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Chief Justice Rehnquist Dies at 80
After 33 years at the bench, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist has passed away at the age of 80 due to thyroid cancer. This comes after the retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor from the court over the summer. Rehnquist's passing gives President Bush the opportunity to replace the second justice of his term, this time perhaps to assume the highest role in the judicial system.
fuck all the politics , lets remember the man..
She will kick ass.
I hear cries of woe and lamentations from the liberals all over the world tonight!
"terrorism" and "pedophilia" are the root passwords to the Constitution
Considering the sweeping implications, I'd say it falls squarely under "stuff that matters".
I, for one, welcome our new Chief Justice Ballmer to lead us!
Say hello to my little sig.
Seriously though. When can we get someone who wasn't in line to buy grandkids Pong when it first came out? I'm not concerned about the political leanings so much as I am about getting someone who doesn't think "The Internet" is a feature of premium adult diapers.
Obviously important, but your rights online??!?
Did Grokster matter to you? Guess who decided that? It rhymes with "Mupreme Mort". The people who comprise that court have a very important influence on your rights, even online. Child Online Protection Act, Grokster, inevitable decisions on the Patriot Act and the DMCA, to name a few. So, yes, his death is important to your rights online. Sorry for the condescending rant. Well, not really.
But wasn't Televangelist Pat Robertson praying for the death of a supreme court judge? If so.... @_@
Clinton got his two nominees, looks like Bush will get his two also.
Just hope this won't immediatly swing the issues of legal abortion and religious coersion too far to the right when all is said and done. Right wing judges aren't insane, but they are at least as activist on their core issues.
Ryan Fenton
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... that this sesssion of Congress will be filled with love, cooperation, friendship, and togetherness.
Are you stupid. The court has more power than the president. They are the only institution that can VETO both the president and congress. They are a staple of humainty.
Back when the court was something, they are the ones who told the police they must read rights to people. Back then, the courts said that people could not be taken by government for no reason. That government could not look at your reading list and label you as a terrorist because you read Carol Marx. Do you know how many Joe McCarthy's there are in government, and how the courts have stopped them?
Times are changing.
Why did Rehnquist not retire? Why did he stay when he was sick? Was he this sick? Why did Vincent Foster kill himself in a public park?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
So essentially God has a sense of humour?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Possible replacements include Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales
Based on his past memos, that would be one of the scariest things for human rights as a whole.
Nowadays, Washington is dominated by a self-righteous Us-And-Them mentality that makes such friendships impossible. The Supreme Court is sort of resistant to this, but is still pretty bad. And we're all suffering for it.
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It's a pretty common number. Clinton got two, the elder Bush got two, Reagan got two. Even Ford got one. Nixon got three, and Johnson and Kennedy each got two. Ike got four.
Carter seems to have been the only president in the last century that hasn't appointed anyone to the Supreme Court.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
If he was alive, he would have had power.
Imagine the following exchange.
Rehnquist : Mr President, I am ready to retire, but I want a replacement who is not too whack.
President:: No!
Rehnquist: Okay, I'll stay in office. Maybe I will live longer than the 4 years you were elected for. Maybe a democrat will win, and replace me with someone who you could never fathom. Or you could compromise.
President: No! Now where is my cake. I was promised cake. With sprinkles.
What sick person would cling to a job? The only reason is the job was so important that if he left, everything would get fucked up. What is going on? Think about it?
If you had cancer, would you tell your boss at Microsoft- "Well, I got bone cancer and the doc gives me 6 months to live, but GOD DAMN IT, I WANT LONGHORN DONE RIGHT!!".
What was Rehnquist sticking around for? What is easier? To die like he did. Or to die at home, in comfort? What was he so worried about?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Oh, well; I wasn't really using the Fourth Amendment, anyway.
>bush's tax cuts and utterly irresponsible fiscal policy ensured /
>that we will be feeling the sting of his tax cuts for many,
>many/ years to come
You mean the tax cuts that immediately followed a long-term upward trend in unemployment that turned into a steady downward trend in unemployment? You mean the tax cuts that immediately predated an upward trend in tax revenues as well as a steady increase in both the number and size of dividend payments by US corporations? Tax cuts after which followed increased entrepreneurial ventures, an increase in the number of IPOs, as well as a return to a bullish stock market?
Oh, woe be us!
Criticize Bush's spending if you will, but the tax cuts have been a boon to our economy.
