What better place to start a new month?
"Weighty Supreme Court docket focuses on questions of equality" by Adam Liptak |
New York Times, September 30, 2012
WASHINGTON — The coming term will probably include major decisions on affirmative
action in higher education admissions, same-sex marriage, and a
challenge to the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those rulings
could easily rival the last term’s as the most consequential in recent
memory.
The theme this term is the nature of equality, and it will play out over issues that have bedeviled the nation for decades....
The term will also provide signals about the repercussions of Chief
Justice John G. Roberts’s surprise decision in June to join the court’s
four more liberal members and supply the decisive fifth vote in the
landmark decision to uphold President Obama’s health care law.
Related: Roberts Reversal Led to Obamacare
Every decision of the new term will be scrutinized for signs of
whether Roberts, who had been a reliable member of the court’s
conservative wing, has moved toward the ideological center of the court....
The texture of the new term will be different, as the court’s
attention shifts from federalism and the economy to questions involving
race and sexual orientation. The new issues before the court are
concrete and consequential: Who gets to go to college? To get married?
To vote?
I've so had it with the division while the war-profiteers and Wall Street looters rob us all blind.
As for the vote, does it matter when it just goes into a rigged machine?
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And just in time to make us forget about those issues and focus on another argument that is brought up every four years:
"Election’s winner may shape Supreme Court; Vacancies likely within next 4 years" by Alan Wirzbicki |
Globe Staff, October 01, 2012
Deeply divided, held in low esteem by the public, and battered by
harsh criticism from both left and right, the US Supreme Court returns
to work on Monday amid speculation that its makeup and ideological
balance could change, perhaps significantly, depending on who is elected
president in November.
The nine justices have an average age of 67. Several have battled
health problems, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and
Ruth Bader Ginsburg will pass their 80th birthdays in the next four
years. Though court-watchers tend to tiptoe around discussions of the
longevity of justices, who have lifetime appointments, they say it would
be no surprise if more than one were to retire in the next four years.
Which justices leave — and whether President Obama or Mitt Romney
wins the chance to nominate their replacements — could tip the balance
on a court that has issued a string of 5-to-4 decisions on contentious
issues, culminating in the ruling in June that enraged conservatives by
upholding Obama’s signature health care legislation....
It'$ a corporate court ju$t a$ it i$ a corporate government.
“It’s one of the president’s most lasting legacies,” said Susan Low
Bloch, a professor at Georgetown Law Center. “It’s amazing to me that
people don’t pay more attention.”
For now, the Supreme Court is focused on its fall agenda: affirmative action, same-sex
marriage, abortion rights, and the scope of environmental and business
regulations....
When are the war crimes cases being heard?
A retired justice, John Paul Stevens, has suggested that the court may also have to revisit
its controversial 2010 ruling that lifted limits on corporate and union
spending in elections, a decision that infuriated many liberals.
The public’s opinion of the court, meanwhile, is low: a Gallup poll
published Friday found only 49 percent of Americans approved of the
court’s performance, while 40 percent disapproved — up slightly from
earlier this year, but still one of the court’s lowest ratings since the
polling organization began asking in 2000.
Related: A Supremely Unpopular Court
Obama appointed two justices — Sonia Sotomayor in 2009 and Elena
Kagan in 2010 — but neither reshaped the court, both replacing
relatively liberal-leaning jurists.
Obama’s appointees have disappointed some of his own supporters, who
view the choices as competent but uninspired and lacking the ideological
fire of the court’s conservative members. He has also faced criticism
for filling lower-court vacancies too slowly, though the president’s
defenders say that has more to do with a broken confirmation process in
the Senate.
They should be used to that by now.
Romney has pledged to use any Supreme Court nominations to tilt the
court further to the right, continuing an aggressive effort by recent
Republican presidents to install conservative justices.
“Republican presidents have made it a greater priority to appoint
conservative Supreme Court justices than Democratic presidents have made
it to appoint liberal Supreme Court justices,” said Richard H. Fallon, a
constitutional law professor at Harvard Law School. “That’s not to say
Democrats haven’t nominated liberals, but if you plotted people along a
spectrum, Republicans have appointed justices that were significantly
further to the right than their predecessors.
“If Romney were elected, I would expect that pattern to continue.”
Romney’s rhetoric and the composition of his legal advisory team
would support that. He has promised to nominate judges “in the mold of
Chief Justice Roberts,” who supported Obama’s health care law but is
generally part of the court’s conservative wing.
And his circle of advisers is packed with prominent conservative
scholars, led by Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon, a passionate
opponent of abortion rights and same-sex marriage and former ambassador
to the Vatican, and Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee whose
rejection by the Senate in 1987 made him an icon in conservative legal
circles.
Also see: Romney's Law
Romney’s track record in Massachusetts, however, suggests a more pragmatic streak. A Globe review in 2005 of his state court picks as governor found more than half were either Democrats or unaffiliated.
In an interview at the time, Romney said that because of the nature
of the cases lower-court judges handle, he wasn’t concerned about their
ideological background and instead was seeking nominees who had strong
legal experience and would be tough on crime.
Legal specialists said that because those judges rarely deal with
cases about charged social issues and complex regulatory matters,
Romney’s selections provided little insight into the kinds of federal
judges and Supreme Court justices he might choose.
“I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from his appointments in
Massachusetts,” said Robert M. Bloom, a law professor at Boston College.
The only exception, he said, might have been if....
And you would know what "might have been if" I decided to keep reading this pos article.
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The way it is looking now the Supreme Court won't have to decide the next president.
