NCB

LOL!! He's not extreme right. If he were, he would not have sailed through the CoA vote with only 3 nays (Kennedy, Durbin, and Schumer). Sounds like hes more of the Rehnquist mold than a Thomas or Scalia.

Becasue I have very little info on him, I reserved judgement until I heard/read what democraticunderground, Schumer, and PAW had to say. They're not happy, which in turn, makes me happy. Not my ideal pick, but a solid conservative pick.

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roachboy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Roberts_Jr.

that was fast...

if you're prochoice, you should get an idea of where this guy stands, if you do not already know from this evening's festivities:

http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/fact...fm&PageID=1916

and this is kinda cool:

http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb06...TS_JOHN_G%20JR

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

j8ear

I love it!

This dude is the whitest, malest, conservativest, pro-life right wing fundie I could have possibly imagined.

With elite breeding and privledge to boot!

He's been a judicial beaurocrat for all but 3 years of his entire legal career.

I sense a trap.

/watching with baited excitement....

-bear

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It's alot easier to ask for forgiveness then it is to ask for permission.

MSD

Bush needs to sacrifice someone so that his opponents take out all their aggression on the first target, and he can slide in someone less objectionable, but still agreeable to his administration.

AVoiceOfReason

I know nothing about Roberts, but can tell a lot about a man by his enemies. Put Kennedy, Durbin and Schumer on one side against Roberts and that tells me the guy's probably OK.

In this debate, I'm not going to listen to a single Republican or pundit complaining about the opposition to Roberts if he actively opposed Breyer or Ginsberg. I didn't like the judicial philosophy of either, but they were qualified to be judges on the SC.

Likewise, I'm not listening to any Democrats or talking head complain about the power of the President to make the selection unless they did so when Clinton made his choices. I heard Hatch say that Bush talked to about 70 senators before announcing Roberts, and that is more than what was normally done.

And I welcome a showdown on the filibuster on nominees--I'm for an up or down vote no matter which party is in power.

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AVOR

A Voice Of Reason, not necessarily the ONLY one.

NCB

Odds that Roberts will recieve same treatment:1500:1

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roachboy

gathering infotainment concerning the bush nominee
thought i would post it here.

roberts is the judge who gave the bush adiminstration a free pass on habeas corpus matters...no need to bring folk stranded in bush admin's legal balck hole to trial...

source: http://slate.msn.com/id/2123055/

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

NCB

From 2003:

.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,85640,00.html



Anyways, this time it will become personal for Chucky boy

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roachboy

isn't this interesting? folk who oppose the bush administration are trying to gather information about robert's record--the right media apparatus is already working to divert attention onto personality conflicts and trivia as a way to generate an adverse response on the part of the right's footsoldiers to any serious interrogation of roberts by the judicary committee. presumably the "logic" of this tack is to cause the right to question any attempt to evaluate roberts on his record and politics. so much for respect for process--but this has never been the strong suit of the populist right in its present form.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

j8ear

It is so amusing when you [and others you have 'converted'] recite this nonsense...

"The right media apparatus"...as if repeating this dillusion over and over and over and over and over will somehow magically convert it into truth.

Hey, that's what the [fringe far-] left is exclusively about. Poster Child=you.

I admire and respect your sticktoittiveness, that's for sure, everything being so black and white for you and all

You have a gift for reframing, and twisting reality into something that suits your failed and dying ideology.

-bear

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It's alot easier to ask for forgiveness then it is to ask for permission.

roachboy

i was going to respond to your last post, bear...
but i find that even typing this dignifies it too much.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

j8ear

Instead you took the high road.

It's settled then. The media is part of a vast right wing conspiracy out to block and derail the careful and thoughtful deliberations of the senate judiciary commity, by preventing access to or publication of anything in anyway derogatory, revealing or controversial about bushco's nominee.

