i feel the winds of vindication blowing at my back, you know for years i've held this same sentiment, the world changes the court rarely does if installed as a right wing shill than you will do just that with rare occasions of conscious, but if you can't be put out to pasture than you crap all over the floor in this case it's elephant dung.
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[Update: please see this follow-up item too.] If People magazine were based in D.C., instead of their Sexiest Man Alive specials they might run Most Cynical Person Alive contests. Obviously there are lots of candidates, but at this moment you would have to give the nod to John Roberts.
Let us travel back in time all the way to the summer of 2005. Take literally one minute to listen to these famous words from earnest young appeals-court judge John Roberts:
Humility. Modesty. Restraint. Deference to precedent. "We're just calling balls and strikes."
That guy sounded so great. Really, watch this minute-long video and think what it would be like to have a person like that on the bench.
- in the "Obamacare" ruling two years ago, apparently decided that the institutional risk to the Court of blatantly coming across as just another branch of party politics outweighed the objections implicit in his prior rulings to the healthcare plan. So he found a way not to overturn the main legislative accomplishment of a president's first term, with all the hubbub that would ensue. As it happens, I was glad that the politics added up that way for him. But ...
- in this week's McCutcheon ruling, following Citizens United, he made up out of nowhere his own interpretation of how electoral politics and favor-trading works*—trumping that of Congress, composed 100 percent of elected members. Plus he invented his own post-Founders, no-input-from-Congress, precedent-be-damned theory of what "corruption" means. As it happens, I disagree with the results of this one. But the main point is that in their activist political sensibility neither this judgment nor the Obamacare one had the slightest connection to the person who so self-effacingly presented himself for confirmation nine years ago.
i remember feeling like whoa, oh no he didn't and republicans running around in full out hate mode this time it included the court, and we all saw sunshine, but cynicism prevailed and we waited for the other shoe to drop and it did via voter registration striking out part of it that seconds later sent NC and the rest back into the mode the court said they no longer needed watching for.
and now part duex of the court's kicking Progressive voters after they smacked us down. i just wrote again yesterday lifetiome nothing in our gov't should ever again be implemented and we should now have a recall and "we the people" decide who will be the ones to interpret law not those who have already usurped the intents and made them their own.
