Free Republic

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Wednesday referred more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints filed recently against Brett M. Kavanaugh to a federal appeals court in Colorado. The 15 complaints, related to statements Kavanaugh made during his Senate confirmation hearings, were initially filed with the federal appeals court in Washington, where Kavanaugh served for the last 12 years before his confirmation Saturday to the Supreme Court. The allegations center on whether Kavanaugh was dishonest and lacked judicial temperament during his Senate testimony, according to people familiar with the matter. Last month, a judge on the U.S. Court of...

Anyone who thinks the vaccine case now before the Supreme Court is merely a matter of giving injured plaintiffs their day in court has misconceived the stakes for those who reap the benefits of vaccines. The U.S. Supreme Court has just heard oral arguments in the case of Bruesewitz v. Wyeth, in which the parents of a severely disabled child wish to sue the manufacturer of a childhood vaccine for causing their child’s disability. At this stage, the dispute is over a purely legal issue: the scope of federal preemption. The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act largely removed childhood...

(Note: THis is a current story on 'The Blaze,' but I can't get the video & info to load.)

The link has only a video posted. "I mean, the Supreme Court has done a tremendous disservice to the United States of America. They have done more to undermine our democracy with their Citizens United decision than all of the Republican operatives in the world in this campaign. They've opened the floodgates, and personally, I'm investigating articles of impeachment against Justice Roberts for perjuring during his Senate hearings, where he said he wouldn't be a judicial activist, and he wouldn't overturn precedents." ~ Rep. Peter DeFazio in an interview with The Huffington Post

Justice Elena Kagan cast her first recorded vote on the Supreme Court late Tuesday, joining the liberals in dissent when the high court cleared the way for the execution of an Arizona murderer. The 5-4 ruling overturned orders by a federal judge in Phoenix and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that had stopped the execution by lethal injection of Jeffrey Landrigan. A judge had put the execution on hold because she said she was "left to speculate" whether this drug was safe for its intended use. "There is no evidence in the record to suggest...

One wonders how Ed Whelan of the Ethics and Public Policy Center managed to get a hold of a private letter sent to President Obama by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe advising him against nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, but be that as it may, its contents are quite interesting and show just how nakedly political Tribe’s view of a justice really is and also how little he thinks of Sotomayor. In the May 2009 letter (PDF link here), Tribe advises Obama to refrain from choosing Sotomayor because “she’s not nearly as smart as she seems to think...

I’ve obtained a copy of an interesting letter that Harvard law professor Larry Tribe wrote to his protégé, President Barack Obama, in the immediate aftermath of Justice Souter’s announcement of his decision to retire from the Court. I will post a PDF of the letter shortly. [Update: Here’s the letter.] In the meantime, I’ll call attention, in this post and two or three others, to some of its highlights. The express purpose of Tribe’s letter is to urge that Obama nominate Elena Kagan to the Souter vacancy. But before making his affirmative case for Kagan, Tribe argues strongly against the...

Despite his quick recovery from the seizure he suffered on Monday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. faces a complex diagnosis and a difficult decision. Because the seizure was his second — he had a similar one in 1993 — he meets the criteria for epilepsy, and he and his doctors will have to decide whether he should take medication to prevent further seizures, said neurologists not involved in his care. (Neither the chief justice nor his doctors would comment yesterday.) The decision will involve weighing the risk of more seizures against the risk of side effects from the drugs....

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 — The Supreme Court displayed little appetite on Tuesday for making basic changes in its approach to campaign finance law, under which the government may place limits on political contributions but not on a candidate's spending. Vermont's aggressive effort to drive much private money out of politics, through a law it enacted in 1997 that set tight limits on both contributions and expenditures, appeared unlikely to withstand the court's scrutiny after an argument that included a low-key but withering cross-examination by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. of Vermont's attorney general, William H. Sorrell. The chief justice...

Today, with the president who appointed him in attendance, the 17th chief justice of the United States will robe and take his high seat as the first among nine equals. John G. Roberts Jr. is expected to preserve the whimsical stripes on his robe introduced by his mentor, the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist. He will honor traditions new and old. But yesterday, he and President Bush, along with other justices, judges and dignitaries, participated in a tradition older still.

He came, he charmed, he shut up. During the opening statements, the senators blathered away their time and more; Judge John Roberts used less than half of his to utter a few graceful generalities. He has made a career out of not saying the wrong thing. Why start now? A lawyer who has been cross-examined dozens of times by the Supreme Court will not be caught off guard by senators posing as legal scholars. There has never been a nominee better prepared to dodge constitutional questions. The only hope for Democrats is to try the tactics used by interrogation pros...

