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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."
Nothing wrong with a SC nominee having no judicial or even trial advocacy experience, though you'd hope they'd at least have a significant body of legal scholarship. Kagan is very smart but she has none of these things, she's basically a career administrator/politician.
I found it hilarious how pissed people were that she gave textbook answers during her hearings while simultaneously complaining that she would judge based on her opinions.
Aren't textbook answers the opposite of opinions?
PS: An activist judge is a judge who makes a ruling that you disagree with.
Living With a Nerd
Well, it would help if we in the US didn't treat political parties as if they were sports teams. And if the dems weren't such pussies. And the gun control thing is patently false anyway.. I don't know a single democrat who wants to ban guns.
Other justices have corporate law backgrounds...
That explains a lot.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
spiffmastercow said "...I don't know a single democrat who wants to ban guns." So Daly in Chicago is not a Democrat?
Waiting for her to hear a few cases so we can see what she really thinks.
The problem is that nowadays presidents aim to nominate people with as little documentation of what they really think as they can get away with. Then we go through Senate confirmation hearings which are largely a chance for the membership of the Senate Judiciary Committee to play for the cameras while the potential justice avoids answering any questions.
I am officially gone from
Sorry, this story is "Stuff that Matters". You wanted this story.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
and the Constitution almost never is,
What are you talking about? The Constitution of the US is -very- clear if you don't try to view it in tinted glasses of various political affiliations. The founders didn't just write a constitution and nothing else, they all wrote lots of books, lots of papers. If there was one document that was written in the 1700s that is the clearest, it would have to be the constitution. What is so unclear about the constitution?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Both cops work for the same department. Both want the same thing out of you. Neither one is your friend. It's a negotiating tactic. Their boss wants something from you, so one of them is going to offer you a cup of coffee and a donut, then while he's out of the room getting it, the other one is going to bash your face in. When the friendly guy comes back with the coffee and the donut, he's going to apologize for his partner and explain to you that he has little control over his 'crazy' partner, and for everyone's sake, you'd better just play along.
Sure, one guy gives you some crappy coffee and a stale donut while the other guy gives you a chair to the face, but they are both working for the same rich asshole, trying to get the same thing from you: your cheap and silent obedience.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Don't suppose you've noticed, but while lawyers are disproportionately represented in Congress, it isn't a prerequisite. Non-lawyers are at least partially responsible for our laws.
For the record, my opinions on this are solely confined to the Supreme Court. Lower courts need experienced judges and lawyers because they are constrained by Supreme Court precedent as well as the laws as written, and it takes training and study to deal with the multiple layers of ambiguity involved.
The whole point of the Supreme Court is that it takes the tough cases, the ones without a clear answer. In those sorts of cases, legal training isn't a prerequisite. Having people trained how to think, rather than solely how to parse legalese is a good thing. A liberal arts student from, for example, St. Johns with a history of non-profit work, or of managing a business, or a successful career as a psychologist would add some diversity of views. The fact of the matter is that lawyers are indoctrinated with a specific world view in modern law schools (a fairly corporatist world view), and having people who don't have these built in assumptions about how the world works on the Court provides more diversity than any number of minorities, women, etc., if the minorities and women were indoctrinated into the law school mindset.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
I couldn't agree more!
All too often we have reams of context in which we can place these well written documents. All too often interpretation is not required in the least. All too often, interpretation, and a poor one, if not flat out wrong, is what we get.
The US Constitution is one of the easiest to comprehend legal documents around. It was purposely made so. When judges can't understand the US Constitution or don't know where they should refer about ambiguity, its their way of saying they are unfit to sit on the bench. All to often, people take this to infer the Constitution is the problem. In reality, it almost never is.
If it were 1 or 2 out of 9 liberal art students on the IT department, maybe we could then give some better error messages than hex codes or "method of object not found"
Having a team of diverse backgrounds does make it stronger and more compentent to serve a world of diverse needs.
Actually, its clear only when you try to do that, because then the tint you choose to use resolves all the inherent ambiguities and conflicts for you -- in the favor of whatever ideological tint you've selected.
Yes, and in some of those books and papers, some of them write about how they were deliberately vague in writing some provisions of the Constitution, in order to let some aspects be resolved by experience because of the inability to come to a consensus on resolution on some points. Because, believe it or not, the political elites of the United States were no more united and homogenous in their ideology of government in the late 18th Century than they are in the early 21st; they were more able to work together, perhaps, but largely because they were more keenly aware of the potential consequences if they failed to do so.
If it were 1 or 2 out of 9 liberal art students on the IT department, maybe we could then give some better error messages than hex codes or "method of object not found"
No. The solution is _not_ to give that work to people who lack the technical skills to do it -- the solution is to give programmers and IT people better training in human interface principles. And for those doing hiring for IT/dev to actually start paying attention to whether a candidate has developed skills in those supposedly extracurricular areas.
Amazing how fast that one dropped out of the right wing lexicon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive
"What is so unclear about the constitution?"
How to get around the bits that prevent the government from doing whatever it is I want it to do, in spite of those pesky "rights of the people".
www.eFax.com are spammers
....the law isn't clear, and the Constitution almost never is...
