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.)

SJC Chief Decries ‘Attacks’ On Judges
By Jenna Russell
The Boston Globe

May 23rd, 2005

Marshall defends bench independence

The chief justice of the state Supreme Judicial Court said yesterday that rhetoric about judges destroying the country and the suggestion that court decisions should conform to public opinion are threatening public trust in the judicial system, a cornerstone of democracy.
Justice Margaret H. Marshall, who has been widely criticized as a judicial activist since writing the court’s 2003 decision allowing same-sex marriage, spoke before a crowd of 7,000 at Brandeis University’s 54th commencement. A native of South Africa who fought apartheid before coming to the United States, she said she is not concerned about criticism of individual judges or decisions, but about ‘’attacks leveled at the very foundation of our legal system — the principle that judges should decide each case on its merits . . . independent of outside influence.”

‘’I worry when people of influence use vague, loaded terms like ‘judicial activism’ to skew public debate or to intimidate judges,” Marshall said. ‘’I worry when judicial independence is seen as a problem to be solved and not a value to be cherished.”

One year after the ruling by the state’s highest court took effect, Massachusetts remains the only state where gay and lesbian couples can legally marry.

The 4-3 decision was seen as a landmark by those on both sides of the marriage debate, and opponents of same-sex marriage across the country moved quickly to build on public outrage in its wake.

In more than a dozen states, voters moved last year to ban same-sex marriage by approving constitutional amendments, against a backdrop of heightened mistrust of the courts. Governor Mitt Romney accused the Supreme Judicial Court of ‘’judicial overreaching” in The Wall Street Journal last year, and President George W. Bush lashed out at ‘’activist judges” — those who use their decisions to push a social agenda — in his State of the Union address.

Marshall did not make specific reference to the same-sex marriage decision yesterday, but she mounted a vigorous defense of the judiciary, calling it remarkable that in this country court decisions are obeyed even when they are controversial, and attributing that obedience to Americans’ ‘’trust in the integrity of our judicial system.”

‘’Americans, thousands of us every day, bring our conflicts to court because we believe we will receive a fair hearing and be treated equally by the judges… whose sole allegiance is to the rule of law,” she said. ‘’Gratuitous attacks on judges undermine that trust.”

Marshall endorsed comments made last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Joan H. Lefkow, the federal judge from Chicago whose mother and husband were killed in February by a man whose case she had dismissed. Lefkow cautioned against the extreme tenor of recent rhetoric and its tolerance by elected officials, and singled out for criticism comments that televangelist Pat Robertson made recently on ABC’s ‘’This Week.”

Marshall did not name Robertson in her speech, but quoted his statement that judges ‘’destroying the fabric that holds the nation together” are a threat ‘’probably more serious than a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings.”

‘’Judge Lefkow called on members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ‘publicly and persistently repudiate gratuitous attacks on the judiciary,’ ” Marshall told graduates and their families in her keynote address. ‘’I would urge you to do the same.”

The speech was warmly received by an enthusiastic crowd at Brandeis, where student speakers and the university president, Jehuda Reinharz, stressed the importance of social activism. Marshall began with a joke about the blue and white balloons suspended from the Gosman Sports Center ceiling. She said she liked the colors, which included ‘’no red states” — winning a big laugh.

A spokesman for Romney declined to comment yesterday on Marshall’s speech. But some analysts accused Marshall of ‘’muddying the waters” with her suggestion that critics want polls to drive judicial decisions. Judicial activism ‘’doesn’t have anything to do with whether their opinions are popular or unpopular,” said Brian Camenker, director of Article 8 Alliance, a Waltham group founded to remove Marshall and the other three justices who ruled for same-sex marriage from the bench.

‘’ ‘Activist judges’ is a specific term that refers to judges who rule outside the rule of law,” he said. ‘’It has to do with whether they use objective, legal, constitutional means to base their decisions.”

Some legal scholars believe courts must base their decisions strictly on specific language found in the constitution. Others say such an approach is impossible, because most constitutions did not anticipate current legal questions.

Some critics have said the same-sex marriage ruling in Massachusetts had no basis in the state’s constitution. But one reason cited by the court for its decision was the state constitution’s equal rights amendment, which says all people are born equal and have certain unalienable rights.

Marshall, who was awarded a doctor of laws degree at the commencement, came to the United States in the 1970s, attended Yale Law School, and later served as Harvard’s general counsel. She was appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court in 1996 and became chief justice in 1999, the first woman to hold the position in the court’s 313-year history.

Yesterday, Marshall asked graduates to undertake ‘’small acts” to promote understanding of the value of judicial independence.

‘’Each new generation must decide, each of you must decide, whether to embrace, to protect the rule of law, or to repudiate it,” she said. ‘’And make no mistake, inaction and indifference are acts of repudiation.”

Globe staff reporter David Abel contributed to this report.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

(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.)

Rehnquist Decries Political Threats
By David Savage
Los Angeles Times

January 1st, 2005

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in a statement to be released today that judges must be protected from political threats, including from conservative Republicans who maintain that “judicial activists” should be impeached and removed from office.
The public, the media and politicians are free to criticize judges, Rehnquist said, but politicians cross the line when they try to punish or impeach judges for decisions they do not agree with.

“The Constitution protects judicial independence not to benefit judges, but to promote the rule of law: Judges are expected to administer the law fairly, without regard to public reaction,” the ailing chief justice said in his traditional year-end report on the federal courts.

“A judge’s ‘judicial’ acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment. Any other rule would destroy judicial independence,” Rehnquist said. “Instead of trying to apply the law fairly, regardless of public opinion, judges would be concerned about inflaming any group that might be able to muster the votes in Congress to impeach and convict them.”

As the chief justice of the United States, Rehnquist leads the federal judicial system as well as the Supreme Court. Since taking office in 1986, he often has used his end-of-year report to set forth his views on controversies affecting the judicial system, including the controversy over political leanings of judges.

Despite Rehnquist’s reputation for conservatism, he has been just as willing to fault Republicans as Democrats when their actions and ideas threaten the courts.

In the late 1990s, he faulted Senate Republicans for blocking votes on the judicial nominees of former President Clinton. More recently, he faulted Senate Democrats for blocking votes on President Bush’s nominees.

In both instances, he said the nominees deserved a hearing and an up-or-down vote.

The chief justice, 80, has been absent from the Supreme Court since he disclosed in late October that he was being treated for thyroid cancer and there was speculation that he was about to announce his retirement.

But Rehnquist made only a brief reference to his illness in his end-of-year statement.

“On a personal note, I also want to thank all of those who have sent their good wishes on my speedy recovery,” he wrote.

Court officials said he has continued to work at home. And to the surprise of some people, he also has announced he plans to give the oath of office to Bush at his second inauguration on Jan. 20.

(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.)