Bloodthirsty Liberal

When I first saw this on Best of the Web Today, I thought Taranto was joking.

The only joke, needless to say, is the now senior senator (though very much junior in popularity and influence) from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts:

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) on Tuesday said he’d support the uphill battle to amend the Constitution to gut the impact of a Supreme Court decision lifting restrictions on corporate campaign spending.

“I think we need a constitutional amendment to make it clear, once and for all, that corporations do not have the same free-speech rights as individuals,” Kerry said during a Senate Rules Committee hearing.

…

“The sovereign right of the people to govern being essential to a free democracy, Congress and the States may regulate the expenditure of funds for political speech by any corporation, limited liability company, or other corporate entity,” the amendment says. “Nothing contained in this Article shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.’’

Cool how he made it all constitution-y sounding. Maybe an extra “e” or two at the end of a word and an “oye” would have helped, but all very powdered wig.

I’m no lawyer, but I wonder if the wording on the proposed amendment wasn’t carefully crafted to allow unions to slip through the cracks. The Democrats have been awfully slippery in their criticism of this SCOTUS decision, too often neglecting to mention McCain-Feingold was just as restrictive on organized labor as it was on the corporate bosses. Unless the AFL-CIO falls under the category of “corporation, limited liability company, or other corporate entity”, it will be free to poor millions into the political process without any offsetting funding from management.

What a grandstanding move by our senator. Is it any wonder that he has only one other co-sponsor so far?

Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) is the only other senator so far to back the idea of a constitutional amendment.

PS: More on the unions:

The two-sentence amendment does not address the prospect of unlimited union spending on independent campaign expenditures, which experts say would be another result of the decision.

Quelle surprise.

John Kerry may have failed in his bid to become president, but his bid for irrelevancy looks unbeatable.

Pretty much everyone on both the left and the right of the political spectrum has shot down President Obama’s patently absurd charge that the recent Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case would open up campaigns to foreign influence.

We can be charitable, and call him ignorant—or we can be honest, and call him a bald-faced lair with the most incendiary pants since No-nad the Barbarian smoldered in failure.

But most of all, we should call his bluff:

[I]f Obama really is concerned about foreign campaign donations, then Obama should request that Attorney General Eric Holder (or an Acting Attorney General since Holder likely has a conflict) appoint a special counsel with the power to investigate, and if justified, prosecute violations of the laws, and conspiracies to violate the laws, forbidding foreign contributions.

And the place the special counsel can start is with Obama’s 2008 campaign, which disabled security features in its credit card web portal so as to allow donors to evade restrictions on numerous aspects of the federal campaign laws, including the prohibition on foreign contributions:

Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor’s identity, campaign officials confirmed….

The problem with such cards, campaign finance lawyers said, is that they make it impossible to tell whether foreign nationals, donors who have exceeded the limits, government contractors or others who are barred from giving to a federal campaign are making contributions.

That the Obama campaign received foreign donations as a result of this scheme may be the only thing agreed-upon by both Pamela Geller and Charles Johnson. Indeed, Obama for America has admitted receiving foreign contributions. The fact that the Federal Election Commission is not investigating the allegations necessitates a special counsel.

There will be no follow-up on this, of course. He will forget he ever said it. If, by some miracle, a reporter ever asks him about the charge, and his own campaign’s suspicious involvement, he will smile and chuckle, and say, “Look, let me be clear…”, and all else after will be a blur.

The Usual Suspects line up on opposite sides of free speech:

In a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court abruptly called a halt to encroachments on political speech in the name of campaign finance reform. It ruled that spending limits imposed on corporations and unions infringed on constitutional rights, ending decades of attempts to limit advertising on their behalf. It also overturned McCain-Feingold provisions barring some kinds of advertising in the weeks before an election.

…

The best campaign finance reform is still transparency. If burning a flag in the street is free speech, then so are political contributions, especially when made in the open. If the reformers in Congress want to clean up elections, then force immediate reporting on the Internet of all contributions to all presidential, Senate, and Congressional races, and full weekly financial reports on expenditures. That will do more than all of the speech-restricting, unconstitutional efforts made since Watergate, and make the entire system a lot more honest.

