Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

[vt]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

How are the Republicans obstructionist when Schumer called for the same thing in 2007, nineteen months before the election?

Both parties are corrupt.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/14/fl...t-nominations/

[vt]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

Truman wasn't a failure. He served in the military, managed a family farm, served in Missouri government, and was in the U.S. Senate.

He was a great President at a critical time in world history.

Grant was a wartime general but ranked in the lower third as a U.S. President.

Bernie doesn't hold a candle to Truman. Harry Truman is probably one of the two best Presidents of the last 70 years.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

How are the Republicans obstructionist when Schumer called for the same thing in 2007, nineteen months before the election?

Both parties are corrupt.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/14/fl...t-nominations/

Not exactly.

In 2007, Schumer spoke to the American Constitution Society.

He argued that the Senate should "..reverse the presumption of confirmation...", and expect to vote no to anyone with either a scant record ( like Thomas) or someone likely to be out of the mainstream (like Alto).
He said he will be more skeptical and be prepared to vote "no".

That's a long, long way from saying a president should not select anyone at all and just leave it to the next president.


Here is that whole 27 minute speech

http://<iframe width="854" height="4...n=""></iframe>

[santafe2]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

I know, the right is still bitter over Bork.

They should be happy, instead of just being dead, he became a verb. As in, dude, your car is totally borked. The polite translation is that something is broken.

I love hand wringing Republicans like Marco Rubio who said, “In the last year of a president’s term, in his second term especially, there should not be Supreme Court nominees put into lifetime positions for a president that you’re not going to hold accountable at the ballot box.”

One assumes he means like Reagan did with Justice Kennedy...after he borked the Bork and the short lived Ginsburg nomination.

[vt]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

This is the key statement. Not 100% that no one would be confirmed but clear it would be a very rare nominee that would get through.

“‘We should reverse the presumption of confirmation,’ Schumer told the American Constitution Society convention in Washington. ‘The Supreme Court is dangerously out of balance. We cannot afford to see Justice [John Paul] Stevens replaced by another [Chief Justice John] Roberts, or Justice [ Ruth Bader] Ginsburg by another [ Samuel] Alito.’” Mr. Schumer went on to say that he would recommend to his Senate colleagues “that we should not confirm any Bush nominee to the Supreme Court except in extraordinary circumstances.”

[jk]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

i guess you guys are never going to get tired of this dems vs republicans thing. it's tiresome. i loathe the republicans more, but the democrats imo are hardly saints.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

Scalia And Leonard Nimoy

"My friends, it's Saturday night, this is an emergency transmission. Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia died earlier today at a ranch outside Big Bend in South Texas. ... The question is, was Anthony Scalia murdered?"

So begins conservative talk show host Alex Jones' Internet video. Jones then quickly answered his dramatic query "Has the Bill of Rights and the Constitution been murdered?" Yes, he says, yes they have.

Jones' video has been watched more than 400,000 times and served as a national wake-up call for those who can't/won't/don't believe that Scalia died of natural causes.

"This is the season of treason," Jones says in the broadcast. "This is the time of betrayal. ... We know there is a foreign offshore coup over this country. ... This is hard-core." When law enforcement authorities quickly reported that Scalia's death appeared to be from natural causes, that was a major red flag for Jones. "I wonder if Clarence Thomas will die of a heart attack next week?" he asked, the skepticism emanating from his eyes.

The death of a great conservative justice was bad enough, but when the cause of death was established over the phone by a local justice of the peace — which is legal in Texas — and no autopsy was ordered, the second-guessing started. That Scalia reportedly was found with a pillow over his head didn't help matters.

The parody website HardDawn.com: Because Morning in America Won't Be Easy, which calls itself "the Internet's preëminent literary journal of prepping, patriotism and prophecy," took up the call: Did Leonard Nimoy Have Antonin Scalia Killed to Give Obama Enough Supreme Court Votes to Cancel the 2016 Election?

Here's how it's going to go: The Republican Party is waiting until Hillary Clinton is nominated to turn over to the FBI reams of documents that implicate the former secretary of state so profoundly that the Department of Justice will have little choice but to indict her. That's when President Obama will be forced to step in and cancel the presidential election to save the Democrats. Without Scalia, the U.S. Supreme Court will be helpless to stop it.

You're probably thinking, "Isn't Leonard Nimoy dead?" That's what Spock wants you to believe. HardDawn explains he's actually been consolidating Illuminati power since faking his own death. And Nimoy, referred to as "the Pinnacle of the Draco," is the "wild card" in a plot to assassinate Scalia.

