Thursday, July 19, 2018

Our Supreme Court is Important

“The Federalists have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold … and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and erased.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1803
Recent headlines concerning the US Supreme Court and its justices should be finally addressed. There are too many politicos who are justices – concerned with “interpretation” of the Constitution instead of its application to cases brought before the SCOTUS. While the President as executor nominates such positions, the Senate's duty is to confirm a nomination, and most importantly, do so without prejudice. Hopefully looking for a judge that has a record of constitutionalism. Unfortunately too many members of the Senate play politics more than performing their required task in a professional manner.
Members of the judiciary at all levels should technically be “independent” instead of affiliating with either Democrat or Republican parties. 

 
The photo below are the US Supreme Court Justices of 2018 and my assessment of each follows. At least three of these Justices should never have been appointed and one of them impeached (Ginsburg) or very least a stern reprimand from the executive office for her downplay of the Constitution in a public Egyptian TV interview concerning our Constitution, which she us under an oath to conserve and protect. Recently it was noticed that she cannot stay awake during sessions – so she should be forced to retire. How can a justice make a proper assessment of any case if that person cannot stay awake?

U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts (seated C) leads Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (front row, L-R), Justice Anthony Kennedy (soon to retire), Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Elena Kagan (back row, L-R), Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Neil Gorsuch. (Reuters photo/Jonathan Ernst)

Chief Justice John Roberts
Nominated by President George W. Bush in 2006, Roberts replaced Chief Justice William Rehnquist after his death. His “jurisprudence” is described as “conservative”. Formerly a US Court of Appeals Judge for the District of Columbia also appointed by GW Bush.
His record of majority opinions in landmark cases include: (1) Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, (2) Shelby County v. Holder, (3) National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius.
Roberts knowledge of the law was evident when he discussed before the Senate hearing panel Supreme Court precedent issues without notes. During those hearings he discussed the Commerce Clause, Federalism, Reviewing Acts of Congress, Stare decisis, Roe v. Wade. Unlike dubious senators today like Barbara Feinstein, Roberts was not grilled concerning religion.
Chief Justice Roberts has been considered to be a “traditional” judge/justice carefully applying established decisional rules and the practice of reasoning from the case law.
Justice Roberts supports restricting abortion, but not abolishing and when Justice Clarence Thomas filed in his opinion that the Roe v. Wade be reversed, Roberts declined.
Justice Roberts opposes the use of race in assigning students to particular schools, including maintaining integrated schools. Roberts stated:
"[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."
When compared to Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, Justice Roberts can be considered to be a “moderate” Conservative.
It is the job of the Chief Justice to administer the oath of office for the President of the United States. He did so at the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009 and it was the first time a president was sworn in by a person who voted against his confirmation (Obama as senator) as a chief justice.
Chief Justice is a Catholic and one of 13 catholic justices in the history of SCOTUS.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg … was born in 1933 as Joan Ruth Bader and appointed by President Bill Clinton, taking office in 1993. She is considered an “ultra-liberal” judge. Ginsburg was born into a devout Jewish family and familiar with the Hebrew language and tenets. She was a “camp rabbi” at a Jewish Summer Program in New York.
Ginsburg was recommended to President Clinton by his infamous Attorney General, Janet Reno.
During her testimony before the US Senate Judiciary Committee and confirmation hearings she refused to answer questions about her views concerning the Constitution. That alone should have provided a red flag. She also refused to answer questions concerning the death penalty.
When the court was split by ideological reasons, Ginsburg normally provided the dissenting opinion.
Ginsburg has consistently supported abortion rights. Her major concern has always been “women's rights”.
Oddly, despite complete ideological differences, Ginsburg and Scalia were close colleagues.
In January 2012, Ginsburg went to Egypt for a 4-day discussion trip with judges and law school students as well as legal experts. In an interview on Alhayat TV and was asked if the Egyptian constitution should be modeled upon that of the US, she stated:
"I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012, I might look at the constitution of South Africa. That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, have an independent judiciary. It really is, I think, a great piece of work that was done."
She chose South African Constitution over US. Many felt this was a major violation of her oath of office and especially against ethics when speaking publicly in a foreign nation.
Today, despite constantly falling asleep during sessions, she refuses to retire.
Protests about Colin Kaepernick, she stated the protests were “really dumb”.
Ginsburg has been called a “pop culture icon” in the media and judicial circles. She has refused to retire despite requests, even by Obama who wanted to ensure she was replaced with a “liberal” justice while he was in office. Actually there are too many already – and, ironically, all three women justices are among them. A Constitutionalist female judge was nominated to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, but shot down by a Democrat majority in the Senate.

