Justin's Political Corner

The influence of right-wing money into judicial elections is a growing problem. Not only have the 1% decided they want to own our politicians, they want to own our judges, too. And because judicial elections mostly fly under the radar, they seem to be getting away with it:

The Club for Growth, a right-wing group that supports tax cuts for the rich, privatizing Social Security and writing Tea Party ideology into the Constitution, spent $300,000 to keep a key ally of anti-union Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) on the Wisconsin Supreme Court — and that was just in the primary.

It’s not surprising that the Club and other well-moneyed conservatives are willing to spend big to keep Roggensack on the court. Roggensack was part of the 4-3 majority that upheld a law pushed by Walker to undermine public sector unions. She also cast the key vote to reject an ethics rule that would have prevented justices from hearing cases involving their major campaign donors.

Instead, Roggensack backed a rule written by corporate lobbyists.

h/t: Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars

Anti-gay activist Bob Vander Plaats, who was labeled the Iowa GOP’s “kingmaker” after Republican presidential candidates lined up to pay homage to him, was the architect of the successful effort to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices, and he’s now spearheading a new effort to remove a fourth justice. All four of the justices Vander Plaats opposes joined the state supreme court’s unanimous opinion recognizing that the Iowa Constitution does not permit marriage discrimination against gay couples.

At a rally last month, Vander Plaats explained why he is so offended by the targeted justices’ application of the state constitution. And then he compared marriage equality to slavery:

We must get back to the constitution… . It is the court that should be independent — free of politics — to uphold the constitution, not to trample on the constitution, not to insert politics in the constitution, and not to run the leftist agenda through the court system. That’s not their role.

The Iowa State Bar Association, they’ll tell you — they’ll say “Bob, this is only one opinion. It’s only one opinion. You can’t be that upset at a court because of one opinion.” One opinion: Dred Scott — blacks are property. One opinion: Roe v. Wade — we’ve killed sixty million babies off a court’s opinion. One opinion, the Varnum opinion and you are now seeing same-sex marriage infiltrate this state. One opinion, where a court legislates from the bench, when a court executes from the bench, when a court tries to amend the constitution from the bench, and when a court tries to do that, it is our responsibility as the people — the final arbitrators — to kick them off the bench.

So when Vander Plaats tries to take revenge against these justices by tossing them out of office, he is the one who injecting politics into the constitution and he is the one who is trying to run his agenda through the court system. Vander Plaats’ campaign is nothing less than an effort to make judges too scared to follow the law when the law conflicts with conservative views.

H/T: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

On Friday, ThinkProgress reported that a Pennsylvania Tea Party group vowed revenge against two state supreme court justices who joined a recent decision that unanimously rejected a lower court order upholding a voter suppression law. Now, the Florida GOP wants to play this game as well:

The party announced late Friday that its board voted unanimously this week to oppose the retention of Supreme Court Justices Fred Lewis, Barbara Pariente and Peggy Quince, who were all appointed by Democratic former Gov. Lawton Chiles and who have ruled against several major priorities of Republican Gov. Rick Scott’s administration.

If the justices are not retained, Scott would appoint replacements.

“While the collective evidence of judicial activism amassed by these three individuals is extensive, there is one egregious example that all Florida voters should bear in mind when they go to the polls on election day,” said spokeswoman Kristen McDonald in a statement. “These three justices voted to set aside the death penalty for a man convicted of tying a woman to a tree with jumper cables and setting her on fire.”

The Florida GOP’s decision to base its PR campaign against these justices around a death penalty decision is rather ghoulish, but it is both familiar and unsurprising. Twenty-six years ago, California Republicans led a $5.6 million campaign to oust California Chief Justice Rose Birdand two of her colleagues. Although the campaign outwardly focused on the death penalty, its top supporters included the Independent Oil Producers Agency, the Western Growers Association, the late anti-tax activst Howard Jarvis and the Free Market Political Action Committee. Bird’s opponents knew they couldn’t run an effective campaign by attacking her for being insufficiently friendly to wealthy corporations and other interest groups, so they chose instead to hide their true motives by focusing on the death penalty.

In 1996, Tennessee conservatives ran a similar playbook, ousting Justice Penny White because she voted to overturn a single death sentence. Significantly, only 19 percent of the state’s voters participated in the retention election, demonstrating the ability of a well-funded campaign to shape the outcome of a judicial race, since the campaign only needs to rally a small group of voters in these very low profile elections.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

Earlier this week, every single sitting Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice rejecteda lower court decision allowing that state’s voter ID law to take effect. Four justices joined a majority opinion requiring the lower court judge to look at the case again due to concerns that voters were unable to obtain the IDs they were supposed to have easy access to as a matter of law, and two more justices joined a dissent arguing that the law should simply be suspended right away. Three of the justices in the majority were Republicans.

