by Joe
Thank goodness it is merely a thought-experiment at this point, but imagine the implications of John Roberts actually having to step down, and giving Barack Obama the opportunity to appoint three more Supreme Court justices – one representing a shift in the ideological balance.
Say a prayer of thanks it was just some inaccurate information. But it is something to think about.
In another example of Obama running true to his roots, his first appeals court nominee is a former ACORN fundraiser as well as a judicial and social extremist. The following article contains several links to other very noteworthy articles, be sure to click through and read them all.
Former ACORN fund raiser gets Obama judicial nomination. Yes, you read that right
President Obama’s first federal court nominee was Judge David Hamilton of Indiana. If you are drinking your morning coffee as you read what follows here, you might want to put down your cup before reading further:
Among Hamilton’s “qualifications” is the fact that he is a former fund raiser for ACORN. That fact was conspicuously left out of the White House statement announcing Obama’s nomination of the federal district judge for a position on the Seventh Circuit federal appeals court.
Hamilton’s decisions, some of which were unanimously overturned on appeal, raise several red flags :
The main problem many senators have with Judge Hamilton is his controversial decisions. Hamilton ignored a felony conviction on a man’s record when being prosecuted for his third felony drug crime to avoid imposing a life sentence, for which Hamilton was unanimously reversed on appeal.
Hamilton also struck down a law requiring convicted sex criminals from reporting information to police to track their whereabouts. He also petitioned the White House for clemency for a police officer who produced child pornography.
He has also shown surprising hostility to people of Christian faith. He ruled that any prayers uttered in the Indiana statehouse that invoke the name of Jesus Christ are unconstitutional and cannot be permitted.
Nor can anyone offer a prayer that is “sectarian” or “pervasively Christian.” Oddly, although prayers mentioning Jesus are somehow a threat to the republic, Judge Hamilton said that it’s okay to offer prayers to Allah.
Is it me, or is it the purpose of the First Amendment to prevent statutory and judicial favoritism of one religion over others ? If this is true then Hamilton appears not to get this most fundamental of Constitutional concepts. We have to ask, what else does he not get ?
Contact Senators Warner and Webb and tell them that the only acceptable vote on Hamilton’s confirmation is a NO vote.
Forget cursing or mud slinging. It doesn’t do anyone any good.
What can do some good is working to undo much of what was done. I would suspect there are plenty of laws that need to be removed from the books … instead of wasting time on beating a dead horse, work to get the course of the country back on track.
National health-care is just about dead, but it needs to be put to sleep.
No Child Gets Ahead needs to be repealed.
Real immigration reform (closing the boarders) needs to be passed.
Those three ought to be enough to get people moving. It would help to push a national prohibition on restriction of firearms as well. There are a number of things that might be possible to push. Don’t waste breath on what changes nothing. Get motivated. Start working to push appropriate legislation through.
Limit the power of the central government to what the constitution says.
But the Supremes did get one right in ruling that the New Haven firefighters were discriminated against because they were not Black.
This may make things a little tricky for S.C. nominee Sotomayor. It is her ruling that the Supremes just overrode.
Let us hope that this ruling will begin to clear the “disparate impact” garbage from the path to a colorblind nation.
Well, the Supreme Court failed to rule the obvious, that Hillary: The Movie, was a political ad.
Be real, folks. By their own admission,
Citizens United, a conservative not-for-profit group, wanted to air ads for the movie in Democratic primary states….
That makes the purpose rather obvious, doesn’t it?
Catholic League President Bill Donohue is someone whose opinion all conservatives should note, and he makes the case that hair-trigger opposition to President Obama’s nominee to the US Supreme Court may be mistaken:
“I wish I knew more about her. But from what we know, it looks like she’ll be at least a wash with Souter, and maybe we’ll even see improvement.”
He noted that while Judge Sotomayor’s record on abortion-related cases is thin and tangential — a challenge to policies on U.S. aid to international family-planning groups and a decision about the free-speech rights of abortion protesters — but she has backed the legal claims of pro-lifers.
“She’s [also] been pretty good on religious liberty cases” and “doesn’t hold any animus on religion” either in her decisions or her known public remarks, he said. “She said it was wrong to prohibit a menorah on public ground; I like that. She talks about the religious rights of prisoners; I like that too.”
