With any luck, Scalia's outburst will have been public enough to scare some people off. And Bush said he wanted more Justices like Scalia and Thomas. With all their talk, Scalia had two sons practicing law at the time of the Gore selection; one in the law offices involved. And, at the same time, Thomas's wife was busy recruiting personnel for Bush out of the offices of the Heritage Foundation. Yet these two paragons saw nothing unethical in this even though they were two major figures involved at the time. This is the kind of behavior and thinking that characterizes the Bush administration.
These two, Scalia and Thomas, have been seeing things their way throughout their court careers, why would they stop at a little thing like being able to put their guy in the White House? Here are two men who have decided again and again against the Federal Government's involvement in State's affairs when it comes to health coverage or the disabiltiy act or others, but apparently found it was time to overrule a State's (Florida) governance of it's election process. Amazing! Here is Thomas who cannot find a right to privacy specifically written in the Constituition but who quite easily found the language to support the majority decision in Gore vs. Bush.
Out with both of them!
A very lovely piece by Linda Greenhouse on this SC term...
Quote:Justice Antonin Scalia, in a bitter dissenting opinion in the gay rights case, accused the court of having "taken sides in the culture war," and there was little dispute that, to some degree, at least, he was right. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas provided much for Justice Scalia to regret, not least its embrace of the right-to-privacy line of cases that began with a birth control decision in 1965 and culminated 30 years ago in the abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.
And Justice Kennedy's citation of a 1981 gay rights opinion by the European Court of Human Rights, the first time a decision of that court has been invoked by a majority of the Supreme Court, marked a stinging defeat for Justice Scalia, who has tried to hold back the court's steadily growing interest in foreign legal developments. Justice Scalia criticized the majority's use of that decision, which Justice Kennedy cited as evidence of a Western consensus on sexual privacy, as "meaningless" and "dangerous," saying the court should not impose foreign views on American constitutional law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/01/national/01SCOT.html?hp
Phoenix32890 wrote:Yea! I find that ruling very hopeful. If the justices would learn to stay out of an individual's private life completely, then Americans would really have the freedom that the Constitution mandates.
Pheonix - TX passing a state law in no way means the
justices are invading our private lives, it means that for Texans, their legislature wishes to do so, and Texans ought to toss them out on their ears for it, but that's a very different thing than saying that, because we disagree with a state law we should be happy when the USSC manufactures a reason to knock it down--not because the Constitution actually allows them to do so, but because the majority of justices agree with us that the law is wrong.
Isn't it wonderful - understanding the differences between states rights, federal, and judicial as delineated in the Constitution?
Simply stated, if the differences weren't there, and so important to the governing of the U.S., there would be no compelling reason to appeal a state decision further to the Supreme Court for consideration about matters which ultimately apply to each state. Just as education is traditionally a states right, but the decisions on who may apply, and the admission or denial, goes into another area which involves the rights of the people of a country as a whole.
Decisions on the rights of privacy pertaining to the citizens of a country as a whole are different from states' rights determining other aspects.
And that, of course, was one of the major implications in the Clinton affair. And maybe one of the factors that entered into the thinking. It was not that final, manipulated lie; it was the machinations that led up to it. A shining example of the invasion of personal privacy.
The sodomy decision is so much more than that. It restores, in a small measure, a basic right. To everyone. Which is what this constitution was originally based upon.
