But here's The Washington Post using the term to refer to a political activist who concerns himself with the judiciary: "Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’/Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice."*
Who's Leonard Leo? The first sentence of the piece calls him "Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo," and the third paragraph calls him "a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges." He's not a judge, and he's not, at least not openly, a proponent of judicial activism.
In the 18-year archive of this blog, Leo's name has come up exactly once, back in 2006, when the NYT invited various legal writers to offer questions that could be asked of Samuel Alito at his confirmation hearing. I wrote:
Here's the Wikipedia article on Leo. I think it's clearly correct to call him a conservative political activist who specializes in the judiciary. It's just off to call such a person a "judicial activist."Leonard A. Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society, asks the one that Robert Bork gave his most damaging answer to: "why do you want to be on the Supreme Court?" (Bork said he thought it would be "an intellectual feast.")
From what I've seen — and I'm old enough to remember "Impeach Earl Warren" billboards and to have studied the Supreme Court since the 1970s — there was a time when judicial activism was considered good. I've seen judicial activism cheered on, and I've seen many law professors sneer at the concept of "judicial restraint." But over the years, it's come to be the tedious practice for all judges to claim to be merely following the law, to be humble practitioners of judicial restraint, and "judicial activism" became a criticism to be aimed at the judges you don't like.
Obviously, a Federalist Society member like Leo is going champion conservative judges and call what they do judicial restraint, and The Washington Post is going to oppose conservative judges and call what they do judicial activism, even as the Federal Society will say the liberal judges are judicial activists, and WaPo will probably try to find ways to characterize what they do as judicial restraint. This is a game that is too boring to belabor, but please, WaPo, don't try to spice it up by calling the political activists "judicial activists." That's just confusing.
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* Did Leo funnel money to Clarence Thomas? That's a bigger question that the usage of the term "judicial activist." According to the WaPo article:
In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.
Leo... told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show.
He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”...
Since its first amicus brief, in the voting rights case in 2012, the Judicial Education Project has submitted about a dozen amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. It has argued for limiting or rolling back race-based college admissions policies, regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions and gun-control measures. In 2014, the group filed a brief in the Hobby Lobby case....
Thomas’s votes were aligned with the Judicial Education Project in six of the cases in which it filed briefs, including the Hobby Lobby case and two involving affirmative action at public universities....
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“About a dozen” is totally lazy reporting.
So Thomas voted 6 times in favor of this foundation’s position and “about six times” against it.
Heaven forfend.
OMG, there's so many "fucking" "air quotes" in that "steaming" pile...
But over the years, it's come to be the tedious practice for all judges to claim to be merely following the law, to be humble practitioners of judicial restraint, and "judicial activism" became a criticism to be aimed at the judges you don't like.
Repeal the 19th.
Now do Sotomayer and Random House.
Leo should have said, "and $25,000 for the big gal."
Democrats are trying to change the meaning of words again. They want us to believe that judges that follow the constitution and don't let blatantly unconstitutional laws stand are activists where their preferred judges make and also leave bad decisions in place because it supports their preferred policy.
Does it really matter that Justice Thomas is morally inept? Or that Justice Sotomayor (probably) leaked the Dobbs opinion? The answer is "no."
The Supreme Court's role is to address rights in a legalistic way, in a very rigid institutional setting, that has nothing to do with morality. This is how we got the Dred Scott and Roe decisions and countless others. It is how we do things here.
With her usual efficiency, Ann Counter explains how leftist judges swill their graft this week in her column, "How to Bribe the Supreme Court." The list of honorary degrees, conference appearances at elite resorts, and other paid homage, essentially plush vacations with cheering audiences, is especially embarrassing in the case of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who accepted countless freebies, and not just from academia but on late night talk shows, with celebrity newscasters, at zoos, and other places unbecoming of her job title.
Academia is especially generous to the lefties on the Court, and they don't transport them business class. A lot goes on behind closed doors on such trips, virtually none of it academic, and we're subsidizing it with our tax dollars, which makes it even more galling.
But the media never questions those bennies. And Notorious GRUB never recused herself from any case involving any institution or group that had showered her with gifts disguised as "honoring scholarship" or involving the ACLU or Planned Parenthood as she made the rounds suctioning up free trips from these groups. See also Daniel Greenfield explaining the big bucks Sotomayor raked in from her publisher while they had business before the court.
Judicial activism is all downstream from this sort of cash-and-accolade graft machine. Ban it all, for all of them. Just because their hosts are law schools and wealthy nonprofits doesn't mean they get to work on the academic calendar and spend the other half of their time flying around on our dime to collect participation trophies at expensive resorts.
Sure seems like another in the list of hit pieces aimed at so-called “conservative justices”.
Is anyone surprised that Thomas would have voted the way they claim he votes in these cases? To roll back gun control legislation? To roll back regulations on greenhouse gas emissions? To roll back race based college admission policies?
Plus which, I have to call BS just from the way this is presented. Why would KellyAnn Conway (or this guy Leo) think they need to funnel money to the Thomases? Why would they think it would have any impact? Why would they NOT think it’d be a colossal liability and risk? Not adding up at all.
So, despite all the alleged money, Justice Thomas only backs their arguments roughly half the time?
It's almost as if the man has a mind of his own...
Well mangling abusing and redeploying word combinations is a progressive obsession and key to keeping the people in a perpetual state of attempting to keep up with the bullshit.
yes I don't see how that was damaging, exceot to this slithy toves who were planning to destroy this country, brick by brick
Amicus briefs are now being used as potential requirements to recuse? Does that mean the ACLU should not have filed amicus briefs in any case after Justice Ginsburg was appointed to the court?
