The recent Supreme Court decision to allow corporations unlimited spending on political ads was the right decision in the case. It is not something we should be cheering for in the larger sense of what it means for American politics.
 
One good thing about this decision is that it levels the playing field by granting corporations the same advantages Unions and other organizations have when it comes to political campaigns and support of candidates. Another positive twist is that the level of awareness and debate could increase significantly; specifically by exposing a segment of the population who would otherwise be ill-informed in general about politics because what they know is only what they see in TV advertisements in their respective markets.
 
But this case is an isolated one, which does not address the real problem…the fact that too much money in politics not only adds to corruption but also makes it virtually impossible for the average citizen to campaign and compete in elections.
 
Many people on the right argue that this is about the First Amendment right to free speech. I don’t agree with that. The corporation is not an individual that can participate in rights. For example, does a corporation (remember it’s a piece of paper) have the right to keep and bear arms? How about the right to a speedy trial, why would it need that if it is never put in a jail cell? How about the right to the pursuit of happiness? Is a piece of paper capable of being happy or sad?
 
We have structures in place to allow individuals of a political opinion or ideology to band together and fund the propagation of their ideas. That is a healthy way of getting the opinion of the people into the public view. But I doubt very seriously that Nike will be concerned with individual tax rates if they can find a politician who will grant them special privileges for their business.
 
I think most Americans would agree that special interests, corporations and lobbyists already have way too much influence over politics and the legislative process. The Court’s decision opens the floodgates for corporations to increase their influence without limits. How does that serve the people? How does that help the people make their voices heard? Will this ratchet up the polarization of debate, further fueling the divisions in the electorate?
 
Insurance companies are corporations. How on earth will letting them spend freely on politics increase competition in the marketplace allowing us to negotiate lower prices and policies that fit our lifestyles and budgets. What about multinational corporations, which have no allegiance to America but will now have the opportunity to influence our political process through unlimited funding to promote ideologies that serve their particular interests? Think about the potential hazards this could lead to…special interests on steroids. Corporations will be able to fund the people who are friendly to them regardless of what it means to this society and our freedom.
 
The case I would like the Supreme Court to decide is if the current campaign finance laws are constitutional and actually serve the people. I would argue that we need significant limits on campaign financing activities. We should have a system that encourages average individuals to serve in public office. Today we have a system that encourages wealthy lawyers who can rarely avoid scandal as their power and influence is auctioned to the highest bidder(s).
 
In short, the money should be funneled through individuals, have low limits and be tax-free. Corporate profits should be directed to equity growth, dividends and R&D; allowing individual investors the opportunity to participate in the wealth generating machine that corporations are capable of being.

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Sonia Sotomayor has another interesting court case that involved a teen blogger, a reputation as a bully among her peers, declaring the 2nd amendment is not a constitutional right, and after posting yesterday about La Raza, (in which I made no mention of a connection), we find out that she is in fact a member.  La Raza in Spanish means The Race.  The very essence of the group is racist.

The teen blogger case is very disturbing, mainly because it was a high school student who was denied the opportunity to run as class president because of a statement she made on the Internet about her teachers and the school administration calling them D* bags.  What child doesn’t say nasty things from time to time when they get emotional or upset?  Sotomayor’s ruling stated that the female student, who used the term after the school’s battle of the bands was canceled by faculty, would cause a possible disruption, and therefore was unable to run – hello?? Basic 1st amendment? It’s not like she yelled fire in a crowded movie theatre – we are talking about an angry Internet post of a term that is commonly used nowadays when people are upset.  Being from Connecticut myself, I’m surprised I didn’t already know about this woman, granted she did not preside over my jurisdiction/county. 

Sonia Sotomayor’s peers and co-workers have also made statements after her nomination claiming that she is a bully and quite abrasive in the work environment.  Compared to other court justices on both sides of the aisle, most are very well respected and amiable.  It’s important in any working environment to feel comfortable and not harassed – it would be very upsetting to learn that she tried to pressure or bully other SCOTUS members in the future, to make a decision to her liking.

Sonia has also ruled that the 2nd amendment was not a constitutional right in the past.  I’m not sure why it would be an amendment in the constitution, and the 2nd one at that, if it wasn’t constitutional, but what do I know?  It’s also my understanding that our constitution was established based on Jefferson’s Federalist Papers?  Federalism did reign supreme in those days and that meant more state power…?

Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayorruled in January 2009 that states do not have to obey the Second Amendment’s commandment that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In Maloney v. Cuomo, Sotomayor signed an opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that said the Second Amendment does not protect individuals from having their right to keep and bear arms restricted by state governments.

The opinion said that the Second Amendment only restricted the federal government from infringing on an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. As justification for this position, the opinion cited the 1886 Supreme Court case of Presser v. Illinois.