…

No great shock to see Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Kennedy on one side with Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor on the other.

But Clarence Thomas dissented from one part of the ruling:

Proposition 8 amended California’s constitution to provide that “[o]nly
marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recog­nized in California.” Any donor who gave more than $100 to any committee supporting or opposing Proposition 8 was required to disclose his full name, street address, occupation, employer’s name (or business name, if self-employed), and the total amount of his contributions.

Some opponents of Proposition 8 compiled this informa­tion and created Web sites with maps showing the loca­tions of homes or businesses of Proposition 8 supporters. Many supporters (or their customers) suffered property damage, or threats of physical violence or death, as a after the 2008 election, seeking to invalidate California’s mandatory disclosure laws. Supporters recounted being told: “Consider yourself lucky. If I had a gun I would have gunned you down along with each and every other sup­porter,” or, “we have plans for you and your friends.”

Proposition 8 opponents also allegedly harassed the meas­ure’s supporters by defacing or damaging their property. Two religious organizations supporting Proposi­tion 8 reportedly received through the mail envelopes containing a white powdery substance.

Those accounts are consistent with media reports de­scribing Proposition 8-related retaliation. The director of the nonprofit California Musical Theater gave $1,000 to support the initiative; he was forced to resign after artists complained to his employer. The director of the Los Angeles Film Festi­val was forced to resign after giving $1,500 because oppo­nents threatened to boycott and picket the next festival. And a woman who had managed her popular, fam­ily-owned restaurant for 26 years was forced to resign after she gave $100, because “throngs of [angry] protest­ers” repeatedly arrived at the restaurant and “shout[ed] ‘shame on you’ at customers.”

The police even had to “arriv[e] in riot gear one night to quell the angry mob” at the restaurant. Some sup­porters of Proposition 8 engaged in similar tactics; one real estate businessman in San Diego who had donated to a group opposing Proposition 8 “received a letter from the Prop. 8 Executive Committee threatening to publish his company’s name if he didn’t also donate to the ‘Yes on 8’ campaign.”

He concludes:

The success of such intimidation tactics has apparently spawned a cottage industry that uses forcibly disclosed donor information to pre-empt citizens’ exercise of their First Amendment rights. Before the 2008 Presidential election, a “newly formed nonprofit group . . . plann[ed] to confront donors to conservative groups, hoping to create a chilling effect that will dry up contributions.” Its leader, “who described his effort as ‘going for the jugular,’” detailed the group’s plan to send a “warning letter . . . alerting donors who might be consider­ing giving to right-wing groups to a variety of potential dangers, including legal trouble, public exposure and watchdog groups digging through their lives.”

These instances of retaliation sufficiently demonstrate why this Court should invalidate mandatory disclosure and reporting requirements.

First of all, can we now set aside the racist notion that Justice Thomas didn’t know how to write?

He’s put his finger on the problem. We should call for transparency in all political transactions, but what about the people—the Left, invariably—who take advantage of and abuse that transparency?

I know people who didn’t want to be seen (literally seen) working for Brown, and who wouldn’t give money because they didn’t want their names showing up on his donor list. And it wasn’t for fear of ostracism, I can assure you—these people are open with their friends about their beliefs. Maybe Scott Brown’s campaign didn’t bring out the street thugs on the Left (then again, maybe it did), but something, sometime, will.

How can you have a gentleman’s agreement to respect Free speech and privacy when some members of the other side are the furthest thing from gentlemen?

Now that Sonia From The Bronx has backed away from her comments as if they were a nest of poisonous vipers, I’d like to ask her what she thinks of this judicial philosophy:

“We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old.

Barack Obama, almost two years ago exactly.

This sounds like James Watt’s famous boast that his staff had “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple”—a comment, for which he had to resign from the Reagan administration. But now these are viable criteria for a lifetime appointment to the last and highest court in the land.

