doubt Republicans are smarting from the considerable transformation of the federal judiciary, in terms of basic legal competence and diversity, wrought by those 329 "Obama judges." Their response was to pretty much shut the pipeline, leading to the present horrendous backlog, even of nominees confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee. And because Republicans have unlimited license to be both liars and imbeciles, they can pretend that the record on Senate treatment of actual judicial appointments doesn't matter -- including Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's wholly unprecedented refusal even to consider the Garland Supreme Court nomination.

So what lies ahead for the federal judiciary, apart from the like-as-not three Supreme Court vacancies that will need filling? The Post-ies offer one veteran judicial observer's analysis.

Russell Wheeler, an expert on judicial nominations at the Brookings Institution, said Trump has a great opportunity to change the partisan split in the federal courts. He predicted that by mid-2020, Republican appointees would hold about half of the 673 district judgeships, as opposed to the current 34 percent. And among the 179 circuit court judgeships, Democratic appointees now hold a slim majority, 51 percent, but that could fall to about 43 percent.

But Wheeler warned that there are important limitations to Trump’s power. For one thing, many of the judges most likely to leave their appointments in the coming years were appointed by Republican presidents, meaning there will be fewer opportunities to shift the partisan makeup.

And perhaps more importantly, 28 of the 50 states will be represented by at least one Democratic senator, including large ones such as California, Florida and New York. Senate leaders have a tradition of considering nominees only if they are supported by both senators representing their state — and Democratic senators are expected to bargain hard with the Trump administration, just as Republican senators did with Obama’s.

“The president doesn’t always get exactly who he wants,” Wheeler said.

Well, okay, I suppose. It's just that present-day congressional Republicans have an impressive history of doing whatever it takes to get what they want, and to hell with whoever or whatever gets in their way.


BUT THERE IS A STOPGAP SOLUTION: THE ONE
CRAFTED BY NO LESS THAN SENATOR McCONNELL

Ironically, the McConnell Garland-stonewalling strategy points the way to at least a stopgap solution. Miss Mitch, lying his putrid guts out, as he so often does (like so many Republicans, his basic approach to the truth is "Why resort to it when there's a usable lie available?"), that there was precedent for not considering a Supreme Court made in a president's final year. The truth (ooh, that word again!) is that the precedents apply to appointments considerably later in the president's final year, not to leaving a Supreme Court seat vacant for more than a year.

However, now that it turns out to be a matter of interpretation just how early in a presidential term the embargo on judicial nominees applies, I can't think why it shouldn't already apply to President Trump, and the Senate shouldn't be allowed to consider any judicial nominees from him. After all, there's a presidential election less than four years away, and as Miss Mitch insisted, the people have a right to be heard before the Senate rushes to judgment.

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2013 in Review -- A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy,* Part 4: A great anniversary approaches!

Plus more "Quote of the Year" nominees

[*TO MEET THE JANITOR OF LUNACY, SEE PART 1]



by Noah

One of the greatest anniversaries in our nation’s history will happen this year. Forty years ago, on August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned! It was either that or certain removal from office via impeachment, and it was bipartisan. That’s how bad it was. If Nixon wanted to retire with a pension and perks, it was the only way.

The anti-semitism. The racism. The criminality, the paranoia, and the screaming down the halls of the White House. Psychosis. "I am not a crook." Yes you were, Richard, and worse. What a horrific human being! We can be thankful that he is gone, and we can be very thankful that he wasn't the president during the Cuban missile crisis or we wouldn't be here at all.



True story: One day, back in the early '80s, I went to the Fifth Avenue Doubleday record dept. here in NYC. It was on the second-floor mezzanine. When I got there, I immediately saw Tricky Dick at the counter with his daughter and son-in-law Julie and David Eisenhower. No one else was in the department except two very large bodyguards, who always managed to place themselves between me and His Evilness (I discreetly played with that one a bit). Here's the kicker: Nixon was buying blank tape! Tape! The very thing that had sunk him!

There was just one employee, a young kid who was nervous as hell. The kid was so nervous that he dropped all the boxes of cassettes all over the place. Nixon, in an unexpected (by me, at least) display of humanity, said in his distinctive voice, "Ah, that's all right, young man." I will say that other than the irony of Nixon buying tape, I was struck by the fact that he was very charismatic, but then, many psychotic bigots and war criminals are. They always said that Zodiac and Ted Bundy were very charming, and that Adolf dude could sure give a speech!

But there he was, wearing an expensive royal blue overcoat. I wanted to scream, but I knew I’d be thrown over the balcony or something. So all I did was mutter “war criminal” within earshot of one of the bodyguards as I walked out of the store. My desire to purchase anything was gone.

I had seen the man, in person, who, in an act of treason, sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace talks that President Lyndon Johnson was working on to end the Vietnam War. LBJ’s tapes reveal that he knew of the treason that would lead to tens of thousands of addtional American casualties, but he and his VP, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nominee, did nothing. They didn’t want to expose some wire-tapping. Humphrey thought he was going to win anyway, and LBJ was also thinking that America couldn’t handle the knowledge that a presidential candidate was guilty of treason. LBJ was wrong, just as he had been wrong about our ability to deal with the truth of JFK’s murder.

Sleazy cover-up artist Gerald Ford

Not only had the Paris peace talks been wrecked, Nixon -- who said he had a “secret plan” to end the war -- was elected president. Eventually he got some of what was coming to him, but so many got so much that they didn’t deserve. A sleazy cover-up artist named Gerald Ford was handed the presidency, and he in turn pardoned Nixon of any and all crimes, famously saying that no one wants to see the former president in jail. Really?

So many families were destroyed, all because one lunatic had to be president at any cost. I spit on your grave, Dick Nixon.

There’s huge irony to be seen as we look back on the Nixon presidency. The irony lies in the fact that he was a Republican and there is no way he would ever be able to be in today’s Republican Party. Here’s why:

1. Nixon improved Social Security benefits. He increased some taxes on the wealthy, and he also championed finding a way to guarantee a minimum income.

2. Nixon supported a Clean Air Act and affirmative action.

3. Nixon created the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.

4. Nixon created OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

5. Nixon’s top economic advisor, Herb Stein, is on record as saying, “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon Administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

The man had well-documented issues. The tapes and the eyewitness accounts don’t lie, but if not for the complete evil of the treason for which he should have been hanged, or at least jailed, Nixon would be considered a socialist by the lunatics that inhabit the Republican Party today -- not just a liberal, a raving socialist. They would treat him much like they treat President Obama today. That’s a measure of how sociopathic and psychopathic today’s Republicans are. Obama and the Conservadems? They would fit in fine in the Republican Party of the early 1970s. The Janitor of Lunacy is in full force.


