Sotomayor.....No Surprise

[The Original Tree]

1. The only surprise about the recent dishonesty by Justice Sotomayor is that anyone claims to be surprised.
When Democrats nominate a judge to the Supreme Court, the only reason is provide a reliable vote.....and nothing to do with qualifications or intellect.
Sotomayor case in point.

2. This week, we saw proof:

"Politifact, Jake Tapper call out Justice Sotomayor for glaring falsehoods during vaccine mandate hearing, nets ignore​

3. But simply arguendo, let me outline reasons why this judge should never have been elevated to the Supreme Court.

Judicial intellect

During the Senate hearings, the judge used malaprops such as the following: “…[foreign law] increased our ‘story’ of knowledge.” The word is ‘store,’ or ‘storehouse.’ The judge, in discussing the use of deadly force, used the phrase ‘faced with ‘eminent’ death.’ The correct term is ‘imminent’. Her use of language seems somewhat below what we have come to expect from a Supreme Court Justice. For comparison, imagine the response if former President Bush had used incorrect terminology. And, “…firemen where meant to be hired due to the vagrancies…” She meant vacancies. One more? “Questions of policy are within the providence of Congress…” Clearly, province, not providence- unless she was speaking of the Rhode Island legislature.


b. Judge Sonia Sotomayor once described herself as "a product of affirmative action" who was admitted to two Ivy League schools despite scoring lower on standardized tests than many classmates, which she attributed to "cultural biases" that are "built into testing."

The clips include lengthy remarks about her experiences as an "affirmative action baby" whose lower test scores were overlooked by admissions committees at Princeton University and Yale Law School because, she said, she is Latino and had grown up in poor circumstances.
Videotaped remarks shed light on Sotomayor



c.“The most consistent concern was that Sotomayor, although an able lawyer, was "not that smart and kind of a bully on the bench," as one former Second Circuit clerk for another judge put it. "She has an inflated opinion of herself, and is domineering during oral arguments, but her questions aren't penetrating and don't get to the heart of the issue… Her opinions, although competent, are viewed by former prosecutors as not especially clean or tight, and sometimes miss the forest for the trees.”
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=45d56e6f-f497-4b19-9c63-04e10199a085


But she certainly serves Democrat purposes.

She lied in a Supreme Court Hearing. Is there anything more despicable for a SCOTUS JUSTICE to do? And why haven't they ruled on this yet?

It's an open and shut case. OSHA does not have the right to mandate vaccines in the workplace that you have to take with you home, and live with for the rest of your life.

 

[PoliticalChic]

She lied in a Supreme Court Hearing. Is there anything more despicable for a SCOTUS JUSTICE to do? And why haven't they ruled on this yet?

It's an open and shut case. OSHA does not have the right to mandate vaccines in the workplace that you have to take with you home, and live with for the rest of your life.

Wouldn't be the first time the Supremes defied logic and law.


As I have said before, the Supreme Court decisions should be treated as red and green lights in Rome: as merely a suggestion.

 

[The Original Tree]

Wouldn't be the first time the Supremes defied logic and law.


As I have said before, the Supreme Court decisions should be treated as red and green lights in Rome: as merely a suggestion.

Plessey vs. Ferguson violated The US Constitution and SCOTUS knew it and just went along with The Pressures of The Day and bowed down to the cries of the racist segregationist Democrats promoting segregation instead of following The Constitution.

I am hoping The Rule of Law is followed instead of The Rule of The Mob.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Plessey vs. Ferguson violated The US Constitution and SCOTUS knew it and just went along with The Pressures of The Day and bowed down to the cries of the racist segregationist Democrats promoting segregation instead of following The Constitution.

I am hoping The Rule of Law is followed instead of The Rule of The Mob.

I never count on the Supremes doing the right thing.

Forgive the length, but this is one of those sublects of personal interest for me......the worst Court decisions.


