Friday, April 6, 2012

Re: Maureen Dowd: (Supreme) Men in Black

But it isn't conservative to overturn a major law passed by Congress
in the middle of an election.

Gee TOMMYTOMTOM..... with this as your summation it looks like DOMA
should stay in place....


On Apr 5, 2:26 pm, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Men in Black
>
> Maureen Dowd
> NY Times Op-Ed: April 4, 2012
>
> WASHINGTON
>
> How dare President Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that?
> Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our
> venerable system of checks and balances?
>
> Nah. And why should he?
>
> This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV,
> accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way
> to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history.
>
> It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased,
> honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in
> black robes.
>
> All the fancy diplomas of the conservative majority cannot disguise
> the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting
> Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal
> brief.
>
> President Obama never should have waded into the health care thicket
> back when the economy was teetering. He should have listened to David
> Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and not Michelle.
>
> His failure from the start to sell his plan or even explain it is
> bizarre and self-destructive. And certainly he needs a more persuasive
> solicitor general.
>
> Still, it was stunning to hear Antonin Scalia talking like a Senate
> whip during oral arguments last week on the constitutionality of the
> health care law. He mused on how hard it would be to get 60 votes to
> repeal parts of the act, explaining why the court may just throw out
> the whole thing. And, sounding like a campaign's oppo-research guy, he
> batted around politically charged terms like "Cornhusker Kickback,"
> referring to a sweetheart deal that isn't even in the law.
>
> If he's so brilliant, why is he drawing a risible parallel between
> buying health care and buying broccoli?
>
> The justices want to be above it all, beyond reproach or criticism.
> But why should they be?
>
> In 2000, the Republican majority put aside its professed disdain of
> judicial activism and helped to purloin the election for W., who went
> on to heedlessly invade Iraq and callously ignore Katrina.
>
> As Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times back then, "Deciding a case of
> this magnitude with such disregard for reason invites people to treat
> the court's aura of reason as an illusion."
>
> The 2010 House takeover by Republicans and the G.O.P. presidential
> primary have shown what a fiasco the Citizens United decision is, with
> self-interested sugar daddies and wealthy cronies overwhelming the
> democratic process.
>
> On Monday, the court astoundingly ruled — 5 Republican appointees to 4
> Democratic appointees — to give police carte blanche on
> strip-searches, even for minor offenses such as driving without a
> license or violating a leash law. Justice Stephen Breyer's warning
> that wholesale strip-searches were "a serious affront to human dignity
> and to individual privacy" fell on deaf ears. So much for the
> conservatives' obsession with "liberty."
>
> The Supreme Court mirrors the setup on Fox News: There are liberals
> who make arguments, but they are weak foils, relegated to the
> background and trying to get in a few words before the commercials.
>
> Just as in the Senate's shameful Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings,
> the liberals on the court focus on process and the conservatives focus
> on results. John Roberts Jr.'s benign beige facade is deceiving; he's
> a crimson partisan, simply more cloaked than the ideologically rigid
> and often venomous Scalia.
>
> Just as Scalia voted to bypass that little thing called democracy and
> crown W. president, so he expressed ennui at the idea that, even if
> parts of the health care law are struck down, some provisions could be
> saved: "You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?" he asked,
> adding: "Is this not totally unrealistic?"
>
> Inexplicably mute 20 years after he lied his way onto the court,
> Clarence Thomas didn't ask a single question during oral arguments for
> one of the biggest cases in the court's history.
>
> When the Supreme Court building across from the Capitol opened in
> 1935, the architect, Cass Gilbert, played up the pomp, wanting to
> reflect the court's role as the national ideal of justice.
>
> With conservatives on that court trying to block F.D.R., and with
> Roosevelt prepared to pack the court, the New Yorker columnist Howard
> Brubaker noted that the new citadel had "fine big windows to throw the
> New Deal out of."
>
> Now conservative justices may throw Obama's hard-won law out of those
> fine big windows. They've already been playing Twister, turning
> precedents into pretzels to achieve their political objective. In
> 2005, Scalia was endorsing a broad interpretation of the commerce
> clause and the necessary and proper clause, the clauses now coming
> under scrutiny from the majority, including the swing vote, Justice
> Anthony Kennedy. (Could the dream of expanded health care die at the
> hands of a Kennedy?)
>
> Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and the insufferable Samuel Alito were
> nurtured in the conservative Federalist Society, which asserts that
> "it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what
> the law is, not what it should be."
>
> But it isn't conservative to overturn a major law passed by Congress
> in the middle of an election. The majority's political motives are as
> naked as a strip
>
> More:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/04/opinion/dowd-men-in-black.html?nl=t...
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy

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