Posted on 10/31/2005 3:12:28 AM PST by kcvl
Per Fox News...
Lindsey Grahm reminds me of the Guy on Andy Griffith
Mr. Himmple something like that....
Just a thought he he.
Thank You Pres.Bush
Alito is Catholic? I thought that might be the case.
Alito would give us four solid heavyweight conservative justices (Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito)--all Catholic, and one sometimes-conservative justice, Kennedy, who is also Catholic. I hope and pray there is sufficient conservative mass among the faithful brethren to pull the sometimes-wayward Kennedy into their orbit.
Until we can get another rick solid conservative on the Supreme Court, our best opttion is to pack SCOTUS with the kind and quality of conservative justices who can influence and persuade Kennedy to conservative views.
You can relax, as nobody believed that rationale.
"Did you hear Imus on Friday talking about how to become a Christian??"
I missed that. When I tuned in, he had his wife in the studio and I refuse to be subjected to Imus' version of All In The Family. My usual Imus experience lasts less than ten minutes. Without any conscious thought, my hand reaches for the dial whenever: (1) he starts talking about his amazingly intelligent and precocious son Wyatt; and (2) starts talking about the ranch/retirement home. That does not leave much else. All that being said, I have not been able to find anyplace else to get a national/political news fix between 5:30 and 6:30 a.m.
The problem for these types of groups is that if they fight to the death and lose, they are history. Other than opposing conservative / originalist judicial nominees, they stand for nothing. So they will fight like the cornered 'Rats that they are -- and we need to be ready for them.
You fire your manager if your top RBI man is not in the regular lineup, and is instead available on the bench. :-)
Of course she would say that. Casey's father was a solid pro-lifer, a devout Catholic, and a principled man who was shut out of the 1992 Dem convention because of his pro-life views.
Yeah, LET'S RUMBLE!
I agree. Frum and Kruth and Coulter will be, in the words of the Mickey D's commercial, "Lovin' it!"
Frist is one of my Senator's. I will believe that he will fight when I see it, and not before.
I already feel sorry for him...
I hope he take what's coming...
In his dissent in United States V Rybar Alito argues, in his dissent, that the federal government oversteps it's bounds by using the commerce clause to ban possession of machine guns intrastate.
TO wit:
"Was United States v. Lopez a constitutional freak? Or did it signify that the Commerce Clause still imposes some meaningful limits on congressional power?"
"The activity that the Lopez Court found was not "economic" or "connected with a commercial transaction" was a type of intrastate firearm possession, i.e., the possession of a firearm (including a machine gun) within a school zone. At issue here is another type of purely intrastate firearm possession, i.e., the purely intrastate possession of a machine gun. If the former must be regarded as noneconomic and non-commercial, why isn't the same true of the latter?"
Forewarned is forearmed, the left will be having babies over this one, Roe and Casey notwithstanding.
Going to back to 1833 for support? Just as weak as your lame defense of Meirs was.
Second, I am Catholic myself. Thus, your assertion is not only false, but one given with zero facts whatsoever.
Yep, they are claiming to be "celebrating" another 'deadly decision' for Bush.
If they hate Alito that much---I now LOVE him.
Good pick.
Fortas had also continued, during his time as an Associate Justice, to give LBJ political advice on a wide range of matters, including Vietnam. This was viewed as inappropriate for a sitting Supreme Court justice.
******
Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) ran for Senator from Texas in 1948. His opponent in the Democratic primary (then a one party state, contested elections occurred in primaries, not the general election), Coke Stevenson, had been a popular governor of Texas. LBJ had appeared to win the primary by 87 votes. Charges of voting fraud in south Texas led Stevenson to obtain an injunction preventing LBJ's name from appearing on the ballot for the general election, pending a hearing. Although a number of lawyers were involved in determining LBJ's strategy, it was Fortas who managed the litigation and succeeded in having the injunction overturned. Thereafter, LBJ viewed Fortas as the best lawyer in America, and the relationship between LBJ and Fortas, which began in 1937, became stronger during the 1950s and 1960s. That relationship would eventually lead to Fortas's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1965. Arthur Goldberg, who had been named to the Court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, found the Court not to his liking. He resigned from the Court to become Ambassador to the United Nations. Fortas initially declined the nomination, apparently because he was concerned about his personal financial situation. But LBJ told Fortas he was going to nominate him, and, rather reluctantly, Fortas accepted the appointment.
During his time on the Court, Fortas continued to advise LBJ on political matters, both foreign and domestic. In foreign affairs, the Vietnam War was becoming a more contentious and divisive issue. In domestic affairs, the treatment of black Americans, including the protection of civil rights of black Americans, was a defining topic of the 1960s.
In June 1968, at the end of the 1967 Term of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren had Fortas arrange an appointment at the White House, at which time Warren announced his retirement, effective upon the confirmation of his successor. On June 26, LBJ nominated Fortas as Chief Justice. To Fortas’s seat, LBJ nominated a friend from Texas, Homer Thornberry. In July, Fortas erred, appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee despite the fact that no sitting Justice had ever done so. During those hearings, Fortas lied to the Committee, although he had not yet been caught in that lie. The Senate recessed without voting on the nomination. When Senator Robert Griffin learned in September that Fortas had accepted $15,000 to give some summer school lectures at American University’s law school, money that had been raised by Fortas’s former partners and clients, the nomination was in trouble. In early October, after a vote to end the filibuster on the nomination failed, Fortas asked that his nomination be withdrawn. By 1969, further revelations led Fortas to resign from the Court. A convicted financier named Louis Wolfson had agreed to pay Fortas $20,000 per year for the remainder of his life, an amount that continued until the death of his wife if Fortas died before she did. Fortas received the first check in January 1966, after joining the Court, and though he returned it in December, Fortas's actions were condemned as ethically improper.
