So the Supreme Court rules that Bush deliberately disobeyed the law.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions.

And you get this kind of analysis from the lawyers…

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, who has represented more than 200 Guantanamo inmates, said, “What this says to the administration is that you can no longer decide arbitrarily what you want to do with people. It upheld the rule of law in this country and determined that the executive has gone beyond the constitutional and international law.”

So reading between the lines a little bit… Congress people had recommended to BushCo to do have their military tribunals legitimately by pass such and such law in 2002… but the Bush administration decided it was better to do it illegally.

And yet…would it be any more “legitimate” to put together an already “legalized” tribunal based on laws that hypothetically had been passed in 2002 (which the Supreme Court would by now have “upheld”)? Would the laws be legitimate? And would the question of legality STILL all be based on the veto or withheld veto of nine unelected and un-juried judges? Judges appointed by an indirectly “elected” (questionable) executive?

I am asking — do we and our colleagues and friends intend to continue to give credence to this system of “justice” by debating the “merits” and weakness of such decisions, thereby giving them social legitimacy —- as if they deserve ANY respect? Is “following the rule of law?” in itself a “good,” even when that structure of law supports and creates and defends the rule of powerful minorities, some with “limited liability,”and a constitutionally and legally condoned and legitimized hierarchy of “rights” that places property “rights” above individual and human rights? Is there ANY justification for celebrating when this structure of law is upheld, defended, strengthened? Or are we instead sabotaging any hope for creating justice and democracy by acting as though “upholding the law” as it is solves anything? Aren’t we defusing the badly needed public outrage that should go off like a firecracker on the Fourth of July? Do we want to keep playing the game and jumping through the hoops?

Just my opinion, but I don’t think enough real thinking goes into the discussion of the “pros and cons” of this or any other court decisions, or the Congress’ partisan and laughable plans to “legalize” the illegitimate, by wiping up the executive’s crapping on rights with the papered proliferation of new powers. As long as the style of play is what we focus on, I don’t see how we’ll ever change the rules so the people call the shots.

One more illegitimate legality will hardly be opposed or forestalled, until people stop seeing the “legal” as equivalent to the “legitimate.” Writing laws that kill rights is easy. Getting appointed judges to uphold them is even easier. I can’t see how we can change the rules of this losing game by remaining dilettantes of political / judicial trivia. We have a court saying IT is the “decider” and an executive saying HE is the “decider.” (And a lapdog Congress saying he’s right).

When will The People DECIDE?

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

As if we ever had “free speech rights” at the workplace to begin with, the corporation’s, er the government’s Supreme Court has once again clearly spelled out our lack of rights at work, this time for government workers. And what’s the difference between corporate or government workers in this country where corporations run the government, the Supreme Court - even sitting on it, and our most fundamental laws of the land?

The Supreme Court declared today, in a ruling affecting millions of government employees, that the Constitution does not always protect their free-speech rights for what they say on the job.

Yet another blatant example of just how screwed We the People are, and unless and until we target the structure that denies We People from the getgo, weπre running up a hill of sand with the boulder that even Sisyphus wouldn’t attempt. How absurd must this get?

Read the full New York Times article Here

- Posted by Kat for USTV

The Supreme Court rules (and reigns) again.

In a unanimous decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a lower court ruling that would have invalidated massive taxpayer giveaways to Corporate America. The Supreme Court has long been the victim of a hostile takeover by Big Money interests. It is a court now headed by a corporate lawyer that has repeatedly gone out of its way to protect Corporate America’s ability to bleed the middle class dry. Today’s ruling, though, is particularly egregious. Not only did the court strike down an important ruling, but it essentially emasculated taxpayers’ ability to bring any such lawsuits against their own government in the future.

The details are as shocking as they are disgusting. As the Associated Press reports, “two years ago, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Ohio’s tax credit on new equipment, saying the practice hinders interstate commerce because the incentives are available only to businesses that invest in Ohio.” In other words, plaintiffs correctly noted the credits are creating a race to the bottom that violate interstate commerce laws by forcing states and cities to compete with each other to give away more and more taxpayer cash to Big Business. In the Ohio case, the tax credit was used to give DaimlerChrysler roughly $300 million in taxpayer cash - cash that Toledo’s county auditor says was siphoned away from local schools, forcing the city to close up to nine schools or fire 380 school workers.

