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U. S. Supreme Court
Topic Started: Jun 27 2005, 02:32 PM (455 Views)
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Rock Star From Mars

I'm not terribly surprised by the Ten Commandments ruling.
US justices issue mixed rulings on Ten Commandments

- the thing that got me was their decision that the U S Govt. can allow one group of citizens to take another's private property.
Supreme Court expands public right to private property

Ten Commandments story excerpt:
  • WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Monday that putting framed copies of the Ten Commandments in county courthouses violated church-state separation, but it allowed a commandments monument in a larger display on a state Capitol grounds.

    .... In the other decision, the high court upheld the large granite monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments on the Texas Capitol grounds as part of a display that included numerous other monuments and statutes.

    Part of the distinction between the two rulings turned on the intent of government officials concerning the displays and whether they conveyed a mainly religious message.
Private property story excerpt:
  • Anchorage, Alaska - Suppose your house is in the way of proposed school or road construction, the law says the government can force you to sell. It's called eminent domain.

    But what if the city takes your land for private development, such as a strip mall or office building?

    Now, the Supreme Court says that's OK, too.

    The nation's highest court ruled on a case in New London, Conn. Now some are worrying that the decision handed down today may mean more people could lose their homes to private development.

    With a 5-to-4 decision, Supreme Court justices ruled in favor of a Connecticut nonprofit group seeking land for a strip mall. On the face of it, nothing seems more un-American than forcing someone to give up their property.

    But the use of eminent domain is allowed by the Fifth Amendment.

    “The Constitution does anticipate that there will be public takings of private property for public uses,” says Michael MacLeod-Ball (left), executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska.

    But, for the first time, the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of using eminent domain to take land from a private citizen and give it to a private enterprise.

    That ruling has some worried about what could happen next.

    “Most local governments are going to take this as a green light to take other people's homes and businesses and transfer them to politically connected developers,” says Dana Berliner of the Institute for Property Rights.
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Rock Star From Mars

Story about O'Connor's retirement is below this post, in the second one.
------------------------------------------------------------
O'Connor Used Vote to Entrench Right to Abortion

Excerpts:
  • Issue Rouses Partisans on Both Sides, But Legal Reversal Is Seen as Unlikely

    By David Von Drehle
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Saturday, July 2, 2005; Page A10

    No living person has had more influence over current abortion law in America than retiring Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. So the fight over her successor is sure to draw heat from this intensely polarizing issue.

    But can O'Connor's successor have as much impact as she had on abortion, by undoing what O'Connor has done? Even some prominent critics of abortion rights express doubts.

    .... Bush disappointed some antiabortion activists earlier this year when he minimized the importance of "changing laws," compared with "chang[ing] hearts."

    That is, in part, O'Connor's legacy. There was a time, in the late 1980s, when she might have overturned the court's prior rulings on the constitutional right to choose an abortion. Instead, she used her key vote to embed the right to abortion far more deeply than it was when she joined the court in 1981.

    .... Those cases in turn set precedents for other decisions, and with each new case O'Connor's framework for abortion rights cases has been steadily buttressed. Today, the legal search engine FindLaw identifies 150 different circuit court of appeals decisions from across the country that rely in part on O'Connor's most important abortion decision, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, authored with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter.

    That case effectively replaced the complicated mechanics of Roe v. Wade with a more streamlined set of rules. As O'Connor saw it, the law recognizes a woman's right to an abortion early in pregnancy as a matter of her liberty to decide her own private matters. States can regulate abortion, she ruled, but not to an extent that creates an "undue" burden on the woman.

    Later in pregnancy, when the fetus is "viable" outside the womb, more stringent restrictions are permissible -- unless they endanger the woman's health.

