We already knew that the 2000 election was stolen. This story only serves to show the reader how corruption in just one area of our Government can lead to eight years (plus) of total mayhem. One can easily argue that all the deaths that have and are still occurring in Iraq can squarely be placed on Scalia’s back. Knowing now that the Clinton administration left behind urgent information regarding Osama bin-Laden/Al-Qaeda, information totally ignored by the Bush administration, may very well have saved the lives of 3,000 Americans on 9/11/01, in a Gore administration. And I’m not even going to discuss republican greed nor GOP toe-tapping! You can draw your own conclusions.

Book says Souter almost left court

WASHINGTON - Justice David Souter contemplated resigning from the Supreme Court because he was so upset by the decision that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush, a new book says.

Souter, one of the four dissenting justices in the case, believed his five colleagues in the majority acted in a “crudely partisan” manner in siding with Bush to shut down the recount of votes in Florida in December 2000, author Jeffrey Toobin writes in “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.” A day after the decision in Bush v. Gore, Vice President Al Gore formally conceded the election.

“Souter seriously considered resigning. For many months, it was not at all clear whether he would remain as a justice,” Toobin writes. “At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude toward the court was never the same. There were times when David Souter thought of Bush v. Gore and wept.”

MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

Yahoo! News

I agree whole-heartedly with the above statement. So why does Fred Thompson and the entire Christian-right want to install judges that are all too happy to stick their noses in where they don’t belong? Isn’t pushing God social arbitration? Unwanted pregnancies can’t simply be swept under a rug. We tried that once already, and it failed miserably. (Mostly due to the way the Christian-right treated women of unplanned pregnancies… can you say “SHUNNED“?)

Fred, if you or anyone else doesn’t want to have an abortion, then DON’T! But keep your damn noses out of other people’s business. Try to have some respect for doctor/patient confidentiality and a woman’s right to choose, m’kay?

Thompson’s ‘virtual’ campaign experiencing real bumps

Former Sen. Fred Thompson makes a campaign appearance in Dallas last week.

WASHINGTON (CNN) – Have we been hearing good news or bad news about Fred Thompson’s campaign? The answer is yes.

Or make that the “virtual campaign.” Fred Thompson is not in the Republican race yet. He’s still building an organization and raising money — and hitting some bumps.

He keeps delaying his official announcement, now expected in September. Some staff members have quit.

Controversy has already arisen over the fact that Thompson once accepted a lobbying assignment for an abortion rights group. But his views and his Senate record are strongly anti-abortion, and has come out strongly against the “activist” judges that social conservatives rile against.
[...]

The Politico is reporting that Thompson raised a little over $3 million in June, a figure that will disappoint his supporters.

Bill Schneider, CNN Senior Political Analyst

CNN.com

By MARK SHERMAN

WASHINGTON - Chief Justice John Roberts suffered a seizure at his summer home in Maine on Monday, causing a fall that resulted in minor scrapes, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said.

He will remain in a hospital in Maine overnight.

Chief Justice John Roberts was taken by ambulance to a hospital on Monday after a fall on a dock near his summer home in Maine.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said she did not know how he fell or what injuries he might have suffered. She said he was taken to the hospital as a precaution.

Roberts, 52, bought a home last year in Port Clyde on Maine’s Hupper Island. Port Clyde, which is part of the town of St. George, is about 90 miles by car northeast of Portland, midway up the coast of Maine.

The incident occurred around 2 p.m. EDT, said St. George Fire Chief Tim Polky. Roberts was taken by private boat to the mainland and then transferred to an ambulance, Polky said.

“He was conscious and alert when they put him in the rescue (vehicle) and took him to Penobscot Bay Medical Center,” Polky said. A spokesman at the Rockport hospital did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press.

Named to the court by President Bush in 2005, Roberts is the youngest justice on a court in which the senior member, John Paul Stevens, is 87. Bush was informed of the hospitalization by his chief of staff, Josh Bolten, the White House said.

Roberts is the father of two young children.

By Emily Bazelon
SLATE Magazine online

And other ways for the legal left to rein in the Roberts Court.

The legal left is taking the summer to think. In the next few weeks, the American Constitutional Society and the YearlyKos Convention will host panels on the Supreme Court’s future and what the left can do about it. The short answer, of course, is cry. And then try to win the next election. But there is also a renewed effort to offer an alternative to the conservative vision that the Roberts Court has begun to fulfill-and also an alternative to the old quasi-liberal idea that it is judicial restraint and unity that will deliver the court from the right.

