Free Republic

Welcome to Your Weekend Your Host Here Again Going Through Transition... I am digging through all the archives including books I have accumulated over the years with a 1937 Almanac published by the "Philadelphia Bulletin". Lots of details about Philadephia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. In the details of Delaware something got my attention. What Delaware's Legislature Was Like Before The Earl Warren Supreme Court Changed Things In The 1960's... The Next Round Of Vaxx Jabs The vaccines don't last forever so the next round needs to be planned for. That's what the British National Health Service was saying earlier...

Antonin Scalia pointed out that the Bill of Rights was not enacted to change anyone’s rights. At all. The Bill of Rights was created not to change anyone's rights but to set in concrete the already established rights of the people. That is explicitly the burden of the Ninth Amendment: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. And where the First Amendment refers to “the” freedom . . . of the press, it explicitly means that freedom of the press as it existed in 1787...

AFTER A 50-YEAR siege, the great strategic fortress of liberalism has fallen. With the elevation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court seems secure for constitutionalism — perhaps for decades. The shrieks from the gallery of the Senate chamber as the vote came in last Saturday, and the sight of that bawling mob clawing at the doors of the Supreme Court as the new justice took his oath, confirm it. The Democratic Party has sustained a historic defeat. And the triumph is President Trump’s. To unite the party whose nomination he had won, Donald Trump pledged to select his high...

In a recent speech in Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made some interesting predictions about two of the Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions: Kelo v. City of New London, which ruled that government can condemn private property and give it to other private owners to promote “economic development,” and Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the internment of over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II. On Kelo, Scalia reiterated his 2011 prediction that the decision will eventually be overruled, stating that it “will not survive.” Kelo was a closely divided 5-4 decision (Scalia voted with the...

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger considers himself a glass-half-full guy, and he ended his California Small Business Day speech in Sacramento with a dose of optimism. But it seemed clear the governor has just about had it with California's governance system, especially after last week's special election was a colossal failure. Though he blamed many of the state's budget problems on the current economic collapse, he said part of our woes are "self-inflicted." "California hasn't had a responsible fiscal system since Earl Warren in the late '40s and early '50s," he said. The governor ticked off a number of complaints about the...

SACRAMENTO - As an international movie star and bodybuilding champion, Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is clearly one of a kind. Yet throughout his tenure as governor his actions have seemed to channel past governors. In 2005, Schwarzenegger, with his unsuccessful push for partisan ballot measures, seemed to follow the aggressive, in-your-face approach of former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson. In 2006, Schwarzenegger's emphasis on rebuilding the state's schools, highways and levees recalled the huge building push in the 1960s of former Democratic Gov. Pat Brown. This year, Schwarzenegger has acted much like former Republican Gov. Earl Warren. Both men made a...

"Impeach Earl Warren" was a slogan for billboards, bumper stickers and even buttons some 50 years ago. It was a battle cry of a previous generation of conservative activists. The ruckus was all about the Chief Justice of the United States and his controversial court. A court that increased its own power and the power of the federal government in general, moving the nation to the left. To the left through banning of prayer in the Engel vs. Vitale case or through giving criminals "rights" in the Miranda vs. Arizona case. (I still remember seeing Jack Webb whipping out his...

BERKELEY - A new UC Berkeley think tank will research whether Proposition 209, the state ballot measure that ended affirmative action at California universities, could be challenged successfully in court. Run by the Boalt Hall law school, the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity will take on one of the most contentious issues in higher education: whether race should be used as a factor in college admissions. The institute, to be announced Monday, also will study a broad range of other subjects, including the upcoming reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act and civil rights in K-12...

Contending that President Bush's far-right allies are pushing him to appoint an extreme conservative to the Supreme Court, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid pointed to liberal icon Earl Warren as a model. In his party's weekly radio address, Reid, D-Nev., noted that Saturday marked the anniversary of the 1974 death of Warren, a Republican whose court established a liberal tradition with its 1954 school desegregation ruling and other decisions. Reid said Warren had been able to forge a consensus on the court that would become the national consensus. "Mr. President, that's the kind of justice we hope you'll nominate," Reid...

Some of the Supreme Court justices who defied expectations of the presidents who appointed them: -Oliver Wendell Holmes, appointed by Republican Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, sided with businesses and voted against the president in a case challenging the Sherman Antitrust Act. Roosevelt reportedly said of Holmes afterward, ``Out of a banana I could carve a firmer backbone.'' -Felix Frankfurter, appointed by Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, became a strong advocate of judicial restraint, clashing with liberal members who sought an active court role in protecting minorities and monitoring fairness in the political process, such as legislative redistricting. -Earl Warren,...

Among his most vocal opponents was none other than Chief Justice Earl Warren. According to RFK, Warren responded to the Hastie proposal with marked rejection: "He's not a liberal, and he'll be opposed to all the measures that we are interested in, and he just would be completely unsatisfactory." Warren's "liberal" peer, Justice William Douglas, told Kennedy that Hastie would be "just one more vote for Frankfurter." Thus, two Supreme Court "liberals" (and an array of Kennedy Administration officials suspicious of Judge Hastie's political leanings) spiked the ascent of the would-be first black Justice.

Same-Sex Marriage and the Living Document March 4, 2004 “According to definition,” Hilaire Belloc wrote, “the ideal citizen of this Modern State must be free to act on his individual judgment of morals, must reach conclusions on all matters by private judgment, but must accept the coercion of any law whatsoever when it has been decided by a majority of such individual citizens so concluding.” That about sums it up. The Modern State, now called Democracy, has no moral principles, but we have a duty to obey it anyway. Why? Majority rule, you know. But sometimes the courts overrule the...

Brown Reconsidered January 13, 2004 Judicial review was originally proposed (most notably in Federalist No. 78) as a method of making sure legislatures didn’t pass unconstitutional laws. Today it has become a method of changing the very meaning of constitutions under the guise of interpreting them. The problem was highlighted this past November, when the supreme court of Massachusetts handed down the sensational ruling that the state’s constitution required that same-sex “marriage” be recognized in law. The court didn’t even bother citing any specific passage of the constitution that might be construed to mean this; obviously it couldn’t find one....