Senate Confirms Elena Kagan's Appointment To SCOTUS 618
eldavojohn writes "As expected, by a vote of 63 to 37 Elena Kagan has been appointed as the 112th member of the Supreme Court of the United States. Kagan, only 50 years old, has no judicial experience. The Washington Post explains: 'Other justices have corporate law backgrounds or a long record of arguing before the court. Kagan worked briefly for a law firm and argued her first case before an appellate court 11 months ago. It happened to be before the Supreme Court, the first of six cases she argued as the nation's first female solicitor general.' Her fair use views and free speech views have made her a focus of Slashdot recently."
Re:eh (Score:5, Informative)
No history of scholarship, unless you count being a fucking law professor and dean of the Harvard law school. Or her published books and papers on legal issues. But why would we count that? We don't like her politics.
(Also, she clerked for Thurgood Marshall in the 80s, so it's not like she has no judicial experience of any kind. And it's not unheard of for SC members to jump into the job without being judges first.)
Re:lulz (Score:2, Informative)
The complaints were based on her record. Also, some of her terrible answers--she couldn't answer the question of whether or not the government has the power to tell you what to eat.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
So you've already forgotten their involvement with determining the outcome of the 2000 US presidential election?
Re:lulz (Score:5, Informative)
People were pissed because she was giving textbook answers to make it through the job interview with the Senate while everyone knows she's going to be an activist judge ruling off of her opinion because she has no practical experience.
[citation-needed]
"Everyone knows" is a shitty argument, and the "no practical experience" argument has been thoroughly debunked. True, she's never been a judge, but she's more than qualified [slashdot.org], and if "everybody knew," she wouldn't have been confirmed -- 5 Republicans broke ranks and voted for her, whilst the current crop of Senate Dems are fairly moderate, and wouldn't vote to confirm a far-left activist in considerable numbers, particularly with an election cycle coming up.
Saying something doesn't make it true.
Two words: Sammy Sosa (Score:3, Informative)
He traded Sammy Sosa [highbeam.com]. Nuff said.
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
Oh yeah, I'm sure the republicans would have voted against health benefits for 911 rescue workers if Bush were still in office.
Do you think the Democrats would have voted to confirm a SCOTUS nominee who had previously argued in favor of banning books [reason.com] if GWB had appointed her?
The vast majority of both major parties place duty to party ahead of duty to the Constitution. More's the pity.....
Re:lulz (Score:4, Informative)
Still About Republicans (Score:5, Informative)
36 Republicans and one Democrat tried to block Kagan's appointment. The Democrat is Ben Nelson (D-NE), who represents the (Omaha) insurance industry (which also is the Credit Default Swap industry) and routinely votes with Republicans, especially in filibusters that prevent a simple majority vote that would usually pass.
You can see each of the Republicans give their reasons [huffingtonpost.com] for voting against Kagan's appointment to the Supreme Court, and judge for yourself whether those are either the real reasons, or good ones.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Informative)
There are republicans who support gun control too - look up James Brady.
Re:Lack of judicial experience used to be common (Score:5, Informative)
What is so unclear about the constitution?
Here are two examples, just to get you started. "The Congress shall have Power...To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" but yet "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
So which one trumps? Can Congress make a law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press in order to grant an author the exclusive right to his or her writings? And, hey, what about visual artists? They don't write anything, so do they get copyright protection or not? Or composers? And what about laws that only incidentally affect the press, like taxes on ink or printing equipment? What about a general sales tax that happens to affect ink?
Not so clear, is it?
Or how about this one "The Congress shall have Power...To regulate Commerce...among the several States?" What does that mean? Does it apply only to things like interstate taxes? What about the infrastructure of commerce like interstate roads? What about products sold across state lines? What if the seller doesn't ship it across state lines but the buyer brings it across? What if one state subsidizes the heck out of a product, leading to competition problems with the neighboring state? What about products that are illegal but sold across state lines, like drugs? What if the product is being given away, like open source software, is that still commerce?
So you can see that the Constitution is not very clear at all on a lot of points. Sometimes it's because parts of the document are in tension with other parts. Other times it's because the words are just plain vague. Scholars, politicians, and judges have spent centuries trying to figure out the best way to balance those tensions and interpret those vague words.
Re:lulz (Score:3, Informative)
"Everyone knows" is clearly wrong.