Nevertheless, a Tea Party group is now threatening to exact revenge upon the state supreme court for refusing to uphold a law that prevents many low-income, student and minority voters from casting a ballot:

A Philadelphia-area tea party group says it will work to defeat two state Supreme Court justices next year if the state’s new voter identification law isn’t in effect for the Nov. 6 election.

The Independence Hall Tea Party on Thursday also criticized the court’s decision to send a legal challenge to the law back for a lower court review.

It called the decision “a cowardly move” to “punt the ball.”

Chief Justice Ronald Castille, a Republican, and Justice Max Baer, a Democrat, are each finishing a 10-year term in January 2014.

These kinds of campaigns of vengeance against justices who place the law ahead of conservative’s policy preferences are increasingly common. Two years ago, a Florida Tea Party group launched a similar revenge campaign after the Florida Supreme Court kept an unconstitutional ballot initiative attempting to nullify the Affordable Care Act off the state ballot. Similarly, anti-gay groups poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a successful effort to remove three Iowa supreme court justices because they had the audacity to recognize that the state’s constitution does not permit discrimination against gay couples.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice/

Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court.

He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem.

So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced itsdecision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line.

Not content with issuing a fiery written dissent, Scalia offered a bench statement questioningPresident Obama’s decision to allow some immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children to stay. Obama’s move had nothing to do with the case in question. Scalia just wanted you to know where he stood.

“Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem,” the politician-justice proclaimed. “Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are simply unwilling to do so.

“Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty — not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it.” Cue the tea party rally applause.

As it happens, Obama has stepped up immigration enforcement. But if the 76-year-old justice wants to dispute this, he is perfectly free as a citizen to join the political fray and take on the president. But he cannot be a blatantly political actor and a justice at the same time.

Unaccountable power can lead to arrogance. That’s why justices typically feel bound by rules and conventions that Scalia seems to take joy in ignoring. 

I agree. Scalia needs to be impeached and/or resign! The same goes for Alito and Thomas too.

h/t: E.J. Dionne, Jr at the WaPo

Washington Times columnist and Edmund Burke Institute president Jeffrey Kuhner appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show yesterday where he said that members of the LGBT community “are even worse than the radical Islamists” and more terrifying than the dictators he often writes about, calling them “the most fanatical, hate-filled…and intolerant people I’ve ever met.”

Kuhner: As a journalist I write on a wide range of issues, I write on the Communist Chinese, I write on Putin’s regime, I write on brutal dictatorships over the world, the gay, lesbian, transgender community, the LGBT community, is the most intolerant than I have ever witnessed, they are even worse than the radical Islamists. I get death threats, my family is threatened, they call on me to be fired, they want to destroy my career. I have never seen people as intolerant, as malicious, as so desperate to engage in smear and slander and libel as people and activists in the LGBT community, it is really despicable. So for them to run around and say over and over again, all we want is tolerance, all we want is respect for diversity, all we want is respect for civil rights, it is a complete lie. They don’t practice what they preach, they are some of the most fanatical, hate-filled, and I’m choosing my words very carefully, and intolerant people I’ve ever met. I believe that Middle America does not understand the full threat posed by the homosexual agenda and the homosexual lobby.

Kuhner warned that the sitcom “Will and Grace” and romantic comedies that include “the loveable, fuzzy gay person,” which he claimed are “a form of cultural Marxism,” give “us very much a false picture” of the “vulgarity” that is “at the heart of the homosexual lifestyle”.

Kuhner went on to attack judges who overturned laws banning same-sex marriage as “fascists in black robes” and said the left is imposing a “soft totalitarianism.” “It’s an assault upon freedom, it’s an assault upon liberty, it’s an assault upon our democracy,” Kuhner said of the gay rights movement, “this is about defending our fundamental, basic democracy.”

Kuhner: The moment the people have spoken, you see these secular, progressive liberals go right away to the courts, and three, five or seven judges, almost fascists in black robes, are now able to overturn and thumb their nose at the will of the people. They are becoming increasingly tyrannical, they’re becoming increasingly anti-democratic, and I believe you’re now seeing a soft totalitarianism begin to emerge among the hard left.

From the 05.17.2012 edition of Salem Communications’ The Janet Mefferd Show:

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

If the week of April 2, 2012, goes down in political history, it’ll be for the fact that Republicans suddenly rediscovered their reverence for the third branch of government.