Justice Anthony Kennedy …
Born in 1936 he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and sworn in in 1988. Since Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement in 2006, he has been the “swing vote” on many of Chief Justice Robert's Courts. Justice Kennedy will be retiring effectively on 31 July 2018. He was a California US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit judge appointed by President Gerald Ford. He is noted for his majority opinion concerning gay rights cases. Also in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Kennedy was the majority in the DC ban on handguns case – District of Columbia v. Heller. That case upheld the Second Amendment in protecting the right to keep and bear arms decision. Later he upheld the right to keep and bear arms incorporated against the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Justice Kennedy upheld environment protection concerning a mining company in Coeur Alaska Inc. v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council in 2009.
Justice Kennedy joined majority opinion concerning flag burning as a form of “free speech” in Texas v. Johnson in 1989. Kennedy wrote:
"It is poignant but fundamental that the flag protects those who hold it in contempt."
Justice Kennedy has had conservative rulings for most of his tenure.
Off the bench, Justice Kennedy has been active upon the issue of overcrowded prisons in the US. He spends his summers in Salzburg, Austria teaching international and American law. One of his favorite Founders is George Washington. Kennedy is one of the 13 Catholic justices to serve.
Justice Clarence Thomas …
Born in 1948, Clarence Thomas has served as a lawyer, judge and Associate Justice of the SCOTUS. He succeeded Thurgood Marshall and is the second African American to serve on the court. He grew up in Georgia and attended Yale Law School. He was appointed as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights within the Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed him as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). He was nominated as a judge for the US Court of Appeals for District Columbia in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. Sixteen months later he was nominated to replace Justice Marshall by same president. The Thomas confirmation hearings was a battle because he was accused of sexual harassment by attorney Anita Hill of the Department of Education. Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52-48 in US Senate.
Justice Thomas is a textualist – he upholds the original meaning of the Constitution. He also is known for rarely speaking during oral arguments.
Clarence Thomas is the author of the bestseller, Grandfather's Son that provided him with $1.5 million.
Justice Thomas voted most frequently with Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Scalia, the latter being a close friend. Thomas voted with Scalia 91% of the time, rarely disagreeing.
In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, Justice Thomas agreed with the Fourth Circuit that Congress has the power to authorize the president's detention of US citizens who are enemy combatants. Namely members of terrorist organizations arrested and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Justice Thomas was an advocate of upholding the First and Second Amendments. In the McDonald v. Chicago (2010) case he declared that the right to keep and bear arms is applicable to state and local governments.
In cases concerning unreasonable searches and seizures (4th Amendment), Justice Thomas often favors law enforcement.
Concerning abortion, Justice Thomas, siding with Rehnquist and Scalia, stated that the Constitution does not address the issue of abortion. He dissented in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that reaffirmed Roe v. Wade. Rehnquist wrote: “we believe Roe was wrongly decided, and that it can and should be overruled consistently with our traditional approach to stare decisis in constitutional cases.”
In Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), Justice Thomas dissented and wrote: “Although a State may permit abortion, nothing in the Constitution dictates that a State must do so.”
In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Justice Thomas wrote a one-page dissent where he called the Texas anti-gay sodomy statute “uncommonly silly”. However, Thomas wrote that the Constitution does not contain a right to privacy, therefore, he did not vote to strike the statute down. He saw the issue as a matter for the states to decide for themselves. The same goes for the argument over gay marriage.


Justice Stephen Breyer ...
Born in 1938, Justice Breyer has been a lawyer, professor, and jurist. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994.
Justice Breyer approach to law is pragmatic and constantly attacks “originalism”. He looks more to interpretation, purpose and consequences rather than its original context. He has consistently voted in favor of abortion rights. He has also defended the Supreme Court's use of foreign law and international law as an authority in decisions. He was in constant argument with Justice Scalia. He is considered an activist judge rather than a constitutional one, like Justice Elena Kagan – who also should not have been confirmed.
In a Wikipedia entry:
“In an interview on Fox News Sunday on December 12, 2010, Breyer stated that based on the values and the historical record, the Founding Fathers of the United States never intended guns to go unregulated and that history supports his and the other dissenters' views in District of Columbia v. Heller.”
Justice Breyer is not a friend of the Second Amendment as written.