    Even if O'Connor is replaced with a strong antiabortion justice, the court will still have a slim five-vote majority in favor of the basic abortion rights in Planned Parenthood v. Casey . What might change is the extent of the state limits the court would tolerate. O'Connor's vote was the deciding factor, for instance, in a 2000 case that struck down Nebraska's ban on the procedure called "partial birth" abortion by critics.
- excerpts from Page 1 of a 2 page article
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O'Connor to retire, setting stage for shift in court's balance
Justice O'Connor resigns
  • WASHINGTON — Sandra Day O'Connor's sudden resignation from the Supreme Court on Friday signals the departure of a pioneering justice who was the most influential member of a divided court. It also ignites a political firestorm over her successor and gives President Bush a chance to make a lasting imprint on the bench.

    The departure of O'Connor, who became the first woman on the court when she was named to the bench by President Reagan in 1981, raises the possibility that Bush — who has never made a high court appointment — could get the chance to make two of them in short order.

    Chief Justice William Rehnquist, 80, is battling thyroid cancer, and much of the talk about potential court retirements has focused on him. But Rehnquist concluded the court's term for 2004-05 this week without giving any indication that he planned to step down.

    In a statement released by the court, O'Connor, 75, said she was leaving in part to spend more time with her husband. John O'Connor, 75, has been suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Her resignation creates the first opening on the Supreme Court in 11 years, the bench's longest period without a departure since 1812-1823. The former Arizona state senator was at the ideological center of the court and was its equilibrium, resisting moves by her colleagues to move the court too much to the left or to the right.

    To the disappointment of many conservative Republicans, she cast key votes protecting abortion rights, an issue that is certain to be a key point in the Senate confirmation hearings for whoever Bush chooses as her replacement.
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#1 mandona hater

G.W. has picked conservative John Roberts to take outgoing Sandra Day's place.

The ACLU will be flying its flag at half-mast, if at all.



(Edited by Flea - just the title of the post, to add Roberts' / Alito's name, etc.)
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I haven't been keeping up with this story a lot lately, but the last I heard nobody really knows much about this Roberts guy.

About the only thing I've heard about him is that he's Roman Catholic, and I heard about one legal decision he made involving toads (yes, toads). And you have a bunch of liberals and conservatives studying Roberts' decision in that toad case quite closely, trying to figure out just how conservative he is.

There was that and some other case he worked on involving a girl who got arrested for eating a single french fry in a subway (the city had a 'no food in the subway' law - weird).

Some conservatives, such as Ann Coulter (she's a pundit; she writes conservative books, is frequently a guest on t.v. talk shows, etc.), are not happy with Roberts, because they're afraid he's not going to turn out to be as right wing as they like.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

You're right about the American fixation on abortion, Iron. Both sides - the conservatives and liberals are in a tizzy - demanding to know exactly what the guy's position is on abortion. The liberals seem a little more manic and desperate about it than the conservatives.

I used to be pro-choice (vehemently so, even though I've never had an abortion), but then I became pro-life.

I now regard abortion as being murder, and to me, it's a symptom (or side effect, result?) of irresponsibility (in many but not all cases), but for whatever reason, I don't get 'red in the face' about it, overly emotional, where I want to pound on tables and scream at people about it.

I don't know why I don't feel more impassioned about the abortion issue.

The result is that I'm not as concerned either way with what Roberts thinks about abortion, if he'd try to stamp it out if he became a Justice. I don't know that I really care what he does about it, if he makes it to the Supreme Court.
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The media have been after Roberts - they don't like the fact that he's a Roman Catholic (that didn't seem to bother Democrats and liberals when John F. Kennedy was running for president), then they picked on his wife's clothing (I think that was either the L. A. Times or the Washington Post, I forget which), the media went after Mrs. Roberts and her affiliation with some pro-life group.

Next, the New York Times was trying to find out how to get the adoption records of Roberts' kids unsealed.

Then we have the NARAL ad. I forget what "NARAL" stands for, but it's a very rabid, pro-abortion group whose members are in a snit over Roberts' nomination. I had seen the NARAL ad against Roberts on the Brit Hume show and somewhere else.