“It is settled law, however, that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government seeks to impose on this right,” said the opinion. Quoting Presser, the court said, “it is a limitation only upon the power of Congress and the national government, and not upon that of the state.”

The final and most extreme issue coming to the forefront is her association with the radically liberal La Raza.  I posted yesterday on other details about the SCOTUS nomination and in so doing, also mentioned the organization and provided a link with facts. 

There are many immigrant groups joined in the overall “La Raza” movement. The most prominent and mainstream organization is the National Council de La Raza — the Council of “The Race”.

To most of the mainstream media, most members of Congress, and even many of their own members, the National Council of La Raza is no more than a Hispanic Rotary Club.

But the National Council of La Raza succeeded in raking in over $15.2 million in federal grants last year alone, of which $7.9 million was in U.S. Department of Education grants for Charter Schools, and undisclosed amounts were for get-out-the-vote efforts supporting La Raza political positions.

The Council of La Raza succeeded in having itself added to congressional hearings by Republican House and Senate leaders. And an anonymous senator even gave the Council of La Raza an extra $4 million in earmarked taxpayer money, supposedly for “housing reform,” while La Raza continues to lobby the Senate for virtual open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens.

La Raza lies the real agenda of the La Raza movement, the agenda that led to those thousands of illegal immigrants in the streets of American cities, waving Mexican flags, brazenly defying our laws, and demanding concessions.

Key among the secondary organizations is the radical racist group Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan (MEChA), one of the most anti-American groups in the country, which has permeated U.S. campuses since the 1960s, and continues its push to carve a racist nation out of the American West.

Eeeegads we better watch it here!

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Conservatives are discovering more details on Sotomayor as the days tick on.  She is quite an accomplished woman and had been on the fast track to becoming a leading national judge (at least by the pace at which she was moving up the ranks).  However, she already had various critics back in 1997 like Rush Limbaugh who saw her coming a mile away and knew she could one day be nominated for SCOTUS.  Limbaugh, in 1997, warned listeners that this woman was extremely progressive and liberal in her judgments and leanings.

The president of the National Organization of Women (NOW) has even made an official statement that Sonia is in fact “very progressive.”

The Republicans in the senate are focusing on Sotomayor’s speech that she gave at the University of California, Berkeley (School of Law) back in 2001.  Her lecture at Berkeley was published in La Raza Journal, which made a blatant racist remark when comparing one race over another as to which of those races would make better decisions.  29 Republicans in 1998, when Sotomayor was nominated for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, voted against her for this very reason, as well as her tendency to legislate and be an activist from the bench.

For a little more information on the extremism of La Raza go here.

Newt Gingrich has been on the attack with this one nomination and it is something he apparently feels very strongly about – it may have to do with the history of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals when she was nominated back in 1998 while Newt was still Speaker of the House.  Newt has called Sonia Sotomayor an outright racist and has asked for her to withdraw her name from the SCOTUS nod.

I personally think that when it comes to measuring somebody’s merit and ability – personal feelings aside, what really matters is their record - and this final detail that has come to fruition is incredibly important.  Her opinions have a 60% reversal rate…

Three of the five majority opinions written by Judge Sotomayor for the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and reviewed by the Supreme Court were reversed, providing a potent line of attack raised by opponents Tuesday after President Obama announced he will nominate the 54-year-old Hispanic woman to the high court.

“Her high reversal rate alone should be enough for us to pause and take a good look at her record. Frankly, it is the Senates duty to do so,” said Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America.

The most frustrating aspect of this entire nomination is the media playing it up to be the first ever Hispanic nominated to the Supreme Court – which just isn’t true.  We could go back in history and technically find that Cardozo per the article yesterday, was the first, but even if that is questionable there is Miguel Estrada, who was nominated by a Republican and was a Conservative.  Democrats did not care about his remarkable history, growing up in Honduras and legally immigrating to the United States without being able to speak English and breaking through barriers to go to Columbia University and then onto Harvard Law School.  The Democrats demoralized this man because he was a Conservative and didn’t fit the Conservative mold – he had to be destroyed – the same thing happened to Clarence Thomas – another from humble beginnings, who was a black man and a Conservative.  We could go back through time, but why?  We had an example of this very thing with the past election; Sarah Palin.  A female who came from the lower middle class, if that, who had to pay her way through college, lived in a state that truly is the last frontier, and still isn’t all that developed, worked her way up politically by working hard and never giving up.  But to liberals, a Female, a Black, and a Hispanic should only be democrats, not republicans – those who go against the mold need to be destroyed before anyone else; they are the biggest threats.  The liberals want to make this nomination into this historically wonderful thing, bamboozling the dumbed down masses, attempting to brainwash them into thinking that Sonia truly is the first of her kind to be nominated, when that is an out and out lie.  Ann Coulter talks about this in greater detail on Good Morning America.

