There's another SCOTUS nomination thread that's more appropriate for these kind of comments.
The more troubling thing is he doesn't ask questions , the impression it gives is that he is a mental lightweight. I would never say that about Scalia. He may have been a right wing bastard, but I've never heard anyone say he was stupid.
This is a condolences thread...agree with him or not, some modicum of respect is generally expected.I tend not to look to pathetic shills and hypocrites for guidance on what is appropriate, so it would appear your pretend-time mod panties have been bunched up for nothing.
I do however appreciate the laugh; trying to reconcile this concern of yours here with all the threads you've regurgitated unrelated anti-Hillary tripe into before damn near brought a tear to my eye. :biggrin: Moregood stuff.
I have also wondered just what Kagan's qualifications were for the job. I get that she was a dean of the nation's top law school, but being a dean of a school seems like an awfully inadequate preparation to be on the nation's highest court.
By historical standards her qualifications were certainly perfectly strong. Basically in addition to serving as a law clerk for the DC Circuit Court and Thurgood Marshall for the Supreme Court, she also spent time as White House Council during the Clinton administration in addition to her time as Solicitor General during her "practicing" part of her legal career.I have also wondered just what Kagan's qualifications were for the job. I get that she was a dean of the nation's top law school, but being a dean of a school seems like an awfully inadequate preparation to be on the nation's highest court.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalp...tml?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitterObama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan has been criticized by some Republican senators for lacking judicial experience. But Justice Antonin Scalia, the High Courts most outspoken conservative, said Wednesday that he likes that the former Harvard Law School dean and Solicitor General is not currently a judge.
When I first came to the Supreme Court, three of my colleagues had never been a federal judge, said Scalia who joined the Court in 1986 after being nominated by President Reagan. William Rehnquist came to the Bench from the Office of Legal Counsel. Byron White was Deputy Attorney General. And Lewis Powell who was a private lawyer in Richmond and had been president of the American Bar Association.
Currently, there is nobody on the Court who has not served as a judge --indeed, as a federal judge -- all nine of us, he continued. . . . I am happy to see that this latest nominee is not a federal judge and not a judge at all.
And Trump seems to think his sister will make an excellent SCOTUS justice.
(To be clear, I am not evaluating his sister's qualification which I have absolutely no idea about. I am just pointing out human tendencies and inclinations)
ahh yes Trump:
"if she wasn't my daughter, I'd F her"
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there have been any except Miers and Kagan in my adult lifetime. Rehnquist and Powell were the last, and while I usually find more Nixon parallels with the Hildabeast, here Obama and W stand alone with Nixon on nominating SCOTUS justices with judicial experience. Well, actually I suppose it's just Obama standing alongside Nixon, since Bush's ideology pick withdrew after being soundly rejected by everyone. Mostly Presidents postwar have nominated justices with actual judicial appellate experience. Well, with the notable exceptions of Nixon and Obama. Maybe this time we'll get a community organizer . . .Sorry, I should have been more clear. I meant objection to a Republican nominee who had excellent qualifications similar to Kagan's. Almost everybody thought Miers was a poor choice. Kagan, in contrast, had wide support from both sides of the aisle.
A great many do, and Sotomayor didn't say otherwise. That's where the "whole comment in context" part becomes critical instead of just knee-jerk spasms about racism. I suppose when the race card is the only card in your deck, it's what you play.
But perhaps I'm being unfair. Instead of fixating on that one comment, let's look at her "many" others. You said:
"Sotomayor was at least arguably unreasonable, having asserted many times that a Latina would make better decisions than a white person."Show us some of those other many times, and we can consider them, too.
This frankly appears to be a flat out mistaken argument if I understand it correctly.Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think there have been any except Miers and Kagan in my adult lifetime. Rehnquist and Powell were the last, and while I usually find more Nixon parallels with the Hildabeast, here Obama and W stand alone with Nixon on nominating SCOTUS justices with judicial experience. Well, actually I suppose it's just Obama standing alongside Nixon, since Bush's ideology pick withdrew after being soundly rejected by everyone. Mostly Presidents postwar have nominated justices with actual judicial appellate experience. Well, with the notable exceptions of Nixon and Obama. Maybe this time we'll get a community organizer . . .
If the idea of requiring judicial appellate experience to those appointed to the highest court of the land for life strikes you as a "rather bizarre argument", then I doubt you understand it correctly, although I'm not at all sure how it could be any simpler. Would you consider it equally bizarre for professional football recruiters to be recruiting from colleges just because the last 11 Rookies of the Year "just happened" to have college football experience? Should we also be looking outside politics (which at the moment is Trump and Carson) for our next President since it's pure coincidence that the last 10 Presidents "just happened" to have held political office? Hell, we get a chance to throw out Presidents after four years; SCOTUS justices serve for life, and a bad one might well be there for several decades.This frankly appears to be a rather bizarre argument if I understand it correctly.
You're basically saying that because 11 successful Supreme Court Justice nominees in a row happened to have judicial experience there suddenly is a new requirement which absolutely was not the case in any way previously. (With some of those justices staying on the court until rather recently, such as Powell until 1988, Byron White until 1992, and Rehnquist until 2005.)
Basically besides Powell and Rehnquist you had John F. Kennedy nominating Arthur Goldberg with no previous judicial experience, or even specifically a position of public service specifically involving the law, while also nominating Byron White had no judicial experience with his early professional career notably including three seasons in the NFL for the Detroit Lions.
While John Marshall Harlan had technically previously served as an Appeals Court Judge, this was for less than a year when he was nominated to the Supreme Court by Eisenhower so obviously the extent of his judicial experience was not the key factor behind his nomination. Earn Warren had absolutely no experience as a judge when nominated by Eisenhower, and has just served three terms as Governor of California.