Let’s get to the bottom line here…

Bought-off politicians giving away our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to already wealthy corporations without demanding anything in return. We see this with the Medicare bill and how it gives away more than $1 trillion to the health care/pharmaceutical industries without demanding these industries lower their prices (in fact, the bill prohibits the government from negotiating lower prices for medicines). We see it with the energy bill and how it gives away billions in new tax breaks to oil companies without asking them to lower their prices. And we see it with corporate welfare.

So much for the rights of the people. The law is owned by the welfare queens of the corporatocracy.

Read the full report by David Sirota Here

Good to see more attention being focused on this issue through media. David Sirota lays it out on the real significance of the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Corp. Forget all the hot air about abortion and gay rights. Those are side shows to the real motivating factors being these moves.

Regardless of the argument about the history of the role of the courts, its healthy to enlighten people in increasing awareness of the fact that the courts are not being used to protect their rights, but are agents of corporate power and tools of elite control.

Read his complete post on HuffPo Here

A title well worth checking out on 1st Amendment issues is John Denvir’s, “Democracy’s Constitution: Claiming The Privileges of American Citizenship”.

Among other things, Denvir argues that the 1st Amendment not only gives us the right to speak, but also to be heard.

- Posted by Greg for USTV Media

(Look for Greg Boozell’s column regarding these issues and how their meaning in the context of access television and the internet in an upcoming issue of ‘Community Media Review’. You can write him at gb@cantv.org )

We are living in Brazil - the movie that is. That point seems more and more disturbingly real. This editorial by The New York Times doesn’t allay those concerns at all.

This has been our nightmare since the Bush administration began stashing prisoners it did not want to account for in Guantánamo Bay: An ordinary man with a name something like a Taliban bigwig’s is swept up in the dragnet and imprisoned without any hope of proving his innocence.

A case of mistaken identity’s turning an innocent person into a prisoner-for-life was supposed to be impossible. President Bush told Americans to trust in his judgment after he arrogated the right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and toss people into indefinite detention. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld infamously proclaimed that the men at Guantánamo Bay were “the worst of the worst.”

But it has long been evident that this was nonsense, and a lawsuit by The Associated Press has now demonstrated the truth in shameful detail. The suit compelled the release of records from hearings for some of the 760 or so men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. (About 490 are still there.) Far too many show no signs of being a threat to American national security. Some, it appears, did nothing at all. And they have no way to get a fair hearing because Gitmo was created outside the law.

This is just sick. If this kind of stuff is allowed to stand, America is dead. And Lincoln was right.

“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher”.”

It didn’t come from without. We did it to ourselves.

Today’s reason to move to Canada. The Supreme Court is a tool of the King. There is no “we the people” anymore, officially. There is only power in interest groups aligned with the King.

For this my ancestors fought against the British at Bunker Hill?

During a recent broadcast, Focus on the Family founder and president James Dobson promoted his organization’s annual ex-gay conference, Love Won Out, in which gays and their families are told that homosexuality is “preventable and treatable.” Then, he presented evidence that “the pendulum is swinging back,” informing his listeners that he had just received a thank you note from new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

And for those interested in some insightful analysis on the the brewing economic disaster that is the Bush-led American economy, check out Global Economic Analysis

-Posted by Pete for USTV Media

The Top 10 Filibuster Falsehoods
Media Matters For America

With the Senate debate on two of President Bush’s most controversial judicial nominees, the heated rhetoric over the so-called “nuclear option” to ban Senate filibusters on judicial nominations has reached boiling point. The rules of the Senate are being challenged, and filibuster opponents have pulled all rhetorical stops, advancing numerous falsehoods and distortions. As Media Matters for America documents here, the media have too often perpetuated that misinformation by unskeptically, and sometimes even deliberately, repeating it.

