"The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, responsible for many suicide attacks on Israelis, condemned the London bombings.
"Targeting civilians in their transport means and lives is denounced and rejected," Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy chief of the group's political bureau told Reuters in Damascus by telephone."
I smell hypocrisy.
The Brown decision of 1954, desegregating the schools of 17 states and the District of Columbia, awakened the nation to the court's new claim to power. Hailed by liberal elites -- and finding no resistance from a Democratic Congress or president who spent his afternoons at Burning Tree -- Warren's court went off on a rampage.It invented new rights for criminals and put new restrictions on cops and prosecutors. It reassigned students to schools by race and ordered busing to bring it about, tearing cities apart. It ordered God, prayer and Bible-reading out of classrooms. It said pornography was constitutionally protected, making Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein First Amendment heroes, rather than felons. It ruled naked dancing a protected form of free expression. It declared abortion a constitutional right and sodomy constitutionally protected behavior.
Gee Pat, I suppose that you think that Miranda and Mapp were terrible things, but I don't. I know that you think that Warren did terrible things, but let us take a cursory look here.
"It outlawed the death penalty, abolished terms limits on members of Congress voted by state referendums, and told high school coaches to stop praying in locker rooms and students to stop saying prayers at graduation. It ordered the Ten Commandments out of schoolhouses and courthouses. It condoned discrimination against white students in violation of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. And, two weeks ago, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that towns can seize private homes and turn them over to private developers."I don't really see much here that I have a problem with, with the exception of eminent domain and that is not a province of the Warren court. But you seem to think that there is some conspiracy.
"In every election since 1964, the court -- its liberal bias and usurped powers -- has been at issue. Nixon's narrow victory in 1968 was attributable in part to his pledge to "strengthen the peace forces as against the criminal forces in society" and put a Southerner on the Supreme Court.Attacks upon court decisions seen as pro-criminal and anti-Christian have been a staple of Republican oratory that has given the GOP seven victories in 10 presidential elections and raised party strength from a third of the House and Senate in 1965, to majorities in both houses in 2005.
Hence the Judges War. Left and Right both know that at stake in the nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor is control of the last citadel of liberal power in America. For not one of the radical reforms imposed by our judicial dictatorship would have been approved by Congress."
Patently false rhetoric. How many of the current justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Your argument is so very flawed. But I appreciate your attempt to use liberal as a pejorative. Progressive thinking is not something that you handle well.
"If conservatives can recapture the court, social and moral issues can be returned to where they belong: elected legislatures and executives. The Left will lose its power to advance its social agenda and see a rollback of a revolution imposed undemocratically upon America over 50 years."That last paragraph my friends is very frightening. The man looks back 50 years from the perspective of a white male and views the world through myopic eyes. He has come out and said that he is not in favor of civil rights, that he favors a society that is tilted towards the past. Regressive behavior is not something that will serve us well here.
WASHINGTON - Dwight D. Eisenhower called his Supreme Court appointments the "biggest damn fool mistake I ever made."I think that this is something that you really cannot predict because it is hard to say how someone will vote once they reach the highest court of the land.
Richard Nixon unwittingly named the future liberal author of
Roe v. Wade. George H.W. Bush's choice now evokes a GOP grumble, "No more Souters!"
"There is a long history of those who didn't turn out as expected," said Tom Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who frequently argues before the high court. "It has something to do with their independence — justices, once they're appointed, answering to nobody but themselves."And I think that it is clear that this happens with some frequency.
Noting the first President Bush's choice of David H. Souter, who has since become a consistent vote in the court's liberal bloc, some conservatives have said "Gonzales is Spanish for Souter." Gonzales has dismissed the criticism, saying it is the president's opinion that matters.It is a very serious appointment because this is the ultimate in tenure.
Justices hold lifetime appointments and are charged with upholding the Constitution, a duty of political independence that requires them to strike down unlawful acts of Congress or the president. Still, there are legal gray areas that can bring cries of dismay from interest groups if justices don't rule as anticipated.I cannot remember a time in which a justice was removed, but there must be a mechanism in place so that a justice who is not meeting the grade can be taken out. For example, what happens if one of them was stricken by some disease that rendered them unable to perform their duties.
The court's internal dynamics also play a factor. Justices craft their opinions with an eye toward attracting at least a five-vote majority. If they adopt a hard-line position on principle, justices risk alienating colleagues and writing lonely dissents for years.It is hard to imagine what the US would look like without the Warren court.
"Generally speaking, nominees who have evolved in unanticipated ways did not have federal court backgrounds," said David Garrow, a Supreme Court historian at Emory University. "It's a response to the pressures of Washington, with the Supreme Court presenting legal questions they did not have to confront before."
They include Chief Justice Earl Warren and Justice William Brennan, two Eisenhower appointees who from the 1950s to the 1970s led the court in assaulting racial segregation and expanding individual rights against the government. Warren was a former Republican governor of California; Brennan, a New Jersey state court judge, was coveted partly as a Catholic.
Eisenhower later said the two were among his biggest presidential mistakes.
Other "disappointments," according to historians, were Harry Blackmun, Nixon's law-and-order choice who penned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision making abortion a constitutional right. He later opposed the death penalty. Souter's primary previous experience was on state courts.And now for speculation on why O'Connor left.
The Supreme Court currently splits 5-4 on polarizing social issues such as the death penalty, even though seven of the nine justices were named by Republican presidents. That's because two of them — Souter and John Paul Stevens, who was chosen by President Gerald Ford — typically vote with the two Democratic appointees.
O'Connor, the first female justice, and Anthony Kennedy, President Reagan's compromise choice after the doomed bid of strong conservative Robert Bork, also have drifted left in recent years, making the conservative majority a fragile one.
Arthur Hellman, a constitutional law expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said he believes O'Connor might have been partly pushed away by the fiery conservative rhetoric of JusticeNow we shall have to wait and see.
Antonin Scalia, whom the president has cited as the justice he most admires.
A new justice in the strident Scalia mold might have the same moderating effect on Kennedy that Scalia had on O'Connor, Hellman said.
"I think you have a number of justices who, after serving some time on the court, say, 'I like to be in the middle. I like to be in the balance,'" he said. "If you see an extreme on one side, you might recoil and it pushes you into the other camp."
For Bush, the lessons of judicial nominees might mean he chooses a conservative with an extensive paper trail in federal court who won't alienate his or her colleagues and who could also avoid a bruising confirmation battle.
It could also mean that Bush might have to balance the benefits of a historical first, such as the groundbreaking selection of a Hispanic justice, against a firm conservative ideology.
Still, that might not be enough. Speaking three months ago at a university in Towson, Md., O'Connor said perhaps only time could tell how a prospective justice turns out.
"I frankly do not know how anyone going on the court would be able to predict the thousands of issues that come before the court," she said. "I myself couldn't have told President Reagan what I would do on all these issues, because I hadn't faced them."