That's a hell of a way to dismantle the ACLU. Just appoint a ACLU litigator as a judge and from then on that judge is required to recuse if they get an amicus brief filed.
Amici are not parties to the litigation. They are "friends of the court".
They really are scared of what Justice Thomas is going to write aren't they.
Obviously WaPo wants this to be the scoop of the century. And when you're delivering such epochal news, you don't have time for niceties like consistent phraseology.
But what is the scoop here? What are the documents where these things are supposedly said? Are they authentic? ...Would anyone have a motive to manufacture evidence that could be twisted into something that might support an inference that could be used to smear a Justice? Perish the thought!
The Left hates Leonard Leo because he was successful in getting conservatives appointed to the federal judiciary. To the Left, that's a capital crime.
"Schlesinger called Justices Black, Douglas, Murphy, and Rutledge "Judicial Activists" and Justices Frankfurter, Jackson, and Burton "Champions of Self Restraint.""
The gaslighting started long ago, didn't it?
Any way Thomas would have come to different conclusions in any of those six cases? He's been on the bench since the early 90's, I think his judicial phiolsophy is fairly well known. Unless his votes or written decisions in those cases reflect divergence from his prior track record, so what?
Gee this smells
I am pretty darn sure Bork could define what a woman is.
Control the language...
Even if there is truth in any of this I fail to see how cah floes in the course of Ginni Thomas' career are the equivalent of abribe to Justice Thomas. It's sexist, frankly...
narciso: "yes I don't see how that was damaging, exceot to this slithy toves who were planning to destroy this country, brick by brick"
Yep, and if to prove your point immediately, this pops up:
jim: "Gee this smells"
I just read a report (by the NY Post) that Justice Sotomayor picked up $3MM from Penguin Books and didn't report it? And Penguin had cases before her?
Really? But ignore all that, folks! Look over here at this shiny object in the WaPo!
How well do Thomas's opinions align with Declaration and Constitution? Is he conservative, libertarian, liberal, progressive, or special interest (e.g. politically congruent, butterfly conflation, single/central/monopolistic solutions, [catastrophic] [anthropogenic] immigration reform, wars without borders, labor and environmental arbitrage, DIEversity, shared responsibility/progressive prices)?
If a judge (or a Justice) wishes to practice activism they should resign and run for the legislature.
Teh job of a judge is precisely to restrain his personal beliefs and wishes and interpret the law as the people who wrote it and passed it intended.
Does anybody actually believe that Congress intended to protect abortion and gay marriage when they wrote the 14th Amendment?
This is battle space prep for one of three things- packing the court, assassinating a conservative justice or two, and/or ignoring court rulings by the executive branch.
Isn't the whole purpose of writing the laws and Constitution down is so that their meaning won't be changed over time by activist judges instead of legislatures?
Our country's first judicial Activist was Chief Justice Marshall who engaged in a political conspiracy and began a corrupt process that allowed him to create the power of judicial review out of whole cloth without even resorting to emanations and penumbras.
After the Federalists lost the election of 1800, and thus control of Congress and the Presidency, and after Marshall had been confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, President Adams appointed Marshall to fill a temporary vacancy as Secretary of State. (Jefferson would of course appoint Madison to be Secretary of State when he assumed office in March) Thus while he was acting as Secretary of State, he was already the Chief Justice. President Adams decided to try to retain Federalist control of the judicial branch by appointing a bunch of new Federalist judges at the last moment. (was this really Marshall's idea?) Adams signed a bunch of judicial warrants, and it was Marshall's job to deliver them. Yet somehow, even though Marbury lived in nearby Georgetown, and was a notable Federalist, Marshall never managed to deliver Marbury's warrant before he left office. When Madison assumed office, he threw the undelivered warrants away. Marbury sued, saying that Madison had a legal obligation to deliver the warrant. The case makes its way up to the Supreme Court where Marshall was Chief Justice of a six man Court. The case would be decided 4-0, with two justices not participating(?). The case created the power of judicial review, and while doing so, ruled in favor of Madison so neither Jefferson or Congress would object. No one else would have standing to.
Marshall gets the Guiness World record of judicial activism. Not only was he a judicial activist, he actually created the controversy that enabled him to act.
Clarence Thomas: Making Leftist Brains Explode Since 1991!
If the Democrats keep the Senate and the Presidency in 2024, the Supreme Court will change forever, to the extent that KBJ will be considered a moderate.
The DNC media is just now laying the groundwork.
Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
are not The Federalist Society judicial activists?
Althouse
"In the 18-year archive of this blog, Leo's name has come up exactly once"
Well that settles everything.
Dearest Althouse, the war against who gets to define words has been waged, and lost by those who think definitions have any validity beyond that provided by the situational context of their use. Here, "judicial activist" is defined by those in political opposition to the person supposedly interested in the judiciary in this case, with only passing correlation as "a bad thing" to all previous references to judicial activists and activism.
He could have been called a secret judicial influencer, or a dark mysterious campaigner for a runaway court system, and it would have had no less negative a meaning than "activist" here.
In future, I suggest the Left just call everyone an "Orange Man Bad" or use the acronym TDS, and be done with other words.
GRUB was far more intertwined with the ACLU and PP than is ordinary. And they are very frequently appellants, not merely submitting amicus. She was excused for extracurricular advocacy that would not go without criticism in the case of others. Sexism?
The Federalist Society is different: if the ABA were not an entirely far left partisan entity, there would be no need for them to play the role they do.
Dearest Althouse, the war against who gets to define words has been waged, and lost by those who think definitions have any validity beyond that provided by the situational context of their use.
Althouse herself supports this when it allows activist judges to "interpret" the meaning of laws and the Constitution so they can decide cases in a way she approves of.
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