Supreme Court justice and pop culture icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg left the hospital yesterday after having a heart stent implanted and expects to be back at work Monday. Despite various health issues over the years, Ginsburg insists that she is still of sound body at age 81 (her mind isn’t in question) and has no plans to retire before the end of President Obama’s term to ensure a Democratic replacement. If she keeps to that pledge, and presuming there are no other retirements in the next two years, the makeup of the Supreme Court could be a bigger campaign issue in 2016 than ever before. It certainly ought to be.
Ordinarily, the Supreme Court is brought up almost as an afterthought in presidential campaigns. The potential for a swing in the court is used to motivate activists to volunteer and work hard, and the candidates usually have to answer a debate question or two about it, which they do in utterly predictable ways (“I’m just going to look for the best person for the job”). We don’t usually spend a great deal of time talking about what a change in the court is likely to mean. But the next president is highly likely to have the chance to engineer a swing in the court. The consequences for Americans’ lives will probably be more consequential and far-reaching than any other issue the candidates will be arguing about.
As much as we’ve debated Supreme Court cases in recent years, we haven’t given much attention to the idea of a shift in the court’s ideology because for so long the court has been essentially the same: divided 5-4, with conservatives having the advantage yet liberals winning the occasional significant victory when a swing justice moves to their side. And though a couple of recent confirmations have sparked controversy (Samuel Alito and Sonia Sotomayor were both the target of failed attempts to derail their nominations), all of the retirements in the last three presidencies were of justices from the same general ideology as the sitting president. The last time a new justice was radically different from the outgoing one was when Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall — 23 years ago.
Whether a Democrat or a Republican wins in 2016, he or she may well have the chance to shift the court’s ideological balance. Ginsburg is the oldest justice at 81; Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy are both 78, and Stephen Breyer is 76. If the right person is elected and the right justice retires, it could be an earthquake.
Consider this scenario: Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2017, and sometime later one of the conservative justices retires. Now there would be a liberal majority on the court, a complete transformation in its balance. A court that now consistently favors those with power, whether corporations or the government, would become much more likely to rule in favor of workers, criminal defendants and those with civil rights claims. Or alternately: The Republican nominee wins, and one of the liberal justices retires. With conservatives in control not by 5-4 but 6-3, there would be a cascade of even more conservative decisions. The overturning of Roe v. Wade would be just the beginning.
Look at what the Supreme Court has done recently. It gutted the Voting Rights Act, said that corporations could have religious beliefs, simultaneously upheld and hobbled the Affordable Care Act, struck down a key part of the Defense of Marriage Act and moved toward legalizing same-sex marriage, all but outlawed affirmative action, gave corporations and wealthy individuals the ability to dominate elections and created an individual right to own guns — and that’s just in the last few years.
Whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican, there is probably no single issue you ought to be more concerned about in the 2016 campaign than what the court will look like after the next president gets the opportunity to make an appointment or two. The implications are enormous. It’s not too early to start considering them.
In mid-November of 2012, hundreds of tuxedo-clad Republican lawyers gathered at a hotel ballroom in Washington, DC. They were a mix of heads hung in dejection and chests puffed out in compensatory bluster. Less than two weeks earlier, they’d seen President Obama vanquish his opponent at the polls. Their last chance to knock a hated president out of office — and their last real chance to halt that’s president’s even more hated health reforms — ended in failure. They and their allies had made their best case that liberalism was a path to economic ruin, and the American people had lined up at their polling places to pull the lever for liberalism.
And yet, at this annual gathering of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, arguably the most powerful legal organization in the country, Justice Samuel Alito was defiant. Not long after rising to give his keynote address to the room full of conservative senators, judges, and attorneys gathered before him, Alito launched into a story of a particularly uninspiring law professor whose course he took in law school. The professor, Alito recalled, authored a book in 1970 warning of a decaying society trapped in a “moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.”
Almost exactly one month after his speech, a gunman named Adam Lanza walked into an elementary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and murdered 26 people, 20 of whom were children. What followed was a nationwide debate over the proper way to solve gun violence and over the scope and the wisdom of the Second Amendment. Many of the lawyers and lawmakers who attended Justice Alito’s speech would fight hard — and, ultimately, successfully — to defeat President Obama’s proposals to prevent future Sandy Hooks.