Rush discussed it; here's what he had to say recently (and note: more examples of liberal bias in the mainstream media are discussed below; emphasis added by me by way of bold- faced type; Source = NARAL Ad Sets Women Back 50 Years; NY Times Misrepresents Roberts on Schiavo)
  • Aug 10, 2005

    BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

    RUSH: This NARAL ad, you know, if I were an American woman, I would be outraged at this, because this NARAL ad is setting women back 50 years. I mean, the ad is not only false, it's misleading and dishonest. It is an assault on women.

    It's a setback to all the progress women have made over the years.
    Every negative cliché, every cheap shot that demeans women comes back big time in this ad and women everywhere can thank that ad, NARAL and the NAGs for getting so upset about Roberts, but the main thing is the ad is a lie. The NARAL ad, you may have heard about this now.

    They've got this ad running about Roberts supporting bombers of abortion clinics, and it's been put through the mill by FactCheck.org which is the Annenberg Center where Kathleen Hall Jamison works.

    I mean, here's their headline: "NARAL Falsely Accuses Supreme Court Nominee Roberts; Attack Ad Says He Supported an Abortion Clinic Bomber and Excused Violence.

    In fact, Roberts Called Clinic Bombers 'Criminals' Who Should be Prosecuted Fully -- An abortion rights group is running an attack ad accusing the Supreme Court nominee of filing legal papers supporting a convicted clinic bomber and of having an ideology that leads him to excuse violence against other Americans. It shows images of a bombed clinic in Birmingham, Alabama.

    The ad is false and the ad misleads when it says that Roberts 'supported a clinic bomber.'

    It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right to use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics.

    Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too.

    "Roberts argued that blockades were already illegal under state law. The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures of the clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question," and then there's three pages. I printed it all out.

    No, actually there's five pages of analysis and documentation and proof about how virtually everything in the NARAL ad is a lie -- and yet CNN is, after examining the ad, decided they're going to run it, and I tell you, it looks to me...

    If you look at where this ad is going to be running on CNN, they bought some local time in the northeast, and who's in the northeast to be affected by this ad? This ad is clearly intended for senators.

    Who's up in the northeast that might be affected by the ad? Well, you've got two of them in Maine. You've got Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Then you've got Lincoln Chafee over there in Rhode Island.

    But this has backfired so big time on these people, it's just comical to watch this -- and then we've got a companion story today in the New York Times that started this way:
    -----
    "Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose case provoked congressional action and a national debate over end-of-life care became an issue on Tuesday in the Supreme Court confirmation of Judge John Roberts when a Democrat senator pressed him about whether lawmakers should have intervened."
    -----
    Let me just give you the summary here of what happened. Judge Roberts is making his goodwill tour of various senators, senate offices, and he happened to show up in the office of Ron Wyden of Oregon yesterday, and when Roberts left, Ron Wyden talked to the New York Times and reported to the New York Times what Roberts had said -- and he lied through his teeth.

    He lied through his teeth about what Judge Roberts said to him.

    Judge Roberts in fact said, "I don't know anything about the Schiavo case. I have no answer for you. I didn't study it," and yet you look at the New York Times today.

    The Senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon, "said that Judge Roberts while not addressing the Schiavo case specifically made clear he was displeased with Congress' efforts to force the federal judiciary to overturn a court order withdrawing her feeding tube." This is from the New York Times story.

    It's amazing to sit here and watch these once-great liberal institutions implode -- and I'm telling you, I know exactly why it's happening. It is happening because they now face opposition. They no longer have a monopoly, and they don't get away with lying anymore.

    They always have gotten away with this stuff, but now it's pure panic that's set in, and it's beyond my comprehension. This is silly. The New York Times doing this is as silly as Rafael Palmeiro thinking he can get away with using steroids after his appearance before Congress in March.

    And for NARAL to think that they can get away with this ad is as silly as Rafael Palmeiro thinking he can get away with using steroids after appearing before Congress and knowing the testing was coming up. So let CNN go ahead and run it. Let CNN destroy whatever credibility it's got left at the same time, too. Fine with me.