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The Democrats really know how to play the identity politics card and it would appear that Obama does it better than any leader of the liberal party has in a long time!

No longer does it matter to liberals whether or not you are technically qualified for a position based on past job experience, intelligence, background knowledge of the constitution, etc. – nope, what matters now is that you can empathize with races, genders, religions, or any multitude of things that would otherwise be characterized as superficial traits.

Sonia Sotomayor was nominated as Obama’s first choice to replace Chief Justice Souter as a Supreme Court judge.  Sonia, however, has not issued an opinion of importance in over 10 years and she has quite a reputation.  One tends to lean towards the fact that the only reason she was even nominated was due to her Hispanic background and her gender.  This is affirmative action at its finest, and then people wonder why those who are promoted really aren’t qualified and mistakes are made at organizations and companies… Let’s get back to the merit of a candidate rather than the color of their skin/ethnicity (quotas).

What upsets me is not the fact that this woman came from very humble beginnings, really worked her way up to become more successful than most, even with a head start, but the fact that Democrats exploit these facts and use these things about people to gain constituents and voters.  This is a ploy used to win the Hispanic vote, which is becoming increasingly important when deciding future elections.

In a presentation that will likely lean heavily on style over substance, Sotomayor’s background will allow the administration to again play class warfare with their presentation of her biography. The daughter of Puerto Rican parents growing up in the South Bronx, her father was a manual laborer and her mother a nurse. Her father died when she was 9.

Sotomayor went on to attend Princeton and then Yale Law School before working as a New York assistant district attorney. Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan worked a confirmation deal with the first President Bush to nominate Sotomayor to the Second Circuit.

In one of the biggest sources of the coming Sotomayor controversy, is her conduct in the New Haven, Connecticut firefighter case that’s now on appeal to the Supreme Court.

And I’m sure many reading this are curious to find out what the controversy of the case really was – well here is the long and short of it:

In Ricci v. DeStefano, Sotomayor sided with the City of New Haven that was alleged to have used racially discriminatory practices to deny promotions to firefighters. Sotomayor joined a per curiam opinion that went so far as to bury the white firefighters’ crucial claims of unfair treatment. Judge Jose Cabranes, a Clinton appointee, chastised her in writing for apparently missing the entire host of Constitutional issues that were before the court.

According to Judge Cabranes, Sotomayor’s opinion “contains no reference whatsoever to the constitutional claims at the core of this case” and its “perfunctory disposition rests uneasily with the weighty issues presented by this appeal.”

(To judge just how bad the Ricci opinion is, even liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, wrote of his dissatisfaction with the case, stating, “Ricci is not just a legal case but a man who has been deprived of the pursuit of happiness on account of race.”

Ironically, Sotomayor’s dreadful decision in Ricci is under review at this time by the Supreme Court with an opinion expected by the end of June when David Souter, the justice Sotomayor is nominated to replace, has announced his retirement.

So the official decision is still technically pending… It would be nice to know what the outcome of that case is before nominating this person as a SCOTUS justice.

This was not the first episode of judicial extremism or liberal activism from this individual…

In another example of her radical judicial philosophy, Sotomayor stated in a 2002 speech at Berkeley that she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color,” which she believes should “affect our decisions.” In the same speech, Sotomayor went on to say, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” She restated her commitment to that unlawful judicial philosophy at a speech she gave in 2005 at Duke Law School when she reiterated that the “Court of Appeals is where policy is made.”

The Obama administration has made claims in the media that Sotomayor would be the first Hispanic on the court, which is not entirely accurate. Benjamin Cardozo, a Sephardic Jew of Hispanic ancestry, served on the Supreme Court from 1932-1937. Cardozo traced his ancestry to Portugal, yet there is a mixed bag of which government agencies consider Portugal to fall under the Hispanic umbrella. It is accurate to say Sotomayor, should she be confirmed, would be the first Hispanic woman on the court.

Heaven forbid conservatives or anyone else who questions this woman’s qualifications to really uphold the law of the land, will be labeled a bigot.  This is the new campaign of the left, which is entirely ironic/humorous if it wasn’t so sad at the same time.  So many of color and gender play into this nonsense and believe that the liberals are the party of the common man and that of the minority – when in history, and even to this day, they are anything but.  One would think that when race, ethnicity, religion, and gender are used as a means to an end, that would be considered racist, however, the indoctrinated or brain-washed masses do not understand that.  The simple fact is the party who advocates individual freedoms and liberties is the party of freedom, the party that associates and segregates by race, gender, religion, etc., is the party of oppression and “plantation” politics.  Keep people down so you have voters – it’s the carrot and stick philosophy that you give a little bit to entice the voter, but then you pull it away to keep them coming back for more, never letting them get the entire carrot, because they will no longer be hungry.  At that point they will want their own personal liberties and freedoms – if they ever become successful they won’t require affirmative action, welfare, or government in their lives to help them… therefore Democrats will no longer have a voting bloc.

