ConfirmThem

With each passing day the leftists in this country are demonstrating their true colors (no pun intended). These are bad people willing to perpetrate bad acts upon those who stand in the way of their power. We have to understand that, no less than as in the war on terror, there is a battle in America between those who live by a moral code and those who will subvert any and every code to get what they want. The left would destroy each and every principled person in this country if it meant getting what they desire. We are in big trouble if we don't wake up and take back our children, our government, and our culture, and soon.

Or will this be the venue for that?

What is the holdup on Southwick?? Does anyone know why he hasn't (or Mauskopf for that matter) been voted in the Senate?

I anticipate that Southwick, Elrod, Mauskopf and the two other district court nominees will be voted on just prior to the October 8th Senate break. That means no confirmations next week. All five confirmations will likely occur during the first week of October.

This racial profiling will be one of the main reasons that the Dems will use to block all of the white male nominees to the Fourth Circuit (Conrad, Getchell and Matthews). The Dems have already used this racial excuse to get try to get several African-American Clinton nominees appointed to the Fourth. Gregory of Virginia got through (thanks to Bush), but Beaty and Wynn of North Carolina did not.

"Democratic action [in the 107th Congress] stands in stark contrast to the way the Republican Senate obstructed President Clinton’s nominees to this circuit [in the 105th and 106th Congresses], when six circuit court nominees were blocked by Republicans. Judge James Beaty did not get a hearing or a vote from the Judiciary Committee in 1995, 1996, 1997 or 1998. Judge James Wynn did not get a hearing or a vote in 1995 or 1996. Judge James Wynn did not get a hearing or a vote in 1999, 2000, or the beginning of 2001. Judge Roger Gregory did not get a hearing or a vote in 2000 or the beginning of 2001, when he was a Clinton nominee. Neither Judge Andre Davis nor Elizabeth Gibson got hearings or votes in 2000. Not one of these six circuit court nominees ever got a hearing or a vote in this Committee when the Republican majority stalled so many outstanding, qualified judicial nominees during the last six years of the Clinton Administration."

http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200503/030305a.html

How can Leahy say with a straight face comments like that, after what he has done to Estrada, Boyle, Haynes, Wallace, Saad, Myers, Smith, Kuhl, and Pickering. He should get an Oscar.

Andre Davis and Elizabeth Gibson were nominated in October of 2000 - Davis a month and a day before Bush v Gore and Davis less than two weeks before the election. To say they were blocked and not even given hearings is a classic example of sophistry. Hasn't Leahy already said he will not allow any CCA nominations going back several months from the 2008 election?

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070923/OPINION...

maybe people are out enjoying great weather. I think I'll go for a walk....

has this already been posted at CT.c? If so, I apologize. If not--or if you haven't read it yet--enjoy (if that's the right word)!

Platon for The New York Times
Majority of One Stevens at the Supreme Court.

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By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: September 23, 2007
Correction Appended

The last Supreme Court term, which ended in June, was the stormiest in recent memory, with more 5-to-4 decisions split along ideological lines than at any time in the court’s history. In a series of controversial cases about abortion, racial integration in schools, faith-based programs and the death penalty, the court’s four more conservative justices prevailed, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy providing the crucial fifth vote. The four more liberal justices were often moved to dissent in unusually personal and vehement terms. “It is my firm conviction,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the case striking down race-based enrollment policies in public schools, “that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.” According to the gossip among Supreme Court law clerks, the level of tension among the justices is higher than at any point since Bush v. Gore in 2000.

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Platon
Not long after beginning his tenure as chief justice in 2005, John G. Roberts Jr. announced publicly that he would try to promote unanimity and collegiality on the court. During his first months on the job, the court managed to achieve his goal, issuing a series of 9-to-0 opinions. But this past term, the court’s first full one with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the brief period of harmony abruptly ended: the percentage of 5-to-4 decisions in which the four liberals were together in dissent rose to 80 percent, up from 55 percent in the 2004 term. For the foreseeable future, the court seems likely to be polarized, with the conservative bloc ascendant and the liberal bloc embattled.

Justice Stevens, the oldest and arguably most liberal justice, now finds himself the leader of the opposition. Vigorous and sharp at 87, he has served on the court for 32 years, approaching the record set by his predecessor, William O. Douglas, who served for 36. In criminal-law and death-penalty cases, Stevens has voted against the government and in favor of the individual more frequently than any other sitting justice. He files more dissents and separate opinions than any of his colleagues. He is the court’s most outspoken defender of the need for judicial oversight of executive power. And in recent years, he has written majority opinions in two of the most important cases ruling against the Bush administration’s treatment of suspected enemy combatants in the war on terror — an issue the court will revisit this term, which begins Oct. 1, when it hears appeals by Guantánamo detainees challenging their lack of access to federal courts.

Stevens, however, is an improbable liberal icon. “I don’t think of myself as a liberal at all,” he told me during a recent interview in his chambers, laughing and shaking his head. “I think as part of my general politics, I’m pretty darn conservative.” Stevens said that his views haven’t changed since 1975, when as a moderate Republican he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the Supreme Court. Stevens’s judicial hero is Potter Stewart, the Republican centrist, whom Stevens has said he admires more than all of the other justices with whom he has served. He considers himself a “judicial conservative,” he said, and only appears liberal today because he has been surrounded by increasingly conservative colleagues. “Including myself,” he said, “every judge who’s been appointed to the court since Lewis Powell” — nominated by Richard Nixon in 1971 — “has been more conservative than his or her predecessor. Except maybe Justice Ginsburg. That’s bound to have an effect on the court.”

