John Roberts, Jr to become a Supreme
 

CNN

time to do some reading. i don't really know anything about this guy? who does?

intial reaction:

My God. He's so young. :(

so was O'Connor. and i hear she didn't even have a penis, either. :mg:

Some quotes:

"We continue to believe that Roe was wrongly decided and should be overruled."

"I don't know how you can call the Rehnquist court conservative."


He's also the guy who sent a kid to jail for eating a french fry on the subway.

In a unanimous decision with several other judges.

and the young lady who was made famous in that case now believes the same thing, so he isn't entirely alone in his lunacy.

but i believe your quote was pulled from a brief he wrote @1990. in his confirmation for his current position he fell more in line with what you want, so you can probably relax a bit.

i'm more interested to hear his views on property rights, privacy, etc.

That is so huge. I know they're going to get bogged down on other sexier issues but if we want America to continue to be a special society people need to feel secure in ownership. O'Conner is out, somebody has to stand with the people against the state.

But in a previous confirmation hearing Roberts stated:

"Roe v. Wade is the settled law of the land. .....There's nothing in my personal views that would prevent me from fully and faithfully applying that precedent."

source: The Houston Chronicle

Applying precedent takes on new meaning in the USSC. But I'm still waiting on more information.

i've heard Schumer and a couple of others complaing because we don't know anything about Roberts' personal views. i consider that a good thing. if he is required to pass legal judgement on an issue and he uses the current law and the US constitution as his resources then he is fulfilling his duties. if he ever steps up and says "i feel, or i think..." then that is not what he is supposed to be doing. judges should be able to make rulings that fit legal and constitutional parameters even when it rubs against their personal preferences.

You and I agree on this. I could almost accept even a Yankee fan (and that's saying a LOT). Personal views are personal, and professional comportment can and should be the order of the day.

However. Please correct me if I am reading you wrong, but I depend on the justices' "feeling" and "thinking". Because without that interpretation, without that human, personal reading of the law, there is only a static, lifeless stack of books.

If it were even possible to do this job without thinking and feeling (and I contend that is is not, and should not), why not just give the job to a machine. Hold the brief up to the light against a copy of the constitution and if it's not a match, the answer is no. Really. Not possible or desireable.

I feel confident that President Bush would agree with me on this point, and that's a rarity. I imagine he chose this nominee based on his understanding of John Roberts Jr's thoughts and feelings. I am utterly convinced that the vetting process included many questions to that end.

I may not agree with the nominee's thoughts and feelings about a given case, but using judgement (feeling and thinking) in the context of the law, is what it's all about.

Our society is undergoing constant change. That's the reason there's a court in the first place, to adjudicate a difference of opinion, of interpretation of our rules as they stand. We NEED interpretation. As long as we are a nation of laws (made by Congress, not the Court), there will be conflict, conflicting opinions about what's right, who's right about the law. And the decision makers must think to be able to apply the law. The law often lags social/business/cultural/societal reality. Until the law changes to match the way things are now, we'll need the judges in the courts to define how a law written yesterday applies to today.

A show of hands, please. How many people think that anyone who claimed, in public or in private, to be either neutral or in favor of abortion would be nominated by the Bush administration to sit on Supreme Court?

I have this feeling here like Charlie Brown must feel as he approaches the football teed up by Lucy. This time! This time I'm gonna kick that ball.




Maybe.




Maybe not.

This looks like an easy, predictable setup, a doable thing. An imaginable thing, despite all that has gone before.

Is this the triumph of hope over experience with this administration? Is this nominee conservative (a given) but fair (unknown), or will this be another trick to heave the court further to the right?

Why is a traditionalist SCOTUS a bad thing? It seems to me that a court should stand for established law and let the legislators do the "progressing". Everyone gets so worried that someone's going to take away their precious abortions, or not take everyone's feelings into account. In a way, it would be refreshing to have a machine take over the responsibility of judging the constitutionality of lower court decisions. That way you could be sure that the judgements were free of the influence of beltway cocktail parties, ego, and personal "legacy." Unfortunately, it would also erase the other human components of dignity, honor, and respect for the spirit of the law.

As if recent SCOTUS decisions have demonstrated those, anyway.

No one raised a ruckus over Ginsberg, even though she (OMG! WTF!) pulled the court to the left. She was overwhelmingly confirmed because, at the time, she demonstrated the backbone necessary to keep her personal politics off the bench. Of course, she's failed miserably at that task since then, but again, that's human nature.

Yes, nitpickers, there are holes in this post. But in a perfect world, judges would be seperate from all the bullshit politicking. That's all I'm wishing for, as impossible a goal as it is.

Well, needless to say, the man is extremely conservative. Probably right up your alley, Lookout! ;)

Here's a snip of some of the background on him put together by Alliance for Justice:

At Hogan & Hartson, Judge Roberts had a successful, high profile appellate practice. Some of his noteworthy cases included: Toyota Motor Mfg., Kentucky v. Williams,8 where, on behalf of Toyota, he successfully argued that the Americans with Disabilities Act did not require Toyota to provide a workplace accommodation to a worker who acquired carpal tunnel syndrome on the job;9 Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission,10 where, on behalf of Fox, he successfully argued that Fox was not subject to ownership rules designed to prevent monopolization; Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Mineta,11 where, appearing on behalf of the Associated General Contractors of America as amicus curiae, he argued that Congress failed to make sufficiently specific findings to justify an affirmative action program for Department of Transportation contractors;12 Rothe Dev. Corp. v. United States Dep’t of Def.,13 where, also on behalf of AGCA as amicus curiae, he successfully challenged as unconstitutional the Department of Defense’s affirmative action program granting bid preferences to small, minority-owned businesses;14 Bragg v. West Virginia Coal Association,15 where, on behalf of the National Mining Association as amicus curiae, he successfully used sovereign immunity doctrine to defeat a Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act16 challenge by affected West Virginia citizens to the state’s practice of issuing permits to mining companies to extract coal by blasting the tops off of mountains and depositing the debris in nearby valleys and streams...

More info can be found HERE