The former President has every right to contest it. It’s not a deliberative decision - they are just taking notice of his suspension in Arkansas, and have asked him to show cause why he should not also be suspended from the Supreme Court bar. He has every right to present whatever exculpatory reasons he may have. Nothing wrong with that.
Yes it is!
2sense answered me, regarding my allegation that “we live under the rule of law.”
Huh. Sensible answer, in terms of where the stuff comes from. However, please note that you are not reading this response on the Straight Dope Message Board (unless, of course, you are hardwired into the Chicago Reader servers and capable of interpreting binary electronic pulses) – but on the monitor of your computer.
Similarly, by “the rule of law” I mean the American consensus to agree to obey, in general terms, those things defined as “the law” by Federal and state constitutions, legislative statutes, executive orders, regulations made pursuant to them, rulings made pursuant to legitimate cases and controversies by courts having jurisdiction, formal opinions of state attorneys general, etc.
I view certain statutes as being unconstitutional, and others as immoral trespasses on various rights or freedoms (a right is protected, a freedom may or may not be). As they are not at present goring my ox, I am not in a position to challenge them. I object to them but respect them as “what the law says” at present – reserving the right to advocate their repeal, voiding by courts of law, etc.
“What judges say” counts only insofar as the judges have the moral force to get their decisions enforced. If they go too far in any direction and forfeit the common consent to the rule of law, you get the Jacksonian response. (“Mr. Justice Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”)
On those grounds, are we in some agreement?
Olson didn’t do anything wrong - the liberals got pissy because he had an affiliation with a conservative magazine and tried to make a huge deal out of it. I personally don’t like rehnquist much - I think he’s an idiot to be honest - but he’s never lied or committed perjury.
Bill clinton DID clearly commit perjury. For the best, most objective discussion on the issue, read the first half of Richard Posner’s “An Affair of State.” Posner is the smartest man alive so don’t even think of arguing with him, either.
Um, hello? Smartest Man Alive? That title is held by our very own Cecil Adams.
In general terms yes I would agree, Poly.
Just my 2sense
The republic which sinks into sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any. - Wendell Phillips
Ohhhh I would say that Cecil is the most knowledgable human alive… whereas Judge Posner is (in terms of intellectual capacity) the “smartest” person alive. “Smart” is not to be consfused with punditry. The people who win on Jeopardy are not necessarily smart. No offense to Uncle Cecil, of course.
2sense: thanks for that link! Very cool.
Olson was cited for contempt of court while assistant attorney general to President Reagan. He narrowly avoided prosecution for perjury and obstruction of justice following a full independant counsel’s investigation in to his testimony before congress.
Rehnquest lied his ass off during his confirmation hearings both to the supreme court and to the position of chief justice.
Ahem. Explains Jo Conason in Salon:
Yet this is the person Bush selected to represent the entire country, all of its people, and its laws and our respect for them, before the highest court in the land.
Posner is smart, yes. But he’s also a lawyer, used to taking a side up front and trying to come up with the best rationale he can for the conclusion he’s trying to reach. In the Slate dialogues with Dershowitz already linked (and don’t forget their excellent readers’ message board, called “The Fray”), he was forced one step at a time to admit that all of his substantive arguments were basically bullcrap.
Posner tried to make one last stand by claiming that sometimes courts have to put aside pesky details like the law, standing precedent, and their own principles as stated in other cases, and simply use their power to do what they think is right for the country. No, I’m not making that up.
Yes, that’s a conservative, normally opposed to “judicial activism”, trying to claim that the absolute need of the country to have Bush be President required perhaps the most activist, principle-free decision the Court has ever issued.
Posner is smart, yes. But he’s shown himself to be completely corrupt intellectually.
>I personally don’t like rehnquist much - I think he’s an idiot to be honest - but he’s never lied or committed perjury.
When Rehnquist was a law clerk to Justice Jackson, back in 1952, Rehnquist had written a memo that indicated that he supported the old Jim Crow laws, and the memo suggested Rehnquist was opposed to Brown vs. Board of Education. It caused problems in 1971 when he was nominated to be an associate justice, and again in 1986 when President Reagan nominated him to be chief justice. There is no doubt that Rehnquist lied about the Jackson Memo. He claimed that the views in the memo did not reflect his own. Rather he had written the memo for Justice Jackson to reflect Jackson’s thoughts on upholding the then-existing separate but equal law; in short, it argued for a rejection of the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. This explanation did not fit with the words of the memo to Jackson, nor with anything Justice Jackson had believed. In fact, Justice Jackson voted for Brown vs. Board of Education, with the entire Court, getting out of a hospital bed to show the world the Supreme Court was unanimous in its landmark holding that ended school segregation in America. Not only did Rehnquist lie, he smeared the reputation of another Supreme Court justice in doing so.
First off, not according to Ronald Dworkin, who’s no dummy himself. No link, its from a NYRB article and their archive is undergoing major reconstruction right now.
Second off, Bill Clinton did not commit perjury. My post on this died a couple of weeks ago, but I’ll repost the link to his grand jury testimony here: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/transcr.htm
and ask the same question: have you read it? Please specify which statements were lies. Please also state how, since there could not have been a finding of perjury against Clinton in the Jones case because the contested statements were not material, the Starr grand jury even had reason to question him. Finally, since the Jones case was based on perjury by Paula herself regarding the effects of the “incident,” why have the champions of truth not pilloried her? JDM
Well, it seems like everyone lies their head off when it comes to self-interest… I suppose you have never lied either? not even once? I doubt that you will swear that you will never, ever lie again…
Yes, we are all supposed to be equal under the law; however you can look at a lot of data analysis that shows that not all of us are treated equally under the law. Take a close look at sentencing trends and who sits on death row. Unfortunately there is little data on court issues that are thrown out. Yes, we are a country of laws which are supposed to be applied to all - at least more so than the vast majority of people in the world.