Truman nominated Tom C. Clark who again had no judicial experience, and Harold Burton who had no judicial experience and had been serving as a US Senator at the time.
In other words, even staying post FDR successfully nominating candidates who had no actual prior judicial experience (or practically none) was clearly extremely common. The idea you suddenly now have something like or close to an absolute requirement that a candidate have prior experience as a judge strikes me as extremely unconvincing with the actual true origin of the argument being pretty plainly political opportunism.
As I previously noted, you also had Scalia specifically express the view publicly that Kagan coming from a non-judicial background was actually a good thing for the court. (With presumably the argument being there were advantages to having a different perspective being brought into court discussions.)
Your argument doesn't appear even vaguely convincing at this point, and basically was previously set on a wrong premise. (I also just realized I left out Abe Fortas who had no judicial experience prior to being successfully nominated as an Associate Justice by Lyndon Johnson.) The fact of the matter is post FDR prior to those 11 Justices in a row, 56% of the Justices to the Supreme Court had no judicial experience prior to their nomination or virtually no experience in one case. (And plenty of them were generally considered highly successful and accomplished as judges.) With the past experience aspect you're starting with, the initial strange deviation would have been the Presidents going away from regularly nominating candidates who didn't have judicial experience.If the idea of requiring judicial appellate experience to those appointed to the highest court of the land for life strikes you as a "rather bizarre argument", then I doubt you understand it correctly, although I'm not at all sure how it could be any simpler. Would you consider it equally bizarre for professional football recruiters to be recruiting from colleges just because the last 11 Rookies of the Year "just happened" to have college football experience? Should we also be looking outside politics (which at the moment is Trump and Carson) for our next President since it's pure coincidence that the last 10 Presidents "just happened" to have held political office? Hell, we get a chance to throw out Presidents after four years; SCOTUS justices serve for life, and a bad one might well be there for several decades.
The array of experience is less extensive than you might think with for instance virtually all of them coming from an ivy league college background for example. There are key areas of experience which some observers have noted as potential deficiencies for the current court such as no-one having experience defending a client in a criminal case to bring that perspective in consideration when considering all the different cases impacting someone at least accused of a crime. Another potential issue is that none of the current justices have any experience directly running a campaign for elected office to bring into consideration when hearing campaign finance cases. (And it was common to have at least one Justice with some experience in the area of being an elected politician in the past.)For the other, I'm all for having different perspectives being brought into court discussions, but it's not like justices are hatched out as appellate judges. Presumably they all have had different backgrounds in addition to serving as appellate judges, no?
Basically what you're apparently utterly missing is other legal training and experience as a lawyer (rather than necessarily as a judge) is highly relevant to the court. Basically practically all modern appointees have at least some experience either arguing cases before a court or playing a key role in formulating and presenting arguments before a court. In either case that experience is extremely useful for understanding how things work on the other side and what things to consider and be aware of if they are in such a position. (I.E. maybe they have an obvious weak case in one instance they were stuck with and tried to conceal it with their arguments, and as judge they can be on the lookout for similar signs of one side trying to hide the weakness of their case.) Recent justices including Elena Kagan also had experience as law clerks in her case both at the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court level which did give her key hands on experience behind the scenes on a large portion of the aspects of being a Federal judge.If we're going to call a total lack of experience a good thing in someone appointed for life, why not go whole hog and get even more of a good thing? There is no Constitutional requirement that a SCUTUS justice have any formal legal training whatsoever, so why not advocate for Obama's nominee to be other than a lawyer?
wtf is going on in this photo? Is that his sister? They look a bit in :wub:
One of Poindexters companies was involved in a case that made it to the high court. Last year, the Supreme Court declined to hear a case involving an age discrimination lawsuit filed against one of these companies, court records show.
The nature of Poindexters relationship with Scalia remained unclear Tuesday, one of several lingering questions about his visit. It was not known whether Scalia had paid for his own ticket to fly to the ranch or if someone else picked up the tab, just as it was not immediately clear if Scalia had visited before.
It is also still not known who else was at the Texas ranch for the weekend, and unless that is revealed, there could be concerns about who could have tried to raise an issue around Scalia, said Stephen Gillers, who teaches legal and judicial ethics at the New York University School of Law. He compared it to unease that arises when judges and officials from major companies are invited to seminars or educational events that bring them together for periods of time.
I did, but I can repeat myself. You're wrong.Correct me if I'm wrong ...
Hard for me to say since I have no idea what you think you're talking about. In general, however, it's usually you who invented the stuff I purportedly come up with. What Straw King Werepossum lacks in honestly he more than makes up for with creative writing.Thanks for the chuckle though. Suggesting that a perfectly clear phrase might mean something different if uttered often enough is priceless. How do you come up with this stuff?
Anybody know why Obama won't be attending the funeral?
Yes, that's the plan announced yesterday. Obama will pay his respects Friday. The White House didn't offer an explanation. Speculation is Obama felt his presence at the funeral would be disruptive to Scalia's family.Maybe to make it easier for Scalia's family. I'm pretty sure I saw news that he will be layed(?) instate by the courthouse on Friday. I'd be Obama visits the body then.
Anybody know why Obama won't be attending the funeral?
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/obama-no-scalia-funeral-219384Earnest refused to be drawn out about why the president would not attend the funeral, saying he didnt know what the president plans to do on Saturday, and Scalias son, Eugene, did not immediately respond to a question about whether the family requested that Obama not attend the funeral.