Note the blue-penned time and initials from the witness, the bouncing-off-the-walls Nixon's companion of his final days in office, Henry Kissinger.


NEED MORE EVIDENCE OF THE INGRAINED
LUNACY OF REPUBLICANS? HERE ARE SOME
MORE "QUOTE OF THE YEAR" NOMINEES

1. Judge Edith Jones, U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals, Reagan appointee

Sigh, where do the Republicans keep coming up with these troglodytes? Well, in this case, while Judge Jones may “serve” in Louisiana, she’s from the ultimate loonyland, Texas!


“[C]ertain racial groups like African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime and prone to commit acts of violence.”

And: “Some groups seem to commit more heinous crimes than others.”

Really? Really? If I didn’t know that she had already made it clear that she was talking about African-Americans and Hispanics, I might have thought she was talking about 20th-century Germans, Nixon’s napalm, Stalin’s Russia, 16th-century Spaniards pouring molten gold down the throats of Incans -- or Texans aiming their trucks at Mexicans on their highways, for that matter. Who or what brought this cretin up? And what kind of people invite such a person to speak? This is a judge -- on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, no less? This horror show of a throwback to the Civil War, a Reagan appointee, was even on the short list for promotion to the Supreme Court under both Bushes. Well, no surprise there, is there?

She said this in a talk before the Federalist Society at U. Penn’s law school. I guess she felt comfy as she gazed out into an audience of sheet-wearing Republican morons. What’s next? “Why, I hear them darkies loves pig's feet and fried chicken. And they love our prisons, for the free meals and other free stuff”?

Really, where do they get these people? I guess Judge Judy wouldn’t take the job.

A couple of hundred years ago, people in Europe thought you could tell a person’s criminal proclivities by measuring the size and shape of their skulls. In Republican World, it is still a couple of hundred years ago.


2. John “Where’s My” Boehner, to CBS’s Bob Schieffer


“Well, Bob, we should not be judges on how many laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal."

Rrrriiiight, John-boy. Damn all them laws and regulations. They just get in the way of Republican free expression. Now those folks in Florida, they’ve got it right. See a black kid in a hoodie? Blast him! Voting rights? Hah, who needs ‘em? No one important anyway! Employee pensions? Follow the lead of Michigan’s Governor Snyder: Declare the cities bankrupt and steal the workers' pensions and give that money to the corporations! We don’t need no stinking laws. Do the same with Social Security! Obamacare? Why do we want those people to live anyway? They don’t vote for us.

I wonder why.


3. $en. John Cornyn, $enate Republican whip

From a bizarre place called Texas (which translates loosely from the Mexican as “Land of Los Locos”), comes yet another apparently peyote-button-induced word jumble from the $enator. Cornyn seeks to prove that, while Texas has given us straitjacket candidates like Rick “1-2-?” Perry, Louie “The Bestiality Guy” Gohmert, Canadian-born Rafael “Ted” Cruz, and Steve Stockman, the guy who thinks Cornyn is a liberal, nobody does wackobird better than he, his sun-baked self.

Heeeere’s Johnny as he follows the Fox lead in resurrecting ACORN in another deep-digging desperation attempt to destroy Obamacare, orchestrate more deaths by cancer, increase the infant mortality rate, and do all the other fine things on the Big Republican Wish List. They’ve tried everything else except claiming that Obamacare caused Fukushima.


“We’ve already heard some anecdotal reports about Obamacare navigators, including a woman who had an outstanding arrest warrant at the time she was hired, along with former members of an organization known as ACORN . . . . ”
   
Maybe Obama hired that “Cadillac-driving welfare queen” from the mind of Ronnie Reagan too! “Anecdotal reports”? Some guy who knows some guy who knows some guy who got the real story from the Bigfoot family that live in the treehouse in his back yard. Hey, Cornyn, you want true crime? Take a look around you on the $enate floor. While you’re at it, the House of Representatives is just down the hall. You can find someone with a legal problem in any group of size.

You know it’s bad when people reference something they got from Fox “News” as if it were actually factual. Consider the source. We already know what righties think of “community organizers.” They buried three of them in an earthen dam in Mississippi back in 1964.
   

4. Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI)

I started this post with Dick Nixon so why not end on an impeachment theme too? I’m putting these two together because they’re really just two cheeks of a horse’s ass.

Notice that we have yet another twit from Texas. We'll let him go first.


“If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it.”

I’m sure Boehner would drink to that, but wouldn’t Ol’ Cheez Doodle Face drink to just about anything?

Now, the guy from Nugentland gets his say. Ain’t free speech grand?


“If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true.”

I have to say that if I were a congressman, writing a bill that would create jobs or alleviate poverty and hunger or give people a shot at health care or help children get an education would be my dream come true. I have to admit that I’d also be tempted to write a bill that would send cretins like these two into space -- to one of the big gas giants like Jupiter, where they would be at home. No need to be cruel about it.

And I’m sorry, I don’t really mean to insult horses. That’s just not fair of me. I should have compared these men to cockroaches, the kind that have imbibed too much insecticide and just race around in circles accomplishing nada. If that isn’t an apt metaphor for the current poison-fueled House of Representatives, I don’t know what is.

Oops, there I go again. Sorry, cockroaches.

#

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A PRAYER TO THE JANITOR OF LUNACY*

Part 1: Take a bow, Repugs! (*including Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy") [Monday]

Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums? (Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obma: Some top Republican lies of 2013) [Tuesday]

Part 3: No Cruz control (Rafael "Ted" Cruz in his own words) [Wednesday]

Part 4: A great anniversary approaches! (Nixon's resignation) (plus more "Quote of the Year nominees") [Thursday]

Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me -- Some people really try my patience (Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.) [Friday]

Part 6 (and last): In the words of Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" (Exploiting tragedy for a buck; Miss America's not American?; "Quote of the Year" winner) [Saturday]

And don't forget Noah's recent --
"Need a last-minute Christmas gift suggestion?" [12/22]
"50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles" [12/26]
"A Tale of Two Popes -- the one in the Vatican and the one in North Carolina" [12/27]

#

As DOMA goes down again, will ideological hack shyster Paul "Ohfer" Clement be kicking back any of that $1.5M?

"Severely conservative" U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs -- once the subject of a Glenn Greenwald piece called "Dennis G. Jacobs: Case study in judicial pathology" -- wrote the 2-1 majority opinion declaring Section 3 of DOMA unconstitutional.

"[L]aw (federal or state) is not concerned with holy matrimony. Government deals with marriage as a civil status -- however fundamental -- and New York has elected to extend that status to same-sex couples. A state may enforce and dissolve a couple's marriage, but it cannot sanctify or bless it. For that, the pair must go next door."