Read about the Top 10 Filibuster Falsehoods here….
http://mediamatters.org/items/200505180004

Nuclear Whiner - Bill Frist on Democratic Dissent
By Herman Schwartz
The American Prospect

Bill Frist calls Democratic dissent on some judicial nominees “unprecedented.” Look back a few years and you’ll see that’s simply not true.

As part of their drive to overturn the welfare, regulatory, and social advances of the last 75 years, Republicans have sought to tilt the federal courts far to the right. As Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese understood, stacking the courts could “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so that it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.” If current Majority Leader Bill Frist’s threats are to believed, the Republicans are about to endow themselves with an unprecedented power to complete this quest, removing via the “nuclear option” the Democratic minority’s last resort in moderating their extremist judicial selections: the filibuster.

The Framers of the Constitution knew that they were creating a powerful, independent institution — one tasked with checking the other two branches. To ensure that independence, the Framers designed a system that allows the president to nominate a judge, but subjects the nomination to approval by the Senate. With judges allowed life tenure and near-immunity from impeachment, the decision to confirm a federal judge is effectively irreversible and very long lasting. Today the average tenure of a federal judge is approximately 24 years, or six presidential terms; judges appointed in their 30s or 40s can serve for much longer. Mistakes or misjudgments about a nominee’s fitness cannot be remedied; there can be no second thoughts.

Few, if any other Senate actions have this irreversibility. Legislation can be amended or repealed. A nonjudicial appointee will leave office sooner or later, and usually when the president leaves. And if a judicial nominee is not confirmed, there are more than enough other aspirants. Only a judicial confirmation has this unique combination of power and untouchable longevity.

It is thus essential that judicial nominations command widespread approval, and this is why the Senate is given what Senator Robert Griffin, leader of the 1968 filibuster against Abe Fortas’ nomination to be chief justice, called “the other half” of the power to appoint judges.

Senate rules and practices since the early 1800s have confirmed the institution’s counter-majoritarianism. Both Republicans and Democrats have invoked this protection, especially when the other party controlled both the presidency and the Senate. In such circumstances, protection for the minority with respect to judicial nominations becomes especially important, for senators rarely oppose their own party’s judicial nominations.

Traditionally, the filibuster has not been the only weapon in an opposition party’s arsenal. There are other, less visible ways whereby the Senate’s rules and traditions empower individual senators to block judicial and other nominations. Between 1996 and 2000, Republicans in control of the Senate developed these techniques to a high art.

Prior to 1996, when the Senate majority and the president were from opposing parties, senators usually deferred to the president with respect to lower-court judicial nominations. With the notable exceptions of the 1968 Fortas nomination and a failed Republican filibuster of H. Lee Sarokin in 1994, neither party filibustered the other’s judicial nominations, and virtually all nominees received a hearing unless they were sent up after the presidential nominating conventions.

All this changed in 1996. Rather than openly challenge President Clinton’s nominees on the floor, Republicans decided to deny them Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. Between 1996 and 2000, 20 of Bill Clinton’s appeals-court nominees were denied hearings, including Elena Kagan, now dean of the Harvard Law School, and many other women and minorities. In 1999, Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch refused to hold hearings for almost six months on any of 16 circuit-court and 31 district-court nominations Clinton had sent up.

Read the rest of the article here…
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=9384

Fortas Who?
By Joe Conason
Salon.com

May 20th, 2005

If the GOP applied the same ethical tests to Priscilla Owen that its predecessors used to disqualify a liberal judge in 1968, she’d have to withdraw her nomination.

May 20, 2005 - When Senate Republicans led the 1968 filibuster that blocked the nomination of Abe Fortas as chief justice of the Supreme Court, his opponents focused on an alleged ethical lapse that they said disqualified him.
The real reasons for obstructing Fortas ranged from his liberal ideology and his Democratic partisanship to his Jewish heritage, but his troubles intensified after Sen. Robert Griffin, the Michigan Republican leading the campaign against him, discovered that Fortas had accepted $15,000 to deliver a series of summer school lectures at the American University law school — and that his lecture fee had been subsidized by his former partners and clients.

This lapse in ethical judgment outraged Griffin and his colleagues, although they could point to no decision or pending case before the Supreme Court that involved any of the donors. That issue probably killed the Fortas nomination.

