Churchillio Ad Absurdum

post from Talking Points Memo on 27 May 2009 11:56:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

No final syllable pronunciation appeasement of Sotomayor? Is that the best they got?[...]

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Uh-Oh ... Annals of Off-Message

post from Talking Points Memo on 27 May 2009 11:54:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

The first President Bush introduced Clarence Thomas by hailing his "great empathy."[...]

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Slim Pickens

post from Talking Points Memo on 27 May 2009 11:51:00 AM. © Talking Points Memo

The push on the right, as we've seen, is that Sonia Sotomayor is the dread 'judicial activist', someone who uses the vast powers of a judgeship or, potentially, a spot on the top court to 'legislate' from the bench or impose her own policy or ideological[...]

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Sotomayor on the Bench

post from Daily Kos on 27 May 2009 11:50:06 AM. © Daily Kos

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Goldstein of the SCOTUS Blog pointed out that the debate over Sotomayor's qualifications seemed to ignore the single most important source of information about her legal thinking: the opinions she's written while serving as a judge on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. While fools like Jeffrey Rosen love to focus on gossip, innuendo and b.s., the rest of us are fortunate to have a detailed, extensive, and public trove of data to analyze. Even better, Goldstein's crew has pulled together summaries of what they consider Sotomayor's most important civil decisions. A sampler is below:

Pappas v. Giuliani, 290 F.3d 143 (2d Cir. 2002)... involv[ed] an employee of the New York City Police Department who was terminated from his desk job because, when he received mailings requesting that he make charitable contributions, he responded by mailing back racist and bigoted materials. On appeal, the panel majority held that the NYPD could terminate Pappas for his behavior without violating his First Amendment right to free speech. Sotomayor dissented from the majority’s decision to award summary judgment to the police department. She acknowledged that the speech was "patently offensive, hateful, and insulting," but cautioned the majority against "gloss[ing] over three decades of jurisprudence and the centrality of First Amendment freedoms in our lives just because it is confronted with speech is does not like."

[I]n Ford v. McGinnis, 352 F.3d 382 (2d Cir. 2003), Sotomayor wrote an opinion that reversed a district court decision holding that a Muslim inmate’s First Amendment rights had not been violated because the holiday feast that he was denied was not a mandatory one in Islam. Sotomayor held that the inmate’s First Amendment’s rights were violated because the feast was subjectively important to the inmate’s practice of Islam.

Sotomayor’s dissent in Gant v. Wallingford Board of Education, 195 F.3d 134 (2d Cir. 1999), is perhaps her most strongly worded opinion addressing discrimination. Plaintiff Ray Gant, who was transferred mid-year from first grade to kindergarten because of academic difficulties, alleged that the school was deliberately indifferent to racial hostility that he suffered and discriminated against him through the transfer. Sotomayor agreed with the majority’s decision to dismiss the racial harassment claim, but she rejected their conclusion that the transfer was not race discrimination. In her view, the transfer was "unprecedented and contrary to the school’s established policies": white students having academic difficulties, she noted, received compensatory help, whereas Gant - the "lone black child" in his class - was not given an "equal chance" but was instead demoted to kindergarten just nine days after arriving at the school.

[S]he authored a forceful dissent in Hankins v. Lyght, 441 F.3d 96 (2d Cir. 2006), a case involving a minister who filed suit under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) after he was forced by his church to retire at the age of 70. The district court dismissed the claim; on appeal, the Second Circuit reversed, holding that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which - subject to certain exceptions - prohibits the government from substantially burdening the exercise of religion, had effectively amended the ADEA by providing a defense for ADEA violations. In her dissent, Sotomayor complained that the majority had "violate[d] a cardinal principle of judicial restraint" when it - unnecessarily, in her view - held that the RFRA was constitutional.

In a case involving privacy issues, Leventhal v. Knapek, 266 F.3d 64 (2001), Sotomayor wrote an opinion that rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge to a public employer’s search of an employee’s computer after the employee was accused of being late, coming to the office infrequently, and spending his free time discussing personal computers with his coworkers. Although she agreed that the employee had a "reasonable expectation of privacy in the contents of his office computer," Sotomayor also cautioned that "workplace conditions can be such that an employee’s expectation of privacy...is diminished." Here, she explained, the search was permissible because it could have revealed employee misconduct.

Many more case summaries on a wide variety of topics are available at the link.

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Rove: Attending top schools doesn’t mean
that Sotomayor is smart, but it proves that Bush is.

post from Think Progress on 27 May 2009 11:50:00 AM. © Think Progress

During a debate at Radio City Music Hall last night, former Bush adviser Karl Rove claimed that Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor was “not necessarily” “very smart.” When host Charlie Rose noted in response that she attended Princeton and Yale Law School, Rove replied that you don’t have to be smart to attend a top school:

Rove - “She is competent and will be confirmed….She has an interesting and compelling life story…”
Charlie - “She is very smart.”
Rove “Not necessarily.”
Charlie - “What do you mean? She went to Princeton where she graduating with honors and then went on to Yale Law School….”
Rove- “I know lots of stupid people who went to Ivy League schools.” The crowd applauds.

