Quote:The GOP’s Blocking of Supreme Court Pick Is Indefensible
by GEORGE WILL March 19, 2016 8:00 PM @GEORGEWILL
The Republican party’s incoherent response to the Supreme Court vacancy is a partisan reflex in search of a justifying principle.
The multiplicity of Republican rationalizations for their refusal to even consider Merrick Garland radiates insincerity.
Republicans instantly responded to Antonin Scalia’s death by proclaiming that no nominee, however admirable in temperament, intellect, and experience, would be accorded a hearing. They say their obduracy is right because: Because they have a right to be obdurate, there being no explicit constitutional proscription against this.
Or because President Obama’s demonstrated contempt for the Constitution’s explicit text and for implicit constitutional manners justifies Republicans reciprocating with contempt for his Supreme Court choice, regardless of its merits.
Or because, 24 years ago, then-senator Joe Biden — he is not often cited by Republicans seeking validation — suggested that a president’s right to nominate judges somehow expires, or becomes attenuated, in a “political season,” sometime after the midterm elections during a second presidential term.
Or because if a Republican president tried to fill a Court vacancy during his eighth year, Democrats would behave the way Republicans are behaving.
In their tossed salad of situational ethics, the Republicans’ most contradictory and least conservative self-justification is: The Court’s supposedly fragile legitimacy is endangered unless the electorate speaks before a vacancy is filled.
The preposterous premise is that the Court will be “politicized” unless vacancies are left vacant until a political campaign registers public opinion about, say, “Chevron deference.”
This legal doctrine actually is germane to Garland. He is the most important member (chief judge) of the nation’s second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the importance of which derives primarily from its caseload of regulatory challenges. There Garland has practiced what too many conservatives have preached — “deference” in the name of “judicial restraint” toward Congress, and toward the executive branch and its appendages in administering congressional enactments. Named for a 1984 case, Chevron deference unleashes the regulatory state by saying that agencies charged with administering statutes are entitled to deference when they interpret supposedly ambiguous statutory language.
In his record of deference, Garland resembles two justices nominated by Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, respectively — Chief Justice John Roberts and, even more, Scalia, who seems to be more revered than read by many conservatives. Garland’s reluctance to restrict the administrative state’s discretion would represent continuity in the chair he would fill. Furthermore, Garland’s deference is also expressed in respect for precedents, which include the 2008 Heller decision. In it, the Court (with Scalia writing for the majority) affirmed that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.
Of the last 25 justices confirmed, beginning with Dwight Eisenhower’s 1954 nomination of Earl Warren as chief justice, Garland, 63, is the second-oldest nominee. (Lewis Powell was 64 when Richard Nixon selected him in 1971.) The average age of the 25 was 53. So, Obama’s reach into the future through Garland is apt to be more limited than it would be with a younger nominee.
Republicans who vow to deny Garland a hearing and who pledge to support Donald Trump if he is their party’s nominee are saying: Democracy somehow requires that this vacancy on a non-majoritarian institution must be filled only after voters have had their say through the election of the next president. And constitutional values will be served if the vacancy is filled not by Garland but by someone chosen by President Trump, a stupendously uninformed dilettante who thinks judges “sign” what he refers to as “bills.” There is every reason to think that Trump understands none of the issues pertinent to the Supreme Court’s role in the American regime, and there is no reason to doubt that he would bring to the selection of justices what he brings to all matters — arrogance leavened by frivolousness.
Trump’s multiplying Republican apologists do not deny the self-evident — that he is as clueless regarding everything as he is about the nuclear triad. These invertebrate Republicans assume that as president he would surround himself with people unlike himself — wise and temperate advisers. So, we should wager everything on the hope that the man who says his “number one” foreign-policy adviser is “myself” (because “I have a very good brain”) will succumb to humility and rely on people who actually know things. If Republicans really think that either their front-runner or the Democrats’ would nominate someone superior to Garland, it would be amusing to hear them try to explain why they do
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Quote:Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and appointed with the advice and consent of the National Rifle Association, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
McConnell offered this unusual view of the confirmation process during an interview with Fox News Sunday. In response to a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked if Senate Republicans would consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the election if Hillary Clinton prevails, McConnell responded that he “can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association [and] the National Federation of Independent Businesses.”
The Majority Leader’s statement is significant for several reasons. For one thing, it suggests that his previously stated position that “this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President,” is a sham. Simply put, it’s unlikely that the NRA or the NFIB will change their position on a nominee just because Hillary Clinton is president and not Barack Obama.
But it’s also worth examining exactly who McConnell would give a veto power over nominees. The NFIB, of course, was a plaintiff in NFIB v. Sebelius, the first Supreme Court case seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That lawsuit called upon the justices to impose limits on federal power that even the late Justice Antonin Scalia refused to impose in previous cases (although it’s worth noting that Scalia abandoned his previous principled stance when given the opportunity to cast a vote against Obamacare). When the NFIB isn’t fighting to take health care away from millions of Americans, it fights equally hard against raising the minimum wage.