-- Chief Judge Jacobs, in his ruling

by Ken

I suppose I shouldn't be making fun of ideological hack shyster Paul "Ohfer" Clement just because these days he loses every damn time he argues a case. And no, I'm not even thinking of the fact that I, alone with all U.S. taxpayers, am funding the $1.5M sinkhole House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner has created to bankroll the Ohfer Man. (See my Tuesday post, "Does anyone believe the now-spent $1.5M is all "Sunny John" Boehner will ram through for the defense of DOMA ignorance and hatred?")

No, the reason why I shouldn't be making fun of Ohfer Paul in his bid to enter the Guinness Book in the category of Legal Loozars is that the way the federal courts are stacked now with sociopathic right-wing judicial grunge, the Ohfer Man could just as well be riding a string of decency-defying triumphs. You can't say that Sunny John was wrong to think it worth a roll of the dice -- especially since he's not paying for it.

Still, it's worth noting that the latest DOMA smackdown was issued by a conservative judge -- indeed, a "severely conservative judge," as Ian Millhiser describes the chief judge of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in his ThinkProgress Justice post:

Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs is a very conservative judge. He joined a court decision effectively declaring corporations immune to international human rights law -- even when they “trade in or exploit slaves, employ mercenary armies to do dirty work for despots, perform genocides or operate torture prisons for a despot’s political opponents, or engage in piracy.” And he once gave a speech to the conservative Federalist Society decrying the “anti-social effects” of attorneys providing free legal services to the less fortunate. [This last link, by the way, is to a Glenn Greenwald Salon piece titled "Dennis G. Jacobs: Case study in judicial pathology," which is blurbed: "The ACLU scores a big victory over government lawlessness, but the dissenting judge's ugly outburst speaks volumes."]

And yet, this severely conservative judge is also the author of an opinion striking down the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act. Even more significantly, Chief Judge Jacobs’ opinion concludes that any law which discriminates against gay men and lesbians should be treated very skeptically under our Constitution.

Ian quotes this portion of Judge Jacobs's ruling (the boldface highlighting is Ian's):

[W]e conclude that review of Section 3 of DOMA requires heightened scrutiny. The Supreme Court uses certain factors to decide whether a new classification qualifies as a quasi-suspect class. They include: A) whether the class has been historically "subjected to discrimination," B) whether the class has a defining characteristic that “frequently bears [a] relation to ability to perform or contribute to society," C) whether the class exhibits “obvious, immutable, or distinguishing characteristics that define them as a discrete group," and D) whether the class is "a minority or politically powerless." Immutability and lack of political power are not strictly necessary factors to identify a suspect class. Nevertheless, immutability and political power are indicative, and we consider them here. In this case, all four factors justify heightened scrutiny: A) homosexuals as a group have historically endured persecution and discrimination; B) homosexuality has no relation to aptitude or ability to contribute to society; C) homosexuals are a discernible group with non-obvious distinguishing characteristics, especially in the subset of those who enter same-sex marriages; and D) the class remains a politically weakened minority.

Says Ian:

This is a really big deal. Jacobs is not simply saying that DOMA imposes unique and unconstitutional burdens on gay couples, he is saying that any attempt by government to discriminate against gay people must have an "exceedingly persuasive" justification. This is the same very skeptical standard afforded to laws that discriminate against women. If Jacobs’ reasoning is adopted by the Supreme Court, it will be a sweeping victory for gay rights, likely causing state discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be virtually eliminated. And the fact that this decision came from such a conservative judge makes it all the more likely that DOMA will ultimately be struck down by the Supreme Court.

Ian records "one unfortunate caveat": that Second Circuit Judge Chester Staub, a Clinton appointee on the three-judge panel that issued the ruling (a mere three weeks after hearing oral arguments), dissented. Nevertheless, he says,

this marks the second time that a prominent conservative court of appeals judge declared DOMA unconstitutional, and it relies on a sweeping rationale in doing so. Supporters of equality have a great deal to celebrate today.

OF COURSE CONGRESS COULD SIMPLIFY LIFE
BY GETTING DOMA THE HELL OFF THE BOOKS

NY Rep. Jerry Nadler, you'll recall, is the author of the Respect for Marriage Act, which would show some actual respect for marriage by repealing the crap-brained garbage that is DOMA. Jerry, who happpens to be Edith Windsor's congressman (and submitted an amicus brief in the case), responded quickly to the Second Circuit decision. His office issued the following release:

Nadler Praises Federal Court for Striking Down DOMA in Windsor Case

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, and author of the bill to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), applauded the decision released today by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals which found that "Section 3 of DOMA violates equal protection and is therefore unconstitutional."

"Now it's six in a row," said Nadler.  "Yesterday, we found out Speaker Boehner had already wasted $1.5 million taxpayer dollars losing five DOMA cases in a row.  Today, we learned that a sixth court has just ruled DOMA unconstitutional."

"As the amicus brief I spearheaded in this case pointed out, and as the court agreed, there is no justification for denying Edie Windsor the same right as all other spouses to her full inheritance without paying a tax penalty," continued Nadler.  "Edie lives in my congressional district, and was with her wife, Thea Spyer, for 44 years.  The last thing she should have to worry about following the loss of her spouse is an unjust tax penalty imposed for no other reason than the fact that she and her wife were the same gender.  Now is the time to stop defending this unjust law and repeal it once and for all.  I hope today's ruling brings us one step closer to that goal," Nadler said.

Congressman Nadler is the author of the Respect for Marriage Act to repeal DOMA, and spearheaded an amicus brief joined by 144 Members of Congress in the Windsor case.

The Second Circuit found Section 3 of DOMA, which defines "marriage" for the purposes of federal law as the union between one man and one woman, as unconstitutional.  It did so on the ground that laws like DOMA that discriminate against gay men and lesbians should be the subject to a standard of "intermediate scrutiny" and that DOMA could not withstand that standard of review.  This is particularly notable, as this decision, in Windsor, is the first decision by a Circuit Court to hold that classifications based on sexual orientation are subject to such heightened scrutiny, as opposed to the lower "rational basis" test.

Today's decision upheld the decision of the District Court for the Southern District of New York which held that the government's denial of the marital deduction to same sex spouses was unconstitutional.

Of course, just because it would be the right as well as smart thing to do doesn't mean there's any more likely today than there was yesterday that Congress will avail itself of the opportunity. The Senate won't even have to stand up and be counted, since the math in the House all says, "Gimme a break, no way in hell!" With all due respect to Representative Nadler, I doubt there are any more votes for DOMA repeal today than there were yesterday.

But some one of these days . . . .

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Romney On Bork: "I Wish He Were Already On The Supreme Court"

If you follow me on Twitter you've probably seen me tweeting the Romney quote in the title of this post over the last week or so. I had an advance copy-- I'm a member of People For the American Way; you could be too-- of Jamie Raskin's Borking America, the best report I've ever seen on the dangers inherent to Romney's control over the selection of federal judges.