(I, myself, always liked Captain Kirk better.)

In the world of conspiracy theories it's hard to separate the parody from the true believers. But if you believe these notions are all sound and fury signifying nothing, think again. They eventually compelled Presidio County Judge Cinderela Guevara to make public Scalia's private health information as told to her by the justice's doctor, Rear Adm. Brian Monahan. The doctor told her Scalia had a history of heart disease and high blood pressure so significant that surgery to repair an injured shoulder couldn't be risked.

This may be why his family was not interested in an autopsy, simply grateful for the peaceful circumstances of his demise.

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-...rt-nominations

snip...

If it is possible to find a postwar date for all this ugliness, it would be the early Nixon Administration, starting with the Senate’s refusal to confirm the elevation of Associate Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice, followed by Fortas’s resignation, in May, 1969. Six months later, Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., Nixon’s first choice to replace Fortas, was rejected outright by the Senate—the first such rejection since 1930. When Nixon tried again with G. Harrold Carswell, a federal judge, the Senate, in April, 1970, turned the President down again. In both cases, the nay votes were prompted by the nominees’ suspected views on segregation—both were opposed by civil-rights groups—and in Carswell’s case, by a disturbing lack of qualifications. As if in revenge, Gerald R. Ford, who was then the House Minority Leader, led an impeachment effort against the seventy-one-year-old Justice William O. Douglas, who had served on the court since being appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, in March, 1939.

Ford’s impeachment crusade broke new ground, not least because it was so rare: the first and only impeachment of a Supreme Court justice was in 1804, during Thomas Jefferson’s Administration (Samuel Chase, the judicial target, was not convicted by the Senate.) Speaking from the well of the House, on April 15, 1970, Ford went after Douglas on grounds that were petty, spiteful, and prissy—and had a lot to do with Douglas’s messy personal life, which included four marriages and three divorces; the two latest marriages were to women more than forty years younger than Douglas. “The Constitution,” Ford said, “does not guarantee a lifetime of power and authority to any public official” who does not exhibit “good behavior.” He insisted that it wasn’t personal—that Douglas’s “private life, to the degree that it does not bring the Supreme Court into disrepute, is his own business.” Yet Ford acted personally offended when he mentioned Douglas’s free-speech defense of the magazine Eros and “the filthy film, ‘I Am Curious Yellow’ ”—a once-daring Swedish import—and the fact that Douglas had written for a magazine whose table of contents included an article “provocatively entitled ‘The Decline and Fall of the Female Breast.’ ” Ford finally could not restrain himself: after considering Douglas’s involvement with “pornographic publications and espousal of hippie-yippie style revolution I was inclined to dismiss his fractious behavior as the first sign of senility.”

[vt]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

Alex Jones is a true idiot.

Scalia smoked and was clearly overweight. At 79 with his history of heart disease and high blood pressure it's clear his death was from natural causes.

And there was no pillow over his head; it was in back of it up against the headboard.

[santafe2]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

i guess you guys are never going to get tired of this dems vs republicans thing. it's tiresome. i loathe the republicans more, but the democrats imo are hardly saints.

Unfortunately jk you have the party of the oligarchs and the party navigating the oligarchs minefield and attempting to do that without becoming irrelevant. Today's Republican party has a moral hierarchy that begins and ends with money and power. This wasn't true 25 years ago. Bush senior paid with his political life by ending the first Iraq War. He was hardly a saint but by modern US political standards, he certainly did more good than harm. I feel the same way about Obama, hardly a saint but he's done much more good than harm. As we look at the trajectory of the Republican party over the last 25 years, it's objectively terrifying. One can only imagine Dickensian poverty for the majority of US citizens if they gain control of all three branches of the US government.

You have to ask yourself if you're willing to live with a Supreme Court populated by another racist like Scalia or Bork or would you rather we had a court who will likely overturn Citizens United and a few other wrong headed decisions by the Roberts court. It may be tiresome but I'd prefer we had a less 19th Century, Dred Scott makes sense to me, Supreme Court.

If you can read Scalia's or most other Republican appointees opinions and not be alarmed I'll be surprised. Then read the opinions of Obama's two appointees. Read the opinions of Justice Kennedy. Then read the opinions and idiotic ideology of Justice Thomas. With a Republican in 2016, you're going to get Thomas on steroids.

