Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Republican Court Soon Won't Bother Pretending To Be Restrained Anymore

Posted by olvlzl
If you think the warning below about an emergency is overblown, read this interview with Martin Garbus. He points out some things that make it almost a certainty that Bush will get one more nomination to the Supreme Court, that unless we do something to prevent it he will get another anti-democratic royalist like Roberts on the court and that we could lose just about all the progress made in the past century if another one lies their way into confirmation.

Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day they don’t seem to have lost their ability to put comity before the Constitution, though some of that could be due to the fact that our media seems to think that Arlen Specter and the Republicans are still in the majority*. If we are going to save our civil rights, our environment, any kind of justice then we are going to have to do everything we can to force them to reject anyone who isn’t clearly on record as being considerably to the left of the RATS, and I’d add Kennedy to that list too. Consider this quote:

Words like judicial activism and judicial restraint have absolutely no meaning. If I have a liberal court, I want to see judicial activism. I want to see them go out and do things. If there’s a conservative court, I want to see judicial restraint, so they can’t do too much damage. The language that the Rehnquist Court and the conservatives have used over the last decades accusing the Warren Court of being too judicially active, and that they’re restrainers, is nonsense. The Rehnquist Court struck down more federal legislation than any other Court before it.

-- Martin Garbus, trial lawyer and author of The Next 25 Years.

The words replace reality and they argue about the words. The record is clear, conservatives will rule from the bench and lie about it as they are doing it, they can depend on Republican politicians and the corporate media to repeat the lies for them. Their determination to thwart democracy through a radically conservative judiciary might already be impossible to avoid except through attrition and then only if we can prevent more Roberts, Alitos, Thomases and Scalias being appointed. And that’s going to be hard enough to be getting on with.

* It seems so long ago, when it was only last December, how the media seemed unaware that there were ranking members. The policy was to entirely ignore them when they were Democrats. Now, it’s the majority who seems to have largely disappeared. Notice that the next time you’re watching the news.