Those Dems in DC – Moon of Alabama

August 18, 2005

Those Dems in DC

In a Slate piece three Professors of Law, Stephen Gillers, David J. Luban, and Steven Lubet, find that Supreme Court candidate Roberts has violate federal law. Roberts did not recuse himself from the appeals court panel that was judging the case Salim Ahmed Hamdan vs. Bush while he was interviewed for the top job at the White House.

The case was about the legitimacy of the Guantanamo military tribunals. Roberts was interviewed for the SOCUS job by Alberto Gonzales on April 1. The appeal was argued on April 7. In May Roberts was interviewed by Cheney, Card, Rove Miers, Gonzales and Libby. On July 15, the appeals court panel of three judges, including Roberts, gave the Bush administration the victory about military commissions and Geneva Conventions application by ruling against the lower courts opinion. On July 19 Bush nominated Roberts for the Supreme Court.

The professors find:

"Federal law [on the disqualification of judges] deems public trust in the courts so critical that it requires judges to step aside if their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned," even if the judge is completely impartial as a matter of fact."

Is there a reason question a judge’s impartiality in a case against the heart of the administrations legal opinion when at at the same time the judge is offered the highest available legal job by the same administration at the same time? The professor think so.

There are also some vanishing archive papers with earlier Roberts opinions. There are also several opinions on equal pay, school prayer, "Abortion Tragedy" and others, that are outside the current legal mainstream. Roberts is a radical.

So why is Roberts Unlikely To Face Big Fight? What is the matter with the Dems in DC?

Posted by b on August 18, 2005 at 20:22 UTC | Permalink

Comments

What is the matter with the Dems in DC?
Why do you ask? 😉
P.S.
The system isn’t broken, it just the way they want it. Reality isn’t binary. It’s analog.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 18 2005 21:39 utc | 1

Wall Street knows how how the game is played:

Former NBA player and congressman Tom McMillen is trying to go two-for-two in homeland defense plays. A month ago, Fortress America Acquisition, a so-called blank-check company dreamed up by McMillen, raised $42 million in an initial public offering. The start-up, whose only products are the resumes of its politically connected board, hopes to use those funds to buy a company that “contracts directly with the government on homeland security projects.”

Why lobby for someone else’s pork? Cut out the middle-man!

Posted by: PeeDee | Aug 18 2005 23:00 utc | 2

Bad link. Try this.

Posted by: PeeDee | Aug 18 2005 23:02 utc | 3

Hey this is a bit harsh isn’t it? How else is the gang going to feel ‘comfortable’ with Roberts sitting in the big leather chair unless he proves his loyalty just one more time. Especially if he does it in a compromising way so that the repugs hold some Roberts’ paper?
I think most people realise that he isn’t going to get the gig unless he’s as bent as a left handed corkscrew so although Slate make some good points I doubt it will do anything to any repugs who didn’t already know this except to make them feel more secure.
Let’s face it what the rest of us think doesn’t really matter does it? It would be reassuring to think that Roberts stumbled across the Slate story and felt a twinge of guilt or humiliation at being seen to be so obviously ‘on side’ as this decision shows him to be.
Unfortunately if there was the least chance of that he would never have made it onto the short list.
There’s only one thing for it. We need a geneticist to isolate the segment of the DNA chain that enables wasp men with a full head of hair to behave as though no one else in the universe mattered a toss. Then a biological control can be designed so that all types with this deviant gene suddenly and in unison start ravenously devouring themselves until all that is left is a stinking haemorrhoid encrusted asshole lying on the deck looking for all the world like an abandoned boil plaster.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 19 2005 0:51 utc | 4

Roberts is unlikely to face a fight because there is one party in America, the Republicrat/Demoplican Party, all of whose members lunch at the same trough.

Posted by: John Francis Lee | Aug 19 2005 1:48 utc | 5

Should we Just Ignore Them?
“If only a few people ignore the government, it won’t go away; instead it will come down on those few people like a ton of CS gas. But if the number of people ignoring the government, treating its commands as one would treat the commands of some delusional street person, were to reach critical mass, the power of the state, resting essentially as it does on the complaisance of the governed, would melt away like butter in the Arizona sun.”
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 19 2005 5:00 utc | 6

$cam’s post reminds us of the old saw: “Don’t vote it only encourages the bastards”.
I’m also reminded of the story of when Babu Ram Das (Richard Alpert) was gaoled somewhere on the subcontinent. The prisoners got together and decided that they would all act as though they were willingly in a monastery and prayer times would be set around the gaol routine. That way the only people still in gaol would be the guards.
I suspect the BushCo rethugs would be happy enough if the population passively ignored them ie stopped listening to the inanities that politicians burble daily or not voting etc.
A more active type of ‘shunning’ would have to be instituted like not filing tax returns not paying tax, not obeying the law etc.
Any action like that could only be achieved if the population showed the sort of solidarity that has been in decline since assholes sold staunch people out.
The other problem which is covered briefly in the linked article is that if citizens are compelled to make a nation ungovernable, once the repressors have been shunned into the wilderness it is nigh on impossible to turn civic co-operation back on like a faucet.
South Africa is the most recent major example of this and a heavy price was paid by the generation that were children at the time of school strikes.
That group who are now adults comprise the bulk of the long term unemployed in South Africa.
So shunning the US government would have to be a highly organised extremely co-ordinated effort guided by clandestine ‘leaders’ lest those who were ‘believed to be leaders’ ended up being made examples of.
Not an altogether impossible task but a pretty difficult one. Particularly when it is an act of resistance that requires unity of action as well as purpose at a time when western society is celebrating the cult of the individual.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Aug 19 2005 6:00 utc | 7

You know that John Lennon line that,
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
That’s what life inside the Beltway is like.
Everyone is busy working their own success and promotion and dominance and ideology. No one is at the big wheel.
The result of all this parochial greed and infighting and invbreeding of strange bedfellows is out national now, and national future.
Even the White House, the Executive branch, has joined this rumble in the jungle.
No one’s driving the car.

Posted by: Antifa | Aug 19 2005 16:52 utc | 8

I read that Reps. and Dems. split the hispanic vote in 04. Just a thought but, if the Dem. party were to choose a hispanic vice presidential candadate in 08. Wouldn’t that be an almost certain victory? With that being the largest minority in the US. I also read that the hispanics now out number the Whites in Texas. What a blow that would be to Reps. if the Dems. used this to their advantage. And every state that was close in 04 just went in the blue column. And many states that were not even close would also be added.

Posted by: Spuddog | Aug 19 2005 19:12 utc | 9

No one’s driving the car.
Nahh, it only looks that way.
They just don’t want to talk about where they’re heading.
Feudalism has such a bad name and scares the children.

Posted by: kelley b. | Aug 20 2005 3:08 utc | 10

With regards to kelly b’s horrifiying Feudalism post above:
Tools for Gridcrash
A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Aug 20 2005 6:59 utc | 11

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