Or Groucho Marx's sister?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I was questioning why he stayed in office when everyone was expecting him to retire. I first thought it was just to spite Bush and not give him a chance to seat someone. I think now in hind sight that was wrong. The appoinment of the Supreme court justice is a position that will(can) be held for life. I think Rehnquist is the embodiment of what true commitment is. I don't know the facts, but how many of the previous justices have died while still being seated? Rehnquist is a man, who's life story will be known by many. RIP
Please watch Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru.
I love it when I'm in a discussion and someone quotes the Bible to prove me wrong. (I know that's not what you were doing -- trying to prove the AC wrong, but I think you'll agree with my point.)
When someone does that, I start asking them a lot of questions about the Bible -- not what's in it, but when it was written, when the gospels were written, what sources the writers used, and so on. I have yet to meet someone who uses the Bible as an authority and a "that proves it all" source that has any clue about how it was put together and that the process that brought it into its present form is not at all what they think. Most people who quote the Bible to me are fundies, many of whom hate the Roman Catholic Church, and they get REALLY pissed when I can give them enough history to show them it was that very same church that is responsible for what was put in and left out of the Bible.
I know they're stuck in a mindset and won't change, but after bringing it up with me, they usually go away frustrated. I can only hope that they've heard enough that they start to think, instead of quote what they've been told.
Since blasting McCarthy is so popular, how about another side to the story http://www.aim.org/publications/aim_report/2003/13 .html
OK, that's... interesting.
For those that don't have time to RTFA, here's a time-saving summary:
Open your eyes for just a moment and realize something. Democrats are not your friends. Republicans are not your friends. Each party will seek to expand the government to suit their own interests (which is why it's so great that massive expansion in either direction isn't too easy).
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
Here we go again with this old debate....
Yes, the founders of the United States believed in God -- but this makes them Deists, not necessarily Christians. The Declaration of Independence does indeed speak of "Nature's God", and refer to mankind being "endowed by their Creator" -- but makes no mention of Christianity.
Furthermore, NOWHERE in the Constitution do the words "God" or "Christ" appear — a point oft considered conspicuous by omission in favor of "We The People". Rather, specific references are made to separate church and state, requiring within the constituion proper "no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States", and in the Bill of Rights opening with "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion".
Add in the evidence of the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli as ratified by Congress and as published with little stir in the Press (albeit not as drafted at the treaty table!) which declared "As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion..." , leads one to believe the Founders were doing their utmost to drag the United States away from the sectarian bloodshed that had divided Europe -- and particularly England -- for centuries.
Jefferson is the source of the phrase "wall of separation between church and state" that the religious right so detest; a man who removed all references to the miracles from his personal transcription of the Gospels; and who felt that his authorship of the Stature of Virginia for Religious Freedom one of the accomplishments most worthy for noting in his epitaph. Living in Charlottesville and having recently visited Monticello, I feel obliged to assure you that the persistent ground vibrations you can feel standing in front of his tombstone is not the rumble of a passing truck, but Mister Jefferson spinning in his grave from Bush's Presidency. =)
As for your assertion on abortion, while your position is better founded, I suggest you read the actual Roe v. Wade ruling all the way through; your assertion about the rights of the states in the 10th Amendment falls aside explicitly to the later "Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment"... although the court might reasonably revisit such a question, given the strained reasoning used. This makes the abortion war yet another twisted legacy of the debate over our former "peculiar institution."
As to your prime assertion on the legal import of the intent of the founding fathers, I suggest you read Lessig's "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace"... plus a good more of the biographies of those colorful, contestous, and amazingly human founders of ours. Leaving aside Lessig's points on unaddressed assumptions, suggesting they ever had a single unified intent is a slander to their memories and to what they achieved in their struggle to unify in common cause.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Liberals sit to the left. Conservatives sit to the right. Libertarians are the clowns swinging from the chandeliers. (Heard from a libertarian.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
"and just filibuster until the whitehouse is back in our hands."
Depends on exactly what point you call the "height of Watergate" but Nixon's approval rating was down in the 20's at its nadir, Bush is still in the 40's though it will be interesting to see what Katrina does to him. I suspect now that most of the people are evacuated and fed the outrage about New Orleans will blow over.
