| When Republicans are in a position to nominate a Supreme Court justice, they don't mind so much a judicial nominee who is a judicial activist and will "legislate from the bench." | ||||||||||||||||||
| [W]e've identified one reasonably objective and quantifiable measure of a judge's activism, and we've used it to assess the records of the justices on the current Supreme Court.
Here is the question we asked: How often has each justice voted to strike down a law passed by Congress? Since the Supreme Court assumed its current composition in 1994 [through the publication of this article in 2005], by our count it has upheld or struck down 64 Congressional provisions. That legislation has concerned Social Security, church and state, and campaign finance, among many other issues. We examined the court's decisions in these cases and looked at how each justice voted, regardless of whether he or she concurred with the majority or dissented. We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws.
Source: "So Who Are the Activists?" By PAUL GEWIRTZ and CHAD GOLDER - NY Times - July 6, 2005 [Judge Samuel A. Alito] has...been skeptical about the scope of Congressional power, voting to strike down laws that authorized suits under the Family and Medical Leave Act and made the possession of machine guns a crime. In 2000, Judge Alito, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, ruled that states were immune from suits under the Family and Medical Leave Act. In a dissent in 1996, he wrote that Congress did not have the authority to regulate the possession of machine guns under the commerce clause of the Constitution. In 1991, he wrote a dissent in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, saying a Pennsylvania law requiring women to notify their husbands before they had abortions was constitutional. [Eventually the Supreme Court reversed all three of these rulings. -- SpinShield] Last year, again writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Alito struck down another Pennsylvania law, one that prohibited advertisers from paying for alcohol advertisements in college newspapers. Source: "Rulings That Are Lucid and Methodically Based" By ADAM LIPTAK and JONATHAN D. GLATER - NY Times - 11/1/05 In 1973 a plurality of the Supreme Court argued that sex discrimination was entitled to the same rigorous constitutional scrutiny as race discrimination. But the E.R.A. was never ratified, and the Supreme Court didn’t go as far as the plurality suggested it might. In 1976, the court ruled that sex discrimination deserved only slightly less constitutional scrutiny than racial discrimination — a principle that even the E.R.A.’s opponents claimed to accept. To a Scalia-style strict constructionist, the Supreme Court decisions forbidding sex discrimination were presumably mistakes that should be at most grudgingly tolerated Source: "What’s a Liberal Justice Now?" - NY Times Magazine - May 26, 2009 No doubt these same champions of strict constructionism will be on their high horses again in September, when Chief Justice John Roberts and others on the corporate wing of the court will try to pervert the founders' intent, nullify the will of the people, and radically rewrite a century of legal precedent – all to advance the political agenda of corporate power. At issue are longstanding laws that ban corporations from spending their bottomless financial resources directly on election campaigns. In a quiet move just before the justices' [2009] summer vacation, Roberts got the court to schedule an extraordinary September reconsideration of two major campaign finance laws that the court previously okayed as constitutional. By reversing those rulings and declaring that corporate speech is equal to human speech, corporations would be unleashed to spend billions of dollars to control all of our elections. What the Roberts Court is up to goes way beyond judicial activism– It's a traitorous assault on America's democracy by corporate autocrats intent on imposing their political will through five old men in black robes. Source: "A TRAITOROUS ASSAULT ON OUR DEMOCRACY" by Jim Hightower - August 19, 2009 The ultimate act of judicial activism was Bush v. Gore - 1999, the Supreme Court decision that stopped the vote count in Florida (overturning the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court) and allowed Florida Secretary Of State Katherine Harris (a Republican operative) to declair Bush President of the United States. |
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