Many presidents leave their most enduring legacy to the nation in the Justices that they name to the Supreme Court and the federal judges that they put on the bench. So what inspired former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to name former judge Robert Bork to co-chair his presidential campaign advisory committee on law, the Constitution and the judiciary?

Surely Governor Romney meant to persuade activists on the Religious Right and in the Tea Party that he is ready to do battle-- not just to entrench the Corporate Court that rules today, but to nominate people to the bench who will dismantle what remains of modern civil rights and civil liberties law. What better proof that the formerly pro-gay rights and pro-choice Massachusetts governor has completed his conversion to right-wing conservatism than to pick America’s scowling critic of abortion, gay rights, free speech, progressive regulation and the separation of church and state as his constitutional in-house counsel?  Even if it fails to convince the Right that Romney is a deep-down true believer like Rick Santorum or Michelle Bachmann, at least his appointment of Bork expresses his complete and total surrender to the most right-wing forces in the Republican Party.

But what does this appointment say to the rest of us? Surely Romney must be assuming that it is safe to accede and pander to the Right because we have all forgotten about Bork’s anti-consumer, anti-environmental and anti-worker record as a judge, not to mention his snarling opposition to women’s rights, civil rights and civil liberties-- the hard-core positions that moved the Senate to reject his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the United States Supreme Court on a bipartisan vote of 58-42.

Romney is also presumably trusting that, ever since Bork resigned from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to launch a career as a conservative polemicist with the American Enterprise Institute, most of the public has tuned out his increasingly bitter diatribes against the “feminized” Supreme Court and his embarrassing tirades against “American cultural decline,” and the social “rot and decadence” of our country.

But Romney’s elevation of Bork to advise him on the kinds of judges who should serve on the Supreme Court and the federal bench spells serious trouble for the American people. At a time when a pretty reliable 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court is already sanctifying the power of large corporations and closing down individual Americans’ access to the courts, when reproductive freedom and voting rights hang by a thread, it is a cause for public alarm that Romney wants to try once again to put Robert Bork in the driver’s seat of America’s constitutional journey.

...Robert Bork first gained public prominence when he took leave from Yale Law School to serve as Solicitor General of the United States under President Richard Nixon. From that position, Bork was catapulted to dubious national fame when he became the trigger-man for Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who proved too diligent in the discovery process by demanding Nixon’s secret taped recordings of his Oval Office conversations. When Nixon ordered both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox, they refused and resigned rather than carry out Nixon’s order. Only when Nixon made his way down to the level of Solicitor General Robert Bork did he find a willing accomplice and, apparently, a kindred spirit. Bork became the Acting Attorney General and promptly fired Archibald Cox. At the time Bork insisted that he was acting simply to stabilize the Justice Department, but he later cited Archibald Cox’s association with “Nixon’s despised and feared political enemy, Senator Edward Kennedy” and the Kennedy family as a convoluted justification for this naked assault on independent law enforcement, which led to passage of the Independent Counsel Statute. 

...Bork was confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on February 8, 1982. On the bench, Bork turned his authoritarian instincts into a voting record that nearly always favored government when it was challenged by public interest groups, workers or citizens but favored business corporations whenever they challenged the government. If the New Yorker magazine drew a map of Judge Bork’s vision of America, corporations would loom large and vast over the country, the government would be standing beneath them as a military and police force to control the rabble, and citizens would appear as barely visible specks on the bottom of the land.

In August 1987, during his Supreme Court confirmation fight, the Public Citizen Litigation Group published an exhaustive and devastating report on Judge Bork’s judicial record. The authors could find no “consistent application of judicial restraint or any other judicial philosophy” in Bork’s work on the Court. Rather, by focusing on split decisions, where judicial ideology is made most plain, Public Citizen found that “one can predict [Bork’s] vote with almost complete accuracy simply by identifying the parties in the case.” When the government litigated against a business corporation, Judge Bork voted for the business interest 100% of the time. But when government was challenged by workers, environmentalists and consumers, Bork voted nearly 100% of the time for the government.

In the crucial field of administrative law, for example, “Judge Bork adhered to an extreme form of judicial restraint if the case was brought by public interest organizations. His vote favored the executive in every one of the seven split decisions in which public interest organizations challenged regulations issued by federal agencies.” In these cases, Judge Bork defended, for example, Reagan administration rules relating to the environment, the regulation of carcinogenic colors in food, drugs and cosmetics, the regulation of companies with television and radio licenses, and privacy rules in family planning clinics. Similarly, in the six split decisions relating to civil rights and civil liberties where the government was a party, Judge Bork “voted against the individual every time.” In one of these cases, Dronenburg v. Zech, Judge Bork wrote a 1984 opinion upholding the Navy’s discharge of a sailor for being gay and used the opportunity to attack the Supreme Court’s entire line of authority, beginning with Griswold v. Connecticut, which articulated a constitutional right to privacy in matters relating to sex and procreation.

Yet, in the eight split decisions where a business interest challenged the government, Judge Bork voted straight down the line for business every time.

On July 1, 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court, setting off a profound national debate about the meaning of the Constitution and the role of the Justice. Is the Constitution the expansive charter of the freedoms and liberties of the people, as Justices like William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall argued, or is it a straitjacket on democratic freedom designed primarily to protect those with power, privilege, wealth and property? Bork’s performance was not reassuring. In his most reflective moment at his confirmation hearings, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he wanted to serve on the Court because it offered him an “intellectual feast,” but most Americans rapidly came to the conclusion that, if Bork were seated at the table, they were themselves going to appear somewhere on the menu.

Bork’s opposition to reproductive freedom as a constitutional principle, his skepticism about modern civil rights law, his blithe constitutional acceptance of poll taxes and literacy tests, his reflexively pro-corporate, anti-worker and anti-environmentalist stances, his historical U-turns and dodgy answers all inspired a huge popular mobilization against him. Ultimately, his nomination was defeated with a strong, bipartisan vote of 58-42, with six Republicans voting no and two Democrats voting yes. (Lest one reach the conclusion that the Senate would have rejected anyone nominated to the Court by President Reagan, the body ultimately confirmed, by a vote of 97-0, the deeply conservative Anthony Kennedy, who later came to author the Court’s devastating Citizens United decision.)