To use an example of this SCOTUS candidate, as to what I just discussed above, we can look at one of her quotes she provided in a public forum.

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

So accustomed have we become to identity politics that it barely causes a ripple when a highly touted Supreme Court candidate, who sits on the federal Appeals Court in New York, has seriously suggested that Latina women like her make better judges than white males.
Indeed, unless Sotomayor believes that Latina women also make better judges than Latino men, and also better than African-American men and women, her basic proposition seems to be that white males (with some exceptions, she noted) are inferior to all other groups in the qualities that make for a good jurist.

Any prominent white male would be instantly and properly banished from polite society as a racist and a sexist for making an analogous claim of ethnic and gender superiority or inferiority.

Imagine the reaction if someone had unearthed in 2005 a speech in which then-Judge Samuel Alito had asserted, for example: “I would hope that a white male with the richness of his traditional American values would reach a better conclusion than a Latina woman who hasn’t lived that life” — and had proceeded to speak of “inherent physiological or cultural differences.”

But the crux of the matter has more to do with the battles in which the GOP should choose.  The opposition of this nomination may unfortunately cause quite a hiccup for republicans in future elections with Hispanics.  I do not believe that Sotomayor should be confirmed, that’s my opinion, based on the activism portrayed in several of her decisions and speeches, as well as some off-the-cuff comments made that, by any objective reader, would be considered racist in nature – or at least holding some type of antipathy/grudge towards white males in particular.  However, I’m not so sure this is one of those battles that the GOP should choose to commit to.

The liberals know how to instigate a crisis or a distraction on the other side of the aisle, meanwhile passing/creating other, and more substantive legislation and policies.  Some of the items that may be more useful than arguing over Sotomayor are the upcoming decision in California regarding gay marriage, where democracy and votes no longer count and a state supreme court could trump the will of the people, cap-and-trade is still on the table, health care reform, immigration reform (which has been tabled until the fall), and Obama’s horrible foreign policy experience, as evidenced in the recent North Korea nuke tests.  Obama leans on the United Nations and the rest of the world, because he does not have a backbone of his own to condemn another nation or stand up to it as, for example, Reagan did.  The philosophy of the liberals is “look over there, not over here.”

Sotomayor is an intelligent woman, but she is a radical who does not believe in the constitution.  She would not be on my shortlist of judicial picks, but this appointment will not be much different than the justice she would be replacing; Souter.  The next SCOTUS pick will most likely tend to be more critical than this one…

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The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of senior Bush officials who helped draft the policies for EITs. They state that former Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller cannot be held accountable for an incident with a Pakistani Muslim that occurred back in 2002.

Javaid Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim who spent nearly six months in solitary confinement in New York in 2002, had argued that while Ashcroft and Mueller did not single him out for mistreatment, they were responsible for a policy of confining Muslim prisoners in highly restrictive conditions and subjecting them to strip searches and brutal beatings. He has since been deported to Pakistan.

The Supreme Court, on a 5-4 vote, said there was nothing linking the two Bush officials to Iqbal’s treatment. The court’s liberal justices — David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens — dissented, so even a liberal pick by President Obama to replace Souter would not change the mix.

But as we all know, the liberals won’t stop there. They are planning, if not already, bringing up charges against various Bush administration officials that were also party to the documents, legal memos, and policies used on Gitmo detainees. Earlier on C-Span radio and the Washington Journal, Mr. Kessler who is a journalist for Newsmax, and an author of various books regarding the CIA, Secret Service, and Intelligence Community, gave his take on the CIA memos, waterboarding, EITs, what the true technical definition of torture is, and why terrorists and pirates do not fall under the Geneva Convention. The hate and vitriol from liberal callers was astounding. Just when I think that people couldn’t get more vile and hateful they always seem to surprise me!

A coalition of left-leaning advocacy groups filed complaints today with five state bar associations, accusing a dozen former Bush administration lawyers — including Ashcroft and ….

…former attorneys general Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey — of violating professional standards by approving the use of torture on terrorism suspects. The punishment: They want the lawyers disbarred in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and the District of Columbia.

Also on the list: John Yoo, now a law professor at UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law, Jay Bybee, a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Pentagon lawyer Douglas Feith, and David Addington, legal guru for former Vice President Dick Cheney.