Congress shall make no law...
That's pretty fucking clear to me.
I've got your sig, right here.
So you admit you know nothing about politicians or the politics you pretend to discuss and yet hate republicans. I think that the parties themselves aren't the problem as much as you. And I do mean you personally.
That proves nothing. Sports teams trade away good players all the time. Sometimes they do it because they are rebuilding and need younger players even if they are less experienced. Other times they do it because they can't afford to keep them and would rather get something in a trade than let them go to free agency. Occasionally they even do it to finance a Broadway play, though that one might not have been the best idea in the world.... ;)
Point is, you can't say GWB was an idiot just because he traded Sammy Sosa.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
More like highly-regarded medical scientist being made Surgeon General.
It's far better to have a procedurally unpracticed constitutional scholar for once than the sequence of long-time political hacks we got from the other side.
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.
Well, he did say he was going to "change" things.
If the Constitution is so clear, we'd only ever have unanimous decisions. Even the very first court under John Jay had at split decisions, indicating that less than 5 years after the constitution was completed, there were already disagreements on how it should be interpreted.
The document was written 200+ years ago, before many modern issues could have hoped to crop up. Photography, cinematography, automobiles, airplanes, rocket ships, computers, the internet, medicine, civil rights, economics, weaponry, physics, chemistry, & even mathematics have all advanced significantly since the inception of the constitution. Many of the advances in these areas were completely out of the realm of comprehension in 1787. Even if they were possessed with great foresight, how could the framers have possibly anticipated copyright issues with movies or music, the possibility that health care could ever cost someone more than many people make in a lifetime, or the ramifications of corporate personhood? The fact is they couldn't, and because of that, there are areas in which the constitution is very *unclear*.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
I wish people would stop this "Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard" = *No experience* nonsense.
The woman knows more about the constitution, how's it's been applied/ignored in the past, how the courts have dealt with it since the country was founded, and what's actually written in judicial opinions than most of the judges in the federal court system. One doesn't teach Constitutional Law at places like Chicago and Harvard without being at the top of the game. Hell, some of the students at these places come into classes knowing more constitutional law than most judges.
I know it's fashionable to write places like Harvard off as "the elitist left" and other such nonsense, but seriously, you don't teach there unless you are a major expert in the field. Saying she has no experience is just plain stupid.
Um, from a 2nd amendment standpoint, the need for militias is merely the justification for guaranteeing that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. One absolutely does not need to be part of a militia to have and exercise that right.
Anyway, the 2nd amendment is completely redundant, like the rest of the Bill of Rights. Nothing in the Constitution gives the government the authority to prohibit ownership or non-aggressive use of any kind of weapon in the first place. Given that they needed an amendment to ban alcohol, they would certainly need one to ban guns (or drugs or anything else not specifically mentioned among their enumerated powers).
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
There maybe faults with Kagan but "no judicial experience" is kind of disengenious. She has a pretty extensive record being a clerk for a couple of judges including for Marshall. She has an extensive record in academia including Harvard Law. She has some record being Solicitor General. Kagan appears to have spent a lot of time in and around the Supreme Court of the United States. While never being a judge at state or federal levels that isn't a requirement for the job where Kagan appears to be familiar with constituional law and qualified to comment on constitutional questions.
Harriet Miers on the other hand is by profession a personal attorney with a corporate law background and doesn't appear to have any more of a constitutional background than being an advisor to the President. Worse still being a direct council to Bush means there could and would be direct conflicts of interest and previliage in some instances.
There are legitamate complaints about Kagan but she is heads and shoulders above qualifications on constitional law, history, and even procedures than Miers.
Actually,
Can you cite specific instances of congress being racially motivated to go against Obama based on race ALONE?
Or are you just gratuitously playing the race card as so many others do to ANYONE who dare oppose this president?
Can you provide links of the examples while he is sitting president?
Yeah?
(establishment)
Can congress give money to a religiously run school?
Can you have public prayer in public schools? How about moments of silence for religious reflection?
Can a public school teach creationism?
Is congress allowed to authorize the placement of a christian cross on public land? If they do, do they have to authorize the placement of a summum pyramid?
(free exercise)
Can congress mandate that women aren't allowed to wear face-coverings in government jobs generally? What about jobs that require interaction with the public? What about jobs involving the use of heavy machinery? What about soldiers?
(press)
Can congress force journalists to reveal their sources in testimony?
Can congress forbit the publication of details sensitive to national security? Troop movements?
(assembly)
Can congress mandate that your demonstration requires a permit?
Can they give permits to some groups but not others?
What kind of fee can be charged for a permit?
How close to private property can I assemble?
Can I obstruct through traffic? For how long?
(speech - my favorite)
Can congress ban dangerous speech?
Libelous speech?
Obscene speech?
Fraudulent speech?
Deceptive commercial speech?
Corporate political speech?
The speech of members of the armed services?
Speech carried over public airwaves?
Speech in public schools?
Is wearing a black armband speech? What about carrying a poster?
Does the right of free speech extend to public areas of privately property?
"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."