...As a judge, Bork regularly took the side of business interests against government regulators trying to hold them accountable, but the side of government when it was challenged by workers, environmentalists and consumers pressing for more corporate accountability. Indeed, a characteristic business-oriented opinion by Bork became a crucial point of discussion in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In a 1984 case called Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union v. American Cyanamid Co., Judge Bork found that the Occupational Safety and Health Act did not protect women at work in a manufacturing plant from a company policy that forced them to be sterilized-- or else lose their jobs-- because of high levels of lead in the air. The Secretary of Labor had decided that the Act’s requirement that employers must provide workers “employment and a place of employment which are free from recognized hazards” meant that American Cyanamid had to “fix the workplace” through industrial clean-up rather than “fix the employees” by sterilizing or removing all women workers of child-bearing age. But Judge Bork strongly disagreed. He wrote an opinion for his colleagues apparently endorsing the view that other clean-up measures were not necessary or possible and that the sterilization policy was, in any event, a “realistic and clearly lawful” way to prevent harm to the women’s fetuses. Because the company’s “fetus protection policy” took place by virtue of sterilization in a hospital, outside of the physical workplace,the plain terms of the Act simply did not apply, according to Judge Bork. Thus, as Public Citizen put it, “an employer may require its female workers to be sterilized in order to reduce employer liability for harm to the potential children.”

Like Governor Romney, Bork is adamant that Roe v. Wade (1973) be overturned and states be given the power to prosecute women and doctors who violate state criminal abortion laws. As Bork promises in one of his books, “Attempts to overturn Roe will continue as long as the Court adheres to it. And, just so long as the decision remains, the Court will be perceived, correctly, as political and will continue to be the target of demonstrations, marches, television advertisements, mass mailings, and the like. Roe, as the greatest example and symbol of the judicial usurpation of democratic prerogatives in this century, should be overturned. The Court’s integrity requires that.” Bork, as Romney’s judicial advisor, will be pushing for an anti-choice litmus test to save the Court’s “integrity.” Clearly he will find a receptive audience for that view in Governor Romney. Beyond abortion, Bork denounces the Supreme Court’s protection of a constitutional right to privacy in decision-making with respect to birth control in Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstaedt v. Baird. He does not think this right exists in the Constitution and calls the Ninth Amendment-- which states that the “enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people”-- an “inkblot” without meaning. But the whole purpose of the Ninth Amendment was precisely to prevent authoritarians in government from claiming that people lack rights because they were not explicitly identified in the Constitution. 

Bork is a determined enemy of feminism, a political force that he considers “totalitarian” and in which, it is clear to him, “the extremists are the movement.” Whereas women and men all over America cheered the Supreme Court’s 7-1 decision in United States v. Virginia, which forced the Virginia Military Institute to stop discriminating and to admit its first women cadets, Bork attacks it for producing the “feminization of the military.” He writes: “Radical feminism, an increasingly powerful force across the full range of American institutions, overrode the Constitution in United States v. Virginia.” This decision, for him, was no aberration: “VMI is only one example of a feminized Court transforming the Constitution.” This stance puts him in the bizarre position of describing arch-conservative former Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who concurred in the judgment, as a participant in the radical feminist takeover of the Court. Against the feminized Court, Bork brings his passionate conviction that, outside of standard “rational basis” review, “the Equal Protection Clause should be restricted to race and ethnicity because to go further would plunge the courts into making law without guidance from anything the ratifiers understood themselves to be doing.” Thus, if Bork and his acolytes have their way, decades of Supreme Court decisions striking down gender-discriminatory laws under the Equal Protection Clause will be thrown into doubt as the Court comes to examine sex discrimination under the “rational basis” test, the gentlest and most relaxed kind of judicial scrutiny.

If you think the above was informative, you should be sure to read the rest of this frightening report. And if it's been dawning on you that Bork has been a general in the Republican War Against Women... well, don't worry, he's also a general in the Republican War Against Gays, the Republican War Against Art, the Republican War Against Civil Liberties... the Republican War Against everything. I'll leave off with one last quote, concerning his antipathy to the separation of church and state:

Bork routinely castigates the Court for removing religious prayers from different public school contexts, including commencement exercises and high school football games. He does not believe in the Jeffersonian “wall of separation” between church and state, but rather seems to dabble in the Clarence Thomas theory that the Establishment Clause applies only against federal establishment of an official national church, not religious impositions on citizens by state governments. Writing for the Ave Maria Law Review, the home journal for the law school where he now teaches, Bork makes no bones about his pinched understanding of the Establishment Clause: “If the various Justices take the original understanding of the Clause more seriously than their own precedents, the ‘wall’ will crumble,” he wrote. Meanwhile, Bork increasingly endorses the most extreme right-wing attacks on science and the theory of evolution, writing that “the fossil record is proving a major embarrassment to evolutionary theory” and claiming that one scientist “has shown that Darwinism cannot explain life as we know it.” In Bork’s view, right here at home, “America is engaged in a religious war.”

Republicans Threaten To Filibuster Any Future Obama Appointments Unless He Picks Right-Wing Activists-- Or Was The Letter They Sent Him Just A Prank?

Today's word: chutzpah

Senate Republicans-- all 41 of them that haven't been thrown out of office yet-- have come up with a new one: Obama should just appoint the right wing extremist loons that Bush had been unsuccessfully been trying to insert into the federal judiciary. Most observers think there are already far too many Federalist Society wingnuts on the bench. Where are these kooks from? Limbaughland, apparently. All 41 of them-- yes, including Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter-- signed a letter to Obama threatening to filibuster his judicial nominees, sight unseen, unless he grants them veto power over any appointments he tries to make from their respective states.

But the voters gave Obama a mandate to get the judiciary back in balance after 8 years of the most blatant and egregious partisan hackery in the history of America. Obama, a constitutional scholar, is determined to appoint judges who understand the Constitution and believe in equality under the law, not judges who will protect Republican Party donors from society.

In a letter to the White House, the Republican senators said Obama would “change the tone in Washington” if he were to renominate Bush nominees like Peter Keisler, Glen Conrad and Paul Diamond. And they requested that Obama respect the Senate’s constitutional role in reviewing judicial nominees by seeking their consultation about potential nominees from their respective states.

“Regretfully, if we are not consulted on, and approve of, a nominee from our states, the Republican Conference will be unable to support moving forward on that nominee,” the letter warns. “And we will act to preserve this principle and the rights of our colleagues if it is not.”

In other words, Republicans are threatening a filibuster of judges if they're not happy.

The letter is an opening salvo in what could be a partisan battle in the Obama years. Democrats regularly complained that Bush nominated conservative judges without consulting them, then the Republican-controlled Senate ran roughshod over them even if the nominees lacked support from homestate senators. Obama’s lawyer Gregory Craig has begun his outreach with senators about potential nominees, and several Republicans have warned Obama that the quickest way to squander bipartisan goodwill is to nominate far-left judges.