Judges are supposed to be impartial. They are supposed to follow the law or at least their interpretation of the law. It is in the interpretation of the law that you can assess the impartiality of a judge; does this decision meld well with the other decisions that this particular judge has made in the past? In other words, how consistent is this judge to particular legal principals that s/he have held up in the past. It’s very clear to me that the Supremes were not “nonpartisan” when it came to their Bush v Gore decision; they decided based on their self interest and not their usual legal precedents/principals.
I think that this decision was a fair more horrendous action than what Clinton had to do in reaction to the hounding dogs who were bound to get him come hell or high water. The Supremes have yet to re-instill respect for the institution. I recognize that what the Supremes did the other day was pro forma and in keeping with equal treatment under the law. That does not rebuild confidence in their ability to be impartial under the law. They still smell like political animals.
So, in other words, by being impartial, you think they were partisan.
Therefore, I must assume, in order to seem impartial, they should have acted partisan and refused to take action against Clinton.
Mr. Orwell, call your office.
So it seems Olson did nothing wrong other than being a conservative who hated Bill Clinton. Writing under a pseudonym in a stupid little backwoods magazine isn’t illegal.
I recently read Posner’s book “Breaking the Deadlock” and your summary of what Posner “believes” is completely off. In the slate dialogues he directly negates the question of whether or not he believes what you say he does.
The ultimate irony is that if the “shoe had been on the other foot” (as dershowitz likes to say in regard to the Bush v. Gore decision) - and 5 liberal justices “voted” for Gore… Dershowitz (I know I spelled his name wrong - I don’t respect him enough to get it right) would have never written his idiotic diatribe book “Supreme Injustice.” How’s that for hypocrisy?
Ironic as hell coming from someone who was probably screaming that it wasn’t about sex with Clinton. The allegation is that Olson lied about his involvement in the project. As for the content, the position of solicitor general is rarely held by such a partisan political player.
Your accusation of hypocricy relies on faulty logic. It isn’t that the court split on partisan lines, many decisions of the court split that way, it is that the decision of the court is unexplainable any but partisan grounds.
Cite? Source? The actual memo, even?
JDM: if I answer your question, we will end up arguing over what sexual relations means.
I never knew Rehnquist actually lied about that… but I won’t argue with you. I’ve always disliked rehnquist. I dislike him just as much as I dislike clinton, so I’m not about to defend him.
from http://flag.blackened.net/daver/misc/thurmond.html
A decade later, Rehnquist was a brilliant young clerk for a member of the Supreme Court, Justice Robert Jackson. When the court was hearing arguments about the racial segregation of schools in Brown v the Board of Education (generally agreed to be one of the most significant cases of the century), Rehnquist wrote a memo for his boss. The central legal issue was whether the Supreme Court should strike down a judgment it gave in 1896, in a case called Plessy v Ferguson, upholding the idea of segregated transport facilities, schools, toilets etc.
“I realize,” wrote Rehnquist, “that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by `liberal’ colleagues, but I think Plessy v Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.” He was, in other words, in favour of the maintenance of institutionalised racism, of black people being forced to take a few seats at the back of the bus, of black children being confined to separate, and invariably inferior, schools.
He felt, as he wrote, that it was “about time the [Supreme] Court faced the fact that the white people of the south don’t like the coloured people”. Given one of the starkest tests of belief in basic legality, the upholding of the equal rights of all citizens, he failed miserably.
Nor can this be written off as a folly of youth. Rehnquist went on to work as the Republican Party’s director of what was euphemistically called “ballot security” operations for elections in Phoenix, Arizona (home base of Goldwater), between 1958 and 1962. This was before the civil rights movement had secured the Voting Rights Act, and when white racists were still able to use “legal” devices to stop blacks from voting.
“Ballot security” was the Orwellian term for this systematic ballot-rigging. According to the federal prosecutor sent to monitor the harassment of minority voters in Phoenix during the election of 1962, the principal source of such problems was Rehnquist.
This post is unaddressed. If I am “you” then I must confess that I don’t see where my assertion about Posner’s beliefs are contradicted by his posts in the Slate Dialogue.
Just my 2sense
Truth: Every government is dependent on the failure of the people to overthrow it; this is usually achieved by gaining passive assent. - Pjen
Ahh mea culpa. I was speaking in reference to what ElvisL1ves said:
“Posner tried to make one last stand by claiming that sometimes courts have to put aside pesky details like the law, standing precedent, and their own principles as stated in other cases, and simply use their power to do what they think is right for the country. No, I’m not making that up.”
Posner’s answer to this comment, taken directly from the aforecited slate.com article, is:
“If pragmatic adjudication means ad hoc decision-making that disregards everything besides the immediately foreseeable consequences of the case at hand, I am against it. But I’m for it if it merely means bringing into the decision-making process, to the extent allowed by the conventional materials of adjudication such as text and precedent, a consideration of consequences both long term (such as the importance of predictability in law) and immediate. Law’s consequences are not “extralegal” matters that judges should ignore in accordance with the maxim ruat caelum ut fiat iustitia (let the sky fall so long as justice is done). Law should be in the service of life. Where do you think law comes from if not from practical concerns with attaining such social goals as prosperity, security, freedom, and, in Bush v. Gore, an orderly presidential succession? It would have been irresponsible for the justices of the Supreme Court not to have thought about the possibly very bad consequences (which I think you acknowledge) of allowing the election deadlock to fester indefinitely—provided there was some basis in the text of the Constitution for the court’s intervening. But there was; it was the provision in Article II that the manner in which a state’s presidential electors shall be chosen is to be determined by the state legislature, not the state judiciary.”