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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
As for Sotomayor, the Court's 5-4 decision today ought to put an end to the attempt to use Ricci to depict her as being somehow out of the judicial mainstream and thus unfit for the Court.
If you draw a small enough window around a distorted representation of what Sotomayor writes, you can always claim it is outside the mainstream, especially with the additional evidence that her name is pronounced with the accent on the last syllable.
As for Sotomayor, the Court's 5-4 decision today ought to put an end to the attempt to use Ricci to depict her as being somehow out of the judicial mainstream and thus unfit for the Court.
I don't have to go very far already .. to see the glee in wing-nut land that a Sotomayor decision was overturned
Judges make many rulings and it is always rather ridiculous to point to one, as the Right as done with Judge Sotomayor, and accuse anyone of being outside the judicial mainstream.
It is also clear that the Right loves activist judges, who ignore the clear intent of the law and the power of the states and legislative branches, when they don't like the outcome.
However, in the Ricci case it is not clear what the rationale is for overturning the firefighters' test results.
If diversity, in the absence of actual or history discrimination being show, is a proper goal then does it not embed discrimination into the law for all time? What would be the standard? Mathematical alignment or who has power any one moment?
Without reading the opinion one who hope the Court did what Justice Powell did in Backe, let Backe into medical school and preserved a rational basis for affirmative action.
The city of New Haven made a big mistake in arguing on the basis of racial equity to this Supreme Court. Instead, they should have argued that, as employers, they had the right to use whatever metrics they dam' well pleased to promote or demote their minions.
If there is any group for which the "conservative justices" have more empathy than the downtrodden white male, it is employers.
do you think if the concern over the test was a lack of diversity in other areas - age? geographic location? - that were not strictly merit-based, that conservatives would have been in favor of overriding the state and local laws?
I mean, if it were an older fireman suing the city do you think they would have cared at all?
So now New Haven will have a dyslexic looking up protocols and reading MSDS's in emergencies. Remind me to vacation somewhere else, probably Palau.
Here we have the conservative wing of the Court declaring illegal the employment decisions of local government officials, who used a political approach -- diversity -- which conservatives dislike on policy grounds. So often, the outcomes of the allegedly neutral conservative judges are completely consistent with (and aggressively advance) the political preferences of conservatives (Bush v. Gore being only the most obvious example). Indeed, few things are rarer than conservatives Justices invalidating policies that conservatives like politically, or upholding policies they despise -- the true test for whether one applies to law independently of political and outcome preferences.
That's because those conservative political preferences are RIGHT and the other side are WRONG! Its obviously obvious.
I agree that Sotomayor shouldn't be characterized as "outside the mainstream," particularly in light of the breakdown of the judges' votes as mentioned in the post. I just want to say that some people (me, for instance) object to race-based affirmative action but don't object to "legacy" affirmative action (or other preferences received by various people) for the simple reason that it's against the law to discriminate on the basis of race.
Every headline I've seen about this has been, Supreme Court overrules Sotomayor. Our liberal media at work once again, framing things the way conservatives want them. Now the republicans have a huge club to work with, thanks to the liberal media. I don't many reports will not that many other judges ruled the same way she did. I don't this will sink her nomination though, but it sure doesn't help. Since she's no liberal, I don't care either way on the subject. If confirmed, she'll be very much a centrist, overly demur to state and corporate interests. Hostile to individual rights. No big loss or big win either way, if she is confirmed or not.
I wrote " I don't many reports will not that many other judges ruled the same way she did. I don't this will sink her nomination though, but it sure doesn't help." I didn't do a very good job of spell checking on this one. That should of been "I doubt many reports will note that many other judges ruled the same way she did. I doubt this will sink her nomination though, but it sure doesn't help".
This is a case that has bothered me from the first time I heard about it. As a lawyer, I can see both sides and they both have merit. There was no way I would have even tried to predict the Supreme Court's decision, since it is so easy to argue either side.
Nonetheless, this will give the Republicans another opportunity to gripe about Sotomayor. As if the Republicans really needed any reason to gripe. They will gripe even without a reason.
Spot-on.
It's time that we as a society acknowledge the fact that, despite the right's incessant screeching about "liberal activist judges," the true dangerous radicals--and by that I mean jurists who hold non-majoritarian fringe views and arrive at their decisions based on what they view as the desirable policy outcome of their rulings rather than the established statutory and judge-made law--are consistently Supreme Court Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts and their Federalist Society disciples on the lower federal benches.
To my mind, Alito, with his infamous dissent as a member of a Third Circuit three-judge panel in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, may be the most dangerous of them all. Where was the criticism of Alito as an unprincipled, intemperate activist who empathized with "unborn children" at the expense of grown women and their families when he was nominated to serve on our highest court?
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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