Donohue goes on to note that Obama’s next best choice may be far worse from a conservative perspective – an opinion I’ve seen expressed elsewhere. A next potential Obama nominee is Diane Wood, who pro-lifers should view with much greater apprehension.
The following is the oath a justice must pledge before taking a seat on the federal bench:
“I, __________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as (name of position) under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.”
So, how does this square with Sotomayor’s own statements(see below)?
“[W]e who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience or heritage but attempt . . . continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies, and prejudices are appropriate.”
So a prejudiced judge is okey-dokey if they are Spanish? Or does this extend to all of the ‘oppressed’ classes? This is lunacy. Sotomayor has other statements regarding Judicial activism with regard to where federal policy is set — in the appellate courts! She also believes that latina woman is inherently a better judge than a white male. This is both sexist and racist. This is also Obama’s first pick to the Supreme court. There must be someone better out there. Is there a liberal judge with gravitas in the house?
UPDATE I
While visiting Mason Conservative I found the following –Sotomayor with her foot buried deep in her mouth:
The California Supreme court ruled that the State Constitutional Amendment banning same-sex marriage was, well, constitutional. How a constitutional amendment can not be constitutional is beyond me, but those who brought the case are not well-known for their common sense — or sense of any kind.
Now that 0bama has nominated Judge Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, it is time we take a look at her rulings. Fortunately, the NYT has already compiled some of them, so I will direct your attention there.
Of particular interest is the ruling in Maloney v. Cuomo (2009):
“The Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right.”
This argument is, quite simply, ludicrous. I seriously doubt that Judge Sotomayor would say that the First Amendment does not apply to the States, despite the fact that the first words of that Amendment are “Congress shall make no law….” The Second Amendment does not have such wording. Indeed, she wrote in Ford v. McGinnis that a Muslim prisoner in the New York State Department of Correctional Services had had his First Amendment rights violated by his not being allowed to participate in a non-mandatory holiday feast. So the First Amendment, which specifically applies to Congress, also limits the State governments, but the Second Amendment, which does not specify Congress, does not limit the States.
Well, then, Judge Sotomayor, is it OK for the States to quarter soldiers in people’s homes? It is OK for the State Police to go into people’s homes without warrants? Do the Fifth Amendment protections only apply in federal courts, not State courts? Is one only entitled to a jury of one’s peers in federal courts, not in State courts? Does the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments apply only to the federal courts, not to State courts?
Is Sotomayor’s “logic” what we need in the Supreme Court?
In USA Today, Justice Ginsburg, the only female on the Supreme Court, says that the high court needs another woman. Yet the reasons she gives run counter to the purpose of the Supreme Court, which is to interpret the laws and the Constitution of the United States.
Her status as the court’s lone woman was especially poignant during a recent case involving a 13-year-old girl who had been strip-searched by Arizona school officials looking for drugs. During oral arguments, some other justices minimized the girl’s lasting humiliation, but Ginsburg stood out in her concern for the teenager.
“They have never been a 13-year-old girl,” she told USA TODAY later when asked about her colleagues’ comments during the arguments. “It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”
Understanding and empathy for one side or the other in a dispute should be completely irrelevant to the interpretation of the law and the Constitution. Of course it can go the other way, too:
Often Ginsburg’s view as the court’s only woman emerges in an understated way. The strip-search case that began in 2003 was different: Of all the justices, Ginsburg was the most focused on the plight of Arizona student Savana Redding.
After a classmate told the vice principal at the Safford Middle School that Savana had unauthorized prescription-strength ibuprofen, the vice principal directed a nurse and administrative aide to strip-search the girl. Savana’s mother, April Redding, sued the school district for violating her daughter’s right to be free from unreasonable searches. Authorities found no drugs on Savana.
“After Redding was searched and nothing was found, she was put in a chair outside the vice principal’s office for over two hours, and her mother wasn’t called,” Ginsburg noted during oral arguments. “What was the reason for … putting her in that humiliating situation?”
One of Ginsburg’s liberal colleagues, fellow Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer, saw it a little differently. He said he had a hard time understanding the girl’s claim that her rights had been violated.
