Isn’t the point of the standing requirement that your ox was actually gored and that you have actual skin, or at least ox hide in the game? An adversarial system rises or falls on the zealousness of the parties. How else to you assure the zealous presentation of one side of a legal issue unless you can be certain of a legitimate interest in that outcome?
No, you’re missing the fact that the defendant in this case was the US Government itself. The guy who argued in favor of warantless wiretapping here wasn’t just “some lawyer”, it was a lawyer from the US Attorney General’s office. Voting for a democrat didn’t help at all – if Obama had just told the Attorney General not to defend the case (or better yet, told the NSA to stop doing the warantless wiretapping in the first place), then there’d be no problem.
So yes, while it’s nice to say “this wouldn’t have happened if we’d just voted for democrats” that doesn’t appear to be true.
Edit: just noticed, in post #12 you said “Obama supported the law being challenged”. That is absolutely, positively, utterly untrue. The US government (including the attorney general, who works for Obama) was defending the law here. Remember the case was “Clapper (Director of National Intelligence) vs Amnesty International”. It was Obama’s administration who argued for the supreme court to make the horrible decision that they did.
Oh, and BTW – don’t forget Senator Obama voted for the 2008 FISA bill that is at the heart of this lawsuit. So yes, both parties are definitely to blame here.
Sorry, that sentence could’ve been more clear: “Obama supported the law being challenged” meaning Obama supported the law which was being challenged, not that Obama supported the challenge.
Obama voted for the law in the Senate, so there isn’t really any question he supports it, even apart from his DoJ defending it. I didn’t “miss” that point, I repeated it in my post (albeit unclearly). Hence my point in bringing it up: Obama’s mind was made up on the issue when he appointed Kagan and Sotomayor, and yet both woman voted in the way the OP would presumably like to see Justices vote.
But Obama’s support doesn’t really have anything to do with my argument. Dems appoint Justices that vote in the way the OP supports, the GOP appoints Justices that vote in a way the OP dislikes. The parties aren’t symmetrical on this. If you dislike this decision, and want to vote in such a way as to avoid a repetition, the breakdown of the vote makes it extremely clear that there is in fact a particular political party you can vote for to support that aim.
OK, I see your point now. Slight hijack, I wonder if all the justices (both dem and republican) would have voted the same way had the president been different and had their 5-4 majority been the other way around.
After all, Senator Obama (and Senator Biden and Senator Clinton) all voted against increasing the debt ceiling when Bush was president, and then criticized republicans for doing the same thing when Obama was president, but many liberals argue they’re not being hypocritical because since the democrats were in the minority in 2006 and their vote didn’t matter anyway, its OK if they did symbolic votes but its not ok for republicans to vote the same way in 2012 because they’re in the majority so their vote actually matters.
So there’s no way to prove this either way, but I wonder if some of the four liberal justices might have thought “Yeah, warantless wiretapping is clearly unconstitutional, but the President is saying it (allegedly) saves lives so I’d hate to cast the deciding vote against it…but since my party is in the minority, it doesn’t matter how I vote so I can vote for the abstract good choice without having to consider the practical outcomes that my vote may allow a terrorist attack.” If it had been 5 liberal justices against 4 conservative justices, I wonder if both parties might have swapped their votes, with Scalia et al being able to take a “principled” stand for the constitution since their vote didn’t matter anyway, while the liberal justices (whose vote then would matter since they’re in the majority) swapped their vote in favor of the “practicality” of (allegedly) saving lives.