This is a long’standing project in the academy, and one that even Justice Stephen Breyer has weighed in on, in his book Active Liberty. In the wake of this year’s 5-4 conservative ascendance, however, fighting back-even if it won’t mean winning cases in the short-term-has an extra sense of urgency. And the discussion is especially welcome, because it’s time for the left to rethink the reliance on restraint and unity. For years, some left-leaning legal theorists have argued that constitutional law is best served if judges hesitate before striking down laws or imposing their own bold ideas on the country, and instead stick to narrow, fact-bound rulings that are more likely to achieve consensus. It works well enough in some cases and areas of law. But advocating for this approach has done little to stop the court and the law from moving to the right, and that’s not likely to change now.

There are, however, other promising signs of life on the left’signs that its legal scholars are looking for other ways to counter the court’s rightward intellectual underpinnings. This essay, just posted at the New Republic, picks up on arguments made by Akhil Amar and Jack Balkin that the left should wrestle fealty to the Constitution’s original intent from the right and reclaim it for the left. Yale law professors Robert Post and Reva Siegel’s new paper beats back the claim that the court’s totemic liberal decisions, Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, did more harm than good. And University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein has an upcoming essay in the American Prospect in which he points out how far to the right the composition of the current court has tilted when compared with the court of 1980-itself hardly the Warren Court of the previous decades.

read more at SLATE

By JOHN M. BRODER
from The New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 5 - After a concerted lobbying effort by property developers, mine owners and farm groups, the Bush administration scaled back proposed guidelines for enforcing a key Supreme Court ruling governing protected wetlands and streams.

The administration last fall prepared broad new rules for interpreting the decision, handed down by a divided Supreme Court in June 2006, that could have brought thousands of small streams and wetlands under the protection of the Clean Water Act of 1972. The draft guidelines, for example, would allow the government to protect marsh lands and temporary ponds that form during heavy rains if they could potentially affect water quality in a nearby navigable waterway.

But just before the new guidelines were to be issued last September, they were pulled back in the face of objections from lobbyists and lawyers for groups concerned that the rules could lead to federal protection of isolated and insignificant swamps, potholes and ditches.

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers, charged with enforcing the Clean Water Act, finally issued new guidelines last month, which environmental and recreational groups complained were much more narrowly drawn. These groups argue that the final guidelines will leave thousands of sensitive wetlands and streams unprotected.

The changes in wording between the September and June versions of the guidelines were subtle, hinging on broad scientific questions raised by the Supreme Court ruling over the nature of wetlands and natural drainage systems.

The most nettlesome of these issues was whether regulators need to show that a wetland is directly connected to a navigable body of water in deciding if they have jurisdiction to require permits under the Clean Water Act. The alternate reading, favored by environmental groups, is that it is enough to prove that a wetland or stream is part of a large watershed that drains into such waters.

Environmental advocates said the policy adopted in the June guidance reflected the concerns of developers and polluters and could have a profound effect on how federal water laws are applied.

read more at The New York Times

By Tony Mauro
First Amendment Center legal correspondent
from firstamendmentcenter.org

WASHINGTON - There are only 10 commandments, but it took the Supreme Court 138 pages of opinion to decide whether displays of those commandments belong on public property. And in spite of the verbiage, it all boiled down to the views of one justice: Stephen Breyer.

The Supreme Court splintered yesterday on the issue in Van Orden v. Perry and McCreary County v. ACLU, virtually guaranteeing further litigation. The justices said a Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds in Austin, Texas, could stay where it has been since 1961. But the Ten Commandments displays in two county courthouses in Kentucky, put up in 1999 with unabashed pro-Christian intent, had to come down.

How to reconcile the two decisions? At the strictly numerical level, the answer is Breyer. He was the only justice in the majority in both 5-4 cases.

But beyond that, Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky put it best yesterday: “Context is everything.” Chemerinsky argued before the high court against the Texas monument, and lost. Chemerinsky was pleased to have won the vote of O-Connor, who has voted on both sides of the church’state divide, but sorry to have lost Breyer, the deciding vote.