“I’m trying to work out why is this a major thing to, say, strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym,” Breyer said. “How bad is this?”
Ginsburg retorted that school officials had directed Redding “to shake (her) bra out, to shake, shake, stretch the top of (her) pants.”
She later told USA TODAY, “Maybe a 13-year-old boy in a locker room doesn’t have that same feeling about his body. But a girl who’s just at the age where she is developing, whether she has developed a lot … or … has not developed at all (might be) embarrassed about that.”
Breyer is, of course, another liberal. It does not matter, Justice Breyer, that you might not be embarrassed in such as situation. Nor, Justice Ginsburg, does it matter that you would be. In fact, it does not even matter what the particular girl in question felt about it at the time. The only things that matters are the law and the Constitution.
Then there is the Ledbetter v. Goodyear case, in which Justice Ginsburg read her dissent aloud in court.
This was the case, yet to be ruled upon, that Ginsburg felt repeated Ledbetter. That 5-4 opinion written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito — who succeeded O’Connor — rejected the notion that pay discrimination is harder to detect than other job bias and dismissed the “policy” argument that the law allows more flexibility for suing in such situations.
Ginsburg was so incensed by the decision that she took the unusual step of reading her dissenting opinion from the bench and called on Congress to reverse the court.
Congressional legislation, signed into law by Obama as one of his first official acts, gave workers far more freedom to sue for pay bias long after it began.
Ginsburg said in an interview that she believed some of her male colleagues had trouble understanding the difficulty of getting pay-disparity information and the general reluctance of women to claim a workplace policy is unfair.
“As often as Justice O’Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender discrimination cases,” said Ginsburg, a Brooklyn, N.Y., native and Democrat. “I have no doubt that she would have understood Lilly Ledbetter’s situation.”
This certainly gives the appearance that Justice O’Connor’s sex discrimination rulings were biased. That is not to say that the decisions of the men were unbiased. If fact, I concur with Justice Ginsburg’s dissent — it is both well-reasoned and well-founded on precedent. The majority opinion was that the act of giving lesser pay-raises were the discriminatory acts, while Ginsburg (three others’ concurring) argued that each paycheck was an act of discrimination. Since it is certainly within the power of Goodyear to grant out-of-cycle raises, I must also concur with Ginsburg.
And if I may digress to fire a salvo at the “conservative” side of the court, I have a problem with Justice Scalia’s questioning in the case of AT&T this term, in which the company is accused of discriminating against pregnant employees:
When the attorney for the women challenging AT&T took his turn at the lectern, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that if the court ruled against the company in the case involving retroactive benefits, more lawsuits would come.
“You’re scaring me,” Scalia said, drawing laughter from spectators — but not from Ginsburg.
I do not give a rat’s patootie how many lawsuits will be filed — if illegal acts have been committed, then the law should be applied in every one of those cases. One cannot say that the law should not be applied as it is written, or that one’s Constitutional rights should not be protected, just because a lot of people may demand justice. That is not my idea of conservatism, Justice Scalia.
It looks like 0bama is looking to appoint a woman — not necessarily the best person for the job.
This is typical of the left — they do not care about qualifications (or 0bama would never have been nominated in the first place), they look at group-identity — race, ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, etc. Actually getting a job because you are better qualified is completely anathema to them.
Fortunately, this will not change the balance on the court. However, expect 0bama to nominate someone as far left as possible.
Sally posted this recently as a comment and I feel that it is too important to be overlooked. Thank you Sally for bringing this to our attention. This was Sally’s comment:
You all have probably seen this, but stepped up Homeland Security against right wing:
“WASHINGTON – A newly unclassified Department of Homeland Security report warns against the possibility of violence by unnamed “right-wing extremists” concerned about illegal immigration, increasing federal power, restrictions on firearms, abortion and the loss of U.S. sovereignty and singles out returning war veterans as particular threats….”
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=94803
The first line is underlined and says “A newly unclassified Document….”. You only have to click on this site and read the report. Talk about catagorizing certain Americans into a “paranoid” group! This coming from a PARANOID government. And this is what the government thinks about you if you subscribe to just one of these ideas. Why can’t they be Left-Wing Extremists?