"More than qualified" is a tougher sell. For instance, one of the top alternatives to Kagan was Diane Wood [wikipedia.org], who has experience as a Supreme Court clerk, a law professor, an assistant Attorney General, private practice, and 15 years on the Seventh Circuit. In addition to her opinions, she's published a huge amount of legal scholarship. That's what I call qualified. Or you can compare with David Souter, who prior to serving on SCOTUS had worked in the Attorney General's office of NH for a decade, then served on state court benches for 12 years, and the First Circuit for 4 years.
Kagan's resume, by contrast, made Clarence Thomas's look extensive.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:5, Informative)
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Meaning that because a well regulated Militia is needed for the security, people must have the right to bear arms in order to form a Militia to secure a free state. Without the right to bear arms, it becomes impossible to create a Militia.
The Constitution preserves "the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. . . (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."
James Madison
"[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow citizens."
Alexander Hamilton
"[A]rms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property. . . Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them."
Thomas Paine
"... of the liberty of conscience in matters of religious faith, of speech and of the press; of the trail by jury of the vicinage in civil and criminal cases; of the benefit of the writ of habeas corpus; of the right to keep and bear arms.... If these rights are well defined, and secured against encroachment, it is impossible that government should ever degenerate into tyranny."
James Monroe
Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the people's liberty teeth keystone... the rifle and the pistol are equally indispensable... more than 99% of them by their silence indicate that they are in safe and sane hands. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference. When firearms go, all goes, we need them every hour."
George Washington
"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
Thomas Jefferson
If the right to bear arms meant as you thought it meant, why would the people who wrote the Constitution and served the country in its earliest days have this opinion which strongly suggests the right for every free man to keep and bear arms to defend the country from internal tyranny?
Re:Does it matter? (Score:1, Informative)
Um, from a 2nd amendment standpoint, if you're not in a well regulated militia you have precisely zero right to be armed.
Time to brush up on your reading comprehension skills. The militia bit was an example, not a requirement. Here's an oversimplified modern re-write you should be able to understand:
"It's nice to have people around who know how to handle weapons, so don't take people's guns away."
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
By my math, she's spent 4 years as a clerk, 14 years in academia, and 5 years in politics. I don't think that qualifies her as a "career administrator"
Re:Does it matter? (Score:3, Informative)
Um, from a 2nd amendment standpoint, if you're not in a well regulated militia you have precisely zero right to be armed.
Time to brush up on your reading comprehension skills. The militia bit was an example, not a requirement. Here's an oversimplified modern re-write you should be able to understand:
"It's nice to have people around who know how to handle weapons, so don't take people's guns away."
I'm just gonna go ahead and quote you so the people filtering out by score will see this point. You are exactly correct.
The wording of the amendment implies that the presence of well regulated militias is a function of an armed citizenry. Seeing as how well regulated militias are better than non regulated militias (i.e. street gangs), we ought to make sure our law abiding citizens have a right to arm themselves.
That's not even a really conservative reading of the amendment. A really conservative reading of the amendment would be that it not only gives us the right to be armed, but requires us to maintain militias. Which until the Militia Act of 1903 (which created the national guard) was exactly how most people interpreted it.
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
I've seen little proof otherwise. Their blantly transparent appointment of Micheal Steele as party chairman to insulate themselves from all their members basically shouting the N-word was pathetic.
Hey, if you can get a video of that, you can make $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund. Should be easy, considering all the cameras there that video taped the whole thing. I find it strange that no one has taken Breitbart up on that challenge.
As to the claim you repeating, it was directed to TEA Party members, not the Republican party. At least get your baseless accusations correct.
In other words, PICTURES, OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. Or, to modify the meme, Pictures, or you are lying!
Re:eh (Score:2, Informative)
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, what a great governor -- executing mentally retarded felons.
Um, those "mentally retarded felons" were tried, convicted and sentenced well before GWB was ever the governor. The criticism you are hurling at GWB could just as easily be directed to Ann Richards, the Democrat governor of Texas before GWB.
Strange that you only criticize GWB. Take the following [www.fdp.dk] for example:
President Clinton took time off from his 1992 campaign to be in Arkansas for the execution of killer Rickey Ray Rector. He was so brain damaged from a suicide attempt that he asked guards to set aside his piece of pecan pie so he could eat it after his execution, according to the New York Times.
Re:Obama's Harriet Miers (Score:5, Informative)
George W. Bush appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he goes out and finds a better qualified candidate.