So, when Chief Justice Roberts opened the final session of the Supreme Court’s term on Monday by announcing that Justice Alito would deliver both of the Court’s remaining opinions, liberals immediately knew that they were about to hear some very bad news. In quick succession, Alito dealt sharp blows to public sector unions and to women whose employers object to birth control.
A Straight Face
If Alito’s Hobby Lobby opinion — the second of the two decisions he handed down on Monday — proves anything, it is that Alito has mastered the art of reading legal authorities that cut sharply against his position, and then authoring a legal opinion that passes them off as if they actually bolster his argument. In Hobby Lobby, Alito was confronted by decades of legal precedents establishing that religious liberty claims could not be used to diminish the rights of third parties, especially in the employment context. Worse, at least for Alito’s belief that employers with religious objections to birth control could deny legally mandated coverage to their employees, Hobby Lobby turned upon how the Court interpreted a 1993 law — a law known as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act or RFRA — that explicitly stated that its purpose was to “restore the compelling interest test” set out by these earlier precedents after that test was overruled by an unpopular Supreme Court decision. This was the same legal test that was in place when the Court held that “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”
Yet Alito ignored Congress’s clearly stated purpose, he offered little explanation for why he was justified in doing do, and what little justification he did offer falls apart upon a very cursory inquiry. At one point in his opinion, for example, Alito points to a 2000 amendment to a largely irrelevant provision of RFRA, claiming that the amendment was “an obvious effort to effect a complete separation from First Amendment case law.” Elsewhere, Alito argues that RFRA strengthened the legal protections available to religious objectors prior to 1990. Both claims, however, are difficult to square with RFRA’s statement that its entire purpose is to restore prior precedents — and there is nothing in the 2000 amendment which alters this statement of purpose.
Hobby Lobby is also the latest in a series of decisions Alito has handed down diminishing the rights of women in the workplace. Prior to Hobby Lobby, his most famous decision was undoubtedly Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire, the pay discrimination case that Congress overturned in the very first bill President Obama signed into law.
Alito, however, does not appear at all humbled by the experience of having a successful presidential candidate campaign against his most well-known opinion and then eradicate that opinion just over a week after moving into the White House. Last year, in an opinion with potentially much further reaching consequences than Ledbetter, Alito gutted a core protection helping prevent workers from being racially or sexually harassed by their boss. Harassment suits of this kind are notoriously difficult to win, especially when a worker is harassed by colleagues without direct authority over them. When a worker is sexually or racially harassed by their “supervisor,” however, the law recognizes that employers should have a special incentive to halt this kind of exploitation immediately. In many cases, when a worker is the victim of harassment by their boss, their employer is automatically liable for this harassment.
In a modern workplace, where final personnel decisions are often delegated to a distant human resources office, this means that few workers’ bosses will qualify as supervisors. Indeed, in dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gives several examples of women whose bosses no longer count as “supervisors” under Alito’s framework. One of these non-supervisor supervisors was a man assigned to evaluate a female co-worker’s job perfomance, who then “forced her into unwanted sex with him, an outrage to which she submitted, believing it necessary to gain a passing grade.”
A Corporation’s Best Friend
Lest there be any doubt, these three cases are not isolated decisions. The Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) releases occasional reports tracking how often the Supreme Court sides with the United States Chamber of Commerce in cases where the Chamber files a brief. In large part because the Chamber is both a prominent corporate interest group and an especially active Supreme Court litigant, CAC maintains that tracking the Chamber’s performance is a good proxy for how likely the justices are to side with big business. Year after year, their data shows that Alito is a corporation’s best friend on the Court:
To be fully precise, that does not make Alito the Court’s most conservative member. That honor belongs to Justice Clarence Thomas, who is the only member of the Court who openly pines for the days when federal child labor laws were considered unconstitutional. Yet, while Alito can’t match Thomas’s radicalism, he is far and away the most partisan member of the Court.