The standard I'm using for “worst” is three-fold:

• First, the holding of the case is unambiguously still guiding precedent.
• Second, the holding of the case is inconsistent with the Constitution.
• Third, the case either A) has egregious consequences for individual liberty or B) is clearly ideological- or policy-driven rubbish as a matter of constitutional law (whether or not I happen to like the consequences).

Under the first prong, I will exclude from consideration a number of infamously horrific decisions: Dred Scott (ruling black people aren't citizens), Plessy v. Ferguson (allowing separate-but-equal), Buck v. Bell (permitting compulsory sterilization), and Korematsu v. United States (upholding Japanese internment camps).

Dred Scott and Plessy have been clearly overruled. Buck and Korematsu may not be technically be overruled, but I think the reason is just that a similar case hasn't provided the opportunity. I may be wrong about that for Buck andKorematsu — I hope not — but I am making the assumption that they're not good law anymore.

Using the second and third prongs, I think the case that wins the “honor” for the worst active Supreme Court decision in American history is Helvering v. Davis (1937). Helvering upheld the constitutionality of Social Security on the basis that Congress has a general power to spend on whatever it deems to be in the general welfare.

This ruling completely upended the system of enumerated powers, in which Congress only had the powers delegated to it by the Constitution, and eviscerated the Tenth Amendment that restricted the federal government to its defined roles.

Since Helvering, Congress can spend money on anything it wants, facilitating the welfare state and the immense growth of the federal government in the last 80 years. If I had to make a rough estimate, I'd say about 75% or more of the spending currently done by the federal government relies on this holding inHelvering, making the overwhelming majority of what the federal government does unconstitutional.

Thus, Helvering is the central case that flipped the system from limiting the government to what is explicitly allowed to permitting anything that isn't explicitly banned — effectively ending federalism.




Here are various runners-up, in approximately chronological order:

1. Slaughter-House Cases / United States v. Cruikshank (1873 / 1875)
   Rulings: Eviscerated the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment, preventing the Amendment from broadly protecting individual rights to this day.
2. Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889)
   Ruling: Upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act on the basis that Congress has an inherent power to restrict migration into the United States, despite Congress not actually being enumerated this power.
3. Hans v. Louisiana (1890)
   Ruling: Declared that the symbolic meaning of the 11th Amendmentprevents citizens from suing their states, even though the text makes no such reference, and thus inadvertently damaged the 4th Amendment by foreclosing the most effective means of enforcing it.
4. Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934)
   Ruling: Allowed states to alter banking contracts after the fact and thus effectively eliminated most of the Contracts Clause that prevents states from impairing private contractual obligations.
5. United States v. Carolene Products / Williamson v. Lee Optical (1938 / 1955)
   Rulings: Removed virtually all protection for unenumerated rights, particularly economic liberties, and granted the government nearly unlimited power to blatantly and unambiguously promote special interests at the expense of the public.
6. Wickard v. Filburn / Gonzales v. Raich (1942 / 2005)
   Rulings: Allowed Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce to be used to regulate purely local and essentially non-commercial activities, and thus empowered Congress to regulate essentially anything it wants.
7. Baker v. Carr (1962)
   Ruling: Declared that a “One Person, One Vote” standard is essential to democracy, despite the fact that the Constitution doesn't follow OPOV in elections for the Senate or the presidency; facilitated gerrymandering by requiring every state to redo its districts every census to comply with OPOV.
8. Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. / Runyon v. McCrary (1968 / 1976)
   Rulings: Declared that Congress's power to ban slavery includes a broad power to ban virtually anything that could conceivably be deemed discriminatory, including private individuals refusing to sell private houses or admit students to private schools based on race, and thus transformed the power to stop slavery into a broad power to restrict private and voluntary choices.
9. Buckley v. Valeo (1976)
   Ruling: Granted broad deference to Congress on campaign finance restrictions that limit political speech, despite the 1st Amendment's core protection being for political speech.
10. Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984)
    Ruling: Granted administrative agencies broad deference in creating regulations based on administrative interpretations of laws and thus granted administrative agencies of the executive branch broad lawmaking powers.
11. McCleskey v. Kemp (1987)
    Ruling: Declared that Georgia's application of the death penalty did not violate its victims' Equal Protection rights, despite admitting that racism played a substantial role in determining who received the death penalty and, by implication, insulated the entire criminal justice system from any obligation not to be discriminatory in effect or operation.
12. Morrison v. Olson (1988)
    Ruling: Allowed Congress to create an independent counsel with the power to investigate and prosecute people independent of the president, even though the president is vested with executive power, and prosecutions are purely executive powers.
13. Kelo v. City of New London (2005)
    Ruling: Declared that using the power of eminent domain to take property from poorer people and give the property to large corporations (who pay more taxes) to be a "public use" under the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment.
14. NFIB v. Sebelius (2012)
    Ruling: Allowed Congress to force people to buy health insurance from private companies on the basis of the regulation being a “tax,” by implication allowing Congress do virtually anything with the taxing power that no independent power, even the expansive Commerce Clause, would allow.

