Three beautiful words about an Obama administration
What three words, you ask? The Supreme Court. This was the issue that nobody really talked about but was IMO the most important reason to work like the proverbial dog for an Obama victory. I don't know what kind of picks President Obama will float when the vacancies inevitably come up. I suspect they will be more 'centrist' than I'm going to like but they will doubtless be lightyears better than what we would have been facing under a McCain presidency.
And remember back during the Roberts and Alito confirmation hearings how very concerned the Republicans were about the paramount importance of an "up or down vote" and their bellicose threats about the "nuclear option?" I have a feeling we won't be hearing about those concerns anymore. In fact, we can expect the opposite from the now even more marginalized minority party.
[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]
And remember back during the Roberts and Alito confirmation hearings how very concerned the Republicans were about the paramount importance of an "up or down vote" and their bellicose threats about the "nuclear option?" I have a feeling we won't be hearing about those concerns anymore. In fact, we can expect the opposite from the now even more marginalized minority party.
[More posts daily at The Newshoggers and The Detroit News.]
Labels: President Obama, Republicans, SCOTUS
posted by Libby Spencer at 11:51 AM
7 Comments:
Absolutely right. We need judges who believe in the living constitution, forget about the "centrist" type. With a living constitution, the document will mean what we say it means.
Well, um, no Anon. What we need is judges who are not beholden to political and corporate interests and will interpret the law fairly and impartially. We're not likely to ever get that, so in the alternate the best we can hope for is to rebalance the court so the "strict constitutionalists" don't own it since that label is just a code word for give the fundie whackjobs whatever they want.
The more liberal judges will likely be retiring soon and a more ideologically diverse court serves us the best.
Ms. Spencer:
(Anon coming back for another post) Obama (as far as I remember) has come out strongly for a living constitution. Doesn't this mean not looking narrowly at what the words are in the constitution (sorry for the double negative), but to what is fair and right?
There is enough case law for any fair and just decision to come from whatever our judges say the constitution means. For example, re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine, so the rightwing hate radio will be effectively silenced. This will put those "fundie whackjobs" in their place.
For example, re-instituting the Fairness Doctrine, so the rightwing hate radio will be effectively silenced. This will put those "fundie whackjobs" in their place.
Although I consider myself left-wing and liberal, this concept scares me. Once we go down the slippery slope of silencing others, it increases the chance of us being silenced in turn. The intent of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine" was not to silence but to mandate "equal time."
Obama is a constitutional law scholar. His will be qualified and quality appointments, not ideological whack jobs like the last bunch.
I don't understand where people get the idea the Fairness Doctrine is about shutting down voices. It's not. It's about increasing voices. It wouldn't shut down the hate radio or whatever, it would simply require that for anything aired that is political in nature, equal time must be given to opposing voices.
Nothing could be fairer than that.
You all are of course right that fairness doctrine would mean that opposing views would be forced onto right-wing radio. My point was that this would probably shut them down as their listeners couldn't stand correct information, and therefore the stations would switch to different formats.
Certainly this is just speculation, but since right-wing radio did not really exist when the fairness doctrine was previously in existence, a definite possibility.
The far right would then demand access on NPR, ABC, CBS, NBC, but our judges would make the correct call that these are straight unbiased news sources, and not opinion.
Apologies for the tangent into the fairness doctrine and taking away from your posting on judges.
Anon, that's not the way it would work. Equal air time doesn't mean they have to share the air time in the same hours. It just means they have to give comparable air time to opposing voices. They're not going to force Rush to give Rhandi Rhodes ten minutes of his show.
I would think it would mainly affect the networks that get government subsidies on the air waves. IIRC, that's how it used to work. Of course in those days, news stations used to deliver news instead of Enquirer level gossip.
In any event, it wouldn't nearly as coercive as all those emails you got told it would.
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