Let's Get Rid of Roe

Finn d'Abuzz wrote:

Debra and blatham

Who do you consider to make up the "moral majority?"

finn

I think we both understand the referent here. Simply set a sharp compass in the center of Robertson's head and then draw a perimeter including all those who self-refer as such.

Robertson, quite like Savonarola or the on-call experts in witch-identification at the end of the 1600s, will find evil no matter where he looks.

Or you could go with wikipedia. That turns up some other fellows of the same personality-derangment.

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blatham wrote:

Finn d'Abuzz wrote:
Debra and blatham

Who do you consider to make up the "moral majority?"

finn

I think we both understand the referent here. Simply set a sharp compass in the center of Robertson's head and then draw a perimeter including all those who self-refer as such.

Robertson, quite like Savonarola or the on-call experts in witch-identification at the end of the 1600s, will find evil no matter where he looks.

Or you could go with wikipedia. That turns up some other fellows of the same personality-derangment.

I expected this to be, more or less, your definition, but I suspect Debra's is something broader. Of course now we'll never know for sure. I am sure that Nikki would define the group as anyone who ever recited the pledge of allegience or didn't find Janeane Garofalo all that funny.

Of course the number of people who actually subscribe to Debra's asserted agenda is very small and, by no means, encompasses everyone who might describe themselves as a member of the Moral Majority.

You credit this group with greater influence than they have, or you enjoy serving yourself as large a piece of red meat as you can manage.

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Debra's description does apply to a narrow band of folks. But as regards that group, her description, or something quite like it, is applicable with little need for correction or tempering.

As regards their influence, that's always difficult to make measurement of. You speak confidently, finn, but tell me honestly now (and without quick recourse to google or some such) how much do you know about Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich? What is the distribution of Pat Robertson's various media enterprises? As difficult as it is to measure the influence of an individual or group, there are historical and empirical tools to help with the task. The thing is, one does have to attend to them rather than merely suppose what those facts are.

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All of this discussion about getting rid of Roe Vs. Wade won't happen and anyone acquainted with the thinking of the members of the USSC knows it won't happen.

Judge Roberts has gone on record to state that Roe vs. Wade will be considered as "Stare Decisis"

I am certain that Judge Alito will take the same position.

However, I predict that Roe and Wade will be reduced by attacks on its periphery. I think we can look for a USSC decision opposing partial birth abortion and another one which codifies the right of parents to be informed before a minor daughter's abortion.

It goes without saying that the introduction of a post-coital abortifacient will make the issue moot.

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Fedral wrote:

blatham wrote:
Fedral wrote:
twin_peaks_nikki wrote:

Simple but wrong.

Inherent rights are not granted by the collective will of the people.

So you would have your reproductive rights decided upon by 9 unelected black robes speaking from their marble palace?

So you would have your speech rights decided by elected officials (in their marble palaces)?

If the elected officials start passing laws that I have problems with, I can vote their a$$es out of office.

Quote:

Judges who legislate from the bench are not answerable to the people.

I love that last line. If it's a liberal decision, they're legislating from the bench. If it's a conservative decision, it's sound constitutional interpretation. Whatta hoot.

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Stevepax wrote:

Quote:
Judges who legislate from the bench are not answerable to the people.

I love that last line. If it's a liberal decision, they're legislating from the bench. If it's a conservative decision, it's sound constitutional interpretation. Whatta hoot.

I have a problem with unelected officials making ANY decisions from the bench.

That isn't their job. They are NOT supposed to be legislators.

They are interpreters of the Constitutionality of laws which are made by CONGRESS (The elected representatives of the people) and signed into law by the President (Another elected official)

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I think you missed the point. That's ok.

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It's a complex matter and black/white don't do the trick.

But, for the record, the SC justice who has ruled to overturn Congressional acts least is Breyer (some 25 %) and the justice who has overturned Congressional acts most often is Thomas (some 60+ %).

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blatham wrote:

It's a complex matter and black/white don't do the trick.

But, for the record, the SC justice who has ruled to overturn Congressional acts least is Breyer (some 25 %) and the justice who has overturned Congressional acts most often is Thomas (some 60+ %).

Blatham,

These statistics you quote have been soundly discredited by Orin Kerr (among others) in his Legal Review article Upholding the Law.

Kerr wrote:

I think it is fairly clear that under my definition of activism, the current court is not activist on the scale of either the Lochner Court or the Warren Court. Consider the role of the Supreme Court in those eras. The Lochner Court battled the progressive reforms, constitutionalizing pro-business regulation. The Warren and Burger Courts rewrote and constitutionalized fields such as criminal procedure, voting rights, obscenity, the death penalty, and abortion. In both periods, the Supreme Court played a major role in several of the most significant political debates of the day. The court created new rules that often eclipsed legislative and executive action, engaging in both separation-of-powers activism and precedent activism.