The vast majority of Bush's nominees, including the really awful partisan hacks and incompetents, were confirmed by the Senate, even when the Democrats could easily have prevented that. I never quite understood that. Apparently, neither did the members of the Grand Obstructionist Party... and they don't plan to return the favor. Anyone have any idea what "far left judges" Obama might have in mind? Or is that just how the Repugs define moderates, progressives and Democrats-- like the ones the Republicans refused to confirm when Clinton was president?

Surprise, Surprise: McCain And Bush Are The Bobbsey Twins Of Judicial Philosophy

Every nonpartisan examination of the 2000 election results have shown that George W. Bush was not elected to the presidency of the United States. For the last 8 years we have lived under an illegitimate government that appointed by an ideological right wing Supreme Court. Yesterday Bush-- struggling to keep his approval rating in double digits through January-- embraced McCain's promise to appoint more right wing extremists to the bench as he accused Democrats of contributing to a broken confirmation process for federal judges.

In front of a crowd of extreme and overwhelmingly deranged right-wing Federalist Society lawyers, Bush bragged about his atrocious appointments in Cincinnati, reminding them (and us) that the garbage he appointed to the bench make up more than a third of the federal judiciary.

"I appreciate that many people listening today and here in this room have worked hard to recruit more Americans to this cause. This work is in all our interests, because the truth of the matter is, the belief in judicial restraint is shared by the vast majority of American citizens."

Bush's remarks, delivered on the opening day of the new Supreme Court session, appeared to be aimed in part at highlighting the issue of judicial appointments during the final weeks of the hard-fought presidential campaign between McCain (Ariz.), the Republican nominee, and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), his Democratic opponent.

It's these dangerous extremists in the Federalist Society who have contributed much of the $8,248,032 McCain has gotten this year from lawyers and Bush has given them a virtual veto power of his judicial nominations, just as McCain would do. They swoon at the thought of more like John Roberts and Sammy Alito. They claim Bush hasn't done much because not enough judges died or retired and that it will take a McCain-- or Palin-- to really transform the courts into what they want-- a full blown nazi pseudo judiciary.

Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group, said that 10 of the nation's 13 federal appellate courts are now "dominated by conservatives" and that Roberts and Alito are part of a "conservative juggernaut."

"This administration has cemented a transformation of our federal judiciary begun by Ronald Reagan, which has resulted in less freedom, less privacy and fewer constitutional protections," Aron said.

...Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) said in a statement that the "balance on our nation's federal courts is precarious," with 60 percent of the federal bench appointed by Republican presidents. "We cannot afford more of the same if Americans' rights and liberties are to be preserved," Leahy said.

Will L.A. Elect A Ron Paul Judge To The Superior Court? Meet Bill Johnson

If you ever just pick a judicial candidate randomly at the polling place-- I mean who really knows one from the other, right-- I hope that after you read this, you'll never do it again. On page 7 of the Los Angeles "Official Sample Ballot" for next Tuesday's primary is a race for Judge of the Superior Court (Office number 125). The contest hasn't gotten any publicity. But I want you to read this:

“No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.”

The man who wrote that-- a proposed constitutional amendment-- is asking for our votes for the Superior Court. His name-- well he has many names-- is Bill Johnson. He also goes by the names William Daniel Johnson, Daniel Johnson and James O. Pace. He's an attorney, a Mormon, and, as you may have concluded, a white supremacist (and Ron Paulista). The paragraph comes from his 1985 book, Amendment to the Constitution-- Averting The Decline And Fall Of America in which he urges the repeal of the 14th (which defines citizenship as well as due process and equal protection under the law) and 15th (which guarantees voting rights for all citizens) Amendments. He advocates deporting tens of millions of Americans within one year. That would include... well, read his little amendment again. American Indians, Eskimos, Hawaiians won't be citizens but they'll have to live on reservations.

This isn't Johnson's first bid for elective office. When Dick Cheney resigned from Congress to become Secretary of Defense in 1989, Johnson ran for his House seat in Wyoming. He didn't win although a GOP front group publication, All the Way, strongly backed him.

“The strongest pro-majority campaign in the nation is mounting here with far-reaching implications. Congressional candidate Daniel Johnson is being blasted as a ‘white supremacist’ because he favors repatriating non-whites to Africa and scrapping affirmative action programs.

“Johnson, 34, seeking the post vacated by now-Secretary of Defense Richard Chaney [sic], is a smart Harvard-law grad who persuasively articulates the pro-gun, pro-family, pro-American position. He is a dedicated anti-communist with many youthful supporters.”

One of those "youthful supporters" was his 18 year old campaign manager/KKK organizer, John Abarr. Johnson kind of sounds like a typical, garden variety Republican child molester. In fact, he also ran for Congress in Arizona in 2006, trying to sneak into the Democratic primary. Like Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller, he claimed to be a "traditional Democrat" who was abandoned by the Democratic Party. Blue Dog Gabby Giffords won the primary with 54.1% of the vote. Johnson managed to get 3.0%. Giffords went on to beat Randy Graf, a Republican extremist with similar views to Johnson's.

Aside from being active in Ron Paul's campaign, he is also a Minuteman activist and exactly the kind of person made to feel empowered by CNN resident xenophobe Lou Dobbs. Johnson's campaign manager, Holly Clearman is also state coordinator for the Ron Paul for President campaign and is herself is a candidate for the Republican L.A. County Central Committee. They are counting on Paulistas to put him over the top. Fortunately, there are legal community newspapers that actually do the research on judicial candidates. In L.A. we have the Metropolitan News Enterprise, which dug up a lot of the facts on Johnson's multiple identities.

UPDATE: RON PAUL WITHDRAWS HIS ENDORSEMENT

I hope all the little zombies find out before Tuesday!

IF YOU THINK BUSH CAN'T DO ANY MORE DAMAGE BEFORE HE'S DUMPED INTO HISTORY'S TRASH HEAP, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION-- THE JUDICIARY

A few days ago, I was unhappy with something I read in the Inside the Beltway publication, Roll Call, Reid, McConnell Strike Deal to Move Judicial Nominees. Basically it showed Reid caving in the Mitch McConnell's threats to filibuster the highway funding bill unless the Democrats confirmed some more radical right extremists nominated for lifetime judicial positions by Bush. I contacted the Majority Leader's office and they assured me that they plan to confirm non-controversial judges but not ideological extremists. I guess this letter signed by all the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee-- even the often treacherous DiFi-- is a good indication that the Democrats are very aware of how bad for America it would be to confirm Peter Keisler, a co-founder of the Federalist Society and a former law clerk for Robert Bork and the guy McConnell and the Bush Regime are crying about the loudest.

I don't know too many people who have argued cases in front of the Supreme Court. But one is Kathryn Kolbert, the new president of People For the American Way, who has been widely credited as having saved Roe v. Wade with her 1992 argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. I loved her Proudly Liberal statement when she was appointed PFAW president, so I asked her if she would do a guest post at DWT about the situation with the Bush nominees. She sent this today:

HAD ENOUGH OF BUSH JUDGES?

