Roberts is not Supreme Court material.
When Bush nominated Roberts for the Supreme Court, many of us were wondering where this was going and the rest of us had a decent idea what would follow There were very few comments and even less information about this man who would fill a lifetime position in America's highest court...that seemed instantly suspect. It is unfolding quickly at this point but even if it were not every American should be a bit aprehensive after this..."Justice Sunday II: God Save the United States and this Honorable Court!"
Does anyone not remember the Evangelical extremists who hosted the first Justice Sunday that was primarily meant to pressure our government to put extreme judges in place and support Frist in his nuclear option campaign that would have changed our rules to allow the majority to strip any rights from the minority party? These same people are having a second show to work at getting Roberts on the Supreme Court. The story was covered by the Washington Post under the heading that Frist was not invited to this one because he stood up for stem cell research but the implications of the extreme Christian Right showing support for Roberts is much more destructive.
Be afraid, America...be very afraid.
From what we DO know
1.) Roberts supported regulatory changes that would have permitted the federal funding of discrimination against women, minorities, people with disabilities, and older Americans
2.)criticized the Supreme Court decision forbidding organized prayer in public schools;
3.)sought to expand the ability of prosecutors and police to question suspects out of the presence of their attorneys
(1, 2 and 3 Washington Post, July 26)
4.) Roberts argued that Congress should strip the Supreme Court of authority to rule on cases regarding abortion, school prayer, and certain school desegregation remedies.
5.) Roberts argued that affirmative action programs were bound to fail because they required "the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates"
(4 and 5 New York Times, July 28)
6.) Roberts has admitted to registering as a lobbyist but ommitting that detail from his questionnaire that he submitted to the Senate. (L.A. Times, August 4)
The approach is to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the Court. I'm sorry...that is not good enough. The American people have the right to know whether he will stand fairly for all of us within the law or will he be a hero to the Christian Right by changing laws of today to satisfy ideology of a minority?
If you oppose abortion...don't have one.
Religious zealots who appoint themselves as God to force others into their views are foolish, irrational and arrogant. How many of those zealots will take care of and support those children? If a woman is realistic and knows she could not bear the burdens,...whether it be emotionally, physically or financially...what right does anyone have to force her into doing it anyway and setting her and the child up for failure? Would it be just so they could bitch about welfare lines, child abuse/neglect and juvenile delinquency down the road?
Women deserve all the opportunities that men have under the law.
The days of barefoot, pregnant and subservient are long gone, Roberts, old boy. How dare any man in the US attempt to strip what little rights we have away from us...what, you don't think we should have got the right to vote either, do you? The ORIGINAL Constitution of the US does not specify gender when it states OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE. Women deserve no less than equal opportunity. Even your Federalist Society can not pull that one out of a hat.
White male domination is idiotic, arrogant and much of America's problem
I suppose Condi Rice and Clarence Thomas can appreciate your ideas that appointing blacks would provide "inadequately prepared candidates". I may not care for either very much but it is a bit ironic. I suppose Rosa Parks should have been executed instead of jailed and blacks should have never been given the opportunities to get into college...hell, maybe you would prefer the "ownership society" that we had before Lincoln and slavery was still valid. Sure...let's not give anyone a chance for anything unless they are male and white. Again, the Constitution did not specify racial preferences when it states OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE AND FOR THE PEOPLE.
Hey...we slaughtered the Indians because they were on our land before we got here and then forced their surviving children into Christianity. America is complacent not to see what we did by dropping bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Now we slaughter Iraqis because they were on our oil fields before we got there. Why should we have a legacy other than white dominance due to mass destruction...
Impaired AMERICANS are worthy of respect
Handicapped Americans are not disposable people. They should not be denied what they need to communicate or to be able to learn and survive. Why would you feel that a deaf student had no right to a signing translater for school? What would you have us do with handicapped people...hide them away and deny them basic resources to be productive members of society? Would you repeal legislation that benefits them?
You don't need no stinking lawyer!
Let's all go back to Draconian measures...coersion, torture, forced confessions, etc...Roberts does not believe any innocent person or anyone else would EVER need their lawyer present when they are questioned. Yeah, right... Tell that to the guy released last week after spending 19 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. Scenes of Abu Graib and Gitmo come to mind...oh no, we would never abuse anyone...especially if there was no witness to dispute us.
If you want organized prayer in school, enroll in a Christian School
I refuse to have my grandson forced into something he has not chosen for himself. If you don't like it, you can kiss something green and slimy. Religion belongs in your church, your home and your Christian Schools but it does not belong in our PUBLIC schools. I do not appreciate Christianity being shoved down my throat and I appreciate it even less when it is shoved onto children who are not mature enough to choose their own path. The same people who made themselves God in order to tell women what they can or can not do with their own bodies are the ones who push school prayer for all, yet I see those same people at the heart of it cutting programs that benefit children in all walks of life.
That doesn't even touch the fact that Roberts ommitted his lobbyist ties.
Roberts nomination is shrouded in secrecy and that should be a red flag for this country and it's people. If Roberts was an honorable man with nothing to hide there would be no need for secrecy. Since the fanatics from Justice Sunday are putting this much effort and money into his nomination you can bet that the minority will see their idea of justice while the rest of America suffers a lifetime appointment of a nominee of far right persuasion.
Roberts is dangerous and has no business on the Supreme Court.