To explain this distinction, Thomas not a partisan. He is an ideologue. His decisions are driven by a fairly coherent judicial philosophy which would often read the Constitution in much the same way that it was understood in 1918. While this methodology typically leads him to conservative results, it does occasionally align him with the Court’s liberals. In 2009, for example, in a case brought by a drug company seeking lawsuit immunity after one of their products caused a woman to lose her hand, Thomas arguably took a position well to the left of the Court’s liberal bloc. While Justice John Paul Stevens wrote an opinion for the Court rejecting the drug company’s quest for immunity, Thomas argued that the legal doctrine the drug company relied upon should be tossed out entirely.
What makes Alito a partisan is that there is no similar case where his judicial philosophy drove him to a result that put him at odds with his fellow conservatives. Shortly after Hobby Lobby was handed down, ThinkProgress contacted several legal scholars and Supreme Court advocates asking if they could identify a single closely divided case where Alito broke with his fellow conservatives to join the liberals. Most replied that they could not think of any. One, Boston College Law Professor Kent Greenfield, added that “Scalia is a Roosevelt liberal in comparison” to Alito. Another, a progressive attorney who frequently practices in Alito’s Court, wrote back with just four words — “Nope. He’s the worst.”
Kedar Bhatia, a lawyer who compiles statistics on Supreme Court decisions for SCOTUSBlog, agreed that “I don’t believe there have been any true instances of a 5-4 majority with Ginsburg, Breyer, Stevens/Kagan, Souter/Sotomayor, and Alito,” (although he was able to point to a handful of cases where Alito joined a 5 justice majority that included one other conservative and three liberals). The four other conservatives, Bhatia added, “are more prone to creating that sort of lineup.”
Alito is a reliable partisan, but it would be a mistake to dismiss him as a substanceless hack. Alito may be the smartest member of the Court’s conservative bloc, and he is their best questioner. Recounting the oral arguments in the Citizens United campaign finance case in his book The Oath, Supreme Court reporter Jeffrey Toobin recalled that “[i]t was easy to tell which way Alito was leaning, because his questions were so hard to answer for the lawyer he was targeting.Alito had a radar for weak points in a presentation.”
Indeed, Alito asked a question during the Citizens United argument which has come to define that case for many conservatives. If the Constitution permits campaign finance law to regulate movies and television ads intended to influence an election, Alito asked, could the law also do “the same thing for a book?” After Malcolm Stewart, a longtime Justice Department attorney tasked with arguing this case while the newly inaugurated President Obama was still filling the top jobs in the Solicitor General’s office, answered that books could be regulated under campaign finance law, the argument descended into what Toobin labeled an “epic disaster.” Alito had somehow recast a case about whether corporations could spend unlimited money to shape electoral results into a case about banning books.
Several months later, when Solicitor General (and future Justice) Elena Kagan reargued the case, she tried to undo the damage Alito’s question had caused by announcing that “[t]he government’s answer” to his question “has changed.”But the damage had already been done. Alito’s single question continues to inspire conservative talking points to this day. Just last month, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) labeled supporters of campaign finance regulation “Fahrenheit 451 Democrats.”
In 2005, When President George W. Bush announced Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, he praised his nominee as someone who “understands that judges are to interpret the laws, not to impose their preferences or priorities on the people.” Less than a decade later, Alito rewrote American religious liberty law, and he did so despite an explicit statement by Congress indicating that Hobby Lobby should have come down the other way. Along the road to Hobby Lobby, Alito made the workplace a harsher, meaner place for women. He inspired talking points for Ted Cruz. And he has an unblemished record as the most committed partisan on the Court.
And, unlike the many partisans in Congress and other elected positions, Alito cannot be voted out of office. His appointment to the Court lasts for his entire life.
The last time we visited oral arguments from The Court was in Shelby County v. Holder (a voting rights case), in which Justice Antonin Scalia famously stated that the Voting Rights Act was “perpetuation of racial entitlement”.
That was more of a shocker than Justice Samuel Alito stating that assessing the effects of “marriage equality” is a newer development than cell phones or the Internet. Scalia’s statement was purely racist and insulting…in my opinion Alito’s argument says: “we need a lot more time on this issue…”
I’m still working my way through the transcript (pdf) of today’s Supreme Court oral argument on California’s Prop 8, but there’s one quote that already seems to be generating quite a bit of attention. It comes by way of Justice Samuel Alito:
“Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. I think it was first adopted in The Netherlands in 2000. So there isn’t a lot of data about its effect. And it may turn out to be a — a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe.