But So-So isn’t buying it, not today:

“It was bad because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that’s clearly not what I do as a judge,” Sotomayor said.

…

“A judge should never rule from fear. A judge should rule from law and the Constitution.”

But Obama was not done defining his views of justice:

Speaking at the Planned Parenthood conference in DC this afternoon […] Obama hinted that the court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Carhart — which upheld a ban on partial-birth abortion — was part of “a concerted effort to steadily roll back” access to abortions. And he ridiculed Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote that case’s majority opinion. “Justice Kennedy knows many things,” he declared, “but my understanding is that he does not know how to be a doctor.”

Obama also won a laugh at the expense of Chief Justice John Roberts, saying that judgments of Roberts’ character during his confirmation hearings were largely superficial. “He loves his wife. He’s good to his dog,” he joked, adding that judicial philosophy should be weighted more seriously than such evaluations.*

“Laughs”, “jokes”—I should have guessed the Planned Parenthood crowd would fall for a good dead baby joke.

If I may be allowed one more question, Judge Sotomayor, do you agree with the president that killing viable babies before they are born is a right protected by the Constitution, and do you further agree that Justices Kennedy and Roberts are s**t-for-brains?

She’s either going to have to repudiate Obama, or those sessions in chambers are going to be pretty interesting.

*Of course, he also said this, which is also good for a laugh:

“The cost of our debt is one of the fastest growing expenses in the federal budget. This rising debt is a hidden domestic enemy, robbing our cities and states of critical investments in infrastructure like bridges, ports, and levees; robbing our families and our children of critical investments in education and health care reform; robbing our seniors of the retirement and health security they have counted on … If Washington were serious about honest tax relief in this country, we’d see an effort to reduce our national debt by returning to responsible fiscal policies.” - Barack Obama, Speech in the U.S. Senate, March 13, 2006

When’s your Alec Guinness moment, America? When do you wake up to the consequences of your blind and stubborn refusal to face facts, and ask yourself “What have I done?”

I don’t get it:

Sotomayor defends race comments at hearing

“I do not believe that any ethnic, racial or gender group has an advantage in sound judgment,” she said, adding that she believed every person has an equal opportunity to be a good and wise judge “regardless of their background and life experience.”

That’s a defense?

She also said:

“It was bad because it left an impression that I believed that life experiences commanded a result in a case, but that’s clearly not what I do as a judge,” Sotomayor said.

…

An attempted play on words “fell flat” in a speech in 2001….

That’s a lie, isn’t it AP? Didn’t she make that comment repeatedly, and even put it into her written comments? I get why she’s trying to soft-peddle an offensive remark—but why is the press doing so?

Just kidding, you don’t really have to answer that.

We are a very forgiving people, contrary to what you hear from President Obama about our many flaws, and I would guess we’ll cut her some slack.

But, sheesh, she said a very dumb and offensive—possibly disqualifying—thing. Can’t we all agree on that first?

Sonia From The Bronx, wrong again:

The Supreme Court has ruled that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

It’s a breaking story, so updates (such as vote count) to follow. But this should open up an interesting line of questions at her confirmation hearings.

From SCOTUSBlog: this nugget from Alito’s concurring opinion:

The Alito concurrence does have a harsher criticism of the District Court and Court of Appeals’ ruling. … Referring the plaintiffs, he says: “But ’sympathy’ is not what petitioners have a right to demand. What they have a right to demand is evenhanded enforcement of hte [sic] law . . . And that is what, until today’s decision, has been denied them.”

OH! Badda-bing, badda-boom, that’s going to leave a mark. The opinion was 5-4, by the way with Kennedy siding with the conservatives, and Ginsberg writing the dissent for the Usual Suspects.

If (when?) Sonia From The Bronx is confirmed, there will be some pretty interesting arguments in chambers.

Michelle jokes:

President Obama applauds the decision as a victory for equality under the law. Not.

UPPERDATE:
Nobody like So-So’s ruling. Even the dissenters think it stinks.