In another article,

Kerr wrote:

As a result, using judicial invalidation of federal laws as a quantitative measure of activism seems particularly unhelpful. Perhaps the more relevant quantitative measure would compare how often the Rehnquist Court and Warren Court have struck down legislative acts as a whole, or, better yet, how often they have overruled precedents. I suspect it would reveal a very different picture.

source

Taking Kerr's suggestion, I took a look at the SC cases that the Warren Court (16 years - 1953-1969) and the Rehnquist court (19 years - 1986-2005) had overruled during their tenure. Using GPO statistics as my source, a quick count reveals that the Warren court overruled precedent 44 times, while the Rehnquist court did so only 21 times.

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And to close out the analysis a total of 51 SC cases overruled in the Burger Court (1969-1985).

Liberals should take comfort that Stare Decisis (and by extension Roe v. Wade) is clearly much more respected within those Supreme Courts considered "conservative" than those considered "liberal".

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blatham:

Quote:

But, for the record, the SC justice who has ruled to overturn Congressional acts least is Breyer (some 25 %) and the justice who has overturned Congressional acts most often is Thomas (some 60+ %).

slkshot7:

Quote:

These statistics you quote have been soundly discredited by Orin Kerr (among others) in his Legal Review article Upholding the Law.

and you then quote the passage

Quote:

Kerr wrote:
I think it is fairly clear that under my definition of activism, the current court is not activist on the scale of either the Lochner Court or the Warren Court. Consider the role of the Supreme Court in those eras. The Lochner Court battled the progressive reforms, constitutionalizing pro-business regulation. The Warren and Burger Courts rewrote and constitutionalized fields such as criminal procedure, voting rights, obscenity, the death penalty, and abortion. In both periods, the Supreme Court played a major role in several of the most significant political debates of the day. The court created new rules that often eclipsed legislative and executive action, engaging in both separation-of-powers activism and precedent activism.

My figures are sourced from a recent New Yorker article (I linked or noted that source elsewhere on one thread).

But the quote you've given from Kerr does not "soundly discredit" those statistics. It doesn't even speak to them.

Kerr notes that he defines/identifies "activism" in one way, and that others (like Sunstein) do it differently. Kerr says...

Quote:

IT TURNS OUT TO BE MUCH EASIER TO DESCRIBE ACTIVISM in theory than to identify it in practice.

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ps

It is clearly the case that the common use of "judicial activism" that one bumps into in modern conservative rhetoric is of judges over-ruling the acts or laws created by elected officials. Using that definition, Thomas is an activist more than twice as often as Breyer.

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Blatham,

You obviously didn't read the second source in my post where Kerr does discredit Gerwitz and Golder. To make it easier, I've simply reposted his response below:

Kerr wrote:

Not sure where you come under the impression that judicial activism is defined as you have in conservative circles. Most conservative circles I participate in use the Wikepedia (or similar) definition i.e. judicial activism refers to judicial decisions which do not follow precedent or which otherwise exceed, or are perceived to exceed, the scope of established law.

Using that definition, my assertion stands...liberal courts are more than twice as likely as conservative courts to overturn precedent or exceed the scope of established law.

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twin_peaks_nikki wrote:

Debra_Law wrote:
Abolish abortion and birth control. Outlaw premarital sex. Outlaw single parenthood. Outlaw divorces. Outlaw public assistance and make every person work for a living or starve to death. Make every violation of the law a felony and impose the death penalty. Maybe then the moral majority will be satisfied.

Require any man who contributes to an unwanted pregancy to undergo a vasectomy. After three, chemical castration.

To hell with chemical castration, get an ax.

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Sorry, I did not read the second link.

However, there's no clear reason why others ought to follow your or Kerr's definition and reasoning here to the exclusion of Sunstein and others. And note Kerr's own words...

"this argument nonetheless strikes me as weak."

He doesn't make the claim that Sunstein's argument is invalid (as in your phrase "soundly defeated").

But I'm not going to get into this with you. These arguments are complex and constitutional scholars of integrity and intelligence have varying views and conclusions.

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"But I'm not going to get into this with you" really means---you have eviscerated my argument but I can't lose face by admitting it.

Mark R. Levin defines "judicial activism"

"A judicial activist, on the other hand, construes the Constitution broadly and rejects some of its provisions outright( or gives them superficial acknowledgement) if they interfere with the desired outcome. In essence, activist judges make, rather than interpret the law. They substitute their will for the judgement of deliberative bodies, They see their role as "doing justice" or "righting wrongs" when in fact they are doing neither. They're no more just or wise than the next guy. Judicial activists simply use their high positions to impose by fiat that which should be determined through the democratic process"

As slkshock mentions the Warren court overruled precedent 44 times while the Rhenquist Court, which actually covers three more years than the Warren Court overruled precedent only 21 times.