If we are going to have these truth commissions, maybe we should have had one for Vietnam and lined up LBJ or we should have interrogated FDR for his concentration camps in the United States during World War II. We should also interrogate all the Democrats who were part of the financial melt down and make them take lie detector tests to get at the bottom of who is honest in the government. I would say we should also go back to the Clinton administration and go back over the Kosovo conflict and the fact that his foreign policies lead to much of the 9/11 attacks in the first place… But it’s always the hate on the left that feels the need to act like the new McCarthyites and go on these despicable witch hunts.

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Ok – I just felt like being sarcastic and reporting on some “non” news… Looks like the Supreme Court and the rest of the government is really busy working on things that really make a difference!

The Supreme Court is ordering a federal appeals court to re-examine its ruling in favor of CBS Corp. over Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction.

The court Monday directed the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to consider reinstating the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission imposed on CBS over Ms. Jackson’s breast-baring performance at the 2004 Super Bowl.

Last year, the appeals court threw out the fine against CBS, saying the FCC strayed from its long-held approach of applying identical standards to words and images when reviewing complaints of indecency.

The appellate court said the incident lasted nine-sixteenths of one second and should have been regarded as “fleeting.”

But last week, the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the FCC’s policy threatening fines on so-called fleeting expletives on live television.

(FCC v. CBS Corp.)

However, this next ruling that recently took place at the Supreme Court is not so positive and is important.  The court’s ruling in identity theft for illegal or undocumented workers gives them more protection.  They are not held accountable for identity theft if there is no proof that they knew they were using somebody’s social security number… I’m not sure how there wouldn’t be proof – if you are an illegal immigrant you should know that you do not have a social security number and therefore, you are aware that you are stealing someone else’s identity.

Also on Monday, the Supreme Court limited federal prosecutors’ use of an identity-theft law against undocumented workers with phony identification numbers, including many who had been picked up in immigration raids.

A unanimous court said the law that Congress adopted in 2004 to crack down on identity thieves requires that prosecutors be able to prove that defendants knew they were using ID numbers that belonged to real people.

Justice Stephen Breyer, writing for the court, said intent is often easy to prove in what he called classic identity theft: “Where a defendant has used another person’s information to get access to that person’s bank account, the government can prove knowledge with little difficulty,” Justice Breyer said.

But, as in the case decided Monday, prosecutors have been using the law against workers who needed false documents to obtain employment. The government argued that prosecutors do not have to offer any proof that a defendant knew the identification belonged to someone else and wasn’t simply made up. The high court rejected that argument.

There was no evidence that Ignacio Carlos Flores-Figueroa, an undocumented worker from Mexico, knew that he was using Social Security and alien registration numbers that belonged to others when he was arrested in 2006. Mr. Flores-Figueroa, while acknowledging he used false documents, appealed his conviction on the identity-theft charge.

(Flores-Figueroa v. U.S.)

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Elections have consequences and this could get very interesting especially when you review the front runner’s qualifications or lack thereof:

The most mentioned candidate to replace David Souter is Elena Kagan, former dean of the Harvard Law School, now President Obama’s Solicitor General. Kagan’s best-known piece of legal scholarship is an article in the 2001 Harvard Law Review arguing in favor of stronger direct presidential control over administrative agencies. It makes for ominous reading at a time when Democrats hold big majorities in the elected branches of government.

Let’s put it this way: If Kagan does reach the court, liberals everywhere are going to have to eat their words about the wickedness of those conservative champions of the “unitary executive” theory: “When we said we were opposed to the unitary executive, that was because we favored a super unitary executive!”

Some extracts from Kagan’s article, 114 Harv. L. Rev. 2245:
[P]residential control of administration, in critical respects, expanded dramatically during the Clinton years, making the regulatory activity of the executive branch agencies more and more an extension of the President’s own policy and political agenda.

Faced for most of his time in office with a hostile Congress but eager to show progress on domestic issues, Clinton and his White House staff turned to the bureaucracy to achieve, to the extent it could, the full panoply of his domestic policy goals. Whether the subject was health care, welfare reform, tobacco, or guns, a self-conscious and central object of the White House was to devise, direct, and/or finally announce administrative actions – regulations, guidance, enforcement strategies, and reports – to showcase and advance presidential policies.

**

Accepted constitutional doctrine holds that Congress possesses broad, although not unlimited, power to structure the relationship between the President and the administration, even to the extent of creating independent agencies, whose heads have substantial protection from presidential removal.

The conventional view further posits, although no court has ever decided the matter, that by virtue of this power, Congress can insulate discretionary decisions of even removable (that is, executive branch) officials from presidential dictation – and, indeed, that Congress has done so whenever (as is usual) it has delegated power not to the President, but to a specified agency official. Clinton’s use of what I call directive authority – his commands to executive branch officials to take specified actions within their statutorily delegated discretion – ill-comports with this view. The unitarians would defend the practice simply by insisting, against the weight of precedent, that the Constitution provides the President with plenary authority over administration, so that Congress can no more interfere with the President’s directive authority than with his removal power.