You've made a believer out of me ;-)

-bear

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It's alot easier to ask for forgiveness then it is to ask for permission.

roachboy

there really is nothing in what i said that should have lead you to this conclusion bear.
not even a hostile reading of it--what seperates your interpretation from a hostile reading is the term reading, which would imply that you have to respect to a certain extent the words that actually turn up in the text that you respond to.
i dont think this is an unreasonable expectation, that in a debate the arguments try to stick to the words actually written, as opposed to what you, apparently, would prefer to see.

this nomination/confirmation process involves pressure group artillery from all sides--roberts is an interesting nomination from the tactical viewpoint in that he is at once quite far to the right (from what one can tell given information out there so far) and difficult to oppose on credentials grounds--so the fight is going to be played out across robert's obviously very conservative politics.

given the level of pressure already being brought to bear on this confirmation process, it is not unreasonable to wonder about how various tactics will develop and be deployed to structure opinion on the nominee and the process. my response to ncb's post earlier simply reacted to the kind of trivializing bite he took from fox news as an early example of what i expect to follow in spades from right media. that's it, the only point i was really making.

as for the question of right media or the conservative media apparatus in general--i really do not care if you are bothered by the characterization of it as a single, tightly controlled field of positions. that such a media system exists, that it is tightly co-ordinated and very very well financed, that it is engaged with the conservative think tanks circuit and that it has acquired very considerable cultural power in the states is empirically evident. that a central characteristic of this media apparatus beyond tight co-ordination of political line is the systematic blurring of information and political argument is also obvious. that the right for years has defended what is innovative and dangerous about their repackaging of information as a reactive move is only interesting in that it is an aspect of the general conservative reliance on projection to legitimate their actions. this too is empirically evident--so i really do not care in the least whether you like the terminology or not--and since you offer nothing whatsoever of any substance that would justify having a debate on the question, i consider the matter ended here.

if you want, get some actual information, make some arguments about that information, and start another thread and maybe there could be a debate about this. but i am not wasting any more of my time with you here.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

j8ear

word,

-bear

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It's alot easier to ask for forgiveness then it is to ask for permission.

Zodiak

For a fellow who does not capitalize his sentences, this is a very concise and precise characterization if exactly what I and many other Americans have noticed ever since the loss of the Fairness Doctrine and the Media Consolidation Act of 1996.

I agree wholeheartedly and believe that a return to civilized discourse in the public sphere would require a repeal of both Acts, no matter who passed them.

<apology in advance to roachboy if he thinks I'm picking on him about his capitalization. I realize it is his style and place no judgement on spelling, capitalization, or failure to properly place diacritical marks on anyone on this board.>

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They shackle our minds as we're left on the cross. When ignornace reigns, life is lost!

Zach de la Rocha

Elphaba

The following is an analysis of Roberts' writings during the Reagan administration. I am more than curious as to why this administration refuses to release his writings during the BushOne administration.

News Analysis: Court Nominee's Record Reveals an Advocate for the Right
By David E. Rosenbaum
The New York Times

Thursday 28 July 2005

Washington - The early 1980's were a heady time for conservatives in Washington.

Ronald Reagan was president, and after years on the outside, some of the strongest voices in the conservative movement - men like Edwin Meese III, James G. Watt, William Bradford Reynolds and Theodore B. Olson - were in high positions in the government and were determined to reverse what they believed to be years of liberal policies in areas like civil rights, environmental protection, criminal law and immigration.

John G. Roberts, a young lawyer in the Justice Department in 1981 and 1982 and on the White House counsel's staff from 1982 to 1986, held positions too junior for him to set policy in those days.

But his internal memorandums, some of which have become public in recent days, reveal a philosophy every bit as conservative as that of the policy makers on the front lines of the Reagan revolution and give more definition to his image than was apparent in the first days after President Bush picked him last week to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

On almost every issue he dealt with where there were basically two sides, one more conservative than the other, the documents from the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library show that Judge Roberts, now of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, advocated the more conservative course. Sometimes, he took positions even more conservative than those of his prominent superiors.

