Today, ACS hosted it's
annual review of the Supreme Court Term. In their closing remarks, several of the panel of six leading Supreme Court advocates and constitutional experts commented on this Term as the beginning of a new, conservative era in the Court's history.
Frequent Supreme Court litigator Tom Goldstein suggested that this Term began a rightward lurch as significant as the leftward shift of the Warren era:
So I would say that we’re probably going to look back on this term as if it were June 15, 1961 in reverse. June 15, 1961 was the day that Mapp v. Ohio was decided. It was in effect the birth of the Warren court era, it was decided by a five vote majority. They Court overruled Wolf vs. Colorado and applied the 4th amendment to the states. And it started a whole trend of a series of cases from Reynolds and Sims to Frontiero. . . . all of the major doctrines that law students today think of as if they were written into the Constitution had their birth at the end of the term in 1961.
Former Solicitor General Walter Dellinger lamented two of the Term's most significant decisions:
I just think the term’ll be marked by two cases that are historically tragic decisions. I think the court has turned the corner on a jurisprudence that saw government control of women’s reproductive lives as a totalitarian intervention and was at the core of what we think of as liberty. And I think the school decisions were historically misguided because they conflate two uses of race that are so fundamentally different in such a hyper-technical way that belies common sense. Brown condemned the system of southern racial apartheid, of domination and subordination. The people of Louisville have worked together to try to come up with a system to keep people in the public school system. They have refused to give up on the public schools. They have worked across racial lines. They know that they’re building upon a system of residential segregation which was created by federal, state and local governments. And they know that just to choose that would be to perpetuate segregation. They tried to bring the races together in public schools. And that’s not the same thing that the court condemned in Brown.
and Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan closed the event with these thoughts:
(T)his term we saw the Court announce the first amendment applies to corporations, in the Wisconsin Right to Life case, but not to students, in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case. We saw the court announce that we should be deferential to state trial judges in criminal cases but not to democratically-elected local school boards in the schools cases. So if this is the birth of a new constitutional era, all I say is what an ugly baby.
Free Speech in favor of RW radio:
By Alexander Bolton
June 29, 2007
The House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from using taxpayer dollars to impose the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters who feature conservative radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
By a vote of 309-115, lawmakers amended the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill to bar the FCC from requiring broadcasters to balance conservative content with liberal programming such as Air America.
The vote count was partly a testament to the influence that radio hosts wield in many congressional districts.
It was also a rebuke to Democratic senators and policy experts who have voiced support this week for regulating talk radio.
House Democrats argued that it was merely a Republican political stunt because there is little danger of the FCC restricting conservative radio while George W. Bush is president.
Republicans counter that they are worried about new regulations if a Democrat wins the White House in 2008.
<...>
In 1985 the FCC discarded the policy after deciding that it restricted journalistic freedom and “actually inhibit(ed) the presentation of controversial issues of public importance to the detriment of the public and in degradation of the editorial prerogative of broadcast journalists,” according to a Congressional Research Service report.
Yesterday, the House firmly rejected the prospect of requiring balanced views on talk radio.
<...>
“The best way is to let the judgment of the American people decide, and they can decide with their finger,” Boehner said.
“(People) can turn it off or they can turn it on. They can go to their computer and read it on the Internet.”
Flake added: “Rather than having the government regulate what people can say, we should let the market decide what people want to hear. That’s precisely why the Fairness Doctrine was abandoned, and that’s why it ought not to be revived.”
At the end of yesterday’s debate, Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (Wis.) agreed with Republicans that the government should not regulate conservative radio hosts such as Limbaugh and Hannity.
“We ought to let right-wing talk radio go on as they do now,” he said. “Rush and Sean are just about as important in the scheme of things as Paris Hilton, and I would hate to see them gain an ounce of credibility by being forced by a government agency or anybody else to moderate their views enough that they might become modestly influential or respected.”
moreNow Democrats are advocating for Rush and Sean: call it the Imus irony!
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