Roberts Nomination
While driving to work in the morning early this week I've been captivated by the Roberts Confirmation Hearings that have been broadcast live on NPR. Yes, I know it sounds like really boring stuff but they actually do talk about interesting things that you don't get to hear about very often. And when you realize that this guy is probably going to define the next half century of our rights then you can't help yourself from wanting to know who this guy is.
The first thing to note is that Roberts is a very articulate speaker. It's hard not to like the guy because he sounds like he not only knows what he's talking about, but his ideas are complex and sometimes very subtle. It's a huge contrast from the Bush administration's Black and White beliefs.
A good place to get information about the hearings is from SCOTUS