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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Feb 22, 2016 - 04:27pm PT
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Gary, Brennan was a liberal by the standards of his day.
John
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Jorroh
climber
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Feb 22, 2016 - 05:08pm PT
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"As for the effect of money in politics, I see that Jeb Bush, the Republican candidate with the biggest campaign contributions, by far, bowed out"
No amount of money could polish that turd.
Says nothing at all about the ability of rich donors to get favorable legislation, non-enforcement of laws, favorable court decisions etc. which is really the problem.
Trying to tilt the field in a presidential election is a pretty heavy lift, even with the media on your side.
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Feb 22, 2016 - 05:12pm PT
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That was my next post
JEB! was the problem, not the money backing him
does he get to keep that money?
my prediction:
He will be back
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Feb 22, 2016 - 05:23pm PT
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Looking Back
By Jeffrey Toobin
February 29, 2016 Issue
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/antonin-scalia-looking-backward
Antonin Scalia, who died this month, after nearly three decades on the Supreme Court, devoted his professional life to making the United States a less fair, less tolerant, and less admirable democracy. Fortunately, he mostly failed. Belligerent with his colleagues, dismissive of his critics, nostalgic for a world where outsiders knew their place and stayed there, Scalia represents a perfect model for everything that President Obama should avoid in a successor. The great Justices of the Supreme Court have always looked forward; their words both anticipated and helped shape the nation that the United States was becoming. Chief Justice John Marshall read the new Constitution to allow for a vibrant and progressive federal government. Louis Brandeis understood the need for that government to regulate an industrializing economy. Earl Warren saw that segregation was poison in the modern world. Scalia, in contrast, looked backward.
His revulsion toward homosexuality, a touchstone of his world view, appeared straight out of his sheltered, nineteen-forties boyhood. When, in 2003, the Court ruled that gay people could no longer be thrown in prison for having consensual sex, Scalia dissented, and wrote, “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.” He went on, “Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a life style that they believe to be immoral and destructive.”
But it was in his jurisprudence that Scalia most self-consciously looked to the past. He pioneered “originalism,” a theory holding that the Constitution should be interpreted in line with the beliefs of the white men, many of them slave owners, who ratified it in the late eighteenth century. During Scalia’s first two decades as a Justice, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist rarely gave him important constitutional cases to write for the Court; the Chief feared that Scalia’s extreme views would repel Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court’s swing vote, who had a toxic relationship with him during their early days as colleagues. (Scalia’s clashes with O’Connor were far more significant than his much chronicled friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.) It was not until 2008, after John G. Roberts, Jr., had succeeded Rehnquist, that Scalia finally got a blockbuster: District of Columbia v. Heller, about the Second Amendment. Scalia spent thousands of words plumbing the psyches of the Framers, to conclude (wrongly, as John Paul Stevens pointed out in his dissent) that they had meant that individuals, not just members of “well-regulated” state militias, had the right to own handguns. Even Scalia’s ideological allies recognized the folly of trying to divine the “intent” of the authors of the Constitution concerning questions that those bewigged worthies could never have anticipated. During the oral argument of a challenge to a California law that required, among other things, warning labels on violent video games, Justice Samuel Alito interrupted Scalia’s harangue of a lawyer by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?”
Scalia described himself as an advocate of judicial restraint, who believed that the courts should defer to the democratically elected branches of government. In reality, he lunged at opportunities to overrule the work of Presidents and of legislators, especially Democrats. Scalia helped gut the Voting Rights Act, overturn McCain-Feingold and other campaign-finance rules, and, in his last official act, block President Obama’s climate-change regulations. Scalia’s reputation, like the Supreme Court’s, is also stained by his role in the majority in Bush v. Gore. His oft-repeated advice to critics of the decision was “Get over it.”
Not long ago, Scalia told an interviewer that he had cancelled his subscription to the Washington Post and received his news from the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times (owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church), and conservative talk radio. In this, as in his jurisprudence, he showed that he lived within the sealed bubble of contemporary conservative thought. That bubble also helps explain the Republican response to the new vacancy on the Court. Within hours of Scalia’s death, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, announced that the Senate will refuse even to allow a vote on Obama’s nominee, regardless of who he or she turns out to be.
This Republican intransigence is a sign of panic, not of power. The Court now consists of four liberals (Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan) and three hard-core conservatives (Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Alito), plus Anthony Kennedy, who usually but not always sides with the conservatives. With Scalia’s death, there is a realistic possibility of a liberal majority for the first time in two generations, since the last days of the Warren Court. A Democratic victory in November will all but assure this transformation. Republicans are heading to the barricades; Democrats were apparently too blindsided to recognize good news when they got it.
