Showing posts with label scotus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scotus. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

THE SET-UP.

Remember when King v. Burwell came down, and conservatives cried blackmail? Actually it's gotten to the point where every time Roberts rules against them, conservatives assume it's blackmail.

Well, today I saw this from the Ole Perfesser Instapundit:
JESSE WALKER: Whatever Happened To Jim Webb? The populist Democrat and his barely-visible campaign. At a guess, Hillary’s got some dirt on him.
I know the Clintons are rich, but I'd advise Hillary to start a little higher up the Enemies List if she's going start blackmailing people. Why waste perfectly good Clinton Crime Family blood money on Jim Webb?

I think I'm pretty cynical, but if I started seeing the world this way I'd have myself committed.

Monday, June 29, 2015

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

At the seething cauldron of post-gay-marriage panic that is Power Line, Paul Mirengoff has a theory, important enough to be expounded in not one but two posts. How could a court with all these Reagan-Bush appointees so disappoint Mirengoff as this one did? For one thing,
It’s commonly acknowledged that the trajectory for young men is to move to the right as they begin to assume the responsibilities of adulthood, including paying mortgages and helping to support and raise children.
But Supreme Court Justices are almost always past age 50 when they are appointed. By then, the children are, or soon will be, raised; the mortgage has, or soon will be, paid off; and the Justices are looking forward to grandchildren.
These developments shouldn’t drive anyone to the left, but I believe the aging process itself often does. Why? Because conservatism, especially conservative judging, is predicated on the absence of a certain kind of sentimentality (I say “certain kind” because there is a sense in which the main strand of conservatism is quite sentimental). It is predicated on not letting “feelings” dominate the decision-making process...
Let me see if I'm getting this: Men get more rightwing as they age, except for some of them, who grow childish-foolish and want to be nice like the Bird Lady in Mary Poppins. But why would lawyers, of all people, be the ones to go "sentimental"? Anyway:
The same-sex marriage opinions illustrate the point. Justice Kennedy’s opinion overflows with sentiment. It is sappy. (Kennedy’s sentiments, by the way, are in line with those of Mr. Conservative, Barry Goldwater, the classic example of a conservative who moved leftward in his advanced years).
Yeah, Goldwater's gay rights stand wasn't a natural outgrowth of his libertarianism, it was just senile dementia... Hey, wait a minute, Goldwater was never a lawyer. Why didn't he get more conservative?
...The Obamacare cases also were arguably influenced by age. Forget about what Justice Scalia calls the the Chief Justice’s “sommersaults of statutory interpretation.” In my view, Roberts’ opinions are really about caution. In the first case (on the individual mandate), he was at pains not to overrule the legislature. In the second (on subsidies), he was desperate not to upset the health insurance market.
Caution is an attribute associated with advanced age.
So judges and Barry Goldwater, but not other people, get liberal as they get older, but some also get cautious... This isn't really hanging together, so for his follow-up post Mirengoff hauls in some guy  to spell it out: These judges who don't vote his way are just "soft," Some Guy says, partly because they "have essentially made it in life," but mainly because the evil spirit of liberalism steals upon them and drains their essence:
For virtually all my lifetime, liberalism has ruled the culture (including and importantly academia), and being a conservative just takes a lot of energy. For example, it is not only anti-male and anti-white bias that accounts for the fact that so many leftist airheads get jobs as professors; it’s that when you’re on board with the received liberal wisdom, you swim with the tide rather than against it. 
Swimming against it produces harder thinking (which is one important reason conservatives like debates and more often than not win them), but it also requires a lot of energy. Sooner of later, for most people, it starts to run out.
So liberalism challenges conservatives, thereby making them mentally stronger, but also physically weaker, which is how the Court's conservatives lost the secret Feats of Strength that actually decide their cases. (Ginsburg's thin but she's wiry!)

I guess Mirengoff's beginning to despair that he'll ever get on the High Court and has decided to grace his readers with his Scalia-grade bullshit. Or has the conservative breakdown reached the stage where they're just trying to confuse people?

Thursday, June 25, 2015

THE DEFEAT OF THE MOOPS.

Don't drink all the King v. Burwell tears, you'll get a stomach ache. However, please enjoy responsibly Wayne Root from Glenn Beck's The Blaze:


Is the idea implausible that this same Obama administration that orders IRS attacks, then orders destruction of key evidence, would stop at nothing to save Obama’s signature achievement? Is it impossible to believe that Obama and his socialist cabal that learned from Saul Alinsky that “the ends justify the means” would hold something over a Supreme Court justice’s head?... 
Just blackmail one or two key conservative leaders to stop the GOP from blocking Obama’s agenda. Just find out the weak link of a key opposition leader or government official and hold it over their heads. It’s that simple... 
Am I being too cynical? Really? Did anyone suspect former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was a child molester who commited crimes with underage boys?
No, no, I'm stuffed, positively stuffed...


Still hasn't had actual sex yet, I see. (Yeah, but would you rather believe he had, and still wrote that tweet?) As a digestif, how about some more-sorrow-than-anger nonsense from Matt Lewis:
The upsetting thing is that Roberts was essentially the poster child for what a conservative nominee was supposed to be — that is, if we were to avoid another stealth nominee (like Souter) or a failed one (like Robert Bork). Conservatives invested a lot of effort into creating the infrastructure that would incubate a young John Roberts — and then actually get him confirmed. His end of the bargain? Simply being the kind of justice who honors the rule of law and doesn’t legislate from the bench… And now this happens.
We raised him, incubated him to be impartial -- yet he ruled for someone other than us! That's it, next time we're using a Skinner Box. Also: To be fair, I haven't read the entire opinion, but I'm guessing Flopping Aces' hed "The Roberts Court renders all laws meaningless as written" is figurative.

This has all made me a bit light-headed; maybe I should steady myself with something dry and dull, like crackers, or this press release:
ObamaCare Decision Raises Issues Of Justices' Impeachment, Explains Larry Klayman
Well, that's it for me.
....Freedom Watch has grown especially concerned about the independence of the Supreme Court due to reports from a whistleblower that private information about Chief Justice John Roberts, and other judges and justices, were "harvested' illegally by the U.S. Government. Although it is illegal for the Central Intelligence Agency to operate within the domestic United States, a contractor whose company was hired to perform the "harvesting" for the CIA has come forward to blow the whistle. He claims to have proof that the CIA harvested personal and private information about Roberts and other federal judges and may be intimidating or subtly threatening the U.S. Supreme Court with the fear of personal attacks...
Hear that, Wayne? You've got some backup! Now we just need Sarah Palin or a backwoods preacher to step up and that'll make three, and we'll have a legit "questions remain" for Meet The Press.