-by Kathryn Kolbert

President Bush is in the twilight of his presidency and his approval ratings are scraping bottom. So what did the Senate do last week? It confirmed yet another of Bush's controversial judicial nominees. And Senators are sending signs that they might cave on yet more nominees in the near future.

Let’s stop for a second and think about what happens when Bush nominees get on the courts. We’re coming up on the one year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s destructive Ledbetter ruling. Lilly Ledbetter suffered pay discrimination for years at an Alabama Goodyear plant. She sued when she became aware of it, and a federal jury awarded her back pay and damages. But rather than pay a modest amount to a wronged employee, Goodyear pursued the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Thanks to Bush’s right-wing nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, Goodyear won and it’s now much easier for companies to engage in pay discrimination with impunity.

Despite this and so much else, it’s not just right wingers who are pushing more for Bush nominees to be confirmed to lifetime positions as federal judges. On Tuesday the Washington Post editorial board did exactly that. By focusing on the overall number of nominees confirmed under Clinton and Bush, they missed the point. A far higher percentage of Bush’s nominees have been confirmed than those of Clinton, and the vacancy rate has been cut in half. Clinton only got more nominees confirmed than Bush will because he was faced with many more vacancies when he took office, and he nominated far more nominees.

The Post also ignored the longstanding and bipartisan Senate precedent under which only non-controversial nominees are processed in the months preceding a presidential election. Many of the current nominees, as you might expect, are anything but. DC Circuit nominee Peter Keisler, for instance, co-founded the right-wing Federalist Society, clerked for Robert Bork, and worked on a host of controversial issues in the Reagan White House. The Bush administration refuses to release his records from that time. As it happens, Keisler also worked in the Bush Justice Department and reportedly acted to undermine the government’s landmark tobacco lawsuit.

When Clinton tried to fill the exact same seat that Keisler’s been nominated to, Republicans blocked the effort. They claimed the court’s caseload was to too low to warrant an additional judge. Now, even though the caseload has since decreased, they are threatening to shut down the Senate if he's not confirmed. Go figure.

We didn’t think that the GOP’s manufactured hysterics over judges were fooling anyone, but the Post proved us wrong. At the top of Bush’s current batch of nominees, besides Keisler, is a longtime board member of a group that nominated Rush Limbaugh for the Nobel Prize. Another criticized the notion of safe sex as a way to avoid contracting AIDS. These are apparently the kind of people that the Post wants on the federal bench for life.

If Bush wanted more of his nominees to win confirmation, he would have consulted with the Senate and put forth non-controversial nominees. He has overwhelmingly failed to do so, and his successful nominees have all too often set themselves to undermining Americans’ rights. The clock has run out for Bush and his right-wing nominees. Senate Democrats should ignore the Post’s misguided advice and say “enough!”

-Kathryn Kolbert

Here's that letter I mentioned (although not all the signatures are on the page):

click to enlarge

FORGET THE MORE AND BETTER-- WE JUST NEED BETTER DEMOCRATS-- SOUTHWICK CONFIRMED THANKS TO FEINSTEIN AND OTHER REACTIONARY DEMS

I felt sick this morning when I saw the Republican minority invoke cloture on the attempt by progressives to deny Bush's latest KKK judicial nominee confirmation. Yesterday I warned that Judas goat Ben Nelson was working with Trent Lott in rounding up the votes to thwart the progressive strategy. Thanks to Diane Feinstein (D-CA), he succeeded.

Judith Schaeffer, Legal Director of People For the American Way just summed up with the wretched and useless Senate Democrats just inflicted on the American people:

“Following the 2006 election, President Bush pledged to move ahead in a cooperative and bipartisan manner. But mere days after the new Congress was sworn in, he submitted the controversial nomination of Leslie Southwick.”
 
“Southwick’s disturbing legal recordand lack of commitment to equality before the law make him unfit for a powerful lifetime seat on the federal bench. We are deeply disappointed in the Senate Democrats who acquiesced to the President today on Southwick’s nomination.
 
“That’s not what Americans voted for when they gave Democrats a majority in the Senate. Senate Democrats must hold the President to his 2006 pledge of bipartisanship and cooperation by rejecting nominees who fail to interpret the law fairly for all Americans.”

The win today is being cheered by reactionaries, homophobes, Republican partisans, corporate interests, and racists as a huge victory. After the Republicans passed cloture to shut down debate 62-35, Southwick sailed to victory 59-38. So who were the Democrats who screwed us, Democrats who every progressive should do all they can to defeat?
Well, of course, first and foremost is the horrific and utterly corrupt and contemptible Dianne Feinstein, without whose connivance, Southwick would still be bottled up in committee hearings. And then of course, there's Bush's point man inside the Democratic caucus, Ben Nelson. The full list of Democrats who officially joined the GOP for the day:

Daniel Akaka (HI)
former KKK member (who could he abandon a brother in arms?), Robert Byrd (WV)
Tom Carper (DE)
Kent Conrad (ND)
Byron Dorgan (ND)
DiFi (CA)
Daniel Inouye (HI)
Tim Johnson (SD)- glad you were praying for him? did you send money too?
Blanche Lincoln (AR)
Ben Nelson (NE)
Mark Pryor (AR)
Ken Salazar (CO)

BIZARRE UPDATE D'JOUR: AND I ALWAYS THOUGHT COCHRAN WAS A HOMO

A reliable friend in Mississippi just wrote to me to give me a little context for DiFi's work on behalf of the new KKK judge. She did it for her ex-boy friend, Thad Cochran! Huh? Yeah, that's what I said-- DiFi and Cochran were actually an item at one time and she engineered a lifetime appointment for one of the worst judges imaginable, even from Bush, for her ex. As for the long-standing rumors about Cochran and the boys, he told me he didn't know anything about that but perhaps I was mixing him up with someone named Haley.


AND A NOT AT ALL BIZARRE UPDATE: REP. BARBARA LEE IS ASHAMED OF HER U.S. SENATOR-- WHO ISN'T?

Congresswoman Lee: "Let me also say that as a Californian and as an African American, I am incredibly disappointed that a Senator from my home state, Senator Feinstein, would not only vote for confirmation but would be the one to effectively bring this nomination to the floor by voting with the Republicans to approve the nomination in committee. It is particularly disappointing given California's diversity and our history of leadership on issues of civil rights, women's rights, worker's rights and the basic commitment to equality before the law, all areas where Judge Southwick's record is, quite frankly, sadly
lacking."