Like Nick Carraway, Scalia “wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever.” The world didn’t coöperate. Scalia won a great deal more than he lost, and he and his allies succeeded in transforming American politics into a cash bazaar, with seats all but put up for bidding. But even though Scalia led a conservative majority on the Court for virtually his entire tenure, he never achieved his fondest hopes—thanks first to O’Connor and then to Kennedy. Roe v. Wade endures. Affirmative action survives. Obamacare lives. Gay rights are ascendant; the death penalty is not. (These positions are contingent, of course, and cases this year may weaken the Court’s resolve.) For all that Presidents shape the Court, the Justices rarely stray too far from public opinion. And, on the social issues where the Court has the final word, the real problem for Scalia’s heirs is that they are out of step with the rest of the nation. The public wants diversity, not intolerance; more marriages and fewer executions; less money in politics, not more. Justice Scalia’s views—passionately felt and pungently expressed though they were—now seem like so many boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. ♦
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Feb 22, 2016 - 06:34pm PT
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JEL? Per your last post:
Feb 22, 2016 - 04:27pm PT
Gary, Brennan was a liberal by the standards of his day.
John
I'm maybe a little naive about current Republican politics, so help me out here?
Since Republican President & war hero Eisenhower nominated Brennan, & you say Brennan was a liberal ----- was:
a. Eisenhower a liberal?
b. Eisenhower duped by Brennan?
c. Or have standards for what determines liberals & conservatives changed since then?
Is my childhood hero President Eisenhower now on the conservative schist list for his support for building our interstate highway systems & helping to generate a decade of middle-class prosperity with high taxes?
Sigh.
It ain't easy being a liberal Republican in these trying times.
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Tom
Big Wall climber
San Luis Obispo CA
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Feb 22, 2016 - 06:46pm PT
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10b4m, thanks for that link.
Sandra Day O'Conner rips the GOP over their call to leave a Supreme Court seat empty for a year.
She was a conservative justice, appointed by Reagan. Her opposition to the GOP's official position indicates just how internally dysfunctional the GOP has become.
In another article, Orrin Hatch says the GOP's blockade of an Obama nominee is to protect the Supreme Court from becoming politicized. He also repeats the GOP lie that presidents usually don't nominate justices in election years.
Those GOP guys must all buy their soundbites from the same online stock-slogan store - - - StutterShock.com
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/hatch-dont-denigrate-court-through-constitutional-process
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Gary
Social climber
Where in the hell is Major Kong?
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Feb 22, 2016 - 07:09pm PT
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Gary, Brennan was a liberal by the standards of his day.
Brennan was a commie by the standards of this day.
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Feb 22, 2016 - 10:09pm PT
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But this day is incredibly reactionary..
Hopefully the millennials are bringing it back left, to center
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Feb 23, 2016 - 08:03am PT
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Wikipedia has somewhat supplied me answers to my above questions about Justice Brennan.
Brennan was named to the U.S. Supreme Court through a recess appointment by Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, shortly before the 1956 presidential election. Presidential advisers thought the appointment of a Roman Catholic Democrat from the Northeast would woo critical voters in the upcoming re-election campaign for Eisenhower, a Republican.[10]
Brennan gained the attention of Herbert Brownell, United States Attorney General and Eisenhower's chief legal affairs adviser, when Brennan had to give a speech at a conference (as a substitute for New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Vanderbilt).[11] To Brownell, Brennan's speech seemed to suggest a marked conservatism, especially on criminal matters.
Other factors playing into Brennan's appointment were his Catholicism, his status as a state court judge (no state judge had been appointed to the High Court since Benjamin Cardozo in 1932), and Eisenhower's desire to appear bipartisan after his appointments of two Republicans: Earl Warren (former Governor of California) and John Marshall Harlan II.[12]
Justice Brennan is one of thirteen justices in the history of the Supreme Court who identified as Roman Catholic.[13]
His nomination faced a small amount of controversy from two angles. The National Liberal League opposed his nomination because they thought he would rely on his religious beliefs rather than the Constitution when ruling, and Senator Joseph McCarthy had read transcripts of Brennan's speech where he decried overzealous anti-Communist investigations as "witch-hunts." After a confirmation hearing in 1957 in which Brennan defended himself against McCarthy's attacks and proclaimed that he would rule solely on the basis of the Constitution and not on Church law,[14] he was confirmed by a near-unanimous vote, with only Senator McCarthy voting against him https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Brennan,_Jr.
Just imagine folks! President Eisenhower had already appointed two conservative Supreme Court Justices & he had a desire to appear bipartisan by appointing Brennan.
Sigh.
Those days are gone in America, to my great regret.