Additions 8/6/05
Unlike his position as an assistant to Atty. Gen. William French Smith in 1981 and 1982, Roberts' later post in the solicitor general's office gave him the chance to try to reshape the law at the Supreme Court. And when teamed with Starr, he was not shy about pressing sharply ideological positions in the court.
The duty and role of the solicitor general was a subject of debate in the 1980s. Reagan's first solicitor general, Rex Lee, quit in frustration, saying he was reluctant to "press the administration's policies at every turn …. I'm the solicitor general, not the pamphleteer general."
The solicitors who followed Lee, including Charles Fried and Starr, were more willing to advocate the ideological views of the administration.
And in the Reagan and Bush administrations, that meant urging the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
This latest article makes it very clear that our political front has been and is still being infused with the piety of the minority who believe America's laws should reflect only their choice moral values. This article is from the L.A. Times.
In 1991, Roberts personally argued a case along with lawyers for Operation Rescue. The protesters had been sued in Virginia over their abortion clinic blockades. The women who sued relied on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which made it illegal for a group to conspire to deprive individuals of their rights.
Roberts began by saying that he was not defending the actions of the protesters. Rather, he argued, the 19th century civil rights law did not apply to their conduct. The law only applied when people were singled out for discrimination, as blacks were by the Klan, Roberts said.
"Opposition to abortion is [not] the same as discrimination on the basis of gender," he said, adding that it was "wrong as a matter of law and logic" to make such a claim. In a 6-3 decision, the court agreed with his argument in an opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia.
The lawyer who represented the women said the Bush administration lawyers should have stayed out of the case.
"We were greatly bothered that the federal government was in this case on the side of Operation Rescue," Deborah Ellis, a New York University law professor, said recently. "There is a right to abortion, and whether you agree with it or not, it is objectionable that women could be deprived of this right by force."
(The Supreme Court is set to hear a similar case this fall involving blockades at abortion clinics. Lawyers for the National Organization for Women won a suit against leaders of Operation Rescue for using violence and threats against doctors and patients. The court will hear an appeal from the antiabortion advocates, who say a federal extortion law does not apply to such protests.)
DUH! A woman had a legal right to abortion and they felt intimidated and threatened...the same law should have applied.
Shortly after Roberts arrived in Starr's office, the federal government also intervened in a Missouri right-to-die case.
Nancy Cruzan had been badly injured in an auto accident. She never regained consciousness, and her family petitioned a court to remove her surgically implanted feeding tube.
"The question is whether the state is going to decide this, or the person's family is going to make the decision," William Colby, a lawyer for the Cruzans, told the court.
Missouri's lawyers said they were defending the "right to life" protected by their state constitution, and Starr argued that the states deserved "wide latitude" to set their own rules.
The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, ruled for the state.
It is not the American people who make family decisions...it is those who strip us of that choice. the Bush brothers tried to do that with Terri Shaivo, too, didn't they? Neither state or federal government has a right to invade a family in such a way.
Starr and Roberts also upset women's rights advocates in 1991 when they intervened on the side of a Georgia school district in a major test of Title IX, the law that bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges.
Christine Franklin, a student, said she had been sexually harassed and abused by a popular coach, who was later dismissed. She sued the school district.
Starr and Roberts urged the court to rule that the law did not give victims of sex discrimination a right to sue. The justices unanimously rejected that view.
If women do not gain a clear picture of what we would have to look forward to with Roberts on the Supreme Coart, they are either blind or brain dead.
"He had very strong ideological views about the law, and he saw his mission in life as bringing these conservative views to bear on civil rights and anti-discrimination laws," said Susan Carle, then a lawyer in the department's civil rights division and now a professor at American University's law school.
In Starr's and Roberts' final year in the solicitor general's office, the Reagan Revolution ran aground at the high court.
They had focused on two goals that were dear to conservatives since Reagan's election: restoring prayers to public schools and overturning the right to choose abortion.
They intervened in a Rhode Island case that tested whether school officials could invite a cleric to give an invocation at graduation. The Bush administration lawyers argued that a ceremonial prayer did not amount to an "establishment of religion" and therefore should be upheld.
They also intervened in the Pennsylvania case to argue that states could make all abortions a crime.
The term ended in June 1992 with a pair of setbacks for conservatives. By 5-4 votes, the court ruled that school-sponsored prayers were unconstitutional, even at ceremonies, and upheld the right of pregnant women to choose abortion.
It is even more clear that this man does not belong on the Supreme Court.
He did stand up for men's rights, though...
But Roberts was not always on the government's side.
He intervened in a Louisiana case to argue on behalf of an inmate, Keith Hudson, who had been beaten by two prison guards while he was shackled and handcuffed.
He later sued the guards for violating his constitutional rights and won $800 in damages. But the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans threw out the verdict and ruled that prisoners' rights were not violated by abusive treatment that did not cause a significant and permanent injury.
Roberts spotted the case and said he was troubled by the lower court's ruling. Though "frivolous" suits from prisoners were a problem, this was not a frivolous case, he said. Nor, he told the court, should the law condone the "unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain" on prisoners.
The high court agreed in a 7-2 ruling written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Justices Clarence Thomas and Scalia dissented.
Scalia and Thomas are the biggest slaps in the face that we have in the court system...we do not need another who will set women's rights, the disabled and any race other than white back to the stone age in order to keep the white male domination of this society in place.
If you do not write and call your elected representatives to let them know you do not think Roberts is a good choice, you get what you deserve and put the rest of us in jeopardy.
If you don't care about it, you do not deserve the rights our soldiers have fought, bled and died for.
posted by Myst @ 9:06 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home