“But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution, which is newer than cell phones or the Internet? I mean we — we are not — we do not have the ability to see the future. On a question like that, of such fundamental importance, why should it not be left for the people, either acting through initiatives and referendums or through their elected public officials?”
Alito’s argument seems to be one focused on the calendar. Perhaps, the theory goes, millions of Americans can be denied equal rights for an indefinite period of time, and jurists can revisit the issue in the future. At that point, they can ask once more whether or not allowing two consenting adults to get married is “a good thing.”
Remember the fine print in the Declaration of Independence? We have an inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, just so long as the specific type of happiness is older than mobile telephones.
I’m not altogether sure what Alito thinks might happen, even if he had “the ability to see the future,” but the larger question seems to be the justice’s willingness to leave marriage rights “for the people.” What’s wrong with that? The answer, I suspect, has something to do with the nature of rights — they are, by definition, opportunities afforded to people that cannot be taken away without due process.
Rights are not supposed to be open to popularity contests. Throughout American history, if all contentious decisions over civil rights were left solely to popular will and the political process, progress would have been very slow, indeed. It’s precisely why Americans have turned to their last available option — the courts — as a way of ensuring their rights are protected.
What’s more, as Solicitor General Donald Virrelli reminded Alito, opponents of marriage equality aren’t seeking a pause to progress, or decisions through initiatives, referendums, or the political process — they’re seeking constitutional amendments to permanently limit the rights of same-sex couples.
Virrelli also reminded the justices:
“[T]he principal argument in 1967 with respect to Loving and that the Commonwealth of Virginia advanced was: Well, the social science is still uncertain about how biracial children will fare in this world, and so you ought to apply rational basis scrutiny and wait. And I think the Court recognized that there is a cost to waiting and that that has got to be part of the equal protection calculus.”
During a new term that begins on Oct. 1, the Supreme Court could decide to accept challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, which both define marriage as between a man and woman.
He also spoke on the importance of a balanced Court (even tilted to the left if Obama is re-elected and has the chance to choose two Justices to replace two of the four aging Justices on the bench currently. Conversely, even more conservative Justices could be appointed to the Court if Romney is elected.
The Week talks about upcoming hot-button issues before The Court in the coming nine months…
The high court is taking on hot-button issues such as affirmative action, and may also hand down rulings on gay marriage and civil rights protections
When the Supreme Court begins its 2012-13 term on Monday, few expect its docket to match the drama that accompanied its ruling on ObamaCare in June, in which Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberals to uphold President Obama’s signature domestic achievement — a day that will undoubtedly live in infamy among conservatives. However, the court still has its fair share of politically divisive cases, and court watchers say it’s probable that the justices will accept cases touching on gay marriage and voting rights. Here, three cases to watch in the court’s upcoming term:
1. Affirmative action could come to an end
On Oct. 10 the court will hear oral arguments for Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which many expect to bring about the court’s most significant ruling on affirmative action in at least a decade. At issue is whether the University of Texas is discriminating against white students by taking race into consideration during the application process. The case had been brought by Abigail Fisher, a white student whose application was denied. “There were people in my class with lower grades, who weren’t in all the activities I was in, who were accepted into UT,” she tells NBC News. “And the only difference between us was the color of our skin.” The Supreme Court last upheld affirmative action in universities in 2003, but has grown more conservative since then with the addition of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Many expect the court to strike down affirmative action programs altogether. “I don’t think anyone thinks affirmative action is long for this world,” says Pamela Harris, a former Obama administration official.
2. The Voting Rights Act could be scaled back
The court is “very likely to hear a constitutional challenge to a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act,” which outlawed voter discrimination, says David Cole at The New York Review of Books. The provision in question is Section 5, which requires certain states and localities with a history of racism to get federal clearance before changing voting procedures. Opponents say the provision is outdated, arguing that the “insidious and pervasive evil” of racism in the Deep South no longer exists. The provision’s supporters point to laws recently passed by GOP-controlled legislatures that allegedly suppress minority voting. If the Supreme Court decides to take the case, the conservative wing will have to decide how far it wants to go in affirming a “colorblind” vision of society, in which any policy based on racial considerations, including affirmative action, would be a violation of the “Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the law,” says Cole.