Justice Elena Kagan was born in 1960 and was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2010 and erroneously confirmed in August of 2010. Despite a clear and lengthy justified dissension by Heritage Foundation pointing out that Kagan is an activist liberal and “pro-corporate” judge, he became the fourth woman to serve as a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).
Justice Kagan was an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Law School in 1991 and became a tenured professor of law in 1995. While there she published a law review concerning First Amendment hate speech concerning the Supreme Court ruling in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul that discussed the significance of governmental motive in regulating speech. In other words, she was for the government regulating speech that is contrary to the First Amendment. She was still confirmed by the Democrat-controlled Senate. She attests that flag burning is a part of free speech – which is not conducive with her activist attitude toward government regulating speech in general, especially when it comes to “hate” speech. She has been closely associated with then Senator Joe Biden since he appointed her in 1993 for the Senate Judiciary Committee. During that time she worked closely with another activist justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was popular with her students.
After serving in the White House and her failed judicial nomination, Kagan returned to academia in 1999. She tried to return to University of Chicago Law School, but the school decided not to allow her return from Clinton administration position. She was accepted by Harvard Law School. She became Dean in 2003.
While a Dean, Kagan upheld the policy of barring military recruiters from the university because she was against the military policy against gays and lesbians. She sent an e-mail to students and faculty that military recruiters had shown up on campus violating policy, stating: "This action causes me deep distress. I abhor the military's discriminatory recruitment policy." She also wrote that it was "a profound wrong—a moral injustice of the first order."[51]
From 2005 to 2008, Kagan was a member of the Research Advisory Council of Goldman Sachs that is a target by the Democrat-Socialists.
Kagan is the first justice that has had no prior experience as a judge (which helps in confirmation hearings by looking at decisions) – but still ignored her activist record as a law professor and actions while serving Clinton Administration.
Kagan joined five justices to uphold Obamacare in King v. Burwell. She also joined majority in Obergefell v. Hodges that made same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states – when it should have been turned over for the individual states to decide. Reason: State regulate marriage – so how does federal government have authority to intervene? No constitutional principle was presented in favor of that ruling.
Between October and June of 2011, Kagan had to recuse herself from 28 out of the 78 cases heard because of her previous assignments and remember, she was never a judge. What good is a justice that must be recuse that many times?
Kagan has voted 94% in agreement with activist justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor; and 97% of the time with Justice Breyer.


Justice Samuel Alito ….
Born in 1950, Justice Alito was nominated by George W. Bush, serving on the court since 2006. He is considered a “practical originalist”. His majority opinions include McDonald v. Chicago and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. He is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment as it was written.
Alito graduated from Yale Law School in 1975 where he was the editor of the Yale Law Journal. He was US Solicitor General Assistant to Rex E. Lee from 1981 to 1985. He was Deputy Assistant Attorney General from 1985 to 1987. Alito was US Attorney for District of New Jersey from 1987 to 1990.
His notable majority cases include Planned Parenthood v. Casey that overturned one part of a law regulating abortion concerning a provision that mandated that married women first inform their husbands. Alito was the third judge on panel to disagree. He upheld that the spousal notification mandate should have remained.
Justice Alito has upheld constitutional law in his decisions concerning the 1st, 4th and 8th Amendments in cases such as: Saxe v. State College Area School District, ACLU v. Schundler, and others.
In his dissenting opinion in Snyder v. Phelps, involving protesters at a military funeral, Alito stated: "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case." Other justices (Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Kagan) did not agree that the act was disrespectful to a fallen member of our military being buried and took the side of the picketers as being “freedom of peaceful assembly”.
In his confirmation hearing, Democrats on the panel were so brutally unjustified that Alito's wife, Martha Ann Alito, broke into tears. Even the ACLU opposed his nomination, but everyone knows that the organization is in the pocket of democrat-socialists. After a filibuster failed attempted by Senator John Kerry, the Senate confirmed Alito by a vote of 59-42. Only four Democrats voted to confirm.


Justice Sonia Sotomayor ….
Born in 1954 and nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed in 2009, she is the first Hispanic to become a justice. She received her J.D. From Yale Law School in 1979 after graduating from Princeton University in 1976. She worked as Assistant District Attorney in New York until 1984 when she entered private practice. She served the board of directors for the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund.
Sotomayor was nominated to US District Court for Southern District of New York by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and nominated to US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton.
Sotomayor is a civil rights activist. (Schuette v. BAMN & Utah v. Strieff)
Sotomayor was an active Democrat and was appointed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1988 as one of the founding members of the New York City Campaign Finance Board, serving four years. She was the youngest judge in the Southern District and first Hispanic federal judge in New York State. Sotomayor took on anti-government cases and received high ratings by liberal special interest groups. She especially handed out long sentences for white-collar crimes. She adopted a narrow “just the facts: approach to her decisions. She was confirmed as a justice with only two dissensions. Oddly, she declared she had great respect for Justice Clarence Thomas.
Sotomayor's nomination had been pending for almost a year before finally being confirmed in 1998 by a 67-29 vote. She is considered a “centrist” despite her activism and affiliation with the racist organization La Raza. The controversial organization listed Sotomayor as a member. She acknowledge it, but was still confirmed. The organization has been accused of using taxpayer funds for a radical racist agenda. She was quoted referring to a Donald Trump case: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” 
 