The NRA, meanwhile, is known for its increasingly absolutist opposition to gun safety laws. Though Garland’s record on guns is fairly thin, the NRA opposes Garland’s nomination based on two cases he considered as a judge.
In the first of these two cases, Parker v. District of Columbia, Garland played a very limited role. InParker, two conservative members of a three judge panel struck down the District of Columbia’s strict handgun laws, over the dissent of another conservative, George H.W. Bush appointee Judge Karen Henderson. The District then asked the full appeals court to reconsider this decision in a process known as en banc review. Garland was one of four judges who voted to rehear the case, as was Judge A. Raymond Randolph, an extraordinarily conservative H.W. Bush appointee.
A 5-4 Supreme Court eventually agreed with the three-judge panel in District of Columbia v. Heller, the first decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.
The second case cited by the NRA is National Rifle Association v. Reno, where Garland joined a decision by Judge David Tatel upholding a database the FBI uses to audit the background check system used to screen potential firearm buyers. The FBI retained information regarding individuals who sought to purchase firearms for six months after they attempted to make this purchase, and used this information to perform “quality control checks on the [background check] system’s operation by reviewing the accuracy of the responses given by the NICS record examiners to gun dealers,” among other things.
After six months, information in this database was destroyed. Nevertheless, the NRA claimed that the FBI was required to destroy this information much sooner.
Judge Tatel’s opinion rejecting the NRA’s argument relies on several interlocking provisions of federal law, as well as longstanding Supreme Court doctrines calling for deference to federal agencies, so it is not easily summarized in just a few paragraphs. You can read his opinion and assess his reasoning here. It’s worth noting, however, that NRA v. Reno is a classic case of gun groups seeking to win a victory in the courts that they repeatedly lost in Congress.
A provision of federal law requires the government to “destroy all records . . . relating to the person” who seeks to purchase a firearm — something the FBI did after six months — but does not order the government to do so within a specific time frame. As Judge Tatel notes in the opinion joined by Garland, members of Congress attempted multiple times to change this law to require the government to “immediately” destroy records produced by the background check system, and these efforts repeatedly failed. Thus, having failed to write the word “immediately” into the statute, the NRA asked the courts to do it for them. Tatel and Garland refused to take up this invitation.
So McConnell isn’t simply delegating his duty to evaluate potential Supreme Court nominees to the NRA, he’s deferring to the NRA despite the fact that the gun lobby group’s case against Garland is very thin. It consists of Garland’s single vote to rehear a case that one of his court’s most conservative members also voted to rehear, along with a decision to allow the FBI to continue to perform audits on the background check system after lawmakers sympathetic to the NRA tried and failed to shut those audits down.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
Yeah, I had seen this before about the NRA. I find it interesting how this judge that both sides have liked for years is now suddenly controversial because of the NRA and the NFIB. "We aren't being unreasonable! See? There are reasons! We promise, even though we have sung this man's praises for years!"
(03-21-2016, 01:40 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: Yeah, I had seen this before about the NRA. I find it interesting how this judge that both sides have liked for years is now suddenly controversial because of the NRA and the NFIB. "We aren't being unreasonable! See? There are reasons! We promise, even though we have sung this man's praises for years!"
But, but "both sides do it"!!
And we all wish neither side would do it.
Your anger and ego will always reveal your true self.
(03-19-2016, 05:40 AM)JustWinBaby Wrote: I used to care....then I realized this is all just kabuki theater to manipulate our votes.
I picture the establishment having beers, yucking it up and playing rock-paper-scissors to decide who gets what votes. What's killing us is - shocker - career politicians are more interested in re-election than what is good for the country. We've even been led to believe the media isn't state-sponsored propaganda.
You do realize media is almost entirely paid for either by the end user or advertising. So, no, it's not state-sponsored.
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(03-21-2016, 02:15 PM)Benton Wrote: You do realize media is almost entirely paid for either by the end user or advertising. So, no, it's not state-sponsored.
This Public Service Announcement was brought to you by Coke. Coke — have one with a friend.
One could argue that the same ones buying the advertising are the ones buying the politicians.
(03-21-2016, 03:04 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: One could argue that the same ones buying the advertising are the ones buying the politicians.
and that's a valid argument and one that usually breaks down into money=free speech. But it's not the same as saying "state sponsored media" as that would be media paid for by tax dollars, with the intent of delivering one message.
(03-21-2016, 03:20 PM)Benton Wrote: and that's a valid argument and one that usually breaks down into money=free speech. But it's not the same as saying "state sponsored media" as that would be media paid for by tax dollars, with the intent of delivering one message.
The sad thing is the Dems don't even pay them and they carry the water for them.
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