I too defend the practice, but not on this basis. I accept Congress’s broad power to insulate administrative activity from the President, but argue here that Congress has left more power in presidential hands than generally is recognized. More particularly, I argue that a statutory delegation to an executive agency official – although not to an independent agency head – usually should be read as allowing the President to assert directive authority, as Clinton did, over the exercise of the delegated discretion.
**

[President] Clinton …developed a set of practices that enhanced his ability to influence or even dictate the content of administrative initiatives. He exercised this power with respect to a wide variety of agency action – rulemakings, more informal means of policymaking, and even certain enforcement activities. … In so doing, Clinton also showed that presidential supervision of administration could operate, contrary to much opinion, to trigger, not just react to, agency action and to drive this action in a regulatory, not deregulatory, direction.

**

Presidents before Reagan… usually had shunned direct [Executive] involvement in any administrative rulemaking, and even Reagan, in creating a mechanism for this involvement, had disclaimed any authority ultimately to displace the judgment of agency officials. The Clinton order, by contrast, implied precisely this power – presidential directive authority over discretionary decisions assigned by Congress to specified executive branch officials (other than the President). Under this view, the President would not need to resort to his power of removal over executive branch heads to ensure a certain rulemaking result: that result would – or at least should – follow by virtue of a presidential (displacing a secretarial) order.

That was merely an excerpt of her opinion paper on the don’t ask don’t tell policies of the Clinton administration, which she agrees with.  It gives the executive branch way more control than one ought to have.

But here is some additional information on Ms. Kagan:

“Dean Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be concerning given her complete lack of judicial or appellate experience. She has never been a judge or even argued a case in a court of appeals. It is difficult to see how her experience fundraising for Harvard Law School qualifies her for a seat on the Nation’s high court.

-Dean Kagan has taken positions that are disturbingly out of the mainstream. For example, driven by her view that the “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy adopted by a Democrat Congress and President Clinton is “a profound wrong–a moral injustice of the first order,” she argued that it violates the First Amendment for the United States to withhold funds from colleges that ban the military from recruiting on campus. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected this view.

-It is also unclear that a Justice Kagan would be an adequately independent check on executive excesses. She has argued in favor of greatly enhanced presidential control over the bureaucracy, which is concerning in light of President Obama’s unprecedented centralization of power in the White House.

-Dean Kagan has argued that nominees to the Supreme Court should undergo a searching inquiry into the nominee’s substantive views of the law, and should comment particular issues. If nominated, it will be interesting to see whether Dean Kagan remains faithful to this prescription in answering the Committee’s questions.”

So, we could possibly see a Supreme Court justice who has no real litigation or judicial experience?  This seems similar to the reasoning behind the liberal argument that Obama was qualified just because of the schools he went to… I call Shenanigans!

And what about two other female candidates?  Here are their bios:

Sonia Sotomayor

“Judge Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court would be very concerning given her hard-left record on the Court of Appeals, where she is recognized by practitioners as one of the more liberal judges.

-Judge Sotomayor’s personal views may cloud her jurisprudence. As Judge Sotomayor explained in a 2002 speech at Berkeley, she believes it is appropriate for a judge to consider their “experiences as women and people of color” in their decisionmaking, which she believes should “affect our decisions.”

-Only just recently, in Ricci v. DeStefano, Judge Sotomayor was chastised by fellow Clinton-appointee Jose Cabranes for going to extraordinary lengths to dispense with claims of unfair treatment raised by firefighters. Judge Sotomayor’s panel heard a case raising important questions under Title VII and equal protection law, but attempted to dispose of the firefighter’s arguments in a summary order, until called out by Judge Cabranes. The Supreme Court has agreed to review the case.

-Substantial questions also persist regarding Judge Sotomayor’s temperament and disposition to be a Supreme Court justice. Lawyers who have appeared before her have described her as a “bully” who “does not have a very good temperament,” and who “abuses lawyers” with “inappropriate outbursts.”

Diane Wood

-If nominated to the Supreme Court, Judge Wood will have some substantial questions to answer regarding her judicial philosophy based on her work as a circuit court judge.

Judge Wood’s judicial views have on occasion been far outside mainstream legal thought and appear driven by her personal policy views. In NOW v. Scheidler, she wrote an opinion applying RICO – a statute designed for mob prosecutions – to prevent pro-life activists from engaging in protests. The Supreme Court reversed with Justices Ginsburg’s and Breyer’s concurrence. NOW v. Scheidler, 537 U.S. 393, 402 (2003).

-Judge Wood has betrayed a consistent hostility to religious litigants and religious interests. For example, Christian Legal Soc’y v. Walker, 453 F.3d 853, 867 (7th Cir. 2006), she would have voted to allow a public university to revoke the student organization charter of the Christian Legal Society because it declined to extend membership to homosexuals.