What brought about the change of heart? President Obama’s comments on Monday and Tuesday in which he opined that an adverse Supreme Court ruling on his health care law would represent an extraordinary act of judicial overreach.

On Tuesday, in an extraordinarily unusual step, three Republican appointees to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals went toe-to-toe with the president in the political sphere. On Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell advised Obama to “back off.” The courts’ authority is to be respected, regardless of outcome, he said.

This is a rich new twist for the GOP, which has made decades of sport out of attacking an out-of-control judiciary for legislating from the bench. You literally only have to look back to this GOP presidential primary to find examples of Republicans questioning the courts’ legitimacy and even threatening to neuter them using powers reserved for the other two branches of government.

Here’s a brief digest:

— Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) now says Obama is trying to “bully” the Supreme Court. But in 2004 he sponsored legislation that would have drastically altered the nation’s system of checks and balances — it would have allowed Congress to overturn a high court decision with a two-thirds majority in each chamber.

— At the Palmetto Freedom Forum in September 2011, Newt Gingrich argued that “the legislative and executive, on occasion, have a right to correct the judiciary, or the judiciary is the dominant branch and can dictate to the rest of us.”

— In Iowa one year ago, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said that the federal government can “limit the subject matter that justices can rule on. We have it within our authority to decide what judges can rule on and what they can’t.”

—Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said “activist judges” assume the judiciary is “a super-legislature of moral philosophers entitled to support Congress’s policy choices whenever they choose.” He said the Constitution “solely tasks the Congress with creating law, not the courts.” Years earlier hesaid a spate of attacks on courthouses might be linked to overzealous judging. “I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. … And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence. Certainly without any justification, but a concern that I have.”

— President Bush argued that “judges ought not to take the place of the legislative branch of government.” On the campaign trail, he declared judicial activism a province of the left: “If you think activist judges should be allowed to redefine our country and issue new laws for the bench, vote Democrat. But if you believe the role of the judge is to strictly interpret the Constitution and leave the legislating to the legislators, vote Republican.”

f the Supreme Court upholds the law, it’ll be tempting for Republicans to forget this week’s pious talk and return to their judge-bashing roots. But McConnell insists that won’t happen.

H/T: Brian Beutler and Sahil Kapur at TPM

This is beyond bizarre. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court is hearing a challenge to Obamacare, but when a Justice Department lawyer began arguments this morning she was stopped short:

Appeals Court Judge Jerry Smith immediately interrupted, asking if DOJ agreed that the judiciary could strike down an unconstitutional law. The DOJ lawyer, Dana Lydia Kaersvang, answered yes — and mentioned Marbury v. Madison, the landmark case that firmly established the principle of judicial review more than 200 years ago, according to the lawyer in the courtroom.

Smith then became “very stern,” the source said, telling the lawyers arguing the case it was not clear to “many of us” whether the president believes such a right exists….Smith, a Reagan appointee, went on to say that comments from the president and others in the Executive Branch indicate they believe judges don’t have the power to review laws and strike those that are unconstitutional, specifically referencing Mr. Obama’s comments yesterday about judges being an “unelected group of people.”

Despite the fact that Kaersvang immediately acknowledged that courts can indeed strike down laws, the panel ordered her to “submit a three-page, single-spaced letter by noon Thursday addressing whether the Executive Branch believes courts have such power.”

Seriously? These judges are acting like a middle school teacher handing out punishment to a student because of something her father said at a city council meeting the night before.

h/t: Kevin Drum at Mother Jones

As Dwight K. Schrute says, Kuh-westion: What is the single worst thing a judge can do, according to conservatives? No, not make crude comments to female aides about porn videos. That nets out a rather dandy plus, as we know. To the right, the single worst thing a judge can do is “legislate from the bench.” So it’s worth noting that what conservatives want five Supreme Court justices to do with regard to theAffordable Care Act is … legislate from the bench. Over the course of the past several months, since the Elena Kagan hearings, they’ve devised a spiffy new justification for it. And if the court grants their wish, it will only make that infernal law far more popular than it’s ever been.

 realize that the general category of “conservative hypocrisy” is not exactly man bites dog, and this instance probably isn’t even the number one case of it this week. That would be Paul Ryan calling himself a fiscal conservative (you know, the man whose new plan would balance the budget not in two years or five years but in—and yes, you’re reading this right and my math is right—28 years, and even then only on the basis of some really slippery assumptions). But central as the alleged abhorrence of legislating from the bench has been to the conservative movement for 30 years, it’s worth reflecting on the absurdity of the current situation. On what will probably be the most important and consequential high-court ruling in 13 years, since Bush v. Gore, conservatives will be cheering for their justices to violate what they tell the rest of us is their most fundamental and inviolate jurisprudential principle.