BEN NELSON UP TO HIS OLD TRICKS AGAIN-- AND BUSH'S

Without the efforts of Nelson, Alito wouldn't be on the Supreme Court

I don't recall any netroots or grassroots activists making a stink last year when the absolute worst and most reactionary Democrat in the Senate was up for re-election. No, I'm not talking about Joe Lieberman. First of all he's a member of the CFL (Connecticut For Lieberman Party, not the Democratic Party). And secondly, compared to Ben Nelson (D-NE), Lieberman almost looks... well... looks less reactionary. Nelson's lifetime voting score at Progressive Punch is a dismal 50.28, showing he votes as much with the Bush Regime on their toxic agenda as he does with Democrats. But no one said boo and he was re-elected with much less fuss than he's earned. We'll have another 6 years of this reactionary butthead undermining progressive values every step of the way.

Today he is scurrying around the Senate like a rat trying to gather the votes to close down a Democratic filibuster on Bush's Southwick nomination, a vote expected tomorrow. Today's Congressional Quarterly reports that he is "working behind the scenes to line up enough Democrats to force a confirmation vote on a contentious appellate court nominee, while winning concessions from Republicans in return." He's coordinating efforts with Trent Lott (R-MS) and two Democrats who are rumored to favor the KKK candidate, Ken Salazar (CO) and Robert Byrd (WV).

Nebraska Democrat Ben Nelson is trying to corral at least 11 Democrats and nine Republicans for a deal that would in some ways echo the “Gang of 14” effort that averted a Senate implosion over judicial nominations in 2005. This time, though, Nelson has broadened his effort.

Nelson is trying to persuade Democrats to vote against a filibuster of the nomination of Leslie Southwick to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. But he also wants Republicans to agree, in return, that they will not stand in the way of Senate action on fiscal 2008 spending bills.

Another putative Democrat, Mark Pryor (AR), whose voting record is nearly as bad as Nelson's-- and who is up for re-election in 2008-- has already announced he will be voting to shut down the debate so Bush's latest and perhaps worst judicial nominee can be confirmed.

HOW MANY DEMOCRATS WILL VOTE TO SUPPORT BUSH'S LATEST KKK NOMINEE TO THE JUDICIAL BRANCH NEXT WEEK?

While the Democratic Senate Establishment gets ready to make common cause with the Bush Regime in invoking cloture of Chris Dodd's promise to filibuster the further erosion of our constitutional rights in terms of the fascistic FISA bill crafted by Regime hacks and bribe-happy Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), some treacherous Democrats are also lining up with GOP extremists to push forward Bush's latest radical right judicial nominee, Leslie Southwick.

Senate Republicans have assumed they would need to round up a filibuster-proof supermajority of 60 votes to win confirmation for Southwick. It’s unclear whether Southwick’s supporters have done so. A spokesman for Reid declined to say whether Democrats would filibuster the nomination. A Senate Republican aide said there is no agreement on a time limit for debating the nomination.

One big unknown is how conservative Dem, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who broke with her party on August 2 to insure that Bush's nominee would get out of committee, will vote. Other Democrats who could join the GOP is confirming another KKK judicial nominee are reflexive reactionaries like Ben Nelson (NE), Max Baucus (MT), Mary Landrieu (LA), Blanche Lincoln (AR), Tom Carper (DE), Mark Pryor (AR), Tim Johnson (SD), Evan Bayh (IN), Bill Nelson (FL) and Kent Conrad (ND), Byron Dorgan (ND), and Ken Salazar (CO).

The 49 Republicans eager to confirm one of Bush's worst ever nominees can also count on the support of Joe Lieberman, so they need 10 reactionary Democrats to shut down debate and get Southwick through.

LESLIE SOUTHWICK-- BUSH'S LATEST CORPORATE TOOL HEADED FOR THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY WHILE DEMOCRATS MUTTER IN THE BACKGROUND... OR CHEER

Bush's latest racist, gay-bashing corporatist nominee

Dianne Feinstein disgraced herself a couple of weeks ago by abandoning Democrats attempting to derail Bush latest hideous judicial appointment. Today's Washington Post carries a clear explanation of what Feinstein actually did and how wrong she was, in an Op-Ed by Alliance for Justice's Nan Aron, An Unjust Judge.

To understand the furor over President Bush's nomination of Leslie Southwick to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, one should start with the Goode family of Mississippi.

A propane heater exploded in their house, killing their granddaughter. The Goodes sued the manufacturer. After the trial, new evidence emerged demonstrating that the company had provided inaccurate information about servicing the heater. Yet, in a dissenting opinion, Southwick argued that the Goodes didn't deserve a new trial.

And that really is just the start. Toxic chemicals at the workplace causing workers' illness. Southwick says "Tough luck, commie bastard. Go die quietly." That Southwick is a vicious racist is something the Bush Regime expects the Senate to overlook because it's part of the "culture" of Mississippi. The only Democrat who seems to have bought into this was Feinstein.

Why are so many unions opposed to Southwick? Because Southwick voted against the interests of injured workers and consumers in divided decisions 89 percent of the time. Why are civil rights groups opposed? Because he also voted overwhelmingly -- 54 of 59 times -- against defendants alleging juror discrimination. That prompted his own colleagues on the Mississippi Court of Appeals
to accuse him of "establishing one level of obligation for the State, and a higher one for defendants on an identical issue." Southwick, they charged in a dissent, placed his "stamp of approval on the arbitrary and capricious selection of jurors."

...A nominee's record is the best predictor of what he or she will do on the bench. Southwick's record predicts that those in the 5th Circuit's jurisdiction have much to fear regarding their legal rights and protections. Moreover-- and overlooked by the Post-- the patterns in Southwick's record fit this administration's pattern of behavior. For with the assistance of conservative activists, allies in the Senate and in well-funded interest groups, and the amen chorus of commentators such as Will, George W. Bush has appointed a succession of appellate judges who will serve his administration's ideological agenda long after he has left office.

Will the new Democratic majority in the Senate continue the policy of the past several years of rubber stamping all of Bush's worst judicial nominations, packing the courts with virulent right-wing activists? With Democrats like Feinstein, Baucus, the 2 Nelsons and Landrieu, probably yes. That is why it is so crucial to defeat the fake moderate next year in Senate races from Maine to Oregon. Senate races in 2008 will highlight candidates' judicial nominations records. Rubber stamp Republicans like Susan Collins, Norm Coleman, John Cornyn, Gordon Smith, John Warner, Mitch McConnell, Larry Craig, James Inhofe, John Sununu, Lamar Alexander and Pete "Sneaky Pete" Domineci are exactly what we don't need in the U.S. Senate. Blue America has already endorsed two solutions to that problem-- Tim Allen (D-ME) and Rick Noriega (D-TX)-- two Democrats who will be nothing like Susan Collins, John Cornyn... or Dianne Feinstein.