Indeed, context was the driving force in the Court’s decisions, and nothing made that clearer than the color photographs that were included in the Court’s opinions in the Texas case (see page 31 of Van Orden). Breyer’s concurring opinion, upholding the Texas display, includes a panoramic photo of the Capitol grounds that shows the Ten Commandments monument as a sliver of granite that can barely be picked out among an assortment of other memorials and lampposts. But dissenting Justice John Paul Stevens, who said flatly that the message of the memorial is that “this state endorses the divine code of the Judeo-Christian code,” included a very different photo (see page 63 of Van Orden) in which the face of the memorial, etched with the words of the Ten Commandments, almost fills the frame, with none of its surroundings visible.

For Breyer, the wide-range photo demonstrated one part of the crucial context. “The physical setting of the monument,” he wrote, “suggests little or nothing of the sacred…. The setting does not readily lend itself to meditation or any other religious activity. But it does provide a context of history and moral ideals.”

read more at The First Amendment Center

By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

WASHINGTON - Democratic presidential candidates stood united Thursday night against the Supreme Court and its historic ruling rolling back a half-century of school desegregation laws. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said the conservative court “turned the clock back” on history.

Sen. Barack Obama, the only black candidate in the eight-person field, spoke of civil rights leaders who fought for Brown v. Board of Education and other precedents curbed by the high court. “If it were not for them,” he said, “I would not be standing here.”

The 90-minute debate was the third gathering of the Democratic hopefuls in a presidential campaign that has gotten off to an unusually early start. While the first two debates focused on their narrow differences on Iraq, moderator Tavis Smiley promised to steer the candidates to other issues that matter to black America, including health care, education, criminal justice, police accountability, housing and voting rights.

The debate was held at Howard University, a historically black college in the nation’s capital.

Black voters are a large and critical part of the Democratic primary electorate, making the debate a must-attend for candidates seeking the party’s presidential nomination. Civil rights activist Al Sharpton and Princeton University scholar Cornel West were among those in the audience.

Segregation was not the only issue. In turn, the candidates discussed their hopes to stem poverty, close the economic gap between rich and poor, fight AIDS and overhaul a judicial system that doesn’t always seem colorblind.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

The Supreme Court is expected to issue rulings today, including a decision in the appeal of a Texas death row inmate whose lawyers argue should be spared from execution because he is mentally ill.

Any bets as to how the right-leaning court will rule?

PANETTI V. QUARTERMAN, No 06-6407
(Argued April 18, 2007)
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on January 5 to hear another death penalty case from Texas, this one involving a defendant who may be mentally incompetent. In 1986, the Supreme Court held that it is unconstitutional to execute an inmate who is presently insane. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that Scott Panetti, who was allowed to defend himself in his Texas trial despite his schizophrenia and 14 stints in mental hospitals, and who says the devil compelled his actions, was aware that he committed a crime and that he was to be punished. The question for the Supreme Court is whether mere awareness of one’s acts can be equated with mental competence, or whether the person also needs to rationally understand what is taking place. The National Alliance on Mental Illness had urged the Justices to take the case.

Read: (pdf)
Petitioner’s Cert. Petition.
Petitioner’s Brief
ABA Brief
Legal Historians’ Brief
Medical Association Brief

The Question presented is:

Does the Eighth Amendment permit the execution of a death row inmate who has a factual awareness of the reason for his execution but who, because of a severe mental illness, has a delusional belief as to why the State is executing him, and thus does not appreciate that his execution is intended to seek retribution for his capital crime?

Time for term limits on these folks. THROW THESE DAMN BUMS OUT NOW!

(Pete Yost)

Court bars suit against faith-based plan

President Bush, left, makes remarks on No Child Left Behind reauthorization in the East Room…

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration’s faith-based initiatives got a boost Monday from the Supreme Court: a ruling that ordinary taxpayers cannot sue to stop conferences that help religious charities apply for federal grants.

President Bush called the 5-4 decision “a substantial victory for efforts by Americans to more effectively aid our neighbors in need of help.”

The court blocked a lawsuit by a group of atheists and agnostics against eight Bush administration officials including the head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

The taxpayers set out “a parade of horribles” they contended could happen, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. None did and “in the unlikely event that any of these executive actions did take place, Congress could quickly step in,” he wrote.
[...]

The taxpayers’ group, the Freedom From Religion Foundation Inc., objected to government conferences in which administration officials encourage religious charities to apply for federal money.
[...]

In dissent, Justice David Souter said the court should have allowed the challenge to proceed.

The majority “closes the door on these taxpayers because the executive branch, and not the legislative branch, caused their injury,” wrote Souter. “I see no basis for this distinction.”

Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would have gone further that the rest of the court, favoring a repudiation of the 1968 decision that in certain instances allows taxpayer lawsuits.

“We had an opportunity today to erase this blot on our jurisprudence, but instead have simply smudged it,” Scalia wrote.

Story at Yahoo! News

By James Vicini
from Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A divided Supreme Court on Monday curtailed free’speech rights for students, ruling against a teenager who unfurled a banner saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” because the message could be interpreted as promoting drug use.

In its first major decision on student free’speech rights in nearly 20 years, the high court’s conservative majority ruled that a high school principal did not violate the student’s rights by confiscating the banner and suspending him.

The decision marked a continuing shift to the right by the court since President George W. Bush appointed Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. The court has issued a series of narrow 5-4 decisions on divisive social issues like abortion and the death penalty.

In another decision on Monday by the same 5-4 vote, the court ruled taxpayers cannot challenge Bush’s use of government funds to finance social programs operated by religious groups.

“Both of these First Amendment cases reflect the clear right-wing trend of the Roberts court. Unmistakably. Both are clearly wrong,” said Abner Greene, a Fordham University law professor.

In the school case, student Joseph Frederick said the banner’s language was meant to be nonsensical and funny, a prank to get on television as the Winter Olympic torch relay passed by the school in January 2002 in Juneau, Alaska.

But school officials say the phrase “bong hits” refers to smoking marijuana. Principal Deborah Morse suspended Frederick for 10 days because she said the banner advocated or promoted illegal drug use in violation of school policy.

The majority opinion written by Roberts agreed with Morse. He said a principal may restrict student speech at a school event when it is reasonably viewed as promoting illegal drug use.

read more at Reuters

from the “Haven’t They Got Anything Better To Work On” Department:

By DAVID STOUT
from The New York Times

WASHINGTON, June 18 - A passenger as well as a driver has the right to challenge the legality of a police officer’s decision to stop a car, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously today.

The ruling came in the case of Bruce E. Brendlin, who was a passenger in a car that was stopped by a deputy sheriff in Yuba City, Calif., on Nov. 27, 2001. The deputy soon ascertained that Mr. Brendlin was an ex-convict who was wanted for violating his parole. An ensuing search of the driver, the car and Mr. Brendlin turned up methamphetamine supplies.

Eventually, Mr. Brendlin pleaded guilty to a drug charge and drew a four-year prison sentence. But he continued to appeal on the issue of whether the evidence of drugs found on him resulted from an illegal search and should have been suppressed because of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The California Supreme Court found that, consitutionally speaking, only the driver had been “seized” by the stop, and that therefore Mr. Brendlin had no basis for challenging the search that turned up the drugs. The State of California made that argument again when the case was heard before the United States Supreme Court on April 23.

But Mr. Brendlin’s lawyer, Elizabeth M. Campbell, argued that when an officer makes a traffic stop, “he seizes not only the driver of the car, but also the car, and every person and every thing in that car.”

The justices agreed. “When police make a traffic stop, a passenger in the car, like the driver, is seized for Fourth Amendment purposes and so may challenge the stop’s constitutionality,” Justice David H. Souter wrote for the high court.

read more at THE NEW YORK TIMES

There are many considerations to take into account when voting. One of the most important, if not THE most important consideration is how a candidate would line the SCOTUS. You MUST ask yourself; do you want this country to progress forward or slam on the brakes, be thrown into reverse, and speed backwards… back into the dark ages? It really is that simple. “We the people…” is lost on some members of our society.

There are folks that continue to be forced to the “back of the bus”. The way you vote will determine if this sick aspect of our society can finally draw to a close, or if all the advancements that have been made this past century-and-a-half will be reversed.

What have Roberts and Alito wrought?

Frustrated on other fronts, Bush can claim some success on the high court
(Tom Curry, National affairs writer, MSNBC)

Members of the Supreme Court sit for a portrait last year, with Chief Justice Roberts center in front row and Justice Alito, far right in back row.

WASHINGTON - Iraq remains chaotic and immigration overhaul faces an uncertain fate.

But if President Bush wants to sing the old tune, “They can-t take that away from me” he can turn to the Supreme Court where his appointees Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito sit.

As the high court nears the end of its 2006-2007 term, the impact of Bush’s appointees is becoming clearer.
[...]