In footnote 10 of her dissent, Justice Ginsburg, agreeing with the position that President Obama’s Department of Justice took, states: “Ordinarily, a remand for fresh consideration [whether the City of New Haven in fact had good cause to act] would be in order.” But because the majority saw no need to remand, Ginsburg explains “why, if final adjudication by this Court is indeed appropriate, New Haven should be the prevailing party.” (Emphasis added.)

In other words, Ginsburg doesn’t believe that final disposition of the case is appropriate. She and her fellow dissenters therefore believe that Sotomayor and her Second Circuit colleagues and the district court were wrong to grant summary judgment to the City of New Haven.

[Update/clarification: Ginsburg believes that Sotomayor and the other judges below applied the wrong standard: “The lower courts focused on respondents’ ‘intent’ rather than on whether respondents in fact had good cause to act.”

Is she’s as “wise” a Latina as she thinks she is (something she has long thought), maybe Sonia From The Bronx™ can work this out:

Conservative critics of Judge Sonia Sotomayor may be digging themselves into a hole if they keep hurling the tired old “liberal activist” slogan at her. The reason is that her supporters can plausibly retort that these days, the Supreme Court’s conservatives are as activist as the liberals, especially on racial issues.

But conservatives and like-minded centrists can win the political debate if they focus not on buzzwords but on in-depth, civil discourse about the very big issue on which Sotomayor and her liberal supporters are most at odds — and the conservative justices most in tune — with the vast majority of Americans.

That issue is racially preferential affirmative action. By this, I mean the many forms of supposedly benign discrimination against whites and Asians that have been engineered over the past 45 years to advance blacks and Hispanics in the workforce, in college admissions, and in government contracting.

The long-standing public disapproval of such preferences was documented yet again by a major Quinnipiac University poll released on June 3, showing that American voters, by a lopsided margin, want them abolished.

…

The now-famous New Haven, Conn., firefighter case is a perfect symbol of how the sort of preferences she supports can operate as raw racial discrimination.

…

The Quinnipiac poll showed that respondents, by well over 3-to-1, want the Supreme Court to overturn the Appellate panel’s decision. And although the poll shows that this has not yet hurt Sotomayor’s popularity much, the case will become more salient later this month. The justices are widely expected to reverse the panel’s decision.

It will be very interesting (to say the least) if her hearings take place just as the Supreme Court rejects her decision like Dwight Howard swatting away a Kobe Bryant lay up. I’m not sure the compliant media can spin that one.

The forgotten Brother Gibb, Robert, now acknowledges that So-So (as I named her) employed a poor choice of words:

“I think she’d say that her word choice in 2001 was poor; that she was simply making the point that personal experiences are relevant to the process of judging,” Mr. Gibb said. “Your personal experiences have a tendency to make you more aware of certain facts in certain cases, that your experiences impact your understanding.”

Well, that’s horse[bleep].

Speaking of whom:

“I’m sure she would have restated it,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with NBC News. “But if you look in the entire sweep of the essay that she wrote, what’s clear is that she was simply saying that her life experiences will give her information about the struggles and hardships that people are going through — that will make her a good judge.”

We printed the entire context of her “wise Latina” comment which made it clear she not only meant what she said, but rejected any alternative.

Rich Lowry at NRO makes the point in another way:

I’ve gone back and with a few edits shown how Judge Sotomayor’s poor word choice in her Latina Lecture could be fixed—hey, it could happen to anyone:

While recognizing the potential effect of individual experiences on perception, Judge Cedarbaum nevertheless believes that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law. Although I agree with and attempt to work toward Judge Cedarbaum’s aspiration, I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases. And I wonder whether by ignoring our differences as women or men of color we do a disservice both to the law and society. Whatever the reasons why we may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning, are in many respects a small part of a larger practical question we as women and minority judges in society in general must address…

Justice O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O’Connor is the author of that line since Professor Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

As he says in another post:

[H]ow are you the victim of poor word choice in a speech, as Ed Whelan pointed out the other day, that was apparently delivered from a prepared text and that was then turned into a law review article months later? (Ed refers to it as the “unscripted” law review article.) The problem wasn’t the word choice; the problem was quite obviously what Sotomayor meant to say and said several times in several different ways very clearly.