Barrack Obama appoints some woman with no judicial experience to the Supreme Court, and when people express concerns about her lack of qualifications, he laughs in their faces and pushes her through confirmation anyway.
Harriet Myers:
Elena Kagan:
While it is true tha both women have no experience as a judge, Kagan has much more experience in academia and in government as a lawyer. In my opinion, she's more qualified than Miers. Before her nomination, Miers spent a total of 2 years as a lawyer for the government and no time in academia. Kagan spent 5 years as a government lawyer with 14 years of academia. Kagan also spent 3 years clerking for Thurgood Marshall.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:2, Informative)
No you just thought it was a good idea because they chose your guy. It was an extremely blatant violation of the US constitution to do so. Specifically the twelfth amendment specifies what should be done when the electoral college fails to come to a result. Intervening to name a winner was the most extreme act of judicial activism I can think of. Ruling in favor of the guy who ultimately was shown to not have the votes was extremely poor judgment. Not to mention that the SCOTUS doesn't get to make non-precedence rulings.
Um, actually, independent recounts have shown that GWB truly did win the election. The problem was that Democrats wanted to keep changing the rules and recounting until Gore won, also know as "trying to steal the election". All the Supreme Court did was stop the endless recounts.
Re:Does it matter? (Score:4, Informative)
Personally, I think the Supreme Court should have ruled that the Florida Supreme Court had no jurisdiction and that the matter of Florida's electors should have been decided by the Florida legislature (the Constitution rest all authority for deciding how a state's electors are chosen on the state legislatures). Or alternatively, they could have ruled that in one of several different ways that said that no Electoral College majority was determined so the election gets decided by Congress. In either of those cases the result would have been that George W. Bush ended up President.
The only possible way that Al Gore would have ended up President is if the recount was continued selectively in such a way as to guarantee that only Al Gore got additional votes. Several news organizations (most of which favored Al Gore), ran their own recount after the election and determined that George W. Bush won the Florida election.
Re:Lack of judicial experience used to be common (Score:3, Informative)
Show me an example of constantly unresolved point of the constitution.
Slavery. The authors could not come to a consensus about how to define it or even describe the industry. Once everybody realized that everyone else had different opinions, they stopped trying. The distinction between citizens and property was intentionally not discussed in the Constitution, partly to allow the States to make their own independent conclusions, but primarily so that the Legislative branch of Government could address future aspects of the issue as they arose. Slavery was simply to divisive of an issue to handle at the time, and would have broken up the infant nation had they tried. This example is pretty well documented.
Re:eh (Score:1, Informative)
God you're a fucking moron.
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
You are claiming that the Democrats voted for "Health Care Reform" bacuse they are listening to their constituents?
Correct
"The same constituents that overwhelmingly opposed its passing"
No, they don't. You have some people with the credibility of a 9/11 truthers make shit up and being propagated by republicans.
"..which strengthens the big banks "
no it does not.
"... promises to bail them out if they screw up "
that not what is says.
"who take actions that their constituents oppose "
they don't.
read the fucking bill. Let me know where it says any of that.
Look at the history of the parties. They are not the same thing the where 50 years ago. and again 50 years before that. They basically swap places over time. MY time is now, so I talk about the parties that exist NOW. It was started by ANTI-slave WHIGS and free soil democrats.
The Conservative/social moderate platform of the republican party of the old days is gone.
You need to stop letting fox feed your arrogance from ignorance. Because that posts makes you look like an idiot.
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
The economy collapsed in 2008 on a far vaster scale than any economic damage caused by 9/11. Bush was still president.
Re:Yes, repeal the 17th. (Score:1, Informative)
What douchebaggery is this now?
> The whole point of the senate was to have half the power of the Congress subject to the State's approval.
*No*. The point of having both house and senate is that one body is proportional to the number of citizens in each state, and in the other every state is equal. It's a compromise, since having the entire legislature only based on one of those is susceptible to being gamed - all population based, and the large population states dominate; all equal and a coalition of small states can dominate a large number of people; both cases are democratic failure modes, since both cases basically result in a chunk of the country being removed from having any say in government.
Having the senate elected by state legislatures failed in two ways. First, the state governments were deadlocking on the appointment, leaving them unrepresented in the Senate for years at a time. Second, and probably more important, is that it removed the ability of the citizens to have full say in the federal government; laws need both houses to pass, so even if the House is properly representing the will of the people, if the Senate isn't, then the people are still screwed.