As a result, Stevens is now in the unexpected position of shaping the court’s liberal jurisprudence. With the retirement of Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994, Stevens became the senior associate justice, a position second in authority only to the chief justice. When the chief justice is in the majority and Stevens is in the minority, Stevens decides who will write the principal dissent; when the roles are reversed, Stevens assigns the majority opinion. On the current court, in close cases, Stevens has wielded this power strategically, assiduously courting Kennedy to maximize the chances of winning five votes. In some instances, Stevens has assigned majority opinions to Kennedy to secure his vote; in others he has chosen to write majority opinions himself in ways that will persuade Kennedy to stay in the liberal camp.

If Stevens is shrewd in the majority, he is fierce in dissent. He was especially exercised last term by a case involving death-penalty jurors, which he described to me as “a tremendous change in the law” and which prompted him to criticize his conservative colleagues with extemporaneous comments from the bench. He also assigned several dissents last term to his usually mild-mannered liberal colleagues — Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer and David H. Souter — that inspired some of their most scathing and memorable expressions of frustration with the court’s turn to the right. “I think I’ve made some awfully good assignments, to tell you the truth, in dissents,” Stevens told me, citing Ginsburg’s opinions in the cases last term about pay discrimination and the procedure known as partial-birth abortion. “I think assigning the two dissents that Ruth Ginsburg gave this year were two of my best decisions,” he continued, “because she did a really good job in both.” He added with a chuckle, “I’d rather assign majorities than dissents.”

It may seem surprising that such a passionate leader of the court’s liberal wing bristles when he is called a liberal. But the fact that Stevens sees himself as a conservatively oriented centrist makes perfect sense given what judicial liberalism has become. There was a time, years ago in the Warren Court era, when liberal justices like Stevens’s predecessor William O. Douglas saw themselves as on a mission to recreate American society along boldly egalitarian lines by discovering newly minted constitutional rights. But for better or worse, this ambitious conception of judicial liberalism has been replaced, like much of political liberalism in America, by a more modest, conciliatory and technocratic sensibility. Even the most liberal justices today have little appetite for the old approach.

Judicial liberalism, in other words, has largely become a conservative project: an effort to preserve the legal status quo in the face of efforts by a younger generation of conservatives to uproot the precedents of the past 40 years. Stevens, who wrote or supported many of those precedents, understandably objects when he feels they are distorted or mischaracterized by justices who were in college when he was appointed to the court. At the same time, merely conserving the achievements of the past is less than what many liberals today ultimately hope for. Can Stevens provide a model for a new vision of legal liberalism in the 21st century?

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Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, is a frequent contributor to the magazine. He is the author most recently of “The Supreme Court: The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America.”

Correction: September 22, 2007

An article on Page 50 of The Times Magazine this weekend about Justice John Paul Stevens misstates the university from which he received his undergraduate degree. It was the University of Chicago, not Northwestern.

"The Nine"

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/9/23/121120/629

why, why, why do I always feel the need to click on links to stupid stuff from Kos. I always feel the need to take a shower to wash the sewage off afterwards. It's not even amusing anymore that there are that many certifiably insane people on these internets. It makes me despair for this country and this world.

Courtesy of How Appealing,

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-mukasey24sep24,0,35...

"Don't rush Mukasey's confirmation. The president as well as Senate Democrats should not be hasty in confirming a new attorney general."

"Ironically, Bush himself has removed a justification for fast-tracking the confirmation process. Last Monday, the president announced that the Justice Department would be run temporarily not by Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, the government's chief lawyer in the Supreme Court, but by Assistant Atty. Gen. Peter D. Keisler. That means the Senate can give due consideration to Mukasey's qualifications without distracting Clement from his duties at the court, which begins its new term on Oct. 1."

All this sounds fine with me. The longer the Dems delay Mukasey, the longer Keisler stays as Acting AG and the more experience he gains, experience that can only add depth to his already spectacular resume.

It will give Dems more ammunition to filibuster any future nomination of him, since he'll be participating in the Bush/Gonzales cover-up instead of following the Constitutional requirement that he abet all fishing expeditions by the opposing party.

Interesting article on that fact that a few federal judges are stepping down to pay higher paying jobs in the private sector. Interesting stat: "Resignations once were rare because few judges gave up the lifetime posts. Only three left from 1958 to 1969. Since 2000, there have been 51, and 17 others are projected to leave through 2009."

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20070924/1a_lede24.art.htm

I also learned from the article that District Judge Paul Cassell of Utah resigned from the bench on Friday, citing salary as a factor (he has three kids). He sounds like a real loss. Only 48, he clerked for Scalia on the DC Circuit and Berger at the SCOTUS.

Sorry 'bout that, but I figure we need to know what we're up against.

Does anyone know what the basis is for the charge that Scalia & Thomas should've recused themselves from BvG, that I see endlessly over there? I need a good laugh.