Obama And the USSC
I am disturbed, but not surprised by some of the comments made by Barrack Obama as regards the role of a Justice of the Supreme Court and thereby, what we will get in the replacement for Justice David Souter, who is retiring, next month. Those comments give us a frightening view of what we have in store from anyone Obama might nominate.
There are many, including the Washington Post… hardly a bastion of liberal thought… who have counseled Obama to look for judicial restraint:
Alas, the once-dominant species of liberal proponents of judicial restraint has relatively few surviving members. Obama should find them - why not Jose Cabranes, the excellent judge whom President Clinton appointed to the 2nd Circuit? - and help revive the species.It appears that Obama will be moving in the opposite direction, making that restraint even more of a rarity. Comments made while Obama was still just a candidate, as early as 2001, in an WBEZ interview, are exemplary:
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the [...]
SCOTUS: Navy Can Use Sonar In Exercises
The Supreme Court (Winter v. Natural Resources Defense Council) voted 5-4 to rescind bans on sonar use in training exercises off the California coast. Those bans were implemented by lower federal courts. The ruling states that the lower courts exceeded their authority in those actions.
The bans were in place presumably to protect sea life from the negative effects of sonar use... effects that have been researched by organizations like the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). I can not speak directly to the integrity of the research, but it seems the concerns bear consideration. Perhaps not a knee-jerk response, since sonar has been in regular use for decades now, but enough careful consideration that if sea life is truly being impacted, specifically by excessive noise (and sonar is not the only source of noise that is produced by human activities in the ocean), then we can look at appropriate legal imperatives to provide adequate protection without hog-tying the Navy from being adequately prepared for real battles.
The Court was not, in this case, judging [...]
Voting Fraud: Risks Of An Open Society
The Supreme Court today backed the petition of the Ohio Secretary of State's position that they did not need to verify the records of about 200,000 new voters this years whose ID information did not match government records. That's more than 25% of the new voter registrations in Ohio.
Although it's a fairly partisan confrontation, it highlights something that is becoming more endemic across our fruited plane: in our attempts to ensure that people are able to exercise their right to vote, we are becoming more and more at risk of exposing a larger segment of ballots to fraud.
The problem extends beyond just the sublime attempts to[...]
The View From Here Is Dreadful
I watched Friday’s John and Cindy McCain interview on The View. Below is part 1; parts 2 and 3 should be accessible from the video. [wp_youtube]3Mnj1njG4ww[/wp_youtube] I see several posts refering to this interview as “McCain Grilled On The View”,...Stay in Touch