Justice Neil Gorsuch …
Born in 1967, Gorsuch was nominated by President Donald Trump to succeed Antonin Scalia after the Senate refused to nominate Merrick Garland in 2017. He is the newest of the justices so far. He is an advocate of textualism and originalism when it comes to the Constitution. He sides with Justice Clarence Thomas as an advocate of natural law jurisprudence.
Gorsuch was a clerk for US Court of Appeals in DC Circuit from 1991 to 1992 and then clerked for Justices Byron White and Anthony Kennedy from 1993 to 1994.
He is the first Supreme Court Justice to serve alongside another Justice for whom he once had clerked. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, Juris Doctor from Harvard, and Doctor of Philosophy in law from University of Oxford under supervision of philosopher John Finnis. His mother, Anne Gorsuch Burford, served in the Colorado House of Representatives and later appointed by President Ronald Reagan to be the first female Administrator of United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1981. Before serving in US Department of Justice, he had a private practice.
Gorsuch advocates a “broad definition of religious freedom”. He is geared toward “rule of law” principles which means he considers the Second Amendment to be part of the Constitution and the “law of the land”.
In 2014, Gorsuch joined a panel that found that “it was unconstitutional for a Colorado law to set the limit on donations for write-in candidates at half the amount for major party candidates.”
In Planned Parenthood v. Gary Herbert (2016), Gorsuch wrote for four dissenting judges when the Tenth Circuit denied a rehearing.
Gorsuch supports states rights and federalism. He is opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide on the basis that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”
Gorsuch is married to Marie Louise Gorsuch who is a British citizen he met while attending Oxford. They married at her Church of England parish in 1996. They live in Boulder, Colorado and have two daughters. He loves the outdoors and is an avid fly fisherman once fishing with Justice Scalia who also enjoys the sport. In Colorado he raises horses, chickens, and goats and often arranges ski trips with colleagues and friends. He has authored two non-fiction books: The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in 2006 and The Law of Judicial Precedent published in 2016. He is a recipient of the Harry S. Truman Foundation Stevens Award for outstanding public service in the field of law.
The importance of choosing Justices for SCOTUS cannot be overstated. They must be constitutionalists foremost and Justices must apply the Constitution, not “interpret” it. The practice of inserting foreign laws into case decisions should be stopped. The Constitution is the law of the land and thus all state and local governments must abide by it. They can add to it as an application, but they cannot legislate against it. Prime example would be the Second Amendment that many states defy.
While concealed-carry permits should not be required because the Second Amendment approves that, it is essential that only lawful citizens have such permits and that means a thorough background check for anyone applying for one, if required by a state government. However, any state concealed-carry permit should be accepted in all of the other states when a citizen travels across the United States; just as all states must comply with the Second Amendment.
The US Supreme Court should be ensuring that all state and local governments are complying with the Constitution and its amendments. This has not been the case.
Another problem over the decades is the Supreme Court “legislating from the bench”.
A Justice or even a Judge cannot be a political advocate or bias toward any specific organization or group.
Many cases and laws should have been turned over to the state (delegated to the respective state government), for example, the gay marriage issue. If the state is the one who issues marriage licenses, then it is the state judiciary and legislation that decides to accept same-sex marriage. However, whether state or federal, if same-sex marriage is accepted by the government it cannot force individuals to provide a wedding cake or any other service for a gay wedding because of personal/religious belief. The couple can go somewhere else. 
The following video is a good documentary about the Supreme Court ...
 
“The Obama administration came into Utah and said, 'We're not going to listen to what the U.S. Supreme Court said. 'We, the federal government, are going to recognize marriages in the state of Utah and Utah state law explicitly does not recognize as marriage,' and that was really, in my view, an abuse of power.” — Ted Cruz
"Those in power need checks and restraints lest they come to identify the common good for their own tastes and desires." —Justice William O. Douglas
 
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