It seems to be a popular one. It seems that some people believe it indicates an inborn right amongst all people to posses any weapon (up to and including tanks) that they can afford. Other seem to believe that it implies a right to be armed, but not necessarily a right to any weapon one might chose to own. Still others seem to think it is an abridgeable right, and those guilty of certain types of crimes forfeit it. Others still believe that it implies nothing at all for those who don't happen to be in a "well regulated Militia". I'm not going to go into what I think, but the fact remains that the amendment itself is awful damned vague and a reasonable argument can be made for any of the above. There are other examples, but that's definitely the one that jumps to my mind when people ask about "vague" pieces of the Constitution.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Got the city to build a new stadium
So he had practice ripping off the public to line his pockets.
Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer that relied on federal subsidies. JFK's family not only made money from illicit activities, they maintained their fortune with sweet favors from the government.
I think cities that foot the bill for stadium owners are downright stupid, but it's not as if Bush was the only one to get that kind of deal. All of them do. And you make it sound like he's the only one that's ever profited from stupid government policies.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Maybe not, but there is a preponderance of other evidence supporting that claim.
I'd be willing to bet a substantial sum of money that GWB is smarter than 95% of the people claiming he's an idiot. Measured by way of accomplishment or IQ, he's done a hell of a lot more than the basement dwellers on Slashdot have.
Actually, its clear only when you try to do that
No, it's clear only if you don't try to view it in tinted glasses of various political affiliations. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS itself mucks up the Constitution, like when they said "for limited times" in referece to copyright means whatever Congress says it means, when the average peron of average intelligence or better can clearly see that "longer than a lifetime" is in no way limited and clearly goes way past any reasonable definition of "limited".
Free Martian Whores!
Most of us "basement dwellers" don't count the head of the CIA or a President of the United States as a parent, nor were we born into very rich families.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
If we accept the idea that weapons can't be banned to protect the citizenry from government tyranny, so I assume you won't mind a couple of guys named Mahmoud and Ahmed having a nuclear bomb in New York City, right?
Well, if you can't allow normal citizens to have nuclear weapons, surely you wouldn't mind them having a chemical or biological weapon?
Well, maybe a chemical or biological weapon is too dangerous. So how about a simple conventional bomb, maybe the size of a rental truck?
Ok, no conventional bombs. How about some hand grenades? How about M-16's? How about sniper rifles?
The point is, you have to draw a line somewhere between ok and not ok. If we take the absolutist position that all weapons are fine, then we do run the risk of giving somebody the right to carry a nuke into Manhattan. If we take the absolutist position that all weapons are evil, then you wind up not being able to carry a 2" knife. Presumably, somewhere in between is reasonably ground.
I am officially gone from
The major reason to be rid of the 17th amendment is prior to its instatement Congress couldn't coerce the states. Now many Federal power grabs are backed by indirect forcing of the states to pass laws. For example, congress has no power to mandate seat belts. But it wants all the states to have such a law on the book and passes a Federal law that removes the federal highway funds of any state that fails to enact a seat belt law.
There are numerous other examples of this. It is bald, naked, coercion, and it is wrong. Repeal the 17th amendment and Congress would lose this power because all the Senators would know that the moment they passed a law telling the state legislators what to do they'd lose their seat.
The whole point of the senate was to have half the power of the Congress subject to the State's approval. State legislators are themselves career politicians - watching what Congress does is their job and livelihood. It isn't ours. We could care less about what Congress does day to day and don't have time to keep tabs on them.
Ironically, since the 17th amendment the roles of the House and Senate have reversed. State legislatures have used gerrymandering to control the House. This control isn't perfect - it certainly hasn't prevented coercion, but it has allowed them to influence the House more than they can the Senate. Senate seats have become competitive in most states where House seats almost never are do to Gerrymandering.
Want to fix the mess? Repeal the 17th amendment. Remove the right of districting from states and place it in the hands of a computer algorithm. Divide states into districts of 10 or less reps and use STB ballots to elect them. Elect the president with Instant Run off ballots. These measures would demolish the power of the parties (they'd persist, but in a highly weakened state). It would be nice to see this solution take effect, but too many people in power would lose power if it was ever enacted so it's nothing more than a pipe dream.
Well said. As long as the laws are meant to be obeyed by non-lawyers, they should be comprehensible by non-lawyers. Therefore it makes perfect sense to have non-lawyers determine what the law means.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That's only vague if you don't understand punctuation. There is nothing ambiguous about "shall not be infringed"
I should go back some time and figure out when SlashDot became a bastion of smug left wing douches. Didn't used to be this way. The Republican party has its issues with obstructionists and religious whackos, but the ideals they're _supposed_ to uphold are closer to the libertarianish views SlashDot used to hold.
Now every time there's a political story I know exactly what to expect...
+5 Insightful
Blah blah... Bush..blah blah... Right wing whackos...
+5 Insightful
Blah blah... Corporations..blah blah...Blah blah......
+5 Insightful
Blah blah... Works better in Europe..blah blah...Right wing nuts afraid of socialism...Blah blah......
Like clockwork. I don't know if nerd demographics are changing or what, but it's a pronounced change over the last 5-6 years.