If there is any reason to get a leftist to put Green, anti-electoral, or other anti-vote-for-the-Democrats impulses on hold this year, it is the issue of who will be president, and thus able to select replacements for Stevens or Ginsburg. Friends don't let friends siphon votes from the Dem, a la Nader in '00.
Sure, the Democrats are imperfect, and tied to corporate interests, but consider the following.
We easily face an over-turning of Roe v. Wade.
But this is not the only issue. Republicans like to spur Democrats and progressives as supporting activist judiciary decisions. This is the idea that adopting a loose interpretation of the Constitution allows for passing decisions that please progressives, e.g., the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments provide for personal autonomy, and therefore provide for the right to decide to opt to have an abortion. This kind of interpretation and justice is what undergirds Brown v. Board of Topeka, Kansas.
Yet, while they [Republicans/conservatives] target us for loose interpretations of the Constitution, they opt for the same, when it suits their ideological interests.
And, we progressives should be calling attention to the conservatives' own philosophy: activist conservativism. This allows for activist court rulings that further a conservative agenda.
What have been the goals of activist conservativism?
As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in "McJustice": Liberals' long-feared judicial apocalypse is nigh," the latest hard copy issue of "The New Republic,"
So let's assume that McCain gets to appoint at least one activist conservative to the bench. How would America and the law be transformed? The most significant effect of a McCain Court could come in areas pitting the Court against federal regulations passed by Congress. Before the crash of 2008, the previous two most serious depressions in U.S. history--in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--triggered populist economic regulations by Congress and the states to protect citizens from the excesses of industrial capitalism. In both eras, conservative Supreme Court majorities struck down those regulations--from minimum-wage laws to parts of the New Deal--as an affront to property rights and limits on federal power. This triggered a political backlash from Americans convinced that the decisions were bad for the country.
So let's assume that McCain gets to appoint at least one activist conservative to the bench. How would America and the law be transformed? The most significant effect of a McCain Court could come in areas pitting the Court against federal regulations passed by Congress. Before the crash of 2008, the previous two most serious depressions in U.S. history--in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--triggered populist economic regulations by Congress and the states to protect citizens from the excesses of industrial capitalism. In both eras, conservative Supreme Court majorities struck down those regulations--from minimum-wage laws to parts of the New Deal--as an affront to property rights and limits on federal power. This triggered a political backlash from Americans convinced that the decisions were bad for the country.
The Times in October 29's edition, called attention to the conservative majority of judge on the appeals and circuit courts, due to Bush, Bush I, Reagan.
See Charlie Savage's article, "Appeals Courts Pushed to Right by Bush Choices," in "The New York Times," October 29, 2008.
"After a group of doctors challenged a South Dakota law forcing them to inform women that abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being” — using exactly that language — President Bush’s appointees to the federal appeals courts took control,"
A federal trial judge, stating that whether a fetus is human life is a matter of debate, had blocked the state from enforcing the 2005 law as a likely violation of doctors’ First Amendment rights. And an appeals court panel had upheld the injunction.
But this past June, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit voted 7 to 4 to overrule those decisions and allow the statute to take immediate effect. The majority argued that it is objectively true that human life begins at conception, and that the state can force doctors to say so.
Mr. Bush had appointed six of the seven judges in the conservative majority. His administration has transformed the nation’s federal appeals courts, advancing a conservative legal revolution that began nearly three decades ago under President Ronald Reagan.
Due to the power of the appeals courts, they have inveighed on issues, before cases reached the Supreme Court. . . . . Bush openly pandered to the ideological judicial conservative organization, the Federalist Society:
On Oct. 6, Mr. Bush pointed with pride to his record at a conference sponsored by the Cincinnati chapter of the Federalist Society, the elite network for the conservative legal movement. He noted that he had appointed more than a third of the federal judiciary expected to be serving when he leaves office, a lifetime-tenured force that will influence society for decades and that represents one of his most enduring accomplishments. While a two-term president typically leaves his stamp on the appeals courts — Bill Clinton appointed 65 judges, Mr. Bush 61 — Mr. Bush’s judges were among the youngest ever nominated and are poised to have an unusually strong impact.
They have arrived at a time when the appeals courts, which decide tens of thousands of cases a year, are increasingly getting the last word. While the Supreme Court gets far more attention, in recent terms it has reviewed only about 75 cases a year — half what it considered a generation ago. And Mr. Bush’s appointees have found allies in like-minded judges named by Mr. Bush’s father and Reagan.
The article also gives you names of people that might end up on the Supreme Court, should John McCain reach the presidency.
So, listen, leftists, I would have preferred Kucinich and so on and so on . . . but consider how much worse America could be with a 1 or 2 liberal Supreme Court or a more solidly Republican judiciary.
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