3. A ruling on same-sex marriage is likely imminent
By the end of the term, the court “will almost certainly have decided whether gays and lesbians can marry in California,” and whether the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is constitutional, says Bob Egelko at The San Francisco Chronicle. The court could decide as soon as Monday to accept challenges to DOMA and California’s Proposition 8, both of which define marriage as being between a man and a woman. Republican supporters say striking down either DOMA or Prop 8 would be the height of judicial activism, robbing Congress and state voters from implementing their will. Such a decision would “ignite a decades-long firestorm that will make Roe v. Wade‘s disruption of American politics appear minor by comparison,” says Ed Whelan at The National Review. Supporters of same-sex marriage say that DOMA and Prop 8 are clearly discriminatory, though some would prefer to legalize gay marriage through legislation.
One might ask how can we call the Justices of the Supreme Court Tea Partiers. The fact is, the majority Republicans (5) in the Court support and attend meetings and affairs thrown by the Koch Brothers and their ilk. Those are the people that initiated the Tea Party and paid others to organize the alleged “grass roots” coalition.
The court’s conservative wing appears ready to engage in some despicable judicial activism on ObamaCare. Politically, at least, the justices are doing Obama a favor – Robert Shrum
Recall the scorn toward health reform dripping from the lips of Injustice Antonin Scalia. Or think of the tight-lipped Clarence Thomas, who could send a mannequin to sit in his place at the court’s oral arguments for all the difference his brooding presence makes. Along with the more plausibly judicious Samuel Alito, he too had more than likely made his decision. And so on the nation’s highest court, satire replaced stare decisis in a slightly altered version of the Red Queen’s jurisprudence inAlice in Wonderland: First the verdict, then the trial.
Some observers, and administration officials, hold out hope that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy will decide to save health reform from the revanchist claims of right-wing constitutionalism. I’m pessimistic because I lived through Bush v. Gore, when the court acted like a political ward committee, stopping the vote count in Florida to hand the presidency to George W. Bush by the margin of a single judicial vote.
Now comes the historic decision on health reform — which could reach far beyond the case to fray the whole fabric of progress in modern America. To overturn the individual mandate, to throw out all or most of the rest of the law, would be an act of naked judicial activism, which conservatives profess to despise. In truth, though, they practice it vigorously, in barely concealed disguise, when it advances their own ends. Depending on the “reasoning” rationalized by five horsemen of the judicial right, they could jeopardize other basic protections — for example, the prohibition against segregation at distinctly local enterprises like lunch counters, a prohibition that depends on a generous and long-prevailing view of federal regulation of interstate commerce.
I wonder if the Senate, while going through the confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees, has ever ordered psychological testing for those nominees.
I know they can’t order the examinations on the nominee’s spouse, but I swear, regarding “Uncle” Clarence and Ginni Thomas, there’s a case to be made for mandatory psych evaluations of SCOTUS nominees…
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife Virginia “Ginni” Thomas has a new job in conservative journalism that keeps her involved with the recent focus of her political activism and business dealings – the tea party movement.
As a part-time special correspondent for the Daily Caller, Thomas plans to tap into the movement, according to emails sent this month to top tea party organizers around the country, to build a list of “leaders from the grassroots in each state … who have their ear to the ground” and are willing to be surveyed weekly by two “prominent pollsters.” The results will be published on the Daily Caller website.
Thomas’s involvement with the tea party and the conservative movement in general has been a continuing source of controversy both for her and her husband.
And her attendance at an annual summit of major conservative donors organized by the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch – revealed in a recent speech by a federal judge and Thomas family ally – can be expected to draw even more scrutiny.
In remarks prepared for delivery last month to the San Francisco branch of the conservative Federalist Society, Laurence Silberman, a senior judge on the federal appeals court in Washington, blasted critics of the Thomases as “hypocrites” pushing “phony concerns” about judicial ethics, while ignoring real ones and getting their facts wrong.
I suppose most people are adjusting to the fact that those very conservative 5-4 decisions on the United States Supreme Court will continue until one of two things happen: a) a conservative retires and the current president appoints a liberal or moderate to that seat or b) Scalia, Thomas or some other rogue Justice is impeached.