Rove’s dismissal of Ivy League attendance is ironic considering that in an interview previewing the debate, he cited George W. Bush’s experience at Harvard and Yale to mock claims that Bush is stupid. “The myth was that this guy, who was a Yale history grad and a Harvard MBA, was not smart,” Rove told the Chicago Tribune. In December 2008, Rove also touted Bush’s time at Harvard and Yale in a Wall Street Journal column, writing, “You don’t make it through either unless you are a reader.”

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Terrible Graduation Rates Show You Can Do
Anything To The People Of Houston And Get Away With It

post from Texas Liberal on 27 May 2009 11:49:04 AM. © Texas Liberal

A new study reports that only 58.5 % of Houston-area high school freshmen graduate four years later.Here is the Houston Chronicle story about the study. From the study—“Children at Risk, a Houston-based advocacy group, commissioned the Texas Education Agency to conduct study of six-year graduation rates for the region?s 130 high schools. They learned that 53 percent of [...]

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GOP Senators Lack Enthusiasm to Block Sotomayor

post from Open Left - Front Page on 27 May 2009 11:37:09 AM. © Open Left - Front Page

While Rush Limbaugh calls Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist and Ann Couler calls for a[...]

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Dancing With The Pols In Vegas & DC

post from Antemedius - Liberally Critical Thinking on 27 May 2009 11:35:15 AM. © Antemedius - Liberally Critical Thinking

Readers may remember that I called out Harry Reid's ludicrous comments last week relating to his contention that he was withholding approval of funding for the shutdown of the Guantanamo detention facility and subsequent transfer of the prisoners because he did not want terrorists released to (in his telling of it) roam the streets of the United States:

We will never allow terrorists to be released into the United States...
We don?t want them around the United States...
I?m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That?s very clear.
[Reporter's question: No one?s talking about releasing them. We?re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.]
Can?t put them in prison unless you release them.
[Reporter's question: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? ?]
I can?t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.

When I commented on this last week, it was my contention that Reid's words, and handling of the Guantanamo issue were simply an indication of his political pandering, that his response to the issue was motivated by his fear of a small segment of the electorate that might be the swing voters who could prevent or facilitate his return to the Senate after his current term expires. It was my contention that Senator Reid was not standing up like an honorable, courageous leader, working for fairness and justice, working for the best interests of the United States, but was cynically responding in a manner that would (in his mind) prolong his political career.

It seems, at least to this skeptic's eyes, that Senator Reid, is in fact, still practicing his political pandering, just changing his dance steps to exploit the current audience. It was reported by NickBaumann writing in Mother Jones and Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic that in a segment video taped this past Tuesday for Jon Ralston's "Face to Face" television interview program in Las Vegas, that Reid has begun to alter his view of the prisoner situation:

Reid, who has been criticized for his contradictory positions on Guantanamo Bay, said some prisoners will be put in maximum security prisons on U.S. soil, emphasizing the safety of those facilities:
"A maximum security prison in the United States, there has never been a single escape."
JR: "You think eventually the plan is going to be to put them in maximum security prisons here in this country, correct?"
I think some. Keep in mind, Jon, there's so many different issues. There's no question that a number of these people who are there are not guilty of anything. The Uighurs, these are a group of Muslim Chinese who are guilty of nothing. They were arrested, put in there. They are there. They are doing nothing. We're going to have to find someplace to put them. We can't send them back to China. Should they go into a maximum security prison? Probably not."

Has Reid had a real change of heart? Not likely, more likely it is politically expedient this week to soften his stance, given that President Obama traveled to Las Vegas this past Tuesday to give Reid a little fund raising help, as reported by Nick Baumann in Mother Jones:

President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit Nevada on Tuesday to participate in a Las Vegas fundraiser for Sen. Harry Reid, who hopes to raise $25 million to fend off possible GOP challenges to his 2010 reelection campaign. The trip coincides with a sudden?and convenient?change of heart by Reid on the thorny issue of what to do with Guantanamo Bay detainees once the facility is shuttered.

Nothing fundamental has changed in Reid's outlook, he just changed up his dance steps, to give the impression that he is a team player with the president, but in reality Reid is just dragging his feet, and through his leadership as the Majority Leader, dragging the feet of his Democratic Senate colleagues about facing the reality that the Guantanamo detention facility will be closed, and adjudication and ultimate disposition of the prisoners will occur in a manner transparent to Americans and the entire world. It is time for Reid to stop dancing around, take a stand with the president, and with what is the right thing to do in order to correct some of the mistakes our country made while under the influence of the previous, criminal administration.

(The image of Reid at the top of this post is the same image as used last week, only I felt it appropriate to put a frown on Reid's face, as he can't be too happy, having to learn so many dance steps.)

Read more from Big Fella at the BFD Blog!

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Effective Withdrawal

The American Prospect wins an award for best article title of the week with "Exit Strategy"-- a piece that is about neither Iraq nor Afghanistan but rather the withdrawal method of birth control. Specifically, the fact that a recent study found that the[...]

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Fearguth’s Great Snark Hunt

The new Judgebot is certified to be genderless, sexless,identityless, and 100% empathy-free. Furthermore,it is designed to never engage in judicial activism orlegislating from the bench, and can decide complexConstitutional cases while simultaneously solvingthe most difficult Rubik’s Cube puzzles.

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