Free Republic

The transcript of my interview yesterday on the Hugh Hewitt show is now up at Radioblogger. By analogy to that great Congressional tradition, I want to use this post to revise and extend my remarks. In particular, I want to pick up on the baseball analogy. (In the course of doing so, I may also be able to at least indirectly answer some of the questions Beldar posed to me the other day.) The Supreme Court is the big league. Those nine old men and women have arrogated to themselves not only the powers historically exercised by jurists in the...

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due. It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate...

Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it. Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers. Other arguments betray a gross misunderstanding of conservatism on the part of persons masquerading as its defenders. Miers's advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates...

OVER the last two elections, the Republican Party regained control of the United States Senate by electing new senators in Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. These victories were attributable in large measure to the central demand made by Republican candidates, and heard and embraced by voters, that President Bush's nominees deserved an up-or-down decision on the floor of the Senate. Now, with the withdrawal of Harriet Miers under an instant, fierce and sometimes false assault from conservative pundits and activists, it will be difficult for Republican candidates to continue to make this winning...

Tonight in a public question-and-answer session at the University of Minnesota Law School, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the Court did not need to rush into the question of same-sex marriage because the lower courts had not yet disagreed on the issue. Asked whether she thought the Court might take the issue up this Term, Justice Ginsburg noted that all three appellate courts to address the issue so far (the Fourth, Seventh, and Tenth) have struck down state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. She added that we are still awaiting a decision from the Sixth Circuit, which has been...

A granite monument of the Ten Commandments that sits across the street from the U.S. Supreme Court was toppled by vandals sometime over the weekend. The monument sits in the front yard of 209 Second St. NE, the headquarters of Faith and Action, an evangelical Christian group led by the Rev. Rob Schenck. The 3-foot by 3-foot granite sculpture weighs 850 pounds.

I believe the subject of this treatise will be about an individual which a great many people consider to be public enemy number one. For those of you who have read my other treatises, I hate to disappoint you, this particular treatise will not be the scathing witch hunt which uncovers the corruptness of our so-called leadership or of any particular leader for that matter. Instead, I am going to spend the time looking into a man who much of the public seems to intensely dislike, but for whom I have a great deal of respect. While there are nine...

...... Just as Justice Owen Roberts' switch was attributed to the political storm of Democrat opposition to the Court's reversal of New Deal legislation, there is a widely cited report....that Chief Justice John Roberts had originally sided with the conservative dissenters in the ObamaCare decision, but changed his vote because of concerns about the political prestige of the Court in the eyes of the media and Washington elites. Owen Roberts destroyed his judicial papers. However..... He acknowledged that the Supreme Court's pro-New Deal decisions "reduce the states to administrative districts rather than coordinate sovereigns" and that his switch reached "a...

Rule 44. Rehearing 1. Any petition for the rehearing of any judgment or decision of the Court on the merits shall be filed within 25 days after entry of the judgment or decision, unless the Court or a Justice shortens or extends the time. The petitioner shall file 40 copies of the rehearing petition and shall pay the filing fee prescribed by Rule 38(b), except that a petitioner proceeding in forma pauperis under Rule 39, including an inmate of an institution, shall file the number of copies required for a petition by such a person under Rule 12.2. The petition...

Any ideas out there?

Christmas Day is near, and the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ should not only be based upon a notion of just giving gifts, sharing songs of good cheer. Why not open up one more present and present it to God and to Christ. Whether you are in Cleveland, Ohio, Tampa, Florida, or Atlanta, Georgia, give a commitment in the New Year to be accountable to the right to life. Yes, that is correct; Christmas is the perfect opportunity to pray for life, but also to firmly commit to the right to life. Ever since the 1973 U.S. Supreme...

Snopes, Soros and the Supreme Courts Kagan We-l-l-l-l now, I guess the time has come to check out Snopes! Ya' don't suppose it might not be a good time to take a second look at some of the stuff that got kicked in the ditch by Snopes, do ya'? We've known that it was owned by a lefty couple but hadn't known it to be financed by Soros! Snopes is heavily financed by George Soros; a big time supporter of Obama! In our Search for the truth department, we find what I have suspected on many occasions. I went to...

<p>The Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects fundamentalist church members who mount attention-getting, anti-gay protests outside military funerals.</p>

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that corporations have no right of personal privacy to prevent the disclosure of documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the 8-0 opinion Tuesday that reversed an appeals court ruling in favor of AT&T. The outcome was notable for its unanimity, especially in view of recent criticism from liberal interest groups that the court tilts too far in favor of business. "The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend...

Complete title: Justice Department Resists Releasing Records That Could Shed Light on Whether Justice Kagan Needs to Recuse Herself from Health Care Case (CNSNews.com) - The U.S. Justice Department is contesting in federal court a Freedom of Information Act request filed by CNSNews.com that seeks department records that could shed light on the question of whether Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan needs to recuse herself from legal challenges to the health-care reform law President Barack Obama signed last March.The case—the Media Research Center v. the U.S. Justice Department—arises from a complaint the Media Research Center filed on Nov. 23, 2010 against the Justice Department...

RICHMOND, Va. -- Virginia's attorney general has formally asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider his challenge of a key portion of the Obama administration's health care reform law. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli's office said Wednesday it filed a petition late Tuesday to leapfrog an appeals court review scheduled for May. Cuccinelli had announced his intention to seek the review last week.

If you haven’t read Shannen Coffin’s piece on Elena Kagan and the partial-birth-abortion debate today, you really should. What he describes, based on newly released Clinton White House memos, is absolutely astonishing. It seems that the most important statement in the famous position paper of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists—a 1996 document that was central to the case of partial-birth-abortion defenders for the subsequent decade and played a major role in a number of court cases and political battles—was drafted not by an impartial committee of physicians, as both ACOG and the pro-abortion lobby claimed for years, but...

As if there were not already ample evidence to deny Elena Kagan a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, the controversy surrounding the nominee continues to swirl. The controversy casts many doubts on her fitness for the Court. First, a recap of what we know so far is in order.

As more hidden information is discovered about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan there is increasing cause for alarm. In documents uncovered by CNS, Kagan argued that restricting free speech is a legitimate role of government, provided government can establish the 'proper motive' for doing so. In an article Kagan published in the University of Chicago Law Review in 1996, entitled, 'Private Speech, Public Purpose: the Role of Government Motive in First Amendment Doctrine.' she contends that the negative impact of a law restricting freedom of speech is subservient to the government's motive for enacting such restrictions. As long as the...

The U.S. Supreme Court, in rare 8-0 unanimous decision, ruled that Obama court nominee Elena Kagan was wrong to ban ROTC military recruiters from the Harvard campus in 2004-05. Even the liberals on the Court ruled against her. But Kagan went further than merely banning the military from Harvard. She attempted to ban federal funding from any institution of higher learning that allowed military recruitment on their campuses. The reason for Kagan's vendetta against the U.S. military was its 'don't ask, don't tell' policy toward gays. Interestingly enough, it was Kagan's own former employer, President Bill Clinton, who first implemented...