Slashdot Mirror
Senate Confirms Elena Kagan's Appointment To SCOTUS
eldavojohn writes "As expected, by a vote of 63 to 37 Elena Kagan has been appointed as the 112th member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Kagan, only 50 years old, has no judicial experience. The Washington Post explains: 'Other justices have corporate law backgrounds or a long record of arguing before the court. Kagan worked briefly for a law firm and argued her first case before an appellate court 11 months ago. It happened to be before the Supreme Court, the first of six cases she argued as the nation's first female solicitor general.' Her fair use views and free speech views have made her a focus of Slashdot recently."
No history of scholarship, unless you count being a fucking law professor and dean of the Harvard law school. Or her published books and papers on legal issues. But why would we count that? We don't like her politics.
(Also, she clerked for Thurgood Marshall in the 80s, so it's not like she has no judicial experience of any kind. And it's not unheard of for SC members to jump into the job without being judges first.)
So you've already forgotten their involvement with determining the outcome of the 2000 US presidential election?
People were pissed because she was giving textbook answers to make it through the job interview with the Senate while everyone knows she's going to be an activist judge ruling off of her opinion because she has no practical experience.
[citation-needed]
"Everyone knows" is a shitty argument, and the "no practical experience" argument has been thoroughly debunked. True, she's never been a judge, but she's more than qualified, and if "everybody knew," she wouldn't have been confirmed -- 5 Republicans broke ranks and voted for her, whilst the current crop of Senate Dems are fairly moderate, and wouldn't vote to confirm a far-left activist in considerable numbers, particularly with an election cycle coming up.
Saying something doesn't make it true.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Oh yeah, I'm sure the republicans would have voted against health benefits for 911 rescue workers if Bush were still in office.
Do you think the Democrats would have voted to confirm a SCOTUS nominee who had previously argued in favor of banning books if GWB had appointed her?
The vast majority of both major parties place duty to party ahead of duty to the Constitution. More's the pity.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Umm, that activism thing didn't seem to bother W when he nominated his picks for the high court. There's been a pattern in recent years of pro-conservative judicial activism on issues from the 2000 Presidential election to the DC handgun ban to the Lilly Ledbetter ruling. It's asinine to suggest that somehow one person is going to dangerously tip the balance away from that.
36 Republicans and one Democrat tried to block Kagan's appointment. The Democrat is Ben Nelson (D-NE), who represents the (Omaha) insurance industry (which also is the Credit Default Swap industry) and routinely votes with Republicans, especially in filibusters that prevent a simple majority vote that would usually pass.
You can see each of the Republicans give their reasons for voting against Kagan's appointment to the Supreme Court, and judge for yourself whether those are either the real reasons, or good ones.
--
make install -not war
What is so unclear about the constitution?
Here are two examples, just to get you started. "The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" but yet "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
So which one trumps? Can Congress make a law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press in order to grant an author the exclusive right to his or her writings? And, hey, what about visual artists? They don't write anything, so do they get copyright protection or not? Or composers? And what about laws that only incidentally affect the press, like taxes on ink or printing equipment? What about a general sales tax that happens to affect ink?
Not so clear, is it?
Or how about this one "The Congress shall have Power...To regulate Commerce...among the several States?" What does that mean? Does it apply only to things like interstate taxes? What about the infrastructure of commerce like interstate roads? What about products sold across state lines? What if the seller doesn't ship it across state lines but the buyer brings it across? What if one state subsidizes the heck out of a product, leading to competition problems with the neighboring state? What about products that are illegal but sold across state lines, like drugs? What if the product is being given away, like open source software, is that still commerce?
So you can see that the Constitution is not very clear at all on a lot of points. Sometimes it's because parts of the document are in tension with other parts. Other times it's because the words are just plain vague. Scholars, politicians, and judges have spent centuries trying to figure out the best way to balance those tensions and interpret those vague words.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Meaning that because a well regulated Militia is needed for the security, people must have the right to bear arms in order to form a Militia to secure a free state. Without the right to bear arms, it becomes impossible to create a Militia.
The Constitution preserves "the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. . . (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
James Madison
"[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow citizens."
Alexander Hamilton
"[A]rms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. . . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them."
Thomas Paine
"... of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trail by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny."
James Monroe
Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the people's liberty teeth keystone... the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable... more than 99% of them by their silence indicate that they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference. When firearms go, all goes, we need them every hour."
George Washington
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Thomas Jefferson
If the right to bear arms meant as you thought it meant, why would the people who wrote the Constitution and served the country in its earliest days have this opinion which strongly suggests the right for every free man to keep and bear arms to defend the country from internal tyranny?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
George W. Bush appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he goes out and finds a better qualified candidate.
Barrack Obama appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he laughs in their faces and pushes her through confirmation anyway.
Harriet Myers:
Elena Kagan:
While it is true tha both women have no experience as a judge, Kagan has much more experience in academia and in government as a lawyer. In my opinion, she's more qualified than Miers. Before her nomination, Miers spent a total of 2 years as a lawyer for the government and no time in academia. Kagan spent 5 years as a government lawyer with 14 years of academia. Kagan also spent 3 years clerking for Thurgood Marshall.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If the Supreme Court had not stepped in, the election would have been decided by Congress. Considering the makeup of the Congress in 2000, that means that Congress would have decided that George W. Bush was the next President.
Personally, I think the Supreme Court should have ruled that the Florida Supreme Court had no jurisdiction and that the matter of Florida's electors should have been decided by the Florida legislature (the Constitution rest all authority for deciding how a state's electors are chosen on the state legislatures). Or alternatively, they could have ruled that in one of several different ways that said that no Electoral College majority was determined so the election gets decided by Congress. In either of those cases the result would have been that George W. Bush ended up President.
The only possible way that Al Gore would have ended up President is if the recount was continued selectively in such a way as to guarantee that only Al Gore got additional votes. Several news organizations (most of which favored Al Gore), ran their own recount after the election and determined that George W. Bush won the Florida election.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison