supreme court – dowackado

Is this why we vote for Democrats?

By timmukyPosted on May 16, 2010Posted in plus ca change, politicsTagged elena kagan, obama, supreme courtNo Comments

Not much to add to what Black Agenda Report’s Bruce A. Dixon says Elena Kagan shows us about Obama and his party.

The damage that Republican Supreme Court judges like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, to name only a couple, have done is truly incalculable. If appointing a justice who could be counted on to undo and clear away some of that right wing wreckage is too much to ask, what does it say for the main reason, the clinching reason given for supporting Democratic presidential candidates?

This is a crucial and defining moment for the presidency of Barack Obama, the instant at which he leaves his mark on the high court for perhaps twenty or thirty years to come. Retiring justice John Paul Stevens is indisputably the most “liberal” voice on the court, a man with a clear record of opposing many racist practices and authoritarian tendencies. Stevens is the liberal anchor of the court. To replace that liberal anchor with anyone less committed to upholding the rights of the poor and powerless is to unleash and further empower the likes of Roberts, Scalia and Thomas. That’s precisely what President Obama accomplishes with the appointment of Elena Kagan.

Except maybe to mention that other putative trump card for partisan Dems, abortion rights. But the party is not doing such a great job defending the Right to Choose, it seems. This sad, and entirely predictable, state of affairs leads a Firedoglake diarist to lament that “history will show that Obama threw away over 35 years of pro-choice blood, sweat, and tears to give health insurers $474 billion over 6 years… and set us down the path to a country where most women will live in the pre-Roe world.”

Read the entire BAR piece.

“Whores-Race Politics”

By timmukyPosted on January 21, 2010Posted in corporatism, law, politics, prostitutionTagged attack ads, business plot of 1933, campaign finance, chief justice roberts, dahlia lithwick, john paul stevens, money is speech, Smedley Butler, supreme court, whores-race politicsNo Comments

Supreme Court rejects limits on corporate spending in electoral campaigns:

A divided Supreme Court on Thursday swept away decades of legislative efforts to restrict the role of corporations in election campaigns, ruling that severe restrictions on corporate spending are inconsistent with the First Amendment’s protection of political speech.

Chris Lehmann has the best headline: High Court Upholds Whores-Race Politics, although the metafilter one-liner (“The Business Plot of 1933 has reached a logical conclusion”) comes close, and gives me a chance to name-check Smedley Butler again.

Lehmann’s analysis:

The ruling also effectively rolls back many curbs on “soft-money” campaign financing–the coy corporate practice of doling out dosh on candidates’ behalf via dummy interest-group expenditures–during the homestretch of elections that were instituted in the already weak McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. In the majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy stirringly pronounced that “the censorship we confront is now vast in its reach,” neglecting of course to mention that virtually every other Western democracy has far stricter curbs on rampant private-sector electioneering while also mysteriously permitting their private citizens to express themselves just fine.

And Dahlia Lithwick’s The Pinocchio Project has the best subhed: “Watching as the Supreme Court turns a corporation into a real live boy.”

The court had to reach out far beyond any place it needed to go to strike down century-old restrictions on corporate spending in federal elections. This started off as a case about a single movie. It morphed into John Roberts’ Golden Globe night.

Funny. This is a silly case, and what the Court has wrung from it is so preposterous that you want to laugh. But no.

But you can plainly see the weariness in [dissenting Justice John Paul] Stevens[‘] eyes and hear it in his voice today as he is forced to contend with a legal fiction that has come to life today, a sort of constitutional Frankenstein moment when corporate speech becomes even more compelling than the “voices of the real people” who will be drowned out.

“A Constitutional Frankenstein moment.” It has been a pretty awful week.

“Future prospective torturers can now draw comfort from this decision”

By timmukyPosted on December 20, 2009Posted in civil liberties, obama, politicsTagged civil liberties, detainees, guantanamo, obama, personhood, supreme court, tortureNo Comments

Water Torture — We suspect he's an Enemy Combatant, so this is OK!

News earlier this week, from the Center for Constitutional Justice

Today, the United States Supreme Court refused to review a lower court’s dismissal of a case brought by four British former detainees against Donald Rumsfeld and senior military officers for ordering torture and religious abuse at Guantánamo. The British detainees spent more than two years in Guantanamo and were repatriated to the U.K. in 2004.

The Obama administration had asked the court not to hear the case. By refusing to hear the case, the Court let stand an earlier opinion by the D.C. Circuit Court which found that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a statute that applies by its terms to all “persons” did not apply to detainees at Guantanamo, effectively ruling that the detainees are not persons at all for purposes of U.S. law. The lower court also dismissed the detainees’ claims under the Alien Tort Statute and the Geneva Conventions, finding defendants immune on the basis that “torture is a foreseeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants.” Finally, the circuit court found that, even if torture and religious abuse were illegal, defendants were immune under the Constitution because they could not have reasonably known that detainees at Guantanamo had any Constitutional rights.

Eric Lewis, a partner in Washington, D.C.’s Baach Robinson & Lewis, lead attorney for the detainees, said, “It is an awful day for the rule of law and common decency when the Supreme Court lets stand such an inhuman decision. The final word on whether these men had a right not to be tortured or a right to practice their religion free from abuse is that they did not. Future prospective torturers can now draw comfort from this decision. The lower court found that torture is all in a days’ work for the Secretary of Defense and senior generals. That violates the President’s stated policy, our treaty obligations and universal legal norms. Yet the Obama administration, in its rush to protect executive power, lost its moral compass and persuaded the Supreme Court to avoid a central moral challenge. Today our standing in the world has suffered a further great loss.”

No shortage of outraged commentary on this howling catastrophe, but I thought Digby put it pretty well:

So torture is a for[e]seeable consequence of the military’s detention of suspected enemy combatants. I guess it’s official.

Everyone in the world should be advised that if they don’t want to be tortured, they shouldn’t let themselves be suspected of being an enemy combatant. And if they foolishly allow themselves to be suspected enemy combatants, they should realize, regardless of any laws or treaties to the contrary, that they’ll be tortured. After all, nobody can be expected to know ahead of time which people are legally “persons” or which prisoners are allowed constitutional rights. It’s up to innocent people not to allow themselves to be caught in this Catch 22 in the first place. Good to know.

Any guesses who said this way back in January?

I was clear throughout this campaign and was clear throughout this transition that under my administration the United States does not torture.We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest ideals.