It is all those things, of course, except when it isn’t. In those instances, we’re just supposed to forget. In 2009, when the court held for white firefighter applicants who were plaintiffs in Ricci v. DeStefano, the five-member conservative majority (the usual four and Anthony Kennedy) most certainly was making new policy. And not even federal policy, but local policy. The majority, in Jeffrey Rosen’s words, invented “a new legal standard to determine when cities can throw out promotion exams that have discriminatory effects on minority firefighters.” There have been other cases. Indeed, with regard to this very health-care law, the early 2011 ruling against the law by Roger Vinson, a federal judge in Florida, was the definition of legislating from the bench.

Newt Gingrich appeared on Monday’s program of WallBuilders Live with David Barton and Rick Green, where Gingrich once again praised Barton’s right-wing pseudo-history and activism. In fact, Gingrich gave Barton credit for helping him develop his plan to assault the “judicial dictatorship” if elected president. He told Barton and Green that his plan is sending shockwaves through the “the secular left, which has been using the courts to replace the America we grew up in” by legalizing abortion, “driving God out of public life” and making same-sex marriages become “legitimized as if they were the same between traditional marriage between a man and a woman.”

Gingrich added that he would appoint judges in the mold of Robert George, the chairman of the National Organization for Marriage and a drafter of the Manhattan Declaration who has called people to defy Supreme Court decisions on issues like marriage that they disagree with, and graduates of Regent University and Liberty University, the schools founded by the far-right televangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, respectively. Regent University absorbed the Oral Roberts University law program and teaches conservative Christian interpretations of the law, and the Liberty University School of Law even pressured students to disobey U.S. law if it conflicts with what they believe is “God’s law” in situations such as the Lisa Miller kidnapping case. Gingrich also pointed to the right-wing Federalist Society as a source for judicial appointments.

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

Who’s the one that supports “activist judges”? People like David Barton, Newt Gingrich, and their supporters, NOT us Liberals.

Continuing his crusade against the courts, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich railed against judges “imposing secularism” on the country on this morning’s Face The Nation. Arguing that “activist judges” who make disagreeable decisions should be held accountable before Congress, he told Bob Schieffer that he would send a U.S. Marshal or Capitol Police officer to arrest judges if that’s what it took to reign them in, and then encourage impeachment:

SCHIEFFER: One of the things you say is that if you don’t like what a court has done, that Congress should subpoena the judge and bring him before Congress and hold a Congressional hearing… how would you enforce that? Would you send the Capitol Police down to arrest him?

GINGRICH: Sure. If you had to. Or you’d instruct the Justice Department to send a U.S. Marshal.

Newt the Grinch = moron.

H/T: Zach Ford at ThinkProgress Justice

Justice Clarence Thomas has been under ongoing scrutiny by activists and members of Congress for what appear to be numerous ethical lapses and a failure to report hundreds of thousands of dollars on financial disclosure forms.

Now 20 members of Congress have called for an official investigation into that non-disclosure. That investigation could lead to a further investigation by the Department of Justice.

WASHINGTON – Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, Ranking Member of the House Rules Committee, together with 19 Members of Congress, today sent a letter to the Judicial Conference, requesting that the Conference follow the law and refer the matter of Justice Clarence Thomas’s non-compliance with the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 to the Department of Justice.[…]

Section 104(b) of the Ethics in Government Act requires the Judicial Conference to refer to the Attorney General of the United States any judge who the Conference “has reasonable cause to believe has willfully failed to file a report or has willfully falsified or willfully failed to file information required to be reported.”

If the Judicial Conference finds reasonable cause to believe that Justice Thomas has “willfully falsified or willfully failed to file information to be reported,” it must, pursuant to §104, refer the case to the Attorney General for further determination of possible criminal or civil legal sanctions.

The congress members point to recent reports, including the detailed article in the New York Times of the numerous gifts from conservative activist Harlan Crow, the nearly $700,000 his wife earned from the Heritage Foundation from 2003-2007 and as founder of a tea party organization. They say, “Due to the simplicity of the disclosure requirements, along with Justice Thomas’s high level of legal training and experience, it is reasonable to infer that his failure to disclose his wife’s income for two decades was willful, and the Judicial Conference has a non-discretionary duty to refer this case to the Department of Justice.”

H/T: Joan McCarter at Daily Kos.