We don't yet know who Obama will nominate but I guarantee you it will be someone of the highest judicial caliber. Of course they'll be from Harvard or Yale or maybe Columbia but as you pointed out, they're hardly saints.

[Ellen Z]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

I feel the same way about Obama, hardly a saint but he's done much more good than harm.

See this recent column by David Brooks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/09/op...id-brooks&_r=0

"As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama. Now, obviously I disagree with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions. I’ve been disappointed by aspects of his presidency. I hope the next presidency is a philosophic departure.
But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply."

[vt]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

It's all politics and they all change their stories:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...ourt-nominees/

[jk]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

Unfortunately jk you have the party of the oligarchs and the party navigating the oligarchs minefield and attempting to do that without becoming irrelevant. Today's Republican party has a moral hierarchy that begins and ends with money and power. This wasn't true 25 years ago. Bush senior paid with his political life by ending the first Iraq War. He was hardly a saint but by modern US political standards, he certainly did more good than harm. I feel the same way about Obama, hardly a saint but he's done much more good than harm. As we look at the trajectory of the Republican party over the last 25 years, it's objectively terrifying. One can only imagine Dickensian poverty for the majority of US citizens if they gain control of all three branches of the US government.

You have to ask yourself if you're willing to live with a Supreme Court populated by another racist like Scalia or Bork or would you rather we had a court who will likely overturn Citizens United and a few other wrong headed decisions by the Roberts court. It may be tiresome but I'd prefer we had a less 19th Century, Dred Scott makes sense to me, Supreme Court.

If you can read Scalia's or most other Republican appointees opinions and not be alarmed I'll be surprised. Then read the opinions of Obama's two appointees. Read the opinions of Justice Kennedy. Then read the opinions and idiotic ideology of Justice Thomas. With a Republican in 2016, you're going to get Thomas on steroids.

We don't yet know who Obama will nominate but I guarantee you it will be someone of the highest judicial caliber. Of course they'll be from Harvard or Yale or maybe Columbia but as you pointed out, they're hardly saints.

my point was different. yes, these are consequential issues. otoh, can you point me to evidence that because of discussions here at itulip, one single person has changed his/her mind about anything political?

i have been a member since may, 2006 - about 10 years now - and can't think of single example. thus i suggest we not bother with these particular discussions. if you want to talk about the supreme court, certainly there are issues of consequence which may well be decided by the vote of scalia's eventual successor. i suppose we could talk about those issues, but i'm not sure anyone her has much to add about those.

i have learned a lot from various contributors to this community. i can't recall learning anything from these political debates. i should practice what i preach, and thus i regret dragging presidential politics into this thread. i will try to refrain from participation in any more political discussion. i get sucked in because of the importance of the issues, and they do relate to economic topics discussed here via things like bank regulation, monetary and fiscal policy and their consequences.

but iirc ej has on occasion said something along the lines that he's not in the prescribing solutions to economic problems business, he's in the predicting what's going to happen and what is going to be done by those with power business. i think that is a wise position to take and i'm going to do my best to restrain myself and join him in that attitude.

[shiny!]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

my point was different. yes, these are consequential issues. otoh, can you point me to evidence that because of discussions here at itulip, one single person has changed his/her mind about anything political?

i have been a member since may, 2006 - about 10 years now - and can't think of single example. thus i suggest we not bother with these particular discussions. if you want to talk about the supreme court, certainly there are issues of consequence which may well be decided by the vote of scalia's eventual successor. i suppose we could talk about those issues, but i'm not sure anyone her has much to add about those.

i have learned a lot from various contributors to this community. i can't recall learning anything from these political debates. i should practice what i preach, and thus i regret dragging presidential politics into this thread. i will try to refrain from participation in any more political discussion. i get sucked in because of the importance of the issues, and they do relate to economic topics discussed here via things like bank regulation, monetary and fiscal policy and their consequences.

but iirc ej has on occasion said something along the lines that he's not in the prescribing solutions to economic problems business, he's in the predicting what's going to happen and what is going to be done by those with power business. i think that is a wise position to take and i'm going to do my best to restrain myself and join him in that attitude.

Thank you, jk!

[santafe2]

Re: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Dead

Jeffery Toobin, The New Yorker Magazine

The death of Antonin Scalia has returned the Supreme Court, and the federal
judiciary as a whole, to the center of American political culture. President
Barack Obama has made clear that he will exercise his constitutional authority
to make a nomination to fill Scalia’s seat on the Court, and the Republican
leadership of the Senate has been equally adamant that it will block a vote on
any Obama nominee. This standoff is hardly an aberration. It is simply a
continuation of the trench warfare that has defined the President’s
relationship with the Republicans in Congress. On nominations to the Supreme
Court and for other judicial vacancies, the rule has been simple. The side with
the most brute force has won.