I. The Future Is Not the Present Three years ago, in a small conference room at the offices of the law firm Hogan & Hartson in Washington, I had the chance to talk with John G. Roberts Jr. At the time, Roberts was a lawyer in private practice, unsure whether Senate Democrats would hold a hearing on his nomination to be a federal appellate judge. (After being nominated three times, in 1992, 2001 and 2003, he would finally be given a hearing and confirmed in May 2003 after Republicans took control of the Senate.) In a conversation over cookies and...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 - Two weeks before senators begin questioning the Supreme Court nominee, John G. Roberts Jr., the debate over his confirmation is becoming a test of Senate Democrats as well. The party's liberal base, whose contributions during judicial confirmation fights earlier this year have helped the Senate Democratic campaign fund amass twice as much as its Republican rival, is pressing for another vigorous fight against Judge Roberts as documents from the Reagan administration clarify his conservative credentials. But as Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and other liberal stalwarts on the Judiciary Committee step up their criticism of...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - It was July 1985 and the newly confirmed attorney general, Edwin Meese III, was preparing to address the American Bar Association. Trouble was, he was conflicted about what to say. A 17-day hostage crisis involving a hijacked American airliner had just ended, and Mr. Meese felt obliged to discuss terrorism. But the Supreme Court had just delivered a series of decisions that infuriated conservatives and reinforced President Ronald Reagan's resolve to steer the judiciary rightward. In the end, Mr. Meese gave what many say was the speech of his career. Helping lay the foundation for the...

Under pressure, Naral Pro-Choice America has withdrawn a cheesy 30-second TV spot unfairly linking Judge John Roberts Jr. with abortion clinic violence. But the episode's sour taste lingers, and it can only make it harder to get senators to pay proper attention during the Supreme Court confirmation process to legitimate concerns about Judge Roberts's approach to issues of personal privacy and reproductive freedom. The advertisement in question focused on an argument that Mr. Roberts made to the Supreme Court in an abortion-related case in the early 1990's, when he was the principal deputy solicitor general in the administration of the...

Who says President Bush isn't brilliant? His maneuver in appointing Judge John Roberts has completely throttled the Democrats in the highest-stakes game of his second term. The key is that Bush has used the Democrats' opposition to his district and circuit-court judicial appointments against them and made it a ratification of the Roberts candidacy. Simply put, by choosing a judge whom the Democrats confirmed unanimously when he was nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court — and whom they did not filibuster — Bush has made the Democrats impotent. The Democrats thought they were preparing for the Supreme Court battle when...

WASHINGTON - Thousands of pages of newly released documents from John Roberts' first government job show a highly intelligent, politically savvy young man, wrestling with charged legal and political issues on behalf of the deeply conservative Reagan administration. As a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in 1981 and 1982, Roberts advocated positions and drafted memos on issues from judicial restraint to voting rights to affirmative action, which were as controversial then as they are now that Roberts is no longer a twenty-something aide but a nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court. Roberts generally took strongly...

Having been named as a source, Durbin's office is denying it all and claiming that Turley's Monday Los Angeles Times column, "The Faith of John Roberts," was apparently based on Turley's one-minute discussion with Durbin in the NBC News make-up room after the Senator had appeared on Sunday's Meet the Press. "Durbin is prone to make controversial comments and even apologize for them," stated AIM editor Cliff Kincaid. "The issue is whether Durbin has backed away from a false charge or whether Turley rushed into print with an erroneous account." Turley's column claimed that Roberts, in a meeting with Durbin,...

Roberts nomination, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee with the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee because this is the way government is supposed to work. President Bush consulted widely, moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics and selected a nominee based on substance, brains, careful judgment and good character. I love thee because John G. Roberts is the face of today's governing conservatism. Conservatives who came of age in the 1960's did so in an intensely ideological...

....Minutes after the nomination was announced, NARAL shot an e-mail to 30,000 "rapid responders" nationwide, exhorting them to bombard senators with phone calls and write letters to editors of their local newspapers. About 800,000 other supporters were set to receive a more general plea for action. NARAL banner ads began appearing last night on a variety of Internet sites pushing the group's message about abortion rights. At People for the American Way, staff worked late into the evening drafting e-mails telling nearly 800,000 members and activists to call senators in battleground states. Kristin Bateman, who heads the "war room," was...