    I think this is a classic illustration of a bunch of elitists who have run the school, who have run the schoolyard, who have been in charge of everything for years -- and know they are losing their grip but can't figure out a way to hold on, and, of course, all they do is resort to their age-old tactics which have since been discovered and are successfully rebuked and defeated on a daily basis.

    "Wyden said in a telephone interview after the hour-long meeting, 'I asked whether it was constitutional for Congress to intervene in an end of life case with a specific remedy,'" and Wyden said this of Judge Roberts:

    "Well, his answer is, 'I'm concerned with judicial independence. Congress can proscribe standards, but when Congress starts to act like a court and proscribe particular remedies in particular cases, Congress has overstepped its bounds.' The answer, which Mr. Wyden says his aides wrote down word for word, would seem to put Judge Roberts at odds with leading Republicans in Congress, including the Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Tom DeLay, both who led the charge for congressional intervention in the Schiavo case."

    Now, what's happened here -- and I don't mind admitting -- the White House has been calling everybody they can today. They've called National Review.

    They've called a whole bunch of people because they read this story, and obviously Roberts was brought in, "What is this about?" Roberts told them what happened, and so it's time to just try to straighten things out.

    Now, basically it's this. The reporter for the New York Times is Cheryl Gay Stolberg, and she attributed a quote to Judge Roberts that was provided by Senator Wyden.

    She [Stolberg] herself was not at the meeting. She didn't speak with anybody from the White House who was at the meeting. She never sought to verify the accuracy of the quote from the White House nor Judge Roberts. She just accepted what this lamebrain Wyden had to say
    , a guy who can't find his own state on a map half the time.

    What Judge Roberts actually said is materially different and parts of his comments were totally deleted by the New York Times.
    -----
    "On the Schiavo case specifically, Judge Roberts said repeatedly he hadn't studied the case and he didn't want to opine on it. He was asked if he would have denied cert and he didn't answer because he's not examined the case. On Congress overstepping its legislative role, he said that he was aware of court precedents, cases where the court found Congress had overstepped its legislative authority.
    -----
    "But it was clear that he was not offering his own opinion on the Schiavo case or any specific case or issue. He merely stated he was aware of such instances, but he specifically went out of his way to say he hadn't studied the Schiavo case and didn't want to opine on it," and even though the New York Times says, "that while not addressing the Schiavo case specifically, made clear he was displeased with Congress' efforts to force the federal judiciary to overturn a court order withdrawing her feeding tube." Now, this is as disingenuous reporting as you'll find anywhere. The senator, Ron Wyden of Oregon, "said that Judge Roberts, while not addressing the Schiavo case specifically..." Everything that follows is irrelevant. Everything else that follows that phrase is now a lie, because it does attempt to make it seem that Roberts did comment specifically on the Schiavo case.

    "While he didn't address it specifically, in fact, he refused to discuss it." So what's happening here is that Roberts is making his tour of the Senate; he's going up and talking to these lib Democrat Senators, and this is what I asked Fred Thompson about last week.

    "How is this all going? Is this going to matter?" He said, "Probably isn't going to matter much. I mean, it's all going to get blown up when the hearings start. But here these guys go up there, talk to these senators, and senators use the occasion not to get to know Roberts, but to then call their buddies in the press and lie about what Roberts said so as to advance their own cause, which is trying to defeat the guy and harm President Bush and all that -- and they've got their willing accomplices in the press helping them right along, but the fact is there's a giant magnifying glass.

    We're like spies, folks. We are spying on the mainstream press every day and we're not hidden. We're right out in the open, and they simply don't get away with this anymore. They're going to get blown to smithereens all over.

    Now, the Times readers are going to believe it but it's not going to spread, it's not going to get the legs that it would have had years and years and years ago. It all has a deeper meaning. It all has a deep meaning. It means that they're typical.