She also authored an opinion refusing to allow prisons to require inmate participation in drug rehabilitation programs that used “explicit religious content,” even where such programs were the only ones available, effectively allowing inmates to refuse treatment entirely. Kerr v. Farrey, 95 F.3d 472 (7th Cir. 1996).”

You can not tell me that these three choices wouldn’t legislate from the bench and aren’t judicial activists.

BTW what was it that Obama said about appointing judges to the Supreme Court and litmus tests? Listen to McCain and Obama’s record…

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Not devastating news, but news none the less.

NPR has learned that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current court term.

The vacancy will give President Obama his first chance to name a member of the high court and begin to shape its future direction.

At 69, Souter is nowhere near the oldest member of the court. In fact, he is in the younger half of the court’s age range, with five justices older and just three younger. So far as anyone knows, he is in good health. But he has made clear to friends for some time that he wanted to leave Washington, a city he has never liked, and return to his native New Hampshire. Now, according to reliable sources, he has decided to take the plunge and has informed the White House of his decision.

Factors in his decision no doubt include the election of President Obama, who would be more likely to appoint a successor attuned to the principles Souter has followed as a moderate-to-liberal member of the court’s more liberal bloc over the past two decades.

Various observers and supporters feel that Obama will nominate another woman to the high court, which has only seated one female since Sandra Day O’Connor retired.

Possible nominees who have been mentioned as being on a theoretical short list include Elena Kagan, the current solicitor general who represents the government before the Supreme Court; Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Diane Wood, a federal judge in Chicago who taught at the University of Chicago at the same time future President Barack Obama was teaching constitutional law there.

President Obama’s choice has an excellent chance of being confirmed by the U.S. Senate, where Democrats now have an advantage of 59 seats to the Republicans’ 40.

By the time a vote on a successor is taken, the Senate is anticipated to have a 60th Democrat, as the Minnesota Supreme Court is expected to approve the recount that elected Democrat Al Franken over incumbent Republican Norm Coleman in that state.

It probably would not matter if Republicans disapproved of Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court since the possibility of 60 Dem. votes not including the RINOs would trump any type of real filibuster.  For all we know he could appoint Koh to the Supreme Court – wouldn’t that be lovely?

A little Sharia Law never hurt anybody…j/k!

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I better get all my posts in quick – since the bandwidth on the Internet is running out!

So with that – there is some hope on the horizon and some sanity that may kick in regarding the Voting Rights Act:

The fate of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act looked to be in doubt Wednesday as Supreme Court justices questioned whether the Southern states still need special supervision to prevent them from discriminating against black voters.

“Are Southerners more likely to discriminate than Northerners?” asked a skeptical Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.

Is the “sovereignty of Georgia” entitled to less respect than “the sovereign dignity of Ohio? . . . Does the United States take that position today?” asked Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, pressing a lawyer for the Justice Department who was defending the Voting Rights Act.

The Voting Rights Act is a form of discrimination based upon regionalism at this point.  It makes Southern states feel as though they are children who need to be supervised and are not as decent and dignified as Northern states.  The South continues to retain the label of racist, years after Jim Crow laws were abolished, African-Americans received the right to vote and could physically vote, and schools are all integrated.  I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard of any lynchings, assaults or cross burnings that were incited by racism since I was born (80’s).  Times have changed and this is an  incessant grudge and resentment held by a specific ideological party, further repressing their own constituents by playing into this propaganda.  The liberals only want this type of legislation because it helps them get votes.

The comments and questions during an hourlong argument suggested that a majority of the justices were prepared to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. This provision requires many Southern states, counties and school districts to get approval from the Justice Department before making changes in their election rules. These rules range from the location of polling places to the makeup of districts in state legislatures.

The provision also applies to a few counties in Northern California, New York and elsewhere that have a high percentage of residents who do not speak English.
The question before the Supreme Court was whether this special Southern-only “pre-clearance” provision was still needed. “Why didn’t [Congress] extend Section 5 to the entire country?” asked Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Exactly Justice Alito!  This is reminiscent of the hate speech and hate crime legislation where only specific groups are protected and I guess “the south” would not be considered a group discriminated against.  It would only seem fair that all states or none would have to comply with this Section 5 stipulation.  It’s incredibly discriminatory to segregate one specific group.

Like Roberts and Kennedy, he voiced doubt about whether Congress had sufficient reason in 2006 for singling out the South for special supervision for another 25 years. In the past, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also have voiced skepticism about the reach of this provision.

Another 25 years?  The South isn’t the Jim Crow South anymore, nor are we living in the 1950’s/60’s!

