Tag Archives | SCOTUS

An All Female U.S. Supreme Court

By on November 27, 2012 in News 14

Proving, perhaps, that she takes extreme, radical positions on important issues, Justice Ruth Ginsburg says she wants an all female Supreme Court. From CBS:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hopes to see an all-female Supreme Court one day.

Ginsburg made the comment during a 10th Circuit Bench & Bar Conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder, according to CNS News.

“Now the perception is, yes, women are here to stay,” Ginsburg told the conference. “And when I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough and I say when there are nine, people are shocked.”

Ginsburg said that no one has “ever raised a question” when nine men were serving on the bench…

[continues at CBS]… Read the rest

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U.S. Supreme Court To Rule On Gay Marriage

By on November 25, 2012 in News 28

Will the Roberts-led Supreme Court dare to stop the gay marriage juggernaut? This may be the week we find out, per this report in the LA Times:

After two decades in which gay rights moved from the margin to capture the support of most Americans, the Supreme Court justices will go behind closed doors this week to decide whether now is the time to rule on whether gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry.

For justices, the issue is not just what to decide, but when to decide it. In times past, the court has been faulted for waiting too long or moving too quickly to recognize constitutional rights.

The justices did not strike down state bans on interracial marriage until 1967, 13 years after they had declared racial segregation unconstitutional. Yet in response to the growing women’s rights movement, the court in 1973 struck down all the state laws restricting abortion, triggering a national “right to life” movement and drawing criticism even from some supporters that the Roe vs.

… Read the rest

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Supreme Court Upholds Main Part Of Obamacare

By on June 28, 2012 in News 35

UpstateNYer (CC)

The U.S. Supreme Court has finally decided to uphold the critical part of President Obama’s controversial health care law. Expect some Tea Party fireworks just in time for Independence Day next week… Robert Barnes and N.C. Aizenman report for the Washington Post:

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual health-insurance mandate that is at the heart of President Obama’s landmark health-care law, saying the mandate is permissible under Congress’s taxing authority.

The potentially game-changing, election-year decision — a major victory for the White House less than five months before the November elections –will help redefine the power of the national government and affect the health-care choices of millions of Americans.

Passage of the legislation by the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 capped decades of efforts to implement a national program of health care. The legislation is expected to eventually extend health-care coverage to more than 30 million Americans who currently lack it…

[continues at the Washington Post]… Read the rest

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Broccoli Set To Scupper Obamacare

By on June 14, 2012 in News 59

David Monniaux (CC)

Can you believe that the United States Supreme Court is poised to throw out President Obama’s signature health care legislation based on a fear of being made to eat broccoli? I mean, whaaaaat??? James B. Stewart cites various precedents for “broccoliphobia,” but omits George H. W. Bush’s well known dislike of the healthy vegetable, which I would posit made it fashionable for conservatives to denounce it. He reports in the New York Times:

What does broccoli have to do with health insurance?

Until recently, nothing. But now, perhaps a lot.

Broccoli, of all things, came up in the Supreme Court during arguments over the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s health care legislation. If Congress can require Americans to buy health insurance, Justice Antonin Scalia asked, could it force people to buy just about anything — including a green vegetable that many find distasteful?

“Everybody has to buy food sooner or later,” he said.

… Read the rest

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U.S. Supreme Court Legalizes Strip Search For Any Offense

By on April 3, 2012 in News 13

Anthony Kennedy (2009, cropped)Make sure you don’t jaywalk, ride a bike without a bell, protest anything, or otherwise upset a police officer, because the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that you can be forced to strip naked for a visual search no matter how trivial your alleged offense. NPR reports:

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that jailers may subject people arrested for minor offenses to invasive strip searches, siding with security needs over privacy rights.

By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled against a New Jersey man who complained that strip searches in two county jails violated his civil rights.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion for the court’s conservative justices that when people are going to be put into the general jail population, “courts must defer to the judgment of correctional officials unless the record contains substantial evidence showing their policies are an unnecessary or unjustified response to problems of jail security.”

In a dissenting opinion joined by the court’s liberals, Justice Stephen Breyer said strip searches improperly “subject those arrested for minor offenses to serious invasions of their personal privacy.” Breyer said jailers ought to have a reasonable suspicion someone may be hiding something before conducting a strip search.

… Read the rest

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Rep. Peter DeFazio Investigating Impeachment For Chief Justice John Roberts

By on November 5, 2010 in News 27
Rep. Peter DeFazio

Rep. Peter DeFazio

From the Huffington Post:

With Democrats increasingly outraged over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections — a change conservatives have been more successful at taking advantage of — a Democratic congressman is raising the prospect of impeaching the Supreme Court’s chief justice over the issue.

“I mean, the Supreme Court has done a tremendous disservice to the United States of America,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. “They have done more to undermine our democracy with their Citizens United decision than all of the Republican operatives in the world in this campaign. They’ve opened the floodgates, and personally, I’m investigating articles of impeachment against Justice Roberts for perjuring during his Senate hearings, where he said he wouldn’t be a judicial activist, and he wouldn’t overturn precedents.”

In his 2005 confirmation hearings, Roberts famously said, “Judges and justices are servants of the law, not the other way around.

… Read the rest

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Bill Moyers: Welcome To Plutocracy!

By on November 4, 2010 in News 12
Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers

Mr. Moyers delivers his take on what went wrong, where it’s leading, and what to do about it. Take it as you will, but I think it nails the big issues right to the wall for all to see. Via TruthOut:

Bill Moyers speech at Boston University on October 29, 2010, as a part of the Howard Zinn Lecture Series.

I was honored when you asked me to join in celebrating Howard Zinn’s life and legacy. I was also surprised. I am a journalist, not a historian. The difference between a journalist and an historian is that the historian knows the difference. George Bernard Shaw once complained that journalists are seemingly unable to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. In fact, some epic history can start out as a minor incident. A young man named Paris ran off with a beautiful woman who was married to someone else, and the civilization of Troy began to unwind.

… Read the rest

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