Wouldn't be surprised if the Republican spin machine manages to turn it in to a story of the Bush administration stepping in to save the day and blame everything that went wrong on the Democratic mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic governor of Louisiana. I assure you Rove and Co. were thinking about the political implications of this disaster from the get go.
I also wager sometimes this session or next Congress will pass a bill giving the executive branch and DOD sweeping new powers to intervene domestically and overturn Posse Comitatus facilitating future imposition of martial law. The catch phrase will be "Remember New Orleans" as they sell our freedom down the river again just like they did with the Patriot Act.
@de_machina
But one interesting thing about the CJ position is that he gets to decide who writes the opinions. The WSJ cited several examples of where Rehnquist unexpectedly did an about face and voted for stuff everyone was expecting him to vote against. The tinfoil-hat theory is that he did this because he knew he was going to lose (like 7-2 votes) but he wanted to "limit the damage." So he would side with the winners, then elect himself to write the majority opinion. He would make a legitimate assent, the theory goes, but he would carefully limit it. One of the examples was the Miranda case. Everyone expected him to vote against it, but he didn't. Instead, he wrote the opinion and basically just said "Miranda stands as is," when many of the majority justices actually wanted to expand it.
So if the WSJ's depiction is accurate, the CJ is pretty important. He can't make policy, but he can guide it. I'm sure there are also lots of procedural advantages that are mostly invisible to outsiders, like maybe he gets to decide who talks first in deliberations or something.
I agree with this in spirit. It's not impossible that the Chief Justice was not a Bush II type Republican - which people really do need to understand is different than what has generally been considered a Republican before the last 10-15 years. Bush II represents the unconcealed face of the plutocracy. If it were otherwise, the National Guard would be here at home taking care of disaster victims instead of protecting the oil interests of Bush II's buddies.
And when it comes to individual rights, the Democrats are now the conservatives.
Basically, everything is fucked up and inverted.
Before anyone gets too carried away about abortion litmus tests, remember this.
US Constitution Article VI
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
The biggest canard in law is that "strict construction" has a coherent meaning. Other than "I am the true interpreter of the Text!" The bigger joke in politics is that there was anything principled about the guy.
You can look over his record and predict his votes by this formula: economic strong trumps weak (corp vs. individual), powerful trumps weak (govt vs whistleblower or random individual.) Remember: he voted that INNOCENCE WAS NOT A REASON TO OVERTURN A DEATH PENALTY CONVICTION. After all, rich white people are hardly ever in that situation, so it can't be very important.
Even CNN is falling for it. "States rights...except where state law threatens Republican election chances."
Gil made his bones in thuggish suppression of minority votes - naturally the shenannigans in Florida in 2000 so overwhelmed him with nostalgia that he could punt 20 years of his own precident to achieve an outcome.
It's just a shame it didn't happen 40 years earlier.
Actually, they ruled that gays should have the same rights as everyone else, without having to pretend to be straight in order to get them. (if you think gay marriage is a "special right", imagine yourself living as a straight person in a society where only gay marriages were allowed. Would you consider your wanting to marry someone of the opposite sex a "special right"?)
Not only that, but the court told businesses, no matter what religion of the leadership,
they must pay money to gays to support the "spouse". That is even if the business is private, and the owners are christian and want to give christian values to the world, to make the place better.
Not only that, the courts previously ruled that businesses aren't allowed to discriminate against minorities in hiring, even if the business is private, and the owners are KKK members and want to give KKK values to the world, to make the place better.
Some people even look upon this as a good thing.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It is also worth considering that it takes a kind of courage that few on this planet possess to stay working when (quite probably) in terrible agony and (certainly) in full knowledge that his days were numbered.
I see little honor in the living dying for one's country. I see considerable honor in the dying living for theirs. The difference is important. The former is a waste, the latter is devotion.
While I have a hard time telling him to rest in peace, I do at least wish him no ill and pray that whatever lies beyond this life has mercy upon him and remember him not for his faults - we all have those - but for what good he brought into the world.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Sincerity is a highly over-rated virtue. If he did a lousy job it doesn't matter very much if he was sincere in how he tried to carry out his duties.
Are you stupid. The court has more power than the president. They are the only institution that can VETO both the president and congress. They are a staple of humanity.
Actually, the Supreme Court decisions are powerless without the executive and legislative branches' active will to adhere to them.
So let me say it loud and clear: THE SUPREME COURT CANNOT ENFORCE ITS OWN RULINGS.
