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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.
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.
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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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."
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.
>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.
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.
Supreme Court justices tend to retire only for severe health reasons that prevent them from carrying out their duties. Praying for that is disgusting.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
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.
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.