3 posts tagged “supreme court”

I'm trying to look past the Democratic primary to the general election.  Now, there are some people who say that McCain wouldn't be that bad.  I'm here to tell you that this is a gravely mistaken assumption.  Here's one in a long list of reasons why McCain would be just as bad as Bush...  Equal pay for women.

A Republican minority in the Senate has thwarted attempts to repair the damage done by a bare majority of the Supreme Court in Ledbetter, which determined that companies should be able to engage in pay discrimination without the threat of punitive damages as long as they're able to to keep employees in the dark about it for 180 days after it starts. John McCain, although he didn't show up to the vote, applauds the Senate's decision to help companies pay women unequal wages:

"I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what's being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems," the expected GOP presidential nominee told reporters. "This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system."

In other words, McCain favors women's rights...as long as they can't actually sue to enforce them. People who, affected by the bitterness of the primary, are tempted to think that the parties are indistinguishable may want to consider the votes in both the Senate and on the Supreme Court.

So McCain would like to support the retrograde republican-appointed Supreme Court which came to the tortured logic that the law regarding pay equity doesn't permit anyone to actually enforce it.  The Ledbetter decision is so patently ridiculous, that I almost feel embarrassed for the Justices who signed on to it.  It may be embarrassing, but sadly, it is not surprising.  These jack-holes never saw a law limiting the ability of our corporate overlords to exploit us which they didn't like.  With McCain, we'll get another generation of idiots like Alito, Scalia, and Thomas... and seemingly reasonable, but stealthily nasty corporate apologists like Roberts.

One thing I can promise is that with a President Obama (or Clinton), the next Justices will look nothing like that losers that Bush appointed...

Of course we all know that the conservatives on the court sidestepped the law, and installed Bush in the White House.  (Which has turned out great for the country, in retrospect)  You can see how little the supreme court justices who wrote the opinion thought of it if you read it, and notice that they said that it would have no precedent, and the legal "reasoning" used in the case would not be applicable to any other case.  You see, they essentially made some bullsh*t up, and realized that some enterprising lawyers on the left might use their decision in support of something that the conservatives dispised - they just said, sorry, you can't use this, but we can, this one time.  I'm not familiar with something like this ever having happened before.  But hey, they supposedly make the rules, so they just changed them to what they wanted, and then closed the door for anyone else.  As this report noted:

According to Jeffrey Toobin’s new book on the Supreme Court, Justice David Souter nearly resigned in the wake of Bush v. Gore, so distraught was he over the decision that effectively ended the Florida recount and installed George W. Bush as president.

In “The Nine,” which goes on sale Sept. 18, Toobin writes that while the other justices tried to put the case behind them, “David Souter alone was shattered,” at times weeping when he thought of the case. “For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice,” Toobin continues. “That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the Court was never the same.”

It is good to hear that justice Souter felt that strongly about the decision.  I'm glad he didn't resign and give Bush another pick for the court... which is probably why he didn't do it.  However, it lays bare the patent lawlessness of the decision.  It is hard to be a lawyer when you just don't believe in the impartiality supreme courts...

I point you to this excellent blog post at the New Republic.

Imagine that by 2030, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have both resigned, and their successors are much more liberal than anyone serving now on the Court -- far to the left of the Court's supposed liberal wing. The new justices believe that the death penalty is always unconstitutional. They argue that the Constitution creates a right to education and very possibly to welfare and housing as well. They think that affirmative action programs are fine, even if they operate as rigid quota systems. They are not merely committed to a right to choose abortion; they say that the Constitution requires government to fund abortions for poor women, even when those abortions are not medically necessary...

Does this Supreme Court of 2030 seem utterly fantastic and unimaginable -- a conservative's worst nightmare, a liberal's wildest dream? If so, think again. The court just described is no fantasy. In essence, it is the Supreme Court of 1980... The court of 1980, so far to the left of the court of 2007, was itself described as a conservative court. After all, it included five Republican appointees... who generally rejected the liberal rulings of their predecessors on the Warren Court... What was once conservative is now centrist. What was once on the extreme right -- so extreme that it was not represented on the Court at all -- is now merely conservative (Scalia and Thomas). What was once on the left no longer exists.

All we need is to make sure that there is a Democratic president in two years.  Then, hopefully one of the conservative justices, like Kennedy, resigns... and then there is a 5-4 majority with the "liberal" judges in the driver seat.  No more Bush v Gores!  I sure hope so...