Letters to the Editor
Scientician
Published Letters: 534 Editor's Choice: 1
-
the irony is
[Read the article: The Kucinich court decision and "judicial activism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The four most egregious "activist" judges in the whole country sit on the US Supreme Court and go by the names Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas.
Ronald Dworkin exposes their hollow legal equivocations and indefensible rulings that always favour conservative outcomes:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20570
A sample:
It seems guided by no judicial or political principle at all, but only by partisan, cultural, and perhaps religious allegiance. It urges judicial restraint and deference to legislatures when these bodies pass measures that political conservatives favor, like bans on particular medical techniques in abortion. But the right-wing coalition abandons restraint when it strikes down legislation that conservatives oppose, like regulations on political advertising and modest school district programs to further racial integration in public education. It claims to celebrate free speech when it declares that Congress cannot prevent rich corporations and unions from evading restrictions on political contributions. But it subordinates free speech to other policies when it holds that schools can punish students for displaying ambiguous but not disruptive slogans at school events. Lawyers have long been fond of saying, quoting Mr. Dooley, that the Supreme Court follows the election returns.[1] These four justices seem to follow Fox News instead.
Yet another thing us shrill carping bloggers got right and nearly everyone in the pseudo-centrist establishment got wrong: Alito and Roberts are wingnuts and that was evident before they were confirmed. Alito's confirmation is even more tragic since he was obviously a flawed nominee where Roberts had perfected the stealth tactic of never ruling on any hot-button issues.
We celebrated when Harriett Miers went down, but I suspect that was a mistake on the left. She could not have been worse than Alito.
-
hmmmm
[Read the article: The Kucinich court decision and "judicial activism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]So not responding to posts made must indicate our inability to refute them or actual agreement. I've heard "silence is consent" but not applied to the subject of internet debate so explicitly.
-
Aycharaych
[Read the article: The Kucinich court decision and "judicial activism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Quit derailing the thread.
-
Shooter
[Read the article: The Kucinich court decision and "judicial activism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Do you mean the 7-2 Bush v Gore decision regarding unequal treatment? Heh.
Ironically I was just reading Ronald Dworkin's critique of Bush v. Gore. It is defensible to argue that the Florida Court's "clear intent of the voter" directive violated the 14th Amendment, (and also defensible to argue that it didn't) but what wasn't defensible was what the court ordered to remedy that: An immediate halt to recount efforts.
The 2 liberal justices who came on board with that ruling (making it 7-2) wanted the case sent back to Florida for the Florida Supreme court to set some actual standards for the recount. This they could have done, and met the equal protection concerns. Stipulate how the ballots are to be counted. But that was never the issue, Bush was ahead at the moment, and that was all SCOTUS wanted to preserve. Whatever ballot counting scheme they might devise might still give Gore an advantage, as any recount was to his advantage.
Which is why the first thing SCOTUS did in their involvement in the dispute was halt recounts even before hearing any arguments, back when there was more than enough time to do a full recount before the safe harbour deadline would have been reached. This was pure judicial activism by 5 Republicans to make sure Bush never fell behind in the recount,just like the brooks brothers white riot was to halt the recounts in Miami-Dade so Gore could never have the edge. If that had happened, a full recount of all of florida would have been demanded by the nation, and as the subsequent Media funded recount showed, Gore would have won Florida.
Finally, the whole involvement of the US Supreme Court in a clearly state matter of a state supreme court interpreting state election law to govern a state-wide election is fairly evident further Republican hypocrisy with respect to "judicial restraint" and "states rights" either of which they could have manifested in a number of ways, but did not because any of them would have likely resulted in Gore winning the presidency.
That the 2000 election was stolen is beyond reasonable doubt, and that theft was aided and abetted by the biggest Judicial activists of them all: Conservative Republican supreme court nominees.
Read Dworkin's critique:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/13954
-
Troll
[Read the article: The Kucinich court decision and "judicial activism"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I rarely use that term but when someone comes into the thread and immediately turns the debate away from the subject at hand, to something completely irrelevant (in this case, the troll himself) it is beyond doubt what is going on.
Remember, the thesis here is: Conservatives do not believe in any principle of objective legal reasoning or even-handed justice. All they want is conservative ideological results and the law be damned. This example is a small case of a greater truth and it pervades Bush v. Gore, their hiliarous ineptitude about warrantless wiretapping, the farcical interpretations of the constitution including Article II being some grand unlimited grant of power and to Cheney not being part of the Executive branch despite his office being explicitly in Article II.
Conservatives simply do not believe in objective reality.
Usually we confine this thesis to neo-conservatives since they are the most explicit and aggregious examples of this, but regular conservatives are on board with it too, in practice if not in principle. You don't have to even look to written law to find them in abject denial of reality, they also deny science (global warming, evolution), statistics (abstinence only education), economics (supply side) and often basic reasoning and language comprehension itself (see Goldberg trying to spin tales of left wing Nazis or the many times Glenn has schooled the right on the actual definition and meaning of "hypocrisy").
So I'm left to conclude, by the overwhelming evidence as bolded above. If a conservative is a liberal mugged by reality, it seems clear the experience was so traumatic that the victim can't bear to face his attacker ever again.