Re: Maureen Dowd: (Supreme) Men in Black

There is no SUBSTANCE in this tirade.

The election nonsense provided a correct decision but incorrect citation.
AIIS1C2 provides: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors ..."
The Florida Legislature provided such a Manner. The Florida Court sought to provide their own Manner. The supreme Court said ... nope.
Why is this so difficult to grasp?

Similarly, Amendment X provides: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The Health Care legislation in question -- like so many other usurpations -- has no delegation of power upon which to stand.

Why Dowd does not provide SUBSTANCE is likely because there is no SUBSTANCE upon which she can stand.

Regard$,
--MJ

To "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the States, and with the Indian tribes." To erect a bank, and to regulate commerce, are very different acts. He who erects a bank, creates a subject of commerce in its bills; so does he who makes a bushel of wheat, or digs a dollar out of the mines; yet neither of these persons regulates commerce thereby. To make a thing which may be bought and sold, is not to prescribe regulations for buying and selling. Besides, if this was an exercise of the power of regulating commerce, it would be void, as extending as much to the internal commerce of every State, as to its external. For the power given to Congress by the Constitution does not extend to the internal regulation of the commerce of a State, (that is to say of the commerce between citizen and citizen,) which remain exclusively with its own legislature; but to its external commerce only, that is to say, its commerce with another State, or with foreign nations, or with the Indian tribes. Accordingly the bill does not propose the measure as a regulation of trade, but as "productive of considerable advantages to trade." Still less are these powers covered by any other of the special enumerations. -- Thomas Jefferson

 

On Thursday, April 5, 2012 4:26:08 PM UTC-4, Tommy News 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=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120404

--

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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