The preliminary results of an exhaustive study of this
President’s impact on the judiciary, to be published in the Journal of Law and
Courts, elaborate on this point. The authors, Elliot Slotnick,Sheldon Goldman,
and Sara Schiavoni, suggest that the struggle over confirming
judges represents an apt metaphor for the Obama Presidency as a whole: modest
progress in the face of implacable Republican hostility.


Obama has appointed three hundred and twenty-three of the eight hundred and
seventy-five federal judges now sitting—two of nine Supreme Court justices,
fifty-five of a hundred and seventy-nine appeals-court judges, two hundred and
sixty-four of six hundred and seventy-eight district-court judges, and two of
nine Court of International Trade judges.

His numbers are roughly comparable with those of recent two-term Presidents.
George W. Bush had three hundred and twenty-five judges confirmed, Bill Clinton
had three hundred and seventy-three, and Ronald Reagan had three hundred and
seventy-six—the most of any President in history. The touchstone of Obama’s
judicial nominations has been diversity—of gender, race, and sexual
orientation.

In an interview in 2014,Obama told me that diversity was a central concern in choosing justices. “I
think there are some particular groups that historically have been
underrepresented—like Latinos and Asian-Americans—that represent a larger and
larger portion of the population. And so for them to be able to see folks in
robes that look like them is going to be important. When I came into office, I
think there was one openly gay judge who had been appointed. We’ve appointed
ten.” Women constituted forty-seven percent of Obama’s judicial appointees,
compared with twenty-five percent for President George W. Bush; thirty percent
of Obama’s appointees were white males, compared with sixty-four percent for
Bush; nineteen percent were African-American, compared with ten percent for
Bush. (President Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, does appear to have a
weakness for his fellow Ivy Leaguers. The authors note that, of the past five
Administrations, Obama’s had the highest proportion of appointees who had
received an Ivy League undergraduate and law-school education.)

Obama’s record is particularly notable because, when it
came to judges, Obama frittered away much of his first two years in office,
when the Democrats had a commanding majority in the Senate. (The 2010 midterms
made the margin much slimmer.) The President was clearly derelict in this
period, failing to push judges into the confirmation pipeline. Since then, the
process has been a remarkable slog. As the authors write, “Republican
obstruction and delay in the Senate during the 113th Congress, despite the
Democratic majority, made the confirmation of judges an obstacle course,
particularly for the district courts, taking obstruction to levels not seen
before the Obama presidency.” This, in turn, prompted Senate Democrats, led by
Harry Reid, to invoke the “nuclear option” in late 2013, which barred
filibusters on lower-court judges. With Democrats then in the majority in the
Senate, they could push through Obama’s nominees without any Republican
support. The authors conclude that it was only because of the nuclear option
that Obama was able to seat so many judges, especially in 2013 and 2014. “As a
result of the so-called nuclear option, the confirmation rate for the
president’s appeals court nominees in the 113th Congress was the highest in
about 25 years,” with twenty of twenty-two appeals-court judges confirmed, the
authors write, noting likewise that “the overwhelming majority of the district
court nominees who were confirmed in the 113th Congress were seated after the
invocation of the nuclear option and in 2014.”


As a result of the 2014 elections, of course, the Democrats
lost their majority in the Senate altogether, and thus their control of the
judicial-nomination process. Not surprisingly, even before Justice Scalia’s
death, Republicans had slowed the judicial-nomination process to a crawl. Even
by the standards of the last two years of Presidential second terms, the Senate
has confirmed a very small number of lower-court judges, including only one for
the Circuit Courts. This is the pattern of the Obama years: the party in power
exercises that power to the fullest possible extent. Without a majority in the
Senate, the Democrats are getting few judges confirmed—and, it appears almost
certain, no Supreme Court Justices.


The bald assertion by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate,
that he and his colleagues will refuse to consider, much less confirm, any
Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, fits precisely in this pattern. Reid had
the power to invoke the nuclear option, and he did it; McConnell has the power
to protect the Scalia seat, and he is doing it, at least until the next
election. It is thus clearer than ever that the future of the judiciary is
decided at the ballot box, not in the courtroom.