Sandra Day O’Connor

What Might Have Been: Chief Justice Samuel Alito!

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In Jully 2005, shortly after Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, President George W. Bush announced John Roberts as his choice as her replacement on the Supreme Court.

The hearings were scheduled for early September, but two days before the hearings began, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died, and overnight, Bush decided to switch Roberts to be the appointee for Chief Justice, and later selected Samuel Alito to replace O’Connor!

The course of history was changed dramatically by this, ever more so now after Chief Justice Roberts authored the majority opinion on the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare!

Samuel Alito has proved to be a right wing extremist on the Supreme Court, joining with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, and often called “Scalito” by critics. He also is the Justice who mouthed “not true” after the CItizens United Case decision, when President Obama, in the State of the Union speech a few days later, openly criticized that decision to the faces of the Supreme Court, while the other Justices, including Roberts, sat stone faced, which was the professional way to behave, but not for Alito!

The leader of the Court knows the Court is in his name, and that he must think of history, and Chief Justice Roberts knows that well, and has shown his statesmanship on this health care case, realizing no major decision of the Court since 1937 has repudiated a major social reform law passed by Congress.

Justice Alito is NOT a statesman, far from it, and rather is in many ways a disgrace–a narrow minded, hostile, nasty representative of the agenda of the Far Right, who if he had any ethics, would resign from the Court, but preceded by Scalia and Thomas, the two worst Justices of the past half century on the Court!

Is It The Kennedy Court, Rather Than The Roberts Court?

Ronald 1 Comment

The more one analyzes the US Supreme Court in recent years, it is more clear than ever that we should call it the Anthony Kennedy Court, rather than the John Roberts Court!

Kennedy, appointed to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1988 as a compromise choice who could pass Senate muster, after the well publicized rejection of Robert Bork in 1987, has now been on the Court for 24 years, and is seen more than ever as the “swing vote” on the Court, first sharing that with former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, until her retirement in 2005, but now all by himself as the most significant vote on the Court.

Kennedy, basically a conservative but with an open mind, has leaned to the Right two thirds of the time, and to the Left one third of the time on the average.

It is seen by just about all Court watchers that Kennedy’s vote on the Obama Health Care legislation is crucial, as to whether it survives or goes down.

Kennedy disappointed many on the left in being in the majority on the Bush V. Gore case of 2000, the Citizens United case of 2010, and the Strip Search case of this past Monday. But at the same time, he upheld the rights of gays to privacy in the Lawrence V. Texas case of 2003, enraging fellow Justice Antonin Scalia.

His questioning about the Obama Health Care law last week showed the quandary he is in, and he is getting pressure from many sources to uphold the law, but the belief is that he will not give in to pressure, and might even be tempted to go with the other conservative Justices in overturning the law.

The theory is that IF Kennedy goes with upholding the law, that Chief Justice John Roberts will join him, making it a 6-3 vote, but that if he decides to negate the law, then the vote will be a partisan 5-4 vote against the legislation.

So to call the present Court the Kennedy Court seems very appropriate!

The Republican Attack On The Constitution: A Threat To American Democracy!

Ronald 5 Comments

The Republican Party loves to assert that the Democrats, and progressives in particular, are attacking the Constitution, and that they are the experts on the Constitution.

So therefore, in this Presidential primary season, and in the party membership in Congress, there are statements constantly attacking the court system, anytime that a federal judge or court issues a decision against the conservative view of the Constitution. There are condemnations and calls to change the court system on a regular basis.

One would think that the Democrats and their progressive friends have dominated the courts in recent decades, which, of course, is the exact opposite of the truth!

One forgets that from 1969-2011, there have been only 15 years of Democratic control of the Presidency, as compared to 28 years of Republican control.

The vast majority of federal judges have been Republican appointments, as a result, and Republican Presidents have made a total of 13 Supreme Court appointments over those years, and Democrats have made only 4, two by Bill Clinton and two by Barack Obama!

But now,. Newt Gingrich calls for judges to be required to testify before partisan Congressional committees, a violation of the separation of powers, and a danger to an independent judiciary!

What it comes down to is that Newt Gingrich and all of the Republican opponents, with maybe the exception of Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, wish to create a court system that would move away from the path breaking changes that the Supreme Court brought about during the years of the Warren Court, Burger Court, and Rehnquist Court including:

Brown V. Board Of Education
Miranda V Arizona
Roe V Wade
University Of California V. Bakke
Lawrence V Texas

As it is, there are threats presented by the Republican growth of dominance on the federal courts to all of these issues–racial integration, rights of criminal suspects, abortion rights, affirmative action, and gay rights.

The Republicans will not be contented until there are reversals on all of these issues, and a return to the “good old days”, when minorities “knew their place”; police had unlimited rights over those they questioned or arrested; women had no control over their reproductive rights; minorities and women had disadvantages, as compared to white males, on educational and job opportunities; and gays were forced to remain “in the closet” and face open discrimination and hate without recourse!

So when the Republicans claim to understand what the Founding Fathers meant at the Constitutional Convention, they are forgetting that those esteemed leaders put into the Constitution the “Elastic Clause” to allow for expansion of the Constitution beyond the original document, in order to make the Constitution a “living document” adaptable to changing times.

The real threat is not what the federal courts have done in the past sixty years! It is the attempt of conservatives and the Republican Party to negate the great progress brought about the Supreme Court and lower courts in the past sixty years, and revert back to the years after World War II, when all of these great changes started slowly to evolve through courageous judges and Supreme Court Justices, including Earl Warren, William Brennan, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito: Totally Inappropriate Behavior!

Ronald 2 Comments

Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, appointed in 2005 by President Bush, to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, acted totally inappropriate at the State Of The Union Address by President Obama on Wednesday night.

When Obama criticized the recent Supreme Court decision on unlimited corporate spending on political campaigns, reversing the McCain-Feingold Act and numerous other campaign finance laws that in some cases have been part of the law for a century, Justice Alito nodded “no” in a persistent and continuous manner and mouthed the words “Not true”, knowing full well that he was on camera and would be noticed.

For a Supreme Court Justice to do this is actually worse than even Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelling “You lie!”, when the President spoke before Congress last fall on health care reform.

We have a right to expect better public behavior by a Supreme Court Justice than we saw on the part of Alito. Of course, there is an explanation for his behavior. Obama voted against Alito for his Court seat in 2005, and apparently Alito never recovered from that, as when the President elect visited the Supreme Court a few days before the inauguration last year, all of the sitting Supreme Court Justices were there to greet him, EXCEPT Alito. So it is obvious he holds grudges, not exactly professional conduct on Alito’s part.

Imagine that Sandra Day O’Connor had not retired when she did, due to her husband’s diagnosis of Alzheimers disease, from which he recently died. If she had stayed on the Court, this disgraceful Supreme Court decision on corporate spending on campaigns would have ended up 5-4 against the change, rather than 5-4 in favor.

How much a single vote and a single member of the Supreme Court matters! 🙁