    They can't defeat the guy honestly. They can't defeat the guy on substance, so they have to lie about it.

    They have to make it up, and they don't care because their friends in the mainstream press are never going to accuse them of lying. They're going to buck 'em up, back 'em up, and support 'em and promote them no matter what the reaction is because they're all on the same page.

    Before I go to the break I want you to hear this NARAL ad by the way, that has been totally debunked. I mean, I've got the audio to it, and keep in mind that the FactCheck.org has totally, totally repudiated the ad, has come out and claimed it's all false.

    Roberts did not do one thing this ad suggests, and they even use film or video of a burning abortion clinic that occurred seven years after this case. But the NARAL ad stars some babe named Emily Lyons and this is her.

    ---- [start of TV ADVERTISEMENT BY NARAL:] ----

    WOMAN: When a bomb ripped through my clinic, I almost lost my life. I will never be the same.

    VOICE-OVER: Supreme Court nominee John Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber. [SIC]

    WOMAN: I am determined to stop this violence, so I'm speaking out.

    VOICE-OVER: Call your senators. Tell them to oppose John Roberts. America can't afford a justice whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans.
    ---- [end of TV ADVERTISEMENT BY NARAL] ----

    RUSH: The thing that's funny about this is they actually think people are going to buy this, that the president's nominated a guy who is in favor of blowing up abortion clinics.

    We've got a guy going on the Supreme Court who is in favor of violence against women -- and that's why I say this is going to set back all the gains women have made for 50 years because how can we take this seriously?

    This is nothing but a bunch of women on PMS! Can I give you an example of how it's going to set women back? You used to not be able to make jokes about PMS anymore because, well, "You can't do that, Rush!" Well, here you go.

    This is PMS at work.

    This is a bunch of feminists on PMS having PMS and they're just deranged. They're hysterical. This is exactly the kind of setback I'm talking about. Who can take this stuff seriously?

    You read this, you see this, you hear this, you want to send these women off to the doctor. You certainly don't want them in your house. You don't want them in your office; you don't want to even be around them. If a woman is on PMS, get her out of here, you know? Give her a couple-three days and I'll talk to her then.

    BREAK TRANSCRIPT

    RUSH: You know, it will be interesting to see. I want to see if any senator comes out and defends the NARAL ad. Have you seen this, Mr. Snerdley, has anybody seen a senator come out and defend the ad? No, not yet.

    I want to see if one of them does, and I will bet you nobody does.

    I'll bet you not one Democrat comes out and defends this. Well, Maxine Waters might, but I'm talking about somebody in the Senate.

    I'll bet you not one Democrat senator will come out and defend this ad -- and furthermore, I think it would be fabulous, think it would be great, if during the course of the news-gathering process today if some mainstream reporters would run up to Democrat senators and say, "Do you support this ad by NARAL? Could I get your position on this ad?"

    No, I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. I'm just making the point. You won't see it. You won't see any Democrat questioned on this.

    If this were reversed and some wacko conservative group had come out and made some wacko ad, say charging somebody with something, pick your example, you know the media would be all over every Republican and saying, "You support that ad? Have you condemned that ad yet?" But they won't ask one Democrat about this NARAL ad. You just wait and see. It doesn't matter, folks. It doesn't matter whether they do or not. It's going to be like the swift boat ads.

    Swift boat ads were condemned left and right, but this ad, I'm waiting for somebody to come out and praise it. I'm waiting for somebody to come out and take on FactCheck.org and say FactCheck.org is either wrong or biased or what have you, because NARAL's got a lot riding on this ad.

    They spent 125 grand on CNN and CNN has so few audience members, you can buy CNN cheap now.

    So for 125,000 you can get a lot of coverage on CNN. That will get you about two 60s on this show, but on CNN, you could buy a week's worth of time for 125 grand. They also try to put out that Fox is running it. Fox is not. Fox has not.