Former Reagan administration Justice Department official Doug Kmiec, who is professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University, said, “The headline of the term so far” is that “Anthony Kennedy in the presence of John Roberts and Sam Alito has rejoined the Reagan judicial philosophy.” (Reagan nominated Kennedy to the court in 1987.)
[...]

But several of the 5-to-4 decisions in which Roberts and Alito were in the majority have been on politically explosive topics:

* Abortion: In April, the court, in a ruling written by Kennedy, upheld a federal law banning a specific abortion procedure, called “intact dilation and evacuation” or “partial-birth abortion.” The justices said the statute was not invalid on its face, but could be challenged in specific cases in which a woman could show it would violate her rights under the court’s previous abortion rulings, such as Roe v Wade.
* Alleged sex discrimination: Last month, the court, in a decision called Ledbetter v. Goodyear, written by Alito, ruled that a woman who-d alleged sex discrimination in pay, had missed the deadline for filing her claims.
* Death penalty: Last month in upholding the death sentence of a man convicted of murder in Washington state, the court, in a ruling written by Kennedy, ruled that trial judges could exclude potential jurors who voiced qualms about capital punishment.

Full article at MSNBC.com

By Mark H. Anderson
from The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Philip Morris Cos. in its bid to move an Arkansas class-action lawsuit over the marketing of light cigarettes from state to federal court.

The opinion overturns a lower court ruling that had sided with the tobacco giant. The lawsuit, which has not yet been to trial, will now go back to lower courts and will likely be heard by a state court.

Philip Morris, a unit of Altria Group Inc., has been trying to get the case moved out of the Arkansas courts. Corporations prefer the uniform and sometimes tougher standards …

…took another hit this morning. Thank you, Mr. Bush.

The MONITOR:

Court Limits Suits on Pay Discrimination

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) – The Supreme Court on Tuesday limited workers’ ability to sue employers for pay discrimination that results from decisions made years earlier.

The court, in a 5-4 ruling, said that employers would otherwise find it difficult to defend against claims “arising from employment decisions that are long past.”

The case concerned how to apply a 180-day deadline for complaining about discriminatory pay decisions under Title VII of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Lilly Ledbetter sued Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., claiming that after 19 years at the company’s Gadsden, Ala., plant, she was making $6,000 a year less than the lowest-paid man doing the same work.

Ledbetter claimed the disparity existed for years and was primarily a result of her gender. A jury agreed, but an appeals court overturned the verdict because she had waited too long to begin her lawsuit.

The deadline set in the law means nothing if employees can reach back years to claim discrimination, the company argued to the court.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the court, agreed that Ledbetter’s claim was untimely.

The decision broke along ideological lines, with the court’s four liberal justices dissenting.

A case before the Supreme Court may very well hand free speech a big ‘hit’. (pun intended)

“Ken Starr and the Bush administration sided with the principal.”

Allow me a moment to put on my “BIG surprise!” face.

WashingtonPost.com:

Up in Smoke at the High Court

[...]
As Ken Starr told the nine justices yesterday why a student’s “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” banner didn’t qualify as free speech, the whole bunch of them sounded one toke over the line.

“So if the sign had been ‘Bong Stinks for Jesus,’ that would be . . . a protected right?” asked Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“Suppose that this particular person had whispered to his next-door neighbor, ‘Bong hits for Jesus, heh, heh, heh’?” contributed Stephen Breyer.

“What if the sign said ‘Bong Hits Should be Legal’?” queried John Paul Stevens.

Anthony Kennedy got really psychedelic. “Suppose the banner said ‘Vote Republican’?”

David Souter inhaled. Imagine, he said, that the student “just holds a little sign in the Shakespeare class that says ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’ . . . and they say, ‘Well, so-and’so has got his bong sign again.’ They then return to ‘Macbeth.’ ”

Far out. Antonin Scalia wanted a turn. “Smoke Pot, It’s Fun,” he proposed.

” ‘Rape Is Fun’?” offered Kennedy.

” ‘Extortion Is Profitable’?” Scalia rejoined.

If the justices sounded as if they were doin’ the doobies yesterday morning, the case invited a certain amount of reefer madness. The case began when a high school kid unfurled a banner across the street from his Juneau, Alaska, high school in 2002 when the Olympic torch was passing through town. By the student’s own admission, the sign had no meaning, but that didn’t matter. The principal suspended him; he sued. Ken Starr and the Bush administration sided with the principal. The ACLU and various Christian groups sided with the student. Thus does a high school prank become a federal case — an important First Amendment case before the high court, no less.