He favored less government enforcement of civil rights laws rather than more. He criticized court decisions that required a thick wall between church and state. He took the side of prosecutors over criminal defendants. He maintained that the role of the courts should be limited and the powers of the president enhanced.

Mr. Roberts was only 26 when he joined the Reagan administration and 31 when he left. But the ideology he expressed as a young man helps explain why conservative activists seem pleased with him, even though others Mr. Bush might have picked have a more detailed public record of conservative advocacy.

Consider Mr. Roberts's stands on some of the hottest political issues of the 1980's as revealed in the newly public documents:

Busing In 1985, when he was an assistant White House counsel, Mr. Roberts took issue with Mr. Olson, an assistant attorney general at the time, on whether Congress could enact a law that outlawed busing to achieve school desegregation.

Mr. Olson, who considerably outranked Mr. Roberts and who was one of the nation's most widely known conservative lawyers on constitutional matters, was arguing that Congress's hands were tied because the Supreme Court had ruled that busing was constitutionally required in some circumstances.

Mr. Roberts wrote in a memorandum to the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, that Mr. Olson had misinterpreted the law. He said evidence showed that by producing white flight, busing promoted segregation rather than remedying it.

"It strikes me as more than passing strange for us to tell Congress it cannot pass a law preventing courts from ordering busing when our own Justice Department invariably urges this policy on the courts," he wrote.

Sex discrimination Mr. Roberts also challenged Mr. Reynolds, who was assistant attorney general for civil rights and another prominent conservative who outranked him.

In 1981, he urged Attorney General William French Smith to reject Mr. Reynolds's position that the department should intervene on behalf of female prisoners who were discriminated against in a job-training program. If male and female prisoners had to be treated equally, Mr. Roberts argued, "the end result in this time of state prison budgets may be no programs for anyone."

Judicial restraint Mr. Roberts consistently argued that courts should be stripped of authority over busing, school prayer and other matters. In a letter in November 1981 to Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, for whom he had clerked and whom he considered a mentor, Mr. Roberts wrote that he and his colleagues in the administration were determined to "halt unwarranted interference" by the courts in the activities of Congress and the executive branch.

A month later, he wrote to Rex Lee, who was the solicitor general at the time, that courts were "ill-suited to policy making because they are limited to the facts presented to them."

Court-stripping is still an issue in American politics. Last year, the House approved legislation that would prevent federal courts from ordering states to recognize same-sex marriages in other states. The measure never became law.

Presidential war powers In 1983, Arthur J. Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice, wrote a letter to the White House questioning President Reagan's constitutional authority to send troops to Grenada without a declaration of war.

Mr. Roberts replied with a ringing endorsement of the president's power. "This has been recognized at least since the time President Jefferson sent the Marines to the shores of Tripoli," he wrote. "While there is no clear line separating what the president may do on his own and what requires a formal declaration of war, the Grenada mission seems to be clearly acceptable as an exercise of executive authority, particularly when it is recalled that neither the Korean nor Vietnamese conflicts were declared wars."

Affirmative action Mr. Roberts held that affirmative action programs were bound to fail because they required "the recruiting of inadequately prepared candidates."

"Under our view of the law," he wrote in 1981, "it is not enough to say that blacks and women have been historically discriminated against as groups and are therefore entitled to special preferences."

Immigration Mr. Roberts took strong issue with a Supreme Court decision striking down a Texas law that had allowed school districts to deny enrollment to children who were in the country illegally. The court had overreached its authority, he wrote, and the Justice Department had made a mistake by not entering the case on the state's side.

Church-state Mr. Roberts was sharply critical of the Supreme Court decision outlawing prayer in public schools, and he said the court had exceeded its authority when it allowed any citizens to challenge the transfer of public property to a parochial school.

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"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." Molly Ivins - 1944-2007