Antonin Scalia is not a robot. Really! Even conservative Supreme Court justices experience empathy, says Adam Serwer. Just for the religious, the unborn, and powerful corporate interests, natch. Meanwhile, Sarah Posner analyzes the religious right’s takes on Sonia Sotomayor and Proposition 8. And nobody rouses the Republican rabble quite like Newt Gingrich. Paul Waldman considers […]
Samuel Alito
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ALITO’S TWO BAD ARGUMENTS.
Today’s decision in Kennedy v. Louisiana is a fairly typical Eighth Amendment case. The relevant textual language — “nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” — can evidently accommodate multiple outcomes in any case sufficiently interesting to get to the Supreme Court, and this case is no exception. The Court’s four more liberal members and the […]
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IS ROBERTS/ALITO OPTIMISM JUSTIFIED?
Publius has a more optimistic take on last week’s civil rights enforcement decisions, in which (unusually in a major case) Alito and Roberts broke with Thomas and Scalia and (with Kennedy) joined the Court’s more liberal bloc, than I did. His case is, as always, worth reading. He argues — as many Court observers did […]
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The Supreme Court’s Wrong Turn — And How to Fix It
After posing as moderates, Justices Roberts and Alito have moved the Court radically to the right.
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THE ALITO COURT.
THE ALITO COURT. Emily Bazelon has an amusing article asking liberal and moderate legal scholars who claimed that Roberts would not preside over a rightward shift on the Court on the basis of… well, frankly I have no idea, if they have second thoughts. (Of course he said he valued stability and precedent at his […]
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ALITO: STILL WORSE THAN SCALIA
ALITO: STILL WORSE THAN SCALIA. David Savage has a very good article in today’s Los Angeles Times about Antonin Scalia and the effect of appointing Sam Alito. It carefully explains the areas of law where replacing the centrist Sandra Day O’Connor with the doctrinaire reactionary Alito is likely to have an immediate impact. One good […]
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The Alito Reality
By Neil the Ethical Werewolf Dan Gerstein thinks that we shouldn’t blame Lieberman for not voting to filibuster Alito. Matt Yglesias partly agrees. I don’t agree at all. I’m not buying Gerstein’s claim that a Lieberman filibuster vote would’ve triggered the nuclear option. See Mark Schmitt on November 1: But to pull off the Nuclear […]
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Alito Post-Mortems
You know, I think in all the post-Alito self-flagellation, not enough weight is given to the fact that Democrats, if you count Jim Jeffords, are at a five-seat deficit in the Senate. You just don’t beat competent nominees with that sort of a structural disadvantage. Even Bork, the only recent nominee to be defeated in […]
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Attacking Alito
At this moment in American history, it would be hard to find a worse Supreme Court nominee than Samuel A. Alito Jr. His ideology captures everything extremist about the Bush administration. If confirmed, Alito would serve as Bush’s enabler. He would give Bush effective control of all three branches of government and the hard-right long-term […]
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Alito’s Smoking Gun
Samuel Alito could not have put it more plainly. “The Constitution,” he wrote in a 1985 job application he posted to the Reagan administration’s attorney general, Ed Meese, “does not protect a right to an abortion.” The folks charged with getting Alito confirmed as Sandra Day O’Connor’s successor are insisting that the judge’s declaration is […]