Neal Katyal, the Obama administration’s deputy solicitor general, called the law and Section 5 “a landmark achievement” that deters schemes to violate the rights of minorities.

At this point there is so much legislation to help minorities that other groups are overlooked.  And what has any of this legislation actually done over the last 45 years?  If anything, inner cities and liberal bastions have gotten worse.  Minorities are helped by welfare, by affirmative action (which by itself is racist legislation – ask Ward Connerly), and there are specific crimes that exist that an African-American cannot be prosecuted for based on race.  The more we pay attention to race the more racism exists – plain and simple.  I’m getting so sick and tired of all this race baiting and all of this group segregation, all in the name of political expediency, to win votes and keep others oppressed, who don’t know any better.

Debo Adegbile, a lawyer for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense Fund, agreed. He said Congress and the court should “stay the course” and continue the effort to root out subtle discrimination that disadvantages minorities. If Section 5 were struck down, “the discrimination will return,” he predicted.

Subtle discrimination?  What is subtle discrimination?  You can misconstrue a look or a smirk or anything as subtle discrimination if you want by playing the race card.  You can spin anything you want in order to accuse another of racism.  How about we mention the percentage of blacks who voted for Obama?  Was that not racist?  96% of the entire black community voted for Obama.  Howard Stern asked black men and women from Harlem who they were voting for and in so doing he switched John McCain’s platforms and even the VP candidate of Sarah Palin and paired it with Obama.  They didn’t know the difference… that should tell you something.  What about those of us who have lived in inner cities as a Caucasian?  Have we not experienced subtle discrimination or racism?  As a white female I don’t have any rights when it comes to that… I don’t think getting called a “white cracker b*tch” is PC.

But both advocates were met with steadily skeptical questions from the court’s conservatives.

Roberts noted that Massachusetts had a lower rate of registering Latino voters than Texas. “Why didn’t Congress extend the act to Massachusetts?” he asked.

Great point Roberts!

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited any voting discrimination based on race, is often cited as one of most effective and far-reaching laws of the 20th century. Until then, most blacks in the South could not vote — not because of laws against voting — but because voting rolls were controlled by county registrars. And they used many schemes to prevent blacks from registering and casting ballots.

Yes, this happened but that was nearly 45 years ago – much has changed and this doesn’t exist any longer.

If the Supreme Court were to strike down Section 5, the decision would not necessarily affect the remainder of the Voting Rights Act. Discrimination against minority voters would still be illegal, but the onus would be on the Justice Department and private lawyers to bring suits to challenge discriminatory practices.

In Alabama’s Dallas County, where Selma is the county seat, only 156 blacks among 15,000 black adults were registered to vote in the early 1960s .

This figure was cited in a brief to the court by Alabama’s Republican Gov. Bob Riley to show how things have changed. Now, about 73% of blacks and whites are registered to vote in Alabama, he said, and blacks make up one-fourth of the Legislature, matching the percentage of the black population.

Yes, and please look at the number of House representatives from the South that are represented by minorities and most specifically black men and women.

He and other Southern officials said the schemes to prevent blacks from voting have been abolished, and therefore the “pre-clearance” section is outdated.

The challenge to the law arose from an unlikely locale. The Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District in Texas does not register voters, nor has it been accused of discrimination. It is a suburban community that elects members to a water board. But because of Section 5, it had to ask the Justice Department for its approval before it moved the voting location from a private home to a public school.

Gregory Coleman, a former Texas solicitor general, filed a suit on behalf of the district challenging the law as unconstitutional. He argued that the provision of the Voting Rights Act was entirely justified in 1965 but not so today. “Times have changed,” he said, but the Southern states still wear a “badge” accusing them of racism.

In his brief to the court, he cited the historic election of President Obama as evidence that the nation has come a long way since 1965, but he did not repeat that argument Wednesday.

One would think that after the election of Obama that race relations would have been resolved, but instead they get much worse – oh the irony.

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After many years of online shopping, we have come to enjoy the perks of free shipping (in many cases) and no sales tax (in most instances).  However this may be coming to an end as Congress and States look for money.  NY State is going to lead a charge to Congress, that Internet sales can and should be taxed at the rate the state charges where the recipient lives.

What effect will this have on the 103 plus billion dollar Internet sales?  That has yet to be seen, but it will probably cool off the growing industry.  If Congress, in its quest to raise money, adds a tax to internet sales,the savings and convenience enjoyed by online shoppers may diminish significantly.

But is this move legal?  Constitutionally, the movement of goods or services between two or more states is interstate commerce and is subject to Congressional controls and regulations. However, the tax of those goods and services is something that would be challenged by the Supreme Court.  They tax fuel, alcohol, tobacco, phone bills, and a couple of other things. So why not Internet sales?

So once again, the little man, who fuels this economy, will get stuck paying the bills.

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