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Posted on 03/26/2014 4:21:08 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
One of the reasons Clarence Thomas gives for the studious silence he maintains during Supreme Court hearings is that his fellow justices have shown an increasing tendency to talk too much during oral arguments, thus preventing advocates from presenting their arguments coherently. Yesterday’s Supreme Court hearing in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores and Conestoga Wood Specialties v. Sebelius suggest that Thomas is right.
Paul D. Clement, who appeared on behalf of the two companies challenging the Obamacare contraception mandate,was repeatedly interrupted and badgered by justices Sotomayor,Kagan,and Ginsburg. The transcript from yesterday’s hearing shows that Clement was permitted to talk less than 30 seconds before he was interrupted by Justice Sotomayor with a belligerent question that had nothing to do with any of the 49 words he had thus far uttered:
MR. CLEMENT:Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court:When a Federal Government agency compelled employers to provide something as religiously sensitive as contraception, it knew that free exercise in RFRA claims would soon follow. In particular, the agency itself provided exemptions and accommodations for the religious exercise of a subset...
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR:Is your claim limited to sensitive materials like contraceptives or does it include items like blood transfusion, vaccines? For some religions, products made of pork? Is any claim under your theory that has a religious basis,could an employer preclude the use of those items as well?
Sotomayor knows perfectly well that the two companies whose case Clement was attempting to explain to the Court has nothing to do with blood transfusion, vaccines, or pork. So,Clement soldiered on for about a minute, trying to explain that the government would have a more “compelling interest” with regard to vaccinations than it does in the case of abortifacients like the morning after pill. At this point, he was again interrupted, this time by Justice Kagan:......
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
No, but can a company claim protection under the RFRA against being forced to provide vaccines under their health care plan? If a Chrisitan Scientist owns a corporation can they claim refuse to offer medical health care plans to their employees, even if Obamacare requires it, because such a requirement violates their religious beliefs?
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act says that people cannot be forced to take actions that violate their religious beliefs. Mitt Romney said "Corporations are people." The government says they are not. But the courts have ruled in the past that corporations have the same right to free speech that people have, and that they can make political contributions just as people can. So if corporations are the same as people in their First Amdendment right to free speech then shouldn't they be considered the same regarding their First Amendment right to freedom of religion?
But if you consider corporations as people in that regards then what about freedom of association, implicitly protected in the First Amendment? As a person I can associate with anyone I like, and refuse to associate with anyone I like. So shouldn't a corporation be free to refuse service to anyone they want to? Gay marriages, for example? But then can they deny service to anyone they want, based not only on sexual orentation but race, religion or ethnic background?
True believers don’t leave the collective.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/374155/progressives-turn-their-prodigies-charles-c-w-cooke
“............If Klein and Silver have learned anything in the early days of their independence, it will hopefully be that “neutrality” is a mirage — a comforting story that ideologues of all stripes tell one another as to prevent themselves from having to face their prejudices and stand up openly for anything concrete. Being smart sorts, one suspects that in their quiet moments, the pair might have guessed as much. Now they have their precious data, with which to support their hunch.”
“This issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
_________________
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” - Barack Obama, election eve, 2008
...In 1969, the year that publishers reissued Alinsky’s first book, Reveille for Radicals, a Wellesley undergraduate named Hillary Rodham submitted her 92-page senior thesis on Alinsky’s theories (she interviewed him personally for the project). In her conclusion Hillary compared Alinsky to Eugene Debs, Walt Whitman and Martin Luther King.
The title of Clinton’s thesis was “There Is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.” In this title she had identified the single most important Alinsky contribution to the radical cause – his embrace of political nihilism. An SDS radical once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words, the cause of a political action – whether civil rights or women’s rights – is never the real cause; women, blacks and other “victims” are only instruments in the larger cause, which is power.”
Guided by Alinsky principles, post-Communist radicals are not idealists but Machiavellians. Their focus is on means rather than ends, and therefore they are not bound by organizational orthodoxies in the way their admired Marxist forebears were. Within the framework of their revolutionary agenda, they are flexible and opportunistic and will say anything (and pretend to be anything) to get what they want, which is resources and power.......