They are only as powerful as the rest of government allow them to be. Recent precedents within the last fifty years give the court its authority, but in its earlier days historians note that its frailty was this very notion that the President and Congress could ignore the court's decisions, and were in no way explicitly required by law to support the court's decision with any consequent action.
http://www.mintruth.com/blog/index.php?p=323
or even:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WilliamRehnquist
But you're right - it depends on where you sit on the fence. I certainly don't feel like he was one of the greatest, not by far.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Well its easy to explain how they will spin it, and in fact already have been in the last couple of days.
Disasters are state and local responsibilities by law and policy. The Federal government is only supposed to provide support at the call of governor's and mayors.
A. They will blame the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of New Orleans for not marshalling city buses and providing transportation for the poor and infirm. Its a bit unfair because even if they had done this I doubt they could have gotten very many more people out in the short time available. You just can't force people to evacuate a big city in this short time, but providing public transportation for those who want to leave seems like a local failure. Of course once you put them on buses where would they go.
B. They will point out the National Guard is under the control of the Governor so any failure in deploying it is the Governor's fault. This is true though it glosses over the Bush administration had 1/4 to 1/3 of the Guard manpower and 1/2 its equipment in Iraq. The Federal government is by law precluded from putting troops in to states and cities, thanks to the fact the Federal Army ran out of control after the Civil War and was reined in my the Posse Comitatus act in 1878. It is most of the time a good restraint and prevents martial law and dictatorship. In this case it caused problems though.
C. There will be finderpointing as to whose fault it was the levees broke. Maybe it was inevitable they were going to break under this stress, though I wager these localized failures were due to bad maintenance. More importantly there should have been helicopters surveying them the second the weather cleared and sending resource to plug leaks before they washed out leading to the massive failures. Its sad no one had a plan to survey and do emergency repairs on these levees, a stitch(or sandbag) in time might have prevented this though we may never know unless someone was watching how and why the levees actually failed.
Some things I want to come out in the investigation:
- Who stopped the Red Cross from entering New Orleans because it was "to dangerous". Was it FEMA, state or local. For whatever reason, the Red Cross is the one who insured people get food and water and it couldn't get in to New Orleans because someone stopped them.
- The President of Jefferson Parish in New Orleans accused FEMA on "Meet the Press" this morning of intentionally cutting the communication lines they local and state people were using, they had to patch the lines and post armed guards.
- How much did the levees degrade because the Army Corps of Engineers had its funding cut for them and had its personell and money redirected to rebuild Iraq versus how much was due to cuts from local levee districts.
At this point I'd really like to know did FEMA:
- Do everything possible but it was just to hard
- Do a mediocre and inadequate job
- Did FEMA make things worse and actually obstruct the recovery
I'm more than a little suspicious the Bush administration let things go bad on purpose, they just let it go to far and it backlashed on them. They were probably planning to have the President come in on his white horse followed an hour later by the Army moving in to save the day which is more or less what happened its was just to late.
@de_machina
Bush tried to get Governor Blanco to relenquish control for one simple reason, she has failed to follow almost any step in the LA emergency relief plan, and even those she did follow she was pushed into. All the while, the Feds get all the blame for a situation that the Constitution dictates they have no authority over. He declared LA and the surrounding States Federal disaster zones PRIOR to Katrina to open up the federal funds for the various governors use, which is about all he could do. He then had to ask her to request the Mayor order an evacuation prior to Katrina (something that their hurricane plan called for but they failed to do until 24 hours prior to landfall), and even then she failed to mobilize the National Guard and/or State police to assist the NOPD.
Even after discussing options to help speed up the relief refforts she requested 24 hours to consider them (according to statements made by NO Mayor Nagins) and then hired a former Clinton advisor to help her save face.
Members of the State government have made statements that she is refusing to give up control to prevent the Feds from being able to point fingers, not because she has a better plan than them. Simply put, she is putting politics infront of peoples lives.
It amazing how people call for more leadership from Bush with one breath (when he legally has no power to act) but when he attempts to actually do what he can, within the bounds of the law, he is accused of trying to just grab power.
People are dieing and all evidence points to the people in direct control (the Governor and to a much lesser degree the Mayor)of the situation being totally incompetant.
It's a perfect example of damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
And the other affected areas don't look as bad, not because of political affiliation, but because their local and state governments have been helping and not impeding rescue efforts.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!