After resigning from the Court in May 1969, Fortas was rebuffed in his attempt to rejoin the law firm he had helped create, although his wife remained a partner in the firm. In 1970, he started another law firm. He practiced law until his death in 1982.
******
Dishonest Abe; how LBJ's favorite Supreme Court justice became the prototype of Washington's valueless lawyers - Abe Fortas, Lyndon B. Johnson
Washington Monthly, Dec, 1990 by Allan J. Lichtman
Dishonest Abe
Imagine a man with great abilities and strong convictions, but few, if any, principles. He would lack the internal gyroscope to harmonize his disparate beliefs or guide his personal conduct. Ends would always sanction means, and contradictions could be rationalized or simply ignored.
This is the Abe Fortas that emerges from the pages of Laura Kalman's carefully researched and well-written biography of the public man. (*1) It is precisely this kind of man who would falsely believe that he could simultaneously serve the most powerful private interests and promote the public good.
After a brilliant career at Yale Law School, Fortas quickly rose to the top of the New Deal bureaucracy, becoming undersecretary of Interior at age 31. After World War II he fluidly made the transition to power lawyer and LBJ confidant. But he is largely remembered as the first Supreme Court justice to resign under allegations of improper conduct.
Fortas, Kalman shows, was the preeminent moral relativist. For five years he loyally served Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. But just after leaving Interior he had "a convenient lapse of memory" when called upon by Congress to corroborate Ickes's charges taht President Truman's appointee for undersecretary of the Navy had sought to trade political contributions for the leasing of oil rights. Fortas helped Lyndon Johnson steal the senatorial election of 1948 and promoted voting rights for minorities. He advised President Johnson on domestic and foreign issues, drafted speeches, and even helped with legislation while serving on the Supreme Court.
Relativism likewise guided Forta's approach to the law, both as advocate and arbiter. As the managing partner of Arnold, Fortas, and Porter, he felt he could in good conscience represent polluters, chiselers, and cigarette companies, because everyone deserved representation, no matter their character or practices. Never mind that other former New Deal lawyers--Benjamin Cohen, Joseph Rauh, Clifford Durr--had chosen careers that did not focus on aiding the rich and powerful.
As a Supreme Court justice, Fortas tended to reach decisions based on his personal convictions then to search for justification in precedent and social science. His brilliant advocacy made him one of the most influential members of the Warren Court but also earned him the enmity of purists like Justice Hugo Black, who believed that a consistent judicial philosophy should guide decisions of the Court.
Fortas operated and the policy implications of his corporate practice. Prior to World War II, big business came to Washington largely to keep government off its back. During the war, business crowded into the capital for a different purpose: to gain contracts, concessions, and favors from the agencies that now directed the economy. And business stayed after 1945 to reap the enormous profits generated by the creation of a global economic and strategic system dominated by the United States. To cite one example: In 1945 the Export-Import Bank was given lending authority of $3.5 billion (more than one-third of the entire federal budget for 1940) to aid foreign purchases of American goods.
It was Fortas's role as a Johnson adviser while on the Court and his financial arrangements with a businessman who was under federal investigation (and later was convicted of violating securities laws) that ultimately forced him from the Court. These were not lapses but logical extensions of his earlier career.
Kalman accurately links Fortas's problems to his obsessive secrecy, his concern for financial security, and his mistrust of Congress and the public. But his problems are also tied inextricably to his role as lawyer/fixer. Fortas had often used his inside connections to arrange ex parte contracts with government agencies. The value of such contracts was enormous: his clients could plead their cases without formal procedures or opposing views. It was but a small step for him to become the ex parte adviser par excellence to his lod friend Lyndon Johnson. He could remain a back-room power in Washington while in his own mind keeping his Court life segregated. The public simply didn't need to know what it couldn't possibly understand.
In accepting a lifetime yearly retainer of $20,000 (about half his Supreme Court salary) from the family foundation of embattled entrepreneur Louis Wolfson, Fortas was engaging in the same kind of squeeze play that had helped make Washington lawyers rich. Troubled clients were usually willing to work out sweetheart deals...and no one but the lawyer and client needed to know the details.
Transcripts of the wiretap surveillance of Corcoran (conducted by the Truman administration from 1945 to 1947) show how Fortas teamed up with him to work the squeeze play on a financier trying to avoid prosecution for draft evasion. They hoped to extract great sums from the financier, some of which, the conversations suggest, would be diverted to a Selective Service director. But Kalman devotes only one line to that episode. More important, she generally fails to provide an inside account of what goes on behind the scenes at a litigation/lobbying firm like Arnold, Fortas, and Porter.
In assessing Fortas's fall, Kalman shows that he ultimately rejected the retainer from the Wolfson Foundation and returned the only payment he received. But she also notes that he held on to the $20,000 for several months, returning it only after the financier was indicted. By then the damage to Fortas's reputation was done.
Trammel used to give the tige's best hitters "days off" for rest once a week or so. We know what happened to him. Alito probably refused the first time, politely, but now sees his country in peril.
Just thought of something...Hollywood is just now waking up to this news...snort, chuckle, bwhahahaha, and LMAO. Morning, Babs!
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