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/3095927/posts
We've got three morally twisted women on the Supreme Court who vote with their reproductive organs uppermost in mind and their seared consciences to guide them as they interpret a Constitution for which they have no respect nor do they believe it as written or intended. What could possibly go wrong with that combination?
The Founding Fathers warned us against such people. So did the Bible. No good thing can come from such rotten fruit. We are in for nothing but ghastly decisions from their corrupted souls.
Don’t forget Saul Alinsky’s dedication to his book “Rules for Radicals:”
“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer”
This tells us everything we need to know about these people, their agenda, and their world-view.
Eventually a number of the states are going to just quit listening to these people and do whatever they want. We’re getting closer to that all the time. This United States will become more like a collective partnership working together where we agree and not so much where we don’t.
You could throw a brick at a group of normal Americans and kill a better Justice than any of those three.
The ravings of the three female Associate Justices center upon the notion that the state may “tax” someoneone, in this case a business, for daring to exercise religious beliefs. The comment that Hobby Lobby has the option to simply “pay the tax” if the healthcare mandate is morally onerous, is akin to to the Ottomans’ “jizya”, a tax penalty on non-believers. If that’s how she feels, Kagan should just state plainly, “Pay the jizya!”
What they did not address is why it’s somehow a “right” for an employee to demand that an employer pay for abortifacients at all. The issue is further muddied by those who would say that Hobby Lobby refuses to provide plans which cover contraception: which is false. The company only refuses to fund abortion associated prescriptions and devices. In the same way that a company may simply, as the the three women assert, “pay the tax”, an employee may opt to work elsewhere. No one is chained to their job at Hobby Lobby.
The sorry reality of their diatribes is that state authority, central planning, and redistributive social justice dogma trump the free exercise clause of the first amendment for the “liberals” on the court. The irony is that such a position of intolerance and governmental overreach is anything but “liberal.”
Just praying Captain Kenyan won’t get the opportunity to appoint any more SC judges before his reign of terror mercifully ends.
The Founding Fathers could never have foreseen the consequences that face America today. Women were not even thought of in the political process let alone serve on the Highest Court in the land with LGBT issues and items like contraception.
They also were thinking that Americans had like issues and would want to see our Country prosper and not be brought to its knees by a one sided court.
the big mistake was life-time tenure. When judges make political decisions, they should be under the political process.
But they shouldn’t make political decisions.
“So one religious group could opt out of this and another religious group could opt out of that and everything would be piecemeal and nothing would be uniform.”
I don’t see any problem with religion in America being piecemeal and non-uniform.
I don’t agree that the Supreme Court judges should be appointed by the President. Why shouldn’t they have to be voted in by the populous?
Not good. This would remove one of the very few checks on the Judicial Branch the other two branches have.
your Reps approve them for you! That’s what confirmation hearings are all about! So in fact what ever party is in power is what gives you a Judge for life.
That the "fix may be in" if one party controls both the Legislative and Executive branches is irrelevant to my Constitutional point.
And one is a Wise Latina, and the other a certified Diesel, a flower of the Crown of Creation (as gays tell each other).
The attorney should lapse into worshipful silence in the presence of such demiurges, and take diligent and copious notes while they lay it all out.
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Good point. Their conduct reminds us of the behavior of the Nazi judge in the trial of Col. von Stauffenberg.
There, the function of the prosecutor, the judge, and even the defending attorney was to realize the Nazi jurisprudential concept of Fuehrerprinzip, which stated that all officers of the court, and all their efforts, are animated in unison by a unifying principle, that "what the Fuehrer wants, the Fuehrer gets -- promptly."
To this end, the Nazi judge raged and fulminated like a night-court prosecutor against von Stauffenberg, prosecuting him from the bench and sending him very swiftly to his death.
0bama can count on his picks to do his bidding, no matter how much they have to twist and turn reason, logic, and established law; and they will employ the obligatory Newspeak to support their decisions. They have no problem legislating from the bench.
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