And of course, every corruption argument gets worse when you add extra layers between the people and the power; if every layer controls the layer above it, and one layer goes bad, then the people are far more fucked over than if the individual layers are all separately elected by the people. And it's clear that state governments can mess up (see the deadlocks above, for example, or the budget issues in recent years).
Re:eh (Score:3, Informative)
The first recorded mention of the performance of same-sex marriages occurred during the early Roman Empire.[41] These same sex marriages were solemnized with the same ceremonies and customs which were used for heterosexual marriages.[42] Cicero mentions the marriage (using the Latin verb for "to marry", i.e. nubere) of the son of Curio the Elder in a casual manner as if it was commonplace. Cicero states that the younger Curio was "united in a stable and permanent marriage" to Antonius.[43] Martial also mentions a number of gay marriages.[44] By Juvenal's time, gay marriages seem to have become commonplace as he mentions attending gay marriages as if there were "nothing special.".[45] These gay marriages continued until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. A law in the Theodosian Code (C. Th. 9.7.3) was issued in 342 AD by the Christian emperors Constantius II and Constans. This law prohibited same-sex marriage in ancient Rome and ordered that those who were so married were to be executed.[46][47] Note: This is also the approximate age of the written record, prior to this written language was far more abstract, and the fragments that remain are less well understood.
Also for a non western perspective: *In the southern Chinese province of Fujian, through the Ming dynasty period, females would bind themselves in contracts to younger females in elaborate ceremonies.[39] Males also entered similar arrangements. This type of arrangement was also similar in ancient European history.[40]*
PS: As another poster pointed out there is significant evidence that gay marriage predates humanity. So the question boils down to "Does Marriage predate Religion" which is somewhat ambiguous and depends on your definition of religion and Marriage. The basic problem is religion predates the written record so while you can find evidence of gay unions 4000 years ago it's in a tomb http://www.pridedepot.com/?p=357 [pridedepot.com]
Re:eh (Score:2, Informative)
The Washington Post recently found different results [washingtonpost.com] (sorry, probably have to register). I'm sure you'll say they're biased, too, but the point remains that Rasmussen's results aren't the only ones we have available.
Re:eh (Score:2, Informative)
You are marked insightful but you should be marked funny.
The so called "only one in decades to reduce the deficit" is a lie. They balanced a budget- not reduced the deficit- and that was with a republican controlled congress and some special tricks that would have fallen away anyways. These special tricks were the Roth IRA conversions which took taxes that should have been paid in the future and allowed them to be paid now instead in order to bank on the idea that taxes would be higher in the future. These special tricks are also the capitol gains tax cuts that virtually increased the value of holding to make selling of them more attractive which in turned caused tax revenue that wouldn't have otherwise been accounted for. You also have the Y2K situation in which people were tricked into replacing computers and software causing an economic spike that compounded the 2001 recession under the notion that your old computer would kick your wife, rape your dog, and set your house or business on fire because the two digit date would role back and nothing would know what it was doing.
Without all those things, the budget would not have been balanced which in itself is a misnomer. While the budget was supposedly balanced, federal outlays were actually more then receipts when you considered off budget expenditures. While it's true that this slowed the growth of the deficit, it did not reduce it in any way.
Re:Obama's Harriet Miers (Score:2, Informative)
Please don't say 'Dean of Harvard Law School' like that is impressive.
Its not, for a multitude of reasons, but lets just stop it without an argument by pointing out that she held a Administrative dean, not a scholarly one.
She really has practically no experience hearing trials and thats the job we're talking about here, not being someones clerk, not making sure school supplies get ordered on time and that there are enough chairs in the room so some pompus ass can preach at students for hours on end.
I don't really hold that against her, it could very well be an advantage, but more importantly ...
I'm not delusional about her qualifications or experience nor am I a lunatic fanboy.
Be realistic ... you have no idea what so ever how good she will be or which way she'll go on things and no one will until she does it.
Comparisons are not supposed to be fair, but judging someone based on no real evidence is just silly.
Re:lulz (Score:3, Informative)
This is already the case, and the court's ruling did nothing to change it. Foreign based, foreign managed, or foreign owned companies cannot participate in election-related advertising. Domestic companies must document what they spend, and when and how they spend it. This has not changed.