Here is Jesse Jackson's execrable anti-Alito rant. Ugh.
UPDATE: I deleted the long quote. I didn't like the way it looked, taking up all that space at the top of the blog. Go over there and read it. It's disgusting and completely distorted and unfair to Alito.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Todd Zywicki takes special interest in Jackson's promotion of the "Constitution in Exile" conspiracy theory.
MORE: Steven Kaus at Huffington Post reads this post as flaking out over Jackson's use of the term "Constitution in Exile." Makes you wonder about Kaus's ability to read and present things straight, doesn't it? I admit I could have itemized what I didn't like about Jackson's piece, but I just didn't want to bother with it.
November 9, 2005
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17 comments:
Dave: Exactly. I am sure many people will read this and assume he must be right and Alito is a terrible political reactionary.
Saul: The fact remains that Bush has the appointment power and he's picked a worthy jurist. Actually, I'm not really sure what you're driving at.
Saul,
Money heavy campaigning and the interpretation of law are hardly comparable entities. Are you suggesting that our law (and interpretation of such) should change depending on the type of campaigns we run in order to elect our democratic representatives?
How does that commercial go, "Your long term investments shouldn't be altered by daily headlines." Politics come and go, the law is the steady reminder that the ebb and flow revolves around a standard, not the other way around.
I'm waiting for Cindy Sheehan to critique Alito's rulings, or has she already??
Whoa, a "return to states' rights"? How subversive!
What a disgusting editorial. It's very "I'm not saying he's Hitler, but..." isn't it?
I dunno that Revvum Jackson is that far off. He is the only man alive other than Ralph Neas, who noticed that we conservative attorneys have been evilly grinning and rubbing our crinkly hands together, a la C. Montgomery Burns, waiting for the day we can stop paying our Black law clerks and associates, in order to keep 'em down and wring free legal work out of them. Well, we'll still probably have to comp them dinner if they work late, and provide sleeping cots in the break rooms, but generally it should really cut into associate labor costs, especially as our legal workforce gets more diverse.
My conservative friends who work in the IT world are also looking forward to the bidneth that segregated Black and White servers will generate for them. I mean, just look at Gateway computers, with that whole cow thing. The black is separate from the White! No mixed gray colors!
Coincidence?
I think not.
/sarcastic disgust&outrage
Jackson may have credibility. What he does not have is shame or virtue. He has plenty of gall and balls the size of Jupiter.
Activists and the civil rights movement. To some degree you're right, but Brown was a proper interp of the 14th A. which says that states cannot discriminate based on race (strict scrutiny, etc...) Also using Title VII and Commerce Clause,the amendments against poll taxes etc. That's judges interpreting laws on the books passed by the elected branches of gov't. SCOTUS didn't make up the right to have equal school facilities they just corrected the asinine definition of equal facilities from 1896. Like Roe -- just because it's precedent does not mean it's good law or should be followed.
Killing a human being (Not "person") is not as bad as keeping kids from a good school? Or at least important an issue enough for us at least to have a political debate on the issue? So important that we can't be trusted to have a reasoned debate but need judges to instruct us on when life begins and when it can be taken?
I'm really fascinated by the contrast between the picture of Alito painted by people who've seen his legal thinking close up, and those (or at least those who don't like him) who've just read about the outcomes of his decisions.
What's remarkable is that the second group has such inhumanly acute perceptions, that they can detect and infalliably interpret subliminal cues in those decisions, even (or perhaps especially) if they haven't read them. And by interpreting these cues they can, literally, read his mind, and form a much more accurate and complete picture of the way he thinks than any of his colleagues have ever been able to do. He fooled everybody, but he can't fool Jesse Jackson.
What's really sad, I think, is the way the extreme-far-right-wing extremist radical neocon reactionary radical extremists are trying to paint this as some kind of partisanism.
Julian Morrison, if people hear the same thing, repeated incessantly by enough voices for a long enough time, it starts to sound reasonable.
The Sun-Times also publishes Mark Steyn's column. What a contrast!
Wait, I thought the federal government conspired to kill black people after Katrina... yet Jackson wants it to have *more* power... I'm confused!
Julian, I'm not saying it sounds reasonable because they don't know better. I'm saying it sounds reasonable because people keep saying it all the time. It's well below the rational level.
andrew...
Katzenbach -- yes -- a nice piece of judicial activism. I can see both sides but then as a lawyer that's my blessing and my curse!!
Knoxgirl...
But you see, Bush is illegitimate so it's really not the "elected" federal gov't because it's not "by the people" since OH was rigged and FLA before that. JJ means the "real" federal gov't that will come back when Dems are re-elected and the Constitution comes back as well as gov't by the people.
Andrew...
I'm not prepared to say it's murder and if I were a judge it woould be dishonorable of me to take an oath I could not in good conscience uphold. If I swear to uphold the law, then I uphold the law not my personal morality.
I think that's a big difference between textualism and living constitution. Swearing to uphold and enforce the law as opposed to making the law.
No one -- not even Falwell and Robertson truly thinks this world is not fraught with moral dilemmas. Judges make decisions and the law as imperfect as it is -- is the mechanism. I could allow reasonable regulation of abortion as a lower court judge. As a SCOTUS Justice I would reverse Roe as badly decided and overreaching on legislative prerogative -- it would just happen to coincide with my moral view.
I think Saul's underlying point, as I understand it, has some value. If I'm not mistaken, the Court was not intended to be the sole arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution. (and whether, absent Marbury it was even intended to be the final arbiter is another question entirely. But I am sufficiently uninformed on the particulars of that debate to say anything other then it makes pragmatice sense for the Court to occupy that role. But I digress).
The legislature and the executive were also supposed to independantly evaluate the Consitutionality of their actions. If one argues that those branches have largely abdicated that portion of their responsibilities (which, at very least, is not an absurd claim, especially WRT War Powers), then the Court's "caretaker" role becomes more important, and perhaps requires more searching analysis then originalism/strict constructionism would allow.
Having said all that, I'm not sure I agree with it, just that its a point worth discussing rather than dismissing.
mary, I don't see anybody suggesting that the problem with Jackson is that he's not white, or not "intellectually trained". I see people objecting to the fact that he talks absolute nonsense much of the time. If he's done fine things in the past, by all means let's give him credit for it, but doing fine things doesn't earn you the right to be taken seriously when you're talking nonsense, decades later.
I wouldn't cancel William Shockley's Nobel because of the way he ended up; would you accuse me of hating transistors, or physicists, because I disagree with his later views? Don't be ridiculous.
I admit I could have itemized what I didn't like about Jackson's piece, but I just didn't want to bother with it.
If you don't want to just be preaching to the choir here, it really would be helpful if you "itemized". As you are a law professor, I would be interested to hear your critique of the actual piece, because to me the execrability of Jackson's column (as opposed to his persona) is not self-evident. I'd specifically like to see your reaction to this paragraph:
This is a judge who rejected an African-American defendant challenging a verdict by an all-white jury purged of all black jurors because of their race. Alito mocked statistical evidence that showed the prosecutions' systematic exclusion of African Americans from juries, suggesting it was as meaningless as the fact that a disproportionate number of presidents had been left-handed.
Ben: I have many other posts about the Alito nomination and the reaction to it. Jackson's piece is so badly done and full of distortions that I didn't think it was worth my time. It would clutter my blog with a long post on a subject I've already talked about way too much. Read some of the other posts if you really care to know what I have to say about Alito and his critics.
Applicant: I think Jackson's purpose is to shape what people who trust him think. That's part of what I find so repugnant about the linked piece.
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