"Every appointed Supreme Court judge since 1971 has been more conservative than his/her predecessor

“Including myself, every judge who has been appointed to the Court since Lewis Powell <1971> has been more conservative than his or her predecessor.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens

Weekend Edition
April 16-18, 2010

This Will be Obama's Legacy
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR


Stevens, the last protestant on the high court, described himself as a conservative, and in one sense he was, because he tried to preserve the spirit of the progressive Warren court through the decades-long swing of the court toward the right, both among the Republican nominees and the ones put up by Clinton (Breyer and Ginsburg) and by Obama (Sotomayor). As Stevens himself has said to law professor Jeffrey Rosen, “Including myself, every judge who has been appointed to the Court since Lewis Powell <1971> has been more conservative than his or her predecessor.”

As Obama and his counselors ponder potential nominees, the air is filled with counsel that Obama should avoid a protracted fight and should pick “a moderate” – i.e., pro-business, pro-government – nominee, like Elena Kagan, 49, now solicitor general and in earlier years head of the Harvard Law School, where she hired Jack Goldsmith, head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush administration, where he was intimately tied to the torture and detainee abuse scandals. He's Harvard's version of John Yoo. Before that, Kagan served as Clinton’s deputy domestic policy advisor, in which capacity she oversaw, among other assignments, welfare “reform.” One of her colleagues at the White House at that time was Christopher Edley, now the Dean at Boalt, the law school at UC Berkeley. Edley says of Kagan that her politics were “center to center right.”

In the Clinton administration, Kagan helped formulate the Democratic equivalent of what became, in the subsequent W. Bush years, the assertion of unitary executive power. There’s zero evidence that Kagan would do anything to redress the right-wing tilt of the Court and plenty that she might exacerbate it, in the areas of executive power, civil liberties, and assertion of presidential war powers. In her confirmation hearings as solicitor general, she so entranced the right with her proclamations in favor of the War on Terror, indefinite detention, and against any pursuit of war crimes investigations, that Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota) said, “it sounded like she was getting a standing ovation from the Federalist Society.”

Who could the left put up, as an assertion of what a truly progressive justice might look like? How about Steven Bright, of the Southern Center for Human Rights, the country’s leading anti-Death Penalty litigator from Kentucky? Or, David Cole, professor of law at Georgetown? Or, Pamela Carlan, at Stanford, a former counsel for the NAACP and openly gay? Or, Jonathan Turley, at George Washington, who is particularly strong on civil liberties and the environment? Turley defended Sami al-Arian, the Rocky Flats workers, attacked warrantless wiretapping. Or, within the administration, Harold Koh, Korean American and one of the principle legal appointments of the torture policies of the Bush years? Koh was originally a Reagan appointee to the Office of Legal Counsel. Turley says Koh is the closest we have to Justice Brandeis.

There’s one more name that has been nervously circulated among progressive circles, that of Elizabeth Warren, currently head of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the banking bailout. Warren originally hails from Oklahoma and a professor at Harvard Law School. Warren is as close as we can now get to Stevens’ economic populism and has been eloquent on the topic of corporate skullduggery and on the pro-bank tilt of the bailout. She would, actually, be a shrewd choice for Obama, because it would turn the Supreme Court confirmation hearings into a debate on economic justice, consumer protection and regulation of Wall Street where Warren’s Republican opponents be forced to take the side of the rich, at a moment when the rich are not popular with a large number of Americans.

Don’t hold your breath.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04162010.html

More crap from Counterpunch, one of the worst zines on the planet.



http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09rosen.html

End of that nominee. Goldsmith isn't being considered.

and progressives that qualify as progressives to most DUers are a limited minority who somehow thinks they are dominant....

That's a corporate media lie (as best exemplified by that crap the NY Times published about the "well educated" teabaggers recently)

When they are polled on specific issues and policies you appear to be quite mistaken.

overwhelmingly elected Democrats in 2006 and 2008 because they mistakingly thought Democrats were conservatives?

This is right wing talking points nonsense designed to justify moving the court and the nation further to the right. If anything the nation is more socially liberal than ever.

You want to talk fiscally? In the last two decades the American consumer became the all time champion spend thrifts, far worse, even, than their government.

What about the American people is now more conservative than years gone by? They are less unionized. Give me something else.

The MAJORITY of ALL Americans (Democrats & Republicans) are much MORE Liberal than the Democratic Party Leadership, especially when polled on the issues.


*A SuperMajority of ALL Americans supported the Expansion of Medicare/Public Option.
LESS than 33% supported MANDATES without a Public Option

*A LARGE Majority OPPOSED the Great Wall Street Bailouts.

*A VAST Majority support Transparent, Verifiable Elections. (No Black Box Voting)

*A MAJORITY oppose expanding the WAR in Afghanistan

Americans are not nearly as "Conservative" and "Big Business/Corporate Friendly" as you (and the DLC) would like them to be.


"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone

Just kidding.

Most people support liberal policy positions, they just consider themselves "conservative" because of MSM brainwashing.

If there was ever a post meant to make people angry without saying anything much of substance--that one's it.

He's definitely a better choice than Kagan by far. And being a Reagan appointee, there's no way the Repukes can oppose him. If he was good enough for their false Messiah, how could they make a case against him?

Elizabeth Warren needs to be at Treasury, and Timmy the Elf needs to be back at the North Pole.

:rofl:

Just to engage in a personal attack rather than civil discussion?

Bye, bye.

Notice how cap and trade used to be a Republican counter to real emissions regulation? Notice how the HCR bill resembles nothing more than the Dole compromise? Yeah.

It has been wholesale surrender by so-called liberal legislators. The massive wave of deregulation, the HCR bill and Iraq War being good examples.

She just says it like it is.

interpretation of Citizens United v FEC. Besides he thought Ken Star was correct in PERSECUTING President Clinton. So he is OUT!

"This country is going to move so far to the right you won't recognize it."

Spiro Agnew, 1969.