John Thompson (pictured) was convicted of a 1984 armed robbery, and later of murder. He spent 18 years in prison, including 14 years on death row. Problem: the prosecutors who sent him to jail withheld some evidence—including eyewitness reports describing a perpetrator who looked nothing like Thompson, and a blood test that proved Thompson’s innocence.
So, after all those years, after facing seven execution warrants, when Thompson finally managed to get himself freed from prison after new trials, Thompson sued the New Orleans district attorney for not training his prosecutors to, you know, not send innocent people away for decades. He won a $14 million judgment from a jury. That was appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court. And yesterday, voila: John Thompson gets nothing. From the NYT:
Justice Scalia, in a concurrence joined by Justice Alito, said the misconduct in the case was the work of a single “miscreant prosecutor,” Gerry Deegan, who suppressed evidence “he believed to be exculpatory, in an effort to railroad Thompson.” No amount of training, Justice Scalia wrote, would have countered such willful wrongdoing.
In her dissent, Justice Ginsburg wrote that “no fewer than five prosecutors” were complicit in a violation of Mr. Thompson’s constitutional rights. “They kept from him, year upon year, evidence vital to his defense.”
Here in America, all bad outcomes which reflect poorly on the current power structure are the result of a handful of Bad Apples. And you can’t hold the people in charge accountable for the work of A Few Bad Apples. This principle applies to ill-conceived wars gone wrong, greed-induced collapse of financial systems, profit-driven corporate environmental destruction, and willful miscarriages of justice. And any future unforeseen disasters, to be determined at a later date.
Chief Justice John Roberts will lead a contingent of six Supreme Court justices at President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, quieting speculation that only Democratic appointees to the court would attend.
Roberts had objected to the partisan atmosphere at last year’s address, particularly after Obama offered rare criticism of the court during his speech.
Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg confirmed that six justices would be present at Tuesday’s speech, although she would not say which ones. But as three of the nine justices had previously all but ruled themselves out, it seemed a safe assumption that Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy would join their four colleagues who were appointed by Democratic presidents.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor also are expected to attend. For Kagan, it would be her first speech since Obama nominated her last year. Sotomayor was Obama’s first high court pick.
Justice Samuel Alito, who mouthed the words “not true” in response to Obama’s criticism, is spending this week as “jurist in residence” at the University of Hawaii law school. Justice Antonin Scalia, at the Capitol Monday to speak to the Tea Party Caucus, has not attended a State of the Union speech at least since the mid-1990s. Justice Clarence Thomas said last year that he doesn’t go because “it has become so partisan,” although he attended Obama’s first speech to Congress in February 2009. More…
The right-wing “in your face” attitude from Supreme Court Justices Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas pretty much demonstrate why Citizens United became a historic decision.
Then Chief Justice Roberts decides he will not attend any more State of The Union addresses by President Obama. In fact he said that it’s up to each individual Justice, whether or not they attend the State of the Union, which Roberts feels has turned into a “political pep rapply”.
Recently we learned that Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife has formed a “tea party” venture to offset President Obama’s “radical agenda“.
Now we have Justice Alito headlining Republican fundraisers and telling a reporter that his being at a recent fundraiser was “not important”.
Perhaps, because there is no explicit code of ethics for the nine Supreme Court justices, they have been allowed to get away with such behavior. Some Justices have come under scrutiny, such as accepting trips from groups with political and judicial agenda and gifts from private parties who may at some point have business before the court.
Last night, the American Spectator — a right-wing magazine known for its role in the “Arkansas Project,” a well-funded effort to invent stories with the goal of eventually impeaching President Clinton — held its annual gala fundraising event. The Spectator is more than merely an ideological outlet. Spectator publisher Al Regnery helps lead a secretive group of conservatives called the “Conservative Action Project,” formed after President Obama’s election, to help lobby for conservative legislative priorities, elect Republicans (the Conservative Action Project helped campaign against Democrat Bill Owens in NY-23), and block President Obama’s judicial appointments. The Spectator’s gala last night, with ticket prices/sponsorship levels ranging from $250 to $25,000, featured prominent Republicans like RNC chairman Michael Steele, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer (a major donor to Republican campaign committees and attack ad groups), and U.S. Chamber of Commerce board member and former Allied Capital CEO William Walton. Among the attendees toasting Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), the keynote speaker for the event, was Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito. Continue reading…
The Fifth Column 