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Originally Posted by Snaieke
 The President is a disgrace and shouldn't go to the next State of the Union.
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Originally Posted by Snaieke
The President is a disgrace and shouldn't go to the next State of the Union.
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Originally Posted by Princess Kate
A DISGRACE
This is pathetic.. Alito refuses to attend the next State of the Union because he'd be expected to behave civilly and refrain from outbursts if the President of the United States says something he disagrees with |
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Originally Posted by First Class 782
Alito is a douche, but that isn't what he said at all.
And he is not the first, second, or third Justice to skip these things. So who gives a shit. |
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Originally Posted by jvc
1. President Obama did something unprecedented in recent history during a State of the Union Address in directly criticizing a recent Supreme Court decision knowing that the Supreme Court justices are obligated to basically sit there stoically and take it (like potted plants).
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Originally Posted by jvc
2. This predictably lead to the Democrats in attendance seated directly behind the Supreme Court to stand and boisterously cheer the president's attack on the Supreme court.
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Originally Posted by jvc
3. In his attack, President Obama falsely stated that this would open the floodgates for foreign corporations to spend without limits in US elections. Justice Kennedy's majority opinion specifically said otherwise, leaving in place the current law banning foreign spending in US elections.
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Originally Posted by jvc
4. Justice Alito, knowing the falsity of the president's statement and perhaps annoyed by being surrounded by Democrats applauding this misleading attack on the Supreme Court's decision, broke decorum, shaking his head and inaudibly mouthed the words "not true" in response.
5. Because he happened to be caught on camera, Justice Alito faced a lot of criticism, especially from the left, for that breach of decorum. |
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Originally Posted by jvc
6. It is not uncommon for Supreme Court Justices to skip the State of the Union. Earlier in the year, 1/3 of Court, including liberal icon John Paul Stevens, skipped the State of the Union. Justice Stevens called the speech a "political occasion" where the Supreme Court's presence is not required. With Stevens retired and Alito staying away, 1/3 of the Court will again skip the next State of the Union. Several times, no Supreme Court Justices attended the speech. What's the big deal?
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Originally Posted by yt
jvc, I would normally not make such a pointed statement but in response to yours, I would caution you to look outside of whatever your news sources are.
Reagan criticized the court for its ruling on school prayer in his 1988 State of the Union address, and directly attacked the Supreme Court for Roe v. Wade in his 1984 State of the Union address. Bush condemned "activist judges" who are "redefining marriage by court order" in his 2004 State of the Union address. |
| And let me add here: so many of our greatest statesmen have reminded us that spiritual values alone are essential to our nation's health and vigor. The Congress opens its proceedings each day, as does the Supreme Court, with an acknowledgment of the Supreme Being - yet we are denied the right to set aside in our schools a moment each day for those who wish to pray. I believe Congress should pass our school prayer amendment. |
| During our first three years, we have joined bipartisan efforts to restore protection of the law to unborn children. Now, I know this issue is very controversial. But unless and until it can be proven that an unborn child is not a living human being, can we justify assuming without proof that it isn't? No one has yet offered such proof; indeed, all the evidence is to the contrary. We should rise above bitterness and reproach, and if Americans could come together in a spirit of understanding and helping, then we could find positive solutions to the tragedy of abortion. |
| How many SOTUs have you watched? They do that to every line, especially one hitting something so blatantly corrupt and egregious as Citizens United. Obama took his words directly from the minority dissent, btw, so not all the judges were anywhere near as offended as Alito. |
| How is it false? ThinkProgress has documented the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid by foreign, often state-owned corporations directly into the same 501(c)6 account paying for ads against Democrats this season. Just because the rest of the media is pretending it's not happening because they'd like to keep their business on a paying basis doesn't mean it's not compelling and worthy of investigation. Can you imagine your reaction if the reverse were true, if all these outsourcing companies from India, China, oil interests in Saudi Arabia & Russia, etc. were paying for ads against Republicans? |
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Originally Posted by yt
ps. I heard a fascinating discussion today on Diane Rehm about the separation of powers, and one of the scholars was alarmed that Congress has become too weak and dysfunctional to provide any kind of check on the Supreme Court. This scholar noted that Supreme Court impeachments were common during the country's early years but that somehow they've evolved into sacred cows. And that they are a check on the constitutionality of laws passed by Congress, but this legislating from the bench as in Citizen's United is dangerously out of step with their constitutional function. Anyway, I thought that was interesting in light of this discussion.
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Originally Posted by jvc
Just found the audio. I'll give it a listen. I'm a fan of Ed Whelan's Bench Memos blog on National Review. Diane Rehm sounds exactly like my wife's grandmother.
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Originally Posted by jvc
Just found Before I start listening, though, I have a hard time seeing how the Citizens United ruling is legislating from the bench. I see judicial activism or legislating from the bench as ignoring the Constitution and/or statutes in order to impose your preferred policy. The law in question had direct 1st Amendment implications. The opinion was based mostly upon 1st Amendment considerations.