Yes, the Rhenquist court is clearly more in tune with the doctrine of "Stare Decisis" than the Warren Court was.

In the IMMORTAL words of a man who was perhaps one of the least productive of our recent Jurists---Thurgood Marshall---"You do what YOU think is right and let the law catch up" Typical of the disrespect that LIberal activist judges have for the law.

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slkshock7 wrote:

Kerr wrote:
. . . First, using judicial invalidation as a proxy for activism suffers from an obvious flaw: If a legislature passes a plainly unconstitutional law, striking down the statute by applying established precedents reflects neither separation-of-powers activism nor precedent activism. . . .

In other words, if an individual alleges that state action (e.g., state statute) oppressively infringes upon his/her liberty interests in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Court agrees with the individual, THEN you scream "judicial activism." God forbid that the Constitution should protect individual LIBERTY from the oppression of the majority. If the majority of the people want to enact laws that oppress individuals and minorities--that is their right! Majority rules! (muhahahaha) but . . . property rights, on the other hand, are a different story.

Darn that Supreme Court for NOT striking down that democratically-enacted state law that allowed the City of New London to take private property for economic development! Darn the Court! Laughing

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blatham wrote:

Debra's description does apply to a narrow band of folks. But as regards that group, her description, or something quite like it, is applicable with little need for correction or tempering.

As regards their influence, that's always difficult to make measurement of. You speak confidently, finn, but tell me honestly now (and without quick recourse to google or some such) how much do you know about Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich? What is the distribution of Pat Robertson's various media enterprises? As difficult as it is to measure the influence of an individual or group, there are historical and empirical tools to help with the task. The thing is, one does have to attend to them rather than merely suppose what those facts are.

I thought I knew enough about Viguerie and Weyrich to, at least in my mind, consider them outside of the narrow band described by Debra, but since they enjoy such a position of honor in your pantheon of conservative bogeymen I thought I would take a peek at what google might turn up about them. Now I see why you fear these two so much. There are numerous sites which warn against these men with the sort of alarming tenor one would have hoped ran through the German newspapers of the early 30s.

Notwithstanding these many web warnings I still don't consider Viguerie and Weyrich to fall within Debra's described group. Unfortunately I could not find a site where they were asked if they agreed with each of the points Debra made but I see no reason to believe that they promote

The outlawing of single parenthood
The outlawing or premarital sex
Allowing millions of out of work Americans to starve to death
Making every crime a felony and imposing the death penalty for all crimes.

And if they did, they would not have much influence at all.

The scary websites I read were full of revelations about the code these two use. Believing that multiculturalism is detrimental to American society is actually code for racist hate speech. Believing that the accusation of racism has become a favorite and over-deployed tool of a specific ideological group is of course code for racist hate speech, and arguing that immigration, legal as well as illegal, should be curtailed isn't code at all, it's blatant racist hate speech.

In your all too usual condescending way you suggest that I am simply ignorant of who the bogeyman are when I assert that you credit them with too much influence. Robinson and Falwell are your usual ogres, but it's instructive that you've included Viguerie and Weyrich (Actually I was surprised that you didn't try to quiz me on Grover Norquist. For a time there he seemed to be your Numero Uno bogeyman. Perhaps I passed the test in another thread).

I doubt it can be shown that even Falwell or Robinson subscribe to all of Debra's delineated beliefs, but I will grant you that they are at best fools.
But how influential are they?

We can probably identify rough numbers of the people who are reached by their mailings, listen to their broadcasts and actually contribute to their ministries. I'm sure they are fairly sizeable numbers, but enough to actually swing a national election?

The Left is faced with a real quandary. On the one hand they want to raise the alarm about the power of the Extreme Religious Right (to invigorate the Democratic base), and on the other hand they want to minimize their numbers and influence on elections (to keep the Democratic base from believing that voting in future elections is futile and that their policies will not be accepted by a majority of Americans).

Partisans wither on the vine when there isn't an enemy to oppose, and Liberal partisans seem to have a particular affection for enemies who want to steal everyone's choices and enslave the population. Far be it from me to take the caffeine out of your political coffee, but it seems as foolish to me as Conservatives who argue that George Soros, John Podesta, Joan Blades, Wes Boyd and Michael Moore ( No fair googling them if you don't know then blatham!) are trying to tear up the fabric of American society.

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finn

You sometimes slow down and get careful in analysis and claim. This post above isn't an instance.

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blatham wrote:

finn

You sometimes slow down and get careful in analysis and claim. This post above isn't an instance.

How clever.

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Let's Get Rid of Roe

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