This is what Obama considers as “uniting us”? Talk about division. I wonder if this is how King George envisioned the colonials of America? Doesn’t say much for the intelligence of our military either. This read is a total abomination!
btw Read (imagine) what is going to happen to blogging and Gore’s internet because of your discourse towards the government.
Of course, just about any time O’Bama opens his mouth he displays his ignorance, but he sounds good doing it, and he looks good doing it, so the leftist ignoramuses swoon. But for those who are not ignoramuses, and who know that words have meaning, I will document O’Bama’s latest bout of ignorance.
In last night’s debate, Great Uncle Bob brought up Judicial Appointments. McCain, of course, said that he looks at the appointees’ qualifications, not their ideologies, and that he had voted to confirm Justice Ginsburg. Great Uncle Bob, apparently awakening from his nap, asked, “But even if it was someone — even someone who had a history of being for abortion rights, you would consider them?”
McCain, to his credit, did not jump on Great Uncle Bob for being as dumb as O’Bama and say, “Uh, Uncle Bob, you do know that Justice Ginsburg was quite clear in her support of Roe v. Wade in her confirmation hearings, right?” (Her exact words were that abortion was “something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity… And when government controls that decision for her, she’s being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices.” Maybe I’ll address the stupidity of that statement in another post.) No, McCain did not say that. Instead, McCain just re-iterated that he would not impose a litmus test.
Then it was O’Bama’s turn. I can only shake my head ruefully. Right off the bat, he said, “The most important thing in any judge is their capacity to provide fairness and justice to the American people.” Never mind the grammatical number problem — we know he’s a moron, it’s his views that are the issue here.
No, Senator, it is your job to write fair and just laws. It is a judge’s job to interpret the law and the Constitution to the best of his ability. The example O’Bama then gave perfectly illustrates my point:
I’ll just give you one quick example. Senator McCain and I disagreed recently when the Supreme Court made it more difficult for a woman named Lilly Ledbetter to press her claim for pay discrimination.
For years, she had been getting paid less than a man had been paid for doing the exact same job. And when she brought a suit, saying equal pay for equal work, the judges said, well, you know, it’s taken you too long to bring this lawsuit, even though she didn’t know about it until fairly recently.
So, the Supreme Court did exactly what it is supposed to do — interpret the law and the Constitution as they are written, not as Senator O’Bama wants them to be. Senator O’Bama has a problem with that. He continued:
I think that it’s important for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has to stand up, if nobody else will. And that’s the kind of judge that I want.
In short, he wants judges who will legislate from the bench.
Backing up a bit, but still in the same topic, O’Bama let out this little idiocy:
And I think that the Constitution has a right to privacy in it that shouldn’t be subject to state referendum, any more than our First Amendment rights are subject to state referendum, any more than many of the other rights that we have should be subject to popular vote.
What happened to “I know that what works in Chicago may not work in Cheyenne”? Oh, that only applies to our Second Amendment rights. Got it, Senator. Never mind that gun control is not working in Chicago…. Perhaps he should have said, “What works in Cheyenne may not work in Chicago.” What? The point is to make the people vulnerable and dependent on the government? Oh. Well then, bravo.
Shifting back to the Ledbetter v. Goodyear case, O’Bama said,
We tried to overturn it in the Senate. I supported that effort to provide better guidance to the courts; John McCain opposed it.
Yes, O’Bama’s ignorance of the Constitution was in glorious display last night. There he was, saying he supported an ex post facto law, in clear violation of the Constitution (Article I, Section 9).
Isn’t this idiot supposed to have been a professor of Constitutional Law? It seems he took the wrong meaning of the word, and thought a professor was “a person who professes something,” then took the definition of profess to be “to claim to have (some feeling, an interest, knowledge, etc.): often connoting insincerity or pretense.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition)
No wonder the leftists love him — he’s as dumb as they are.
A very frightening Rasmussen poll says that, “60% of Voters Say Supreme Court Should Base Rulings on Constitution.”
What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks do the other 40% think the Supreme Court should base its rulings on? That 40% must be Democrats.