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| The real issue in this case concerns how, not if, the appellant may finance its electioneering. Citizens United is a wealthy nonprofit corporation that runs a political action committee (PAC) with millions of dollars in assets. Under the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), it could have used those assets to televise and promote Hillary: The Movie wherever and whenever it wanted to. It also could have spent unrestricted sums to broadcast Hillary at any time other than the 30 days before the last primary election. Neither Citizens United’s nor any other corporation’s speech has been “banned,” ante , at 1. All that the parties dispute is whether Citizens United had a right to use the funds in its general treasury to pay for broadcasts during the 30-day period. The notion that the First Amendment dictates an affirmative answer to that question is, in my judgment, profoundly misguided. Even more misguided is the notion that the Court must rewrite the law relating to campaign expenditures by for-profit corporations and unions to decide this case. |
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Originally Posted by jvc
Just found As far as I know, the only Supreme Court Justice impeached in our history was Samuel Chase in 1804 for his conduct in cases before a lower court (but really for pissing of Thomas Jefferson). He was acquitted by the Senate. Fourteen lower federal court judges have been impeached.
ETA: Listening now. She was referring to threat of impeachment at all levels of the federal judiciary. |
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Originally Posted by yt
US Supreme Court increasingly favors business, study says.
Meanwhile, with all this talk of Justice Thomas's sexual fetish for hardcore porn in the news lately, I wonder if it's possible that he perjured himself during the Anita Hill hearings. |
Lots of people are making a big deal about the decision regarding the video game ban in Cali but the ruling on the Arizona Public financing issue is disturbing. I'm no lawyer and I'm not even all that smart but it seems crazy to me that a majority of the Supreme Court decided Arizona can't provide public funding for campaigns that has the ability to match, to a point, what a privately funded campaign is bringing in. They actually argued that it infringes on the First amendment right of the privately funded person to allow public funding to match what they raise privately. It just seems to stupid.
The Supreme Court is broken...which is bad.
Nobody seems to notice or care...which is worse.
I think they really tipped their hand with the WalMart case, plus Clarence Thomas's ridiculous conflicts of interest. As soon as they're perceived as being biased, it's their responsibility to police themselves. There is no recourse function if the court becomes corrupt. What happens next is, I think, up in the air. I really hope something dramatic happens because it's getting re-goddam-diculous.
Don't agree with this decision either:
By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled against a New Jersey man who complained that strip searches in two county jails violated his civil rights.
Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion for the court's conservative justices that when people are going to be put into the general jail population, "courts must defer to the judgment of correctional officials unless the record contains substantial evidence showing their policies are an unnecessary or unjustified response to problems of jail security."
In a dissenting opinion joined by the court's liberals, Justice Stephen Breyer said strip searches improperly "subject those arrested for minor offenses to serious invasions of their personal privacy." Breyer said jailers ought to have a reasonable suspicion someone may be hiding something before conducting a strip search.
Albert Florence was forced to undress and submit to strip searches following his arrest on a warrant for an unpaid fine, though the fine actually had been paid. Even if the warrant had been valid, failure to pay a fine is not a crime in New Jersey.
Dude shouldn't have even been arrested anyway. I hope he gets some coin from Christie but I don't see it happening.
I never read exactly what happened blow for blow in Citizens vs. United, but jeez, fuck this court:
Roberts assigned the Citizens United opinion to himself. Even though the oral argument had been dramatic, Olson had presented the case to the Court in a narrow way. According to the briefs in the case—and Olson’s argument—the main issue was whether the McCain-Feingold law applied to a documentary, presented on video on demand, by a nonprofit corporation. The liberals lost that argument: the vote at the conference was that the law did not apply to Citizens United, which was free to advertise and run its documentary as it saw fit. The liberals expected that Roberts’s opinion would say this much and no more.
At first, Roberts did write an opinion roughly along those lines, and Kennedy wrote a concurrence which said the Court should have gone much further. Kennedy’s opinion said the Court should declare McCain-Feingold’s restrictions unconstitutional, overturn an earlier Supreme Court decision from 1990, and gut long-standing prohibitions on corporate giving. But after the Roberts and Kennedy drafts circulated, the conservative Justices began rallying to Kennedy’s more expansive resolution of the case. In light of this, Roberts withdrew his own opinion and let Kennedy write for the majority. Kennedy then turned his concurrence into an opinion for the Court.
The new majority opinion transformed Citizens United into a vehicle for rewriting decades of constitutional law in a case where the lawyer had not even raised those issues. Roberts’s approach to Citizens United conflicted with the position he had taken earlier in the term. At the argument of a death-penalty case known as Cone v. Bell, Roberts had berated at length the defendant’s lawyer, Thomas Goldstein, for his temerity in raising an issue that had not been addressed in the petition. Now Roberts was doing nearly the same thing to upset decades of settled expectations.
Great write up here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/21/120521fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=all
How's everyone else feel about the Affordable Care Act's chances anyway?
It still boggles my mind that the Supreme Court isn't held to same Ethical standards that the rest of the judiciary system is.
