It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren. --Sandra Day O'Connor
Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. Yet, 19 years after our holding that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to terminate her pregnancy in its early stages, Roe v. Wade (1973), that definition of liberty is still questioned. --Sandra Day O'Connor
O'Connor often swerved wildly to miss the point in matters before the court. In case #1, she made the shallow observation that quasi-religious expression in school is hardly threatening, but she missed the broader constitutional point that freedom of religion does not require freedom from religion.
In case #2, she bemoaned the fact that the definition of liberty is questioned, while discounting and condemning the most fundamental liberty of the young and fragile.
The Supreme Court is supposed to settle matters of law. Most of O'Connor's rulings were not only shallow, but exceedingly narrow. This required many more passes at the court to re-try and clarify all these narrow rulings. That makes more work for lawyers, but is ultimately not efficient or effective.
I really wonder if lawyers are all that well suited to be judges. Maybe we should train judges to interpret the law, instead of drawing from the pool of those paid to exploit it.
12 comments:
O'Connor helped put a monkey in the White House where the president is supposed to live.
We will be cleaning up flung poo for generations.
Not that there was any reasonable alternative (let alone a valid choice); but even there, Sandy missed the opportunity to frame the real issue: that it is unconstitutional to rewrite election laws after the election is over, and then apply them retroactively. At least the court got that one right.
In the December 12 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court handing the election to George Bush, the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogtate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law.
If you doubt this, try to imagine Al Gore's and George Bush's roles being reversed and ask yourself if you can conceive of Justice Antonin Scalia and his four conservative brethren issuing an emergency order on December 9 stopping the counting of ballots (at a time when Gore's lead had shrunk to 154 votes) on the grounds that if it continued, Gore could suffer "irreparable harm," and then subsequently, on December 12, bequeathing the election to Gore on equal protection grounds.
There haven't been as many as four conservatives on the court in my lifetime (or yours), but that's another discussion. If the court hadn't interceded on 12/12/00, the Dems would have kept counting ballots and changing rules until the numbers came out their way. As it turned out, all subsequent counts (sponsored by the Miami Dade Herald and other media types -- and using the proposed new counting "rules") came up with the same result (i.e., Bush wins), so the court had no pivotal input in the matter. I credit the Supreme Court with at least saving us the irritation of having to listen to the whiny democrat revisionists.
The Florida Ballot Project, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago (NORC.uchicago.edu) showed that a statewide recount would have given Gore the electoral vote, as well as the popular vote.
The ONLY reason that miserable failure is being allowed to fling poo from the White House is because the Supremes believed actually counting the votes was "quaint."
Well, they actually DID count the ballots. It was the repeated handling and rehandling of the ballots that presented a problem.
Any initiative to re-open the count would have required the opening of another 40,000 ballots from the military, resulting in a Bush win of some 30,000 votes; so there wasn't even a good reason to go on.
The "close" loss and quasi controversy over the election is therefore more favorable to the dems than an honest accounting of the votes showing that result would have been.
http://www.umich.edu/~nes/florida2000/general_info.htm
I looked around there, and found the certified results. Didn't see any other useful conclusions...were there any?
Actually, NORC just presented raw data, probably to protect their own neutrality. Media outlets had to do their own analyses of the NORC data, which led to some contradictory headlines.
If Gore had gotten the recount he asked for, he would have lost. If he had gotten a statewide recount, he would have been shown to be the winner.
Go here to see how the NY Times calculated it http://www.nytimes.com/images/2001/11/12/politics/recount/preset.html
Well, I suppose we could shake the tea leaves any which way and suggest an alternate scenario. (I prefer strict adherence to election laws --but hey, no system's perfect).
Here's a thought: Maybe we are just plain lucky that Gore is not president. Perhaps we should be grateful that Sandy was where she was when she was.
I've already mentioned, in another comment, the clear evidence of Democratic voter fraud in Palm Beach County. In addition, the fact that the press went out of their way to call the election results in Florida prior to the closing of the polls in western Florida, the panhandle (which not coincidentally is strong Bush/Conservative country) undoubtedly reduced Bush's vote margin by discouraging conservative voters from going to the polls for what appeared to be an already decided state result.
And contrary to what anonymous says about the conservative supreme court justices (and it's a highly insulting statement, but what would you expect from someone with a scatological fascination with monkey poo?), the justices she mentions are, and have repeatedly, shown that they are above politics, and will vote to support basic Constitutional principles, even if it leads to results they personally might not like.
But then, I know such honor and forthrightness are completely alien concepts to the Left.
True enough, and you didn't have to be a personal friend of Richard J. Daley to know how far Democrats are willing to go to change things. The whole "exit poll" imnitiative is another example of shadiness, if not outright tampering.
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