    Somebody tried to say that Fox was running this ad, too, but they are not going to do that. It's running on some Fox local affiliates, but not in any way the Fox News Channel.
~ Edit ~
Update:

NARAL Dumps Ad About Judge Roberts - from The Conservative Voice

CNN Bias Revealed in NARAL's Attack on Roberts - Pro Life Blogs
-(their views, this is not a regular 'news' source)

NARAL Pro-Choice America To Withdraw TV Ad Criticizing Supreme Court Nominee - from Medical News Today

From The Conservative Voice:
  • August 12, 2005
    Under increasing pressure from members of both the Democrat and Republican Party the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) has decided to drop their recent advertisement that vilifies Judge Roberts.

    In the Ad, NARAL accuses Judge Roberts (who is nominated to an Associate Justice position on the US Supreme Court) of siding with those individuals who have bombed abortion clinics.

    In what some have called both slanderous and libelous, a portion of the NARAL Television and Radio Ad says: "Roberts filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted abortion clinic bomber." Sen. Arlen Specter ® said "The NARAL television advertisement is blatantly untrue and unfair."
~ Edit 2 ~
I should also mention that there are some self-professing conservatives who are not happy with Roberts, they wish Bush would've chosen someone else, and they're not so sure if Roberts should have been named as the nominee.

So it's not only some liberals who are against Roberts.

The biggest objection I've seen from these extremely right wing types (who are also very critical of George W. Bush by the way) is that Roberts once worked pro bono on a case for a homosexual couple.
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Senate confirms Roberts as chief justice

Excerpts:
  • The US Senate on Thursday confirmed Judge John Roberts as the first new chief justice in a generation, and the first of two new justices who could determine the direction of the Supreme Court for decades to come.

    Mr Roberts, 50, was approved by a vote of 78-22, commanding the support of all 55 Senate Republicans, but splitting the Democrats. Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, voted against his nomination, along with half of Senate Democrats.

    Despite the fact that Mr Roberts is widely respected across party lines for his intellect and temperament, he still got more No votes than any justice in two decades (except for the controversial Clarence Thomas and the late William Rehnquist on his confirmation as chief justice).

    The large number of Democratic votes against Mr Roberts raises the prospect of a much tougher fight over the nomination, expected to be imminent, of a candidate to fill the second vacant seat on the court the seat of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

    Mrs O'Connor is a moderate Republican who held the balance of power on the court of William Rehnquist, which often split 5-4 on social issues. Her replacement could substantially alter the ideological balance of the court.
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1. Alito's Supreme Court Nomination Clears US Senate Committee - Bloomberg

2. Dodd will oppose Alito; Lieberman mum on decision - Newsday

From Link 1 above:
  • Jan. 24 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, voting 10-8 along party lines, cleared the way for the full Senate to consider confirming Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr. to succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

    The committee sent Alito's nomination to the Senate, where debate is scheduled to begin tomorrow. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, said the full Senate may vote on Alito by the end of the week.

    Today's vote underscored that Alito will get fewer than the 22 Democratic votes Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. received when he was confirmed, 78-22, in September. Six of the Democrats who supported Roberts have said they will vote against Alito. Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson is the only Democrat who has announced he will vote for Alito.
From the second link:
  • WASHINGTON (AP) _ Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd said Tuesday that he will vote against Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito because his judicial philosophy is "outside the mainstream."

    Dodd's decision came hours after the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday approved Alito on a party-line vote. The panel's 10 Republicans supported Alito while the eight Democratic members opposed him.
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US Senate Confirms Alito for Supreme Court
  • By Deborah Tate
    Capitol Hill
    31 January 2006

    The U.S. Senate has confirmed Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court in a largely party-line vote. He is poised to become the 110th justice on the high court, succeeding Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

    Senator Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, announced the vote as he presided over the Senate.

    STEVENS: "On this vote, the ayes are 58, the nays are 42. The president's nomination of Samuel A. Alito, Jr. of New Jersey to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is confirmed."