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Feb 23, 2016 - 08:51am PT
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Eisenhower was a Great Liberal
At that time, the Parties weren't conservative/liberal
The Conservatives in the South were Dems
And the Northern Liberals were Republicans
Look at this Election map from 1952
It shows how different politics was back them
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Craig Fry
Trad climber
So Cal.
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Feb 23, 2016 - 08:56am PT
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Oh my GOD!!
Look at that Party Platform, couldn't be more Liberal,
or pinko Commie by today's standards
It looks just like Bernies!
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Fritz
Trad climber
Choss Creek, ID
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Feb 23, 2016 - 09:15am PT
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OK! I must confess I ran Craig's 1956 Republican Party platform past Snopes. They are a little long-winded about it, but it passes their tests, as based on facts & substantially true.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/politicians/1956.asp
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blahblah
Gym climber
Boulder
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Feb 23, 2016 - 09:25am PT
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The libtards crowing about Eisenhower nominating Brennan should remember that Eisenhower later said that it was one of his two biggest mistakes as president--the other was nominating Warren (a perhaps even worse justice inasmuch as was chief justice).
One may have thought that the Repubs would have learned their lesson and indeed they did make some good appointments, but they soon forgot the lessons of history and appointed such abominations as Blackmun, Stevens, and Souter. Even Roberts is nothing to write home about--I think Alito is the only relatively recent justice we can count on, and then Thomas going back a bit further.
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Fat Dad
Trad climber
Los Angeles, CA
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Feb 23, 2016 - 11:32am PT
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^^^
I hate to sound impolite on these threads but damn, blahblah, you are an idiot. If by "count on", you mean decide a case on a personal disposition rather than the facts and law then, you're right, Alito is your man. Also, if you fail to see Roberts as anything other than a conservative shill, you aren't looking very hard. One of the few cases in recent memory where he has shown any amount of bipartisanship, King v. Burwell, appeared to be concerned more with the appearance of his legacy as Chief Justice. Although he had famously commented at his confirmation hearing (relatively tame despite his conservative credentials) that he would simply be "calling balls and stikes" was clearly not an accurate statement of his approach.
The reason why some judges become more liberal after appointment is that they are now appointed for life, so they aren't beholded to anyone for reelection and also, I believe, they have a greater clarity of what their role in society is. They become aware that their decisions have a far greater and lasting impact than before and that can mean abandoning a rigid world view like those carried by a Scalia or Alito.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Feb 23, 2016 - 11:49am PT
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Just imagine folks! President Eisenhower had already appointed two conservative Supreme Court Justices & he had a desire to appear bipartisan by appointing Brennan.
Sigh.
Those days are gone in America, to my great regret.
That is, indeed, the problem. As Steve (Fat Dad) implies, federal judges change their minds on the bench. While of late, the only changes on the Supreme Court have been Republican appointees moving toward the left or center, appointees of Democrats have moved right, too, such as Justices White and Frankfurter.
If I were President Obama, I would nominate a centrist judge and put the onus on the Republicans to say why the nominee is unqualified. If he nominates someone with the leanings of Kagan, Sotomayor or Ginsburg, the Republicans can legitimately oppose the nominee under the Bork doctrine, originated by the Democrats, that the nominee is an extremist. If he nominates someone like Breyer, who sometimes breaks ranks with the liberals or, heaven forbid, someone like Kennedy, the Republicans will have a tougher time.
I understand that at least one pro-choice Republican, former judge and Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval has put his hat in the ring. I'd love to see a nomination like that, because it would send the "I'd rather be right than president" wing of the Republican party into a hilarious apoplexy. The Heritage Foundation and Ted Cruz would end up in orbit.
I doubt Obama's administration has the wit to act in this way, but it would be fun - and good for the country - if he goes ahead and nominates a centrist.
John
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Fossil climber
Trad climber
Atlin, B. C.
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Feb 23, 2016 - 11:55am PT
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Scalia + Supreme Court Conservatives = GWB presidency = Iraq invasion = ISIS.
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JEleazarian
Trad climber
Fresno CA
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Feb 23, 2016 - 11:58am PT
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Wayne, I don't think it's fair to blame Scalia for ISIS. Bush v. Gore was a 7-2 decision.
John
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dirtbag
climber
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Topic Author's Reply - Feb 23, 2016 - 12:22pm PT
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If I were President Obama, I would nominate a centrist judge and put the onus on the Republicans to say why the nominee is unqualified. If he nominates someone with the leanings of Kagan, Sotomayor or Ginsburg, the Republicans can legitimately oppose the objection under the Bork doctrine, originated by the Democrats, that the nominee is an extremist. If he nominates someone like Breyer, who sometimes breaks ranks with the liberals or, heaven forbid, someone like Kennedy, the Republicans will have a tougher time.
I agree.
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