If BG Bob and Obama himself feel the need to answer for her, you wonder if there’s some traction here.

Move over, J-Lo; there’s a new girl in town.

It’s So-So’s time:

President Obama announced on Tuesday that he will nominate the federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, choosing a daughter of Puerto Rican parents raised in Bronx public housing projects to become the nation’s first Hispanic justice.

Judge Sotomayor, who stood next to the president during the announcement, was described by Mr. Obama as “an inspiring woman who I am confident will make a great justice.”

The president said he had made his decision after “deep reflection and careful deliberation,” and he made it clear that the judge’s inspiring personal story was crucial in his decision. Mr. Obama praised his choice as someone possessing “a rigorous intellect, a mastery of the law.”

But those essential qualities are not enough, the president said. Quoting Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mr. Obama said, “The life of the law has not been logic, it has been experience.” It is vitally important that a justice know “how the world works, and how ordinary people live,” the president said.

Well, she’s ordinary, all right:

“Thank you, Mr. President, for the most humbling honor of my life,” Sotomayor said.

…

“I am an ordinary person who has been blessed with extraordinary opportunities and experiences,” Sotomayor said.

I wonder why that is?

Kidding! She was summa cum laude at Princeton and Yale Law Review (where I expect she had more published than did the president at Harvard Law): she earned her opportunities.

But why this fascination with the Bronx?

Sonia Sotomayor’s path to the pinnacle of the legal profession began in the 1960s at a Bronx housing project just a couple blocks from Yankee Stadium, where she and her family dealt with one struggle after another.

When I cited the lyrics to the Patty Duke theme the other day, little did I realize that they would hold a key to ascending to the highest court in the land.

But Patty’s only seen the sights
A girl can see from Brooklyn Heights

And she’s played a blind/deaf girl. So-So from the Bronx can’t touch that.

President Obama may be putting the screws to detainees in Gitmo, but he just threw a big juicy bone to his radicalized, left-wing extremist base.

PS: Everyone will say that the president should get his nominee.

How did then-Senator Obama vote on Justice Roberts?

Obama (D-IL), Nay

And Sam Alito?

Obama (D-IL), Nay

Oh, okay.

If President Obama is a man of his word (and that’s a rather gargantuan if), we already know the sort of person he will nominate to the Supreme Court.

Let him tell you himself:

But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change.

Everybody here remembers when that clip came up late in the campaign. In a sane world, that passage alone would have disqualified someone from taking an oath for an office for which the officeholder swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Doesn’t say anything about breaking free of constraints, or about negative liberties.

But that’s history, much like our republic. Given the template laid out above, we can expect Justice William Ayers—and I’m not kidding. On the bright side, he’ll be hard to distinguish from Justice Souter.

PS: Ken Starr, of all people, had this to say about prospective Obama nominees, well before Souter’s retirement and Specter’s treachery:

During a speech yesterday in Boston, Starr told a group of attorneys that President Obama could face an uphill battle over his Supreme Court nominees because as a senator he opposed two of President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court picks, Samuel Alito and John Roberts.

…

Starr pointed out that Obama enters office with healthy Democratic majorities in the House and Senate; however, he said “the salience of this very enviable position, politically, for our president is brought home by the president’s own approach to the high court during his years of service as a United States senator.”

He continued: “There is one historical factoid of note: He is the first president of the United States ever in our history to have participated in a Senate filibuster of a judicial nominee. Never before has that happened.”

It may not matter. Little does for him. But no one will legitimately be able to criticize any effort to hold up the nomination of a candidate who as seen as unfit for the court. Roberts and Alito may be conservative, but they were eminently qualified (Harriet Myers not so much). And Obama filibustered them.

It’s on.