Never has a filibuster been used by any party for this particular cause. Hey, good luck getting any of the next Democtratic President`s appointees past the conservatives next time around.
Youre right though - Its very shmuckish.
DSY -* “2) The federal court was involved because the issue in question was violation of a U. S. Constitution provision, with no conjoined state law issue. The jurisdiction for such cases is, by the U. S. Constitution and by U. S. law, with the federal bench. Duh. (whuckfistle, you might want to actually obtain some knowledge before you rant; it makes for much more accurate assertions…)”*
Um, which US Constitutional Provision is being violated? Or should I ask, HOW is it being violated?
Chuckster you described the ACLU as “elite political entities.” How so? Anyone is welcome to become a member.
And it is one of the most non-partisan organizations in the country. Their purpose is to see that the civil liberties of all Americans are protected. If the ACLU is for Democrats and Liberals, it is hard to explain how they have gone to court for the KKK and neo-Nazis.
It is their membership which is probably mostly Liberals. I’m wondering why more Conservatives aren’t concerned about protecting civil liberties.
Because the ACLU had already brought the punch ballot issue into court and had been promised that they would not be used in the next election. (So it was a non-partisan issue.) Since that promise was being broken, they went back to court and the ruling went against them. They have the right of appeal so it went to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which is there for that purpose. Now the other side has a week to take it to the Supreme Court.
I suspect the gentleman was conservative – so conservative that he refused to answer any questions on his views.
You are both claiming that the current ruling is an application of the Bush/Gore USSC ruling. As I noted in the other current thread on the topic, the USSC specifically disclaimed this in their ruling. I wonder if you could comment on this.
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The CA constitution allows for candidates to declare themeselves “no less than 59 days prior to the date of the election”. Great-- we need more candidates in this recall election.
The wonderful new optical scanning machines being used in CA cannot accomodate a ballot large enough for the recall and all the other candidates and issues expected in the March primary, as reported today in the SJ Merc.
More than 300k absentee ballots have already been cast. What do we do with those ballots, since a delayed vote ballot will certainly contain a different set of names (either more added, or those no longer running dropped)?
Actually, in this case it’s the law of “consequences that a normal human being would easily think of before making an idiotic ruling such as this one.”
No, what I’m saying is that willingness to sign a petition follows a normal (bell) curve. If you have enough money to stay the course you can finally collect enough signatures from the end of the bell curve willing sign anything put in front of them to qualify a petition requiring all Democrats to wear derby hats.
The point being that the 9th Circuit decision was not, as the title of the OP implies, a slap in the face to “the voters.”
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I see DSY has beaten me to retroactivity, and has been much more thorough and detailed than I could have been.
But let me add that, as I understand it, a major issue in the ACLU’s suit is the differential use of the old, presumably inferior machines, which raises an equal protection issue: if Group A is going to have to use voting machines that fail to count a higher proportion of votes than the voting machines that Group B gets to use, then Group A’s votes effectively count less than those of Group B members. That wasn’t an issue when everyone used the old machines.
DSY and Sua, is this an accurate summary? You’re the lawyers; I’m just a number-cruncher.
whuckfistle, you put your [rant] far later in your post than it belonged.
Could you provide some stats to back up this claim? Numbers of judicial nominations submitted to Congress/approved by Congress by Clinton and (so far) Bush would be very illustrative, if you have them.
The California race is expected to be close – if the outcome of the recall hinges on fewer votes than the margin of polling error, we’re back to the debacle of the 2000 presidential election.
Disqualifying 40,000 ballots because they were mispunched or miscounted isn’t an issue when the winner would remain the same regardless of which candidate you attributed them to. But in the case of a tie, the candidates would fight tooth and nail over every hanging chad and possibly end up having the Supreme Court stop the recount in order to appoint the Republican governer of their choice.
I kind of doubt that.
Estrada served under the Clinton Admin in some high capacity (US. Department of Justice Solicitor General’s Office
Assistant to the Solicitor General ). I don`t think he was TOO conservative. Estrada .
In Bush v. Gore, the Supremes asserted that their decision applied only to that case. The Supreme Court has tried this trick in other cases in the past, and it never works.[sup]1[/sup]
It doesn’t work because the attempt is an affront to the common law system, in two regards. First, every case is limited to a ruling on the facts presented, and the determination is only a determination of that one case. The decision, however, is made by the application of principles of law to those particular facts. Those principles of law are universal - you cannot make the claim that the principles apply differently in different cases. Second, what is a lower court to do when faced with a situation that touches on matters decided in Bush v. Gore? They are going to apply that decision, because the Supreme Court said “this is how you decide such matters.” At the very least, Bush v. Gore is persuasive precedent and, at most, controlling precedent.
Sua
[sup]1[/sup] We saw a variation on this in the Lawrence opinions, which claimed that the decision there would not lead to legalization of gay marriages. Lawrence may or may not lead to gay marriage, but the Supremes’ assertion that it would not is irrelevant.
Wow. Whatever happened to 1995-2000? Did we just lose those years down a memory hole??
Comparing the first two years of the respective administrations provides a surface parallelism that creates the patina of a legitimate comparison without its actual presence. Anyone who was paying attention remembers how the Pubbies shelved large numbers of Clinton’s nominees in the later years of his presidency. If you choose to put that part of the record outside of this debate, whuckfistle, then I have nothing more to say to you in this forum, and I honestly don’t care enough about you to bother Pitting you.
I believe you may have misunderstood my post. The SC did not merely say that the ruling was limited to the case at hand - they gave a specific rationale for this. Suppose the SC says “we rule this way only in Case X where Rationale Y applies, but this does not apply to Case Z where Rationale Y does not apply for the following reason…” Are you saying that the declaration by the SC that Rationale Y does not apply in the other case is to be disregarded by other courts?
Here’s the relevant part of the opinion:
While they are not saying directly that their decision does not apply in local cases, they are clearly delineating reasoning that they feel only applies to the case at hand and describing why.
IzzyR, as DSYoungEsq already noted, there is a statewide remedy in place - the consent decree in Common Cause I. So your attempt at distinction, whether it would be apt in other circumstances, does not apply here.
Two other points - from your quote, the Supremes did not decide that local entities can use different systems for implementing elections. Instead, it simply noted that that was not the issue they were deciding in Bush v. Gore.
Point the second - if the issue of local entities using different systems for elections was at issue, the logic of Bush v. Gore would actually require uniform statewide systems for statewide elections. The reason is that “equal treatment and fundamental fairness” requires that all votes for a particular contest have the same change of being read correctly (or misread). To do that, you have to record and count the votes in the same manner.
So, if they wish, local entities can use a different system for electing the town dogcatcher (or mayor), but they would have to use the same, statewide, system for presidential, gubernatorial, etc., elections.
The never said that it wouldn’t lead to gay marriages. They merely said that the specific issue before them was sodomy laws, and that’s what they are ruling on at the moment.
Here’s another excerpt from the Lawrence decision:
It’s common judicial practice to rule on the most narrow question possible (in this case, the constitutionality of sodomy laws), and leave broader questions for other cases.
Blalron, re-read them. Particularly re-read O’Connor’s concurrence.
Scalia certainly believed that the majority asserted that Lawrence would not lead to gay marriage - he refuted the assertion.
