Posts tagged supreme court
politics and puppies
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CBS News’ Jan Crawford confirms widespread rumors that Chief Justice John Roberts initially voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, but decided midway through the opinion drafting process that he could not support this constitutionally unjustifiable result. In what may be the biggest revelation of her piece, Crawford also reports that pseudo-moderate Justice Anthony Kennedy led the internal lobbying effort to bring Roberts back into the right-wing fold…
Crawford sites two unnamed sources, and there are a very limited universe of people who could have revealed this information to her. Only the justices and their personal staff would have access to this knowledge, and it is highly unlikely that a clerk or secretary would be willing to risk their entire career by revealing the Court’s confidential deliberations to the press. Crawford, moreover, is a very well connected conservative reporter who has, at times, worked closely with the Federalist Society to drive conservative legal narratives. Nothing is certain, but it is likely that one or both of Crawford’s sources is a conservative justice…
To be clear, at this point only two facts are confirmed: 1) According to Crawford, Roberts flipped his vote midstream; and 2) someone within the Court must have leaked her this information. It is perfectly appropriate for Justice Kennedy, or any other justice, for that matter, to internally lobby Roberts to try to obtain his vote in an important case. If a member of the Court has turned to conservative columnists like Will or reporters like Crawford in order to pressure and then embarrass Roberts, however, that would be a significant and unusual escalation from the justices’ regular tactics.
(Source: diadoumenos)
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Supreme Court Ruling Allows Strip-Searches for Any Arrest
this. is. huge.
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Tomorrow: the role of the Supreme Court in suppressing civil rights. We talk to Lawrence Goldstone. His book, Inherently Unequal, takes a look at the push for equality for black Americans — and the push back — both during and after Abraham Lincoln’s presidency.
U.S. Supreme Court building, Washington, D.C. (LOC) (by The Library of Congress)
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Prosecutorial Responsibility: A Supreme Court Preview
Click through for an article giving an interesting, though somewhat one-sided, preview of Connick v. Thompson - an important case on the Supreme Court docket this spring.
This is just one case, but it is a stark reminder of a prosecutor’s power and potential impact on one life, and, in turn, a reminder of the prosecutor’s duty to behave both in line with human morality, as well as with the law…and to remember the importance of intersections of the two.
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all the single ladies, the week you’ve all been waiting for!
ELENA KAGAN CONFIRMATION HEARING WEEK!
As Ms. Kagan kicks off her Congressional hearings this week in that snazzy electric blue blazer ensemble, [hearings which I will likely come back to again, though I (as I believe most of the country) don’t foresee this process being one of terribly surprising Bork-like conclusions] and as a dear friend of my struggles with the conundrum of being openly divorced on her online dating profile (dudes, stop searching for single never marrieds, be open and be fair), we come back to a consideration of the concept of being a single woman. The fact that Ms. Kagan, an incredibly brilliant and accomplished woman, has been consistently scrutinized repeatedly by the press since her nomination for this fact, indicates that we have not made many strides in women’s equality rights as one might have presumed or hoped.
I had a brief discussion with aforementioned dear friend and a couple others about the recent Maureen Dowd article in the NYT discussing the differences between being single and unmarried.
Being a single woman has implications of choice, while being unmarried reflects your life as something that exists only in contrast to being a married woman, and of course connotes a lack of choice to be in that category and favorability. Do single women become unmarried at a certain age that society considers the line or the over the hill age? And who decides who is single vs. who is unmarried? I think this is the central question for me that I’ve been considering…Is this something dictated solely by the undefined by clearly present mores of society, or is this something that is internalized and projected by each individual according to their own level of comfort with being who and what they are?