Ethical standards seem to have declined considerably over the past four decades — at least among Republican senators and their preferred nominees for the federal bench. What compromised the late Fortas to an unacceptable degree now looks quaintly innocent compared with the record of Priscilla Owen, who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from companies and lawyers with cases in her court — and issued rulings favorable to them on many, many occasions.

Owen is the conservative judicial activist from Texas whose nomination to a lifetime appointment on the federal appellate court may soon spark the long-awaited “nuclear” confrontation in the Senate over the filibuster. If the Republicans applied the same ethical test to her that their predecessors used to disqualify Fortas, she would have been forced to withdraw her nomination, just as he did.

Then she could go home and continue her career of catering to the corporations, trade associations and law firms that have financed her campaigns for the Texas Supreme Court (which were run, incidentally, by Karl Rove).

While much of the debate over the Owen nomination has focused on her opinion in a controversial abortion rights case — in which her activist interpretation earned a scathing denunciation from none other than Alberto Gonzales, then her colleague on the Texas high court — it is not her extremist ideology alone that should give senators pause. Equally disturbing is her involvement in the Lone Star State’s “pay for play” judicial system, which is something she has in common with Gonzales.

Only a few states require nominees to their highest court to run for election — and thus to raise enormous sums of money to pay for the cost of statewide campaigns. In Texas, where campaign fundraising taints so much of the political system, the state Supreme Court has suffered national ignominy for many years because of the confluence of corporate contributions and judicial decisions.

Naturally, George W. Bush chose to elevate the two members of that court who took the largest sums of campaign money from Texas business interests while he was governor — Gonzales, who set the record, and Owen, who came in second.

Owen’s defenders argue that she should not suffer from her participation in a system that stigmatizes every judge with the appearance of corruption. The Texas Supreme Court has swung far to the right ever since the state’s business interests and corporate law firms joined forces in financing campaigns by conservative nominees about 15 years ago (and hired Rove to help them win).

And Owen appears quite comfortable with the Texas system. Certainly she has never spoken out against its sleaziness, which during her years on the court has convinced most Texans that corporate contributions influence judicial decisions.

That widespread suspicion isn’t theoretical. Among the most notorious examples is a case in which Owen wrote the majority opinion that allowed Enron Corp. to escape more than $200,000 in school district taxes. In her 1994 campaign, she took $8,600 from the Houston energy firm and $31,550 from its lawyers at the powerhouse firm of Vinson & Elkins; her consultant Rove also worked for Enron. Two years later, when Spring Independent School District vs. Enron reached her court, she did not recuse herself from the case. Her opinion allowed Enron to choose its own method for valuation, cutting the taxable property assessment by millions of dollars.

So obnoxious was her conduct in the Enron case that it provoked the Houston Chronicle — a newspaper that has enthusiastically endorsed Bush — to urge the Senate to reject her nomination three years ago. While acknowledging that Democratic objections to Owen were hardly apolitical, the newspaper’s editorial said the Democrats were also displaying “a rational desire to prevent the lifetime appointment of a justice who has shown a clear preference for ruling to achieve a particular result rather than impartially interpreting the law.”

Owen’s devotion to her business ideology and apparent sympathy toward her campaign contributions has often left her in the extremist minority, even on the right-tilting Texas bench. One of her better-known dissents came in a case that tested the constitutionality of a state law that had been written specifically to exempt a land developer from the city of Austin’s water quality regulations.

Having taken $2,500 from that developer (and an additional $45,000 from the developer’s law firm), Owen blasted her colleagues for violating the firm’s “property rights,” which included the right to foul the water supply in her view. The majority replied that her dissent was “nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric and thus merits no response.”

Indeed, Owen has issued rulings favoring her big-business contributors in the overwhelming majority of cases in which they appeared before her.

Given the culture of corruption on Capitol Hill, where pay for play has become a way of life, it may be too much to expect that the Republican leadership would worry about Owen’s ethics. And expecting them to remember the ethical considerations that defeated Fortas is equally unrealistic. After all, they suddenly seem unable to remember that the Fortas filibuster ever happened.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)