15 Supreme Court Decisions that Shredded the Constitution | Sean J. Rosenthal

From Slaughter-House to Obamacare, the Supreme Court has often abdicated its responsibility to limit state power.

fee.org

To see the abject cowardice of the Justices, note that in invalidating the Guffey-Vinson Coal Act on May 18, 1936, less than a year before Roosevelt attempted to pack the court, Justice Charles Evans Hughes said that federal laws restricting local labor relations provisions were unconstitutional, that "the relations of employer and employee is a local relation" and "the evils are all local evils over which the federal government has no legislative control."

Sadly, eleven months later, Chief Justice Hughes, spoke for the majority in finding the Wagner Labor Relations Act constitutional. Yes, he said...Congress could regulate labor relations in manufacturing plants.



a. "April 12. In a series of five cases, headed by the Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. case, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act — or * 'Wagner Act" — designed to

protect labor unions and promote collective bargaining in industries throughout the nation. Factories and mills and mines and stores, whose activities had long been legally classified as ''local,'' subject only to state regulation, and so immune, under the Constitution, from federal meddling, were suddenly found — in fiat contradiction of the barely dry Schechter and Carter Coal Co. decisions — to "affect" interstate commerce "directly" enough to warrant Congressional control under the commerce clause. "

Full text of "Nine men : a political history of the Supreme Court from 1790 to 1955"

archive.org

“…here we have government by the people, making laws through their own elected representatives, not government by unelected “experts” autocratically making rules that tell us what to do. Implicit in the beginning of the speech was a repudiation of the Administrative State, which Supreme Court rulings from Wickard v. Filburn in 1942 down to the present day have authorized, giving bureaucrats power to overturn the checks and balances of limited government that the Framers built into the Constitution in 1787 and that Woodrow Wilson and FDR methodically and intentionally subverted.”
Pro-American

 

[The Original Tree]

Integrity is meaningless. Honesty is meaningless. The Constitution is meaningless.

All that matters is the agenda. Everything else must be discarded.

If The Government can Mandate you wear a mask, undergo weekly testing, and force you to take experimental vaccines in to your body and if you refuse, you will lose your job, your home, and health insurance.....

Is it really The Land of The Free when you are not given a choice?

You've become a slave.

"Malo periculosom libertatem quam quietam servitutem!"

"I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude!"

Thomas Jefferson

 

[AMart]

We need more wise Anglo Saxons on the bench, Clarence is an honorary member.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

Sotomayor looks awful! I guess she's cut off from her adrenochrome

 

[Orangecat]

Sotomayer and Kagan are affirmative action nominees, both utterly incongruous with the concept of judicial impartiality.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Sotomayer and Kagan are affirmative action nominees, both utterly incongruous with the concept of judicial impartiality.

....synonymous with "Democrat nominees."


There are only three things important to the Democrat program, agenda.....Race, Class, and Gender.
Not liberty, not religious freedom, not prosperity, not individuality, not tranquility.
Race, Class, and Gender.