    The vote fell generally along party lines, with all but one of the Senate's majority Republicans voting in favor of Judge Samuel Alito. All but four of the Democrats voted against the nomination.

    The lone Republican who opposed Alito was Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who is facing a tough reelection battle this year in the Democrat-leaning state.

    The confirmation vote culminated weeks of often bitter, partisan debate over the nomination at the start of the mid-term election year.

    Democrats expressed concerns that Judge Samuel Alito, a conservative, would tilt the ideological balance of the court, noting that as he is succeeding Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate, who often cast the deciding vote in five-to-four rulings in controversial cases.
please click link at top to read rest...

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What's-his-face is retiring, and no doubt liberal Obama will replace him with another liberal justice.

Obama is sure as heck not going to replace Souter with a moderate or a conservative.

High court reactions to Souter's retirement

David Souter profile: the Supreme Court's surprise reliable liberal

Farewell, Justice Souter

Evaluating Souter: A Strange Judicial Trip, Leaning Left

US Supreme Court Justice Souter to retire
  • May 1, 2009

    Barack Obama vowed to consult “across the political spectrum” as he began a search on Friday for his first Supreme Court nominee.

    The pledge came after Justice David Souter announced plans to step down. Mr Souter was appointed by George Bush, the Republican president, in 1990 but went on to become one of the most liberal members of the nine-strong panel. The judge said he would retire when the court breaks for the summer next month.

    His decision created an early opportunity for Mr Obama to place his own imprint on the court and consolidate its liberal-leaning faction after two conservative selections by George W. Bush.

    ....The president faced an immediate barrage of advice from leftwing groups urging him to make a bold choice in keeping with his strong election mandate and conservative groups warning against an overly liberal nominee.

    While the replacement of one relatively liberal justice with another would not alter the balance of power on the court, it allows Mr Obama to entrench liberal influence by appointing a younger justice who could serve for decades.
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<span style='font-size:13pt;line-height:100%'> US Supreme Court Ruling Reverses Iowa Campaign Law

Analysis: High court ruling a game-changer
  • In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not ban political spending by certain groups
Ruling Opens Door to More Political Groups
  • Corporations, labor unions and other political entities are gearing up to play a larger role in elections in 2010 and beyond after a decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down elements of campaign-finance law.

    The Supreme Court Thursday made it easier for entities to influence elections for Congress and the White House by stripping away rules that limited their ability to fund campaign advertisements.

    The court also struck down a part of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law that prevented independent political groups from running advertisements within 30 days of a primary election or 60 days of a general election.

    The question now is whether corporations and labor unions will take advantage of their new freedom. For the last decade, labor unions have been more aggressive than corporations in finding legal ways to fund independent political campaigns.

    But the relaxation of campaign-spending restrictions could clear the way for groups from all points along the political spectrum to spend more, and target more of that spending in the critical final days of a campaign.
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Alito and Obama Face Alleged Breaches of Etiquette

Alito openly disagrees with president’s criticism of court
  • Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. disagreed with President Obama’s public criticism of the high court’s ruling removing many corporate campaign spending limits - and he didn’t try to hide it.

    Alito made a dismissive face, shook his head repeatedly, and appeared to mouth the words “not true’’ or “simply not true’’ when Obama assailed the decision Wednesday night in his State of the Union address.

    The president had taken the unusual step of publicly scolding the high court with some of its robed members seated before him in the House. “With all due deference to the separation of powers,’’ he said, the court last week “reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests - including foreign corporations - to spend without limit in our elections.’’

    Alito was in the majority in the 5-to-4 ruling.

    Bill Burton, White House deputy press secretary, defended the president’s statement.

    “One of the great things about our democracy is that powerful members of the government at high levels can disagree in public and private,’’ Burton said yesterday.

    “This is one of those cases. But the president is not less committed to seeing this reform.’’

    Vice President Joe Biden called the ruling “dead wrong’’ yesterday.

    “The president didn’t question the integrity of the court; he questioned the judgment of it,’’ Biden said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.’’
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