“Cultural Marxism, though it’s dismissed by critics as a “term invented by the Right”, “was an undeniable school of thought taking Marxist categories of oppressed and oppressor beyond the economic realm and applying to it other forms of oppression: gender, race, sexuality.”
Caldron Pool

 

[Pete7469]

Kagan got the job because she called Barack and asked "How is my favorite foreign law student"?

I think IT got the job because IT looks like a small boy and can put IT'S ankles behind IT'S hobbit looking ass ears. That's about all it takes to become a "success" in the democrook party.

 

[daveman]

If The Government can Mandate you wear a mask, undergo weekly testing, and force you to take experimental vaccines in to your body and if you refuse, you will lose your job, your home, and health insurance.....

Is it really The Land of The Free when you are not given a choice?

You've become a slave.

"Malo periculosom libertatem quam quietam servitutem!"

"I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude!"

Thomas Jefferson

The problem is there are so many Americans willing to become slaves. They're terrified of the responsibilities of citizenship. And since they can't imagine life out from under the government yoke, they assume ALL Americans want to be slaves.

 

[The Original Tree]

The problem is there are so many Americans willing to become slaves. They're terrified of the responsibilities of citizenship. And since they can't imagine life out from under the government yoke, they assume ALL Americans want to be slaves.

Exactly!

 

[AZrailwhale]

Her personal corruption is much more an important factor than any of your reasons. She is highly dependable on making decisions based on her leftist political persuasion.

As is true of all the them deciding based on politics, with a 'possible' exception of Roberts, who appears to go renegade from time to time.

However, keeping in mind that Roberts hasn't really decided contrary to the rightist political agenda when his position counted. Well, hardly ever, except when outward appearances would have sunk his credibility boat.

You need to be reminded Chicy, that what appears to you as being important, is of little or no interest to others.

She's going to decide with the 'free choice' side on the abortion issue, regardless of whether she gets the grammar and spelling completely right.

Roberts renegated and rammed Obamacare down our throats by declaring it a tax and thus legal even though the administration never argued for that point.

 

[monkrules]

Imo, all 9 justices are political hacks. Sadly, they're appointed to lifelong terms. We're stuck with them.

 

[Pete7469]

Roberts renegated and rammed Obamacare down our throats by declaring it a tax and thus legal even though the administration never argued for that point.

You know he was on Epstein's plane and was compromised. The globalists got dirt on him. Maybe he was all into it, maybe got drunk, maybe even ruffied. Someone got a picture of him with his dick somewhere it shouldn't be and he has to rule on key cases against the interests of the republic or be exposed.

 

[PoliticalChic]

 

[PoliticalChic]

Imo, all 9 justices are political hacks. Sadly, they're appointed to lifelong terms. We're stuck with them.

I'm gonna challenge you on that.

If you can back it up, fine......but it sounds far too much like the excuse that many use to avoid actually thinking and investigating the two parties.


1. Writes Jeffrey Toobin:

In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.

This is one of the most startling reappraisals to appear in The New Yorker for many years. It is hard to think of other revisions as radical as the declownification of Clarence Thomas: Herbert Hoover as the First Keynesian? Henry Kissinger as the Great Humanitarian? Richard Nixon, the most liberal president ever (that one might even be true)?

If Toobin’s revionist take is correct, (and I defer to his knowledge of the direction of modern constitutional thought) it means that liberal America has spent a generation mocking a Black man as an ignorant fool, even as constitutional scholars stand in growing amazement at the intellectual audacity, philosophical coherence and historical reflection embedded in his judicial work.

Toobin is less interested in exploring why liberal America has been so blind for so long to the force of Clarence Thomas’ intellect than in understanding just what Thomas has achieved in his lonely trek across the wastes of Mordor. And what he finds is that Thomas has been pioneering the techniques and the ideas that could not only lead to the court rejecting all or part of President Obama’s health legislation; the ideas and strategies Thomas has developed could conceivably topple the constitutionality of the post New Deal state.

The next topic for Constitutional revisionism is the expansive reading of the commerce clause that the New Deal judges used to justify the Roosevelt administration’s ambitious economic programs. The Obamacare health reform depends on that kind of reading of the commerce clause; the penumbras must stretch pretty far for the Constitution to give Congress the right to require all Americans to buy private health insurance. And if the commerce clause can be stretched this far, one must ask whether there is anything that the Constitution blocks Congress from doing.

If gun control and Obamacare were the only issues at stake in the constitutional debate, liberals would find Thomas annoying but not dangerous. Losing on gun control and health care frustrate and annoy the center left, but those are only two items on a long list of liberal concerns.

The real problem will come if Thomas can figure out how to get the Tenth Amendment back into constitutional thought in a serious way. The Second Amendment was a constitutional landmine for the left; the Tenth is a nuclear bomb.



The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The standard interpretation is that this merely restates an assumption that undergirds the Constitution as a whole and so has no special meaning or significance in law. If reading the rest of the Constitution leads you to uphold some act or law as constitutional, this amendment would not affect that judgment. Therefore it can be and usually is ignored. That is certainly what we were told to do with it in the hallowed halls of Pundit High.

But there is another view of this amendment. The Constitution of the United States confers specific, “enumerated” powers on the Congress, and many of the things that Congress does today are not listed among those enumerated powers. On his last day in office, President James Madison vetoed what today we would call an infrastructure bill. He thought the bill was a good idea, that the country needed the infrastructure and that the federal government was the right agency to provide it, but believed that the Constitution he had helped write provided no authority for Congress to act in this way. If Congress wanted to support infrastructure in the various states, the right way to proceed was to get an infrastructure amendment into the Constitution. Barring that, nothing could be done.

Taken seriously today, that approach to the Constitution would change the way Washington does business. Radically. The list of enumerated powers is short and does not include, for example, health care, education, agricultural subsidies, assistance to the hungry or old age pensions. Most of the New Deal and Great Society (with the interesting exception of civil rights laws which enforce the Civil War era amendments) would be struck down. Whole cabinet departments would close.

The federal government would not wither away completely; even on a narrow reading of the commerce clause (the clause that places the regulation of interstate commerce among Congress’ enumerated powers), Washington would exercise considerable authority over the national economy. But the balance between the states and the feds would change, and among other things, our federal tax burdens would fall, but the costs of state government would rise.

This is pretty much a Tea Party wish list, and it is why the Tea Party movement is so strongly identified with originalist interpretations of the Constitution. Unleashing the Tenth Amendment would move the constitutional status quo back towards the early 1930s when the “Nine Old Men” struck down one New Deal law after another. For Toobin and most New Yorker readers, it is hard to imagine an idea that more radically and totally runs against everything they believe.

That Justice Thomas’ wife Virginia is a prominent speaker and organizer in the Tea Party completes the picture: the Thomas’ are the anti-Clintons, the power couple out to dismantle the progressive American state. The specter Toobin’s piece conjures is of Clarence and Virginia, like Frodo and Sam, quietly toiling towards Mount Doom while liberal attention is fixed elsewhere.


Read more: http://blogs.the-american-interest....omas-and-the-amendment-of-doom/#ixzz1WXKBUI2I

Partners

Will Clarence and Virginia Thomas succeed in killing Obama’s health-care plan?

www.newyorker.com

 

[Donald H]

Roberts renegated and rammed Obamacare down our throats by declaring it a tax and thus legal even though the administration never argued for that point.

That is the decision from Roberts that I was suggesting, but it's questionable on whether he actually reneged or he saw taking the other side would be much too politically unpopular with the people.

 

[AZrailwhale]

That is the decision from Roberts that I was suggesting, but it's questionable on whether he actually reneged or he saw taking the other side would be much too politically unpopular with the people.

Political popularity should NEVER be a concern to the members of the SCOTUS. Their only concern should be the guidance of the constitution.

 

[DGS49]

Despite what Leftists think or want, it is not the role of the USSC to rule on the wisdom or efficacy of Executive policy, only whether it is found in the Constitution.

And given the idiocy disclosed during last week's hearings, the USSC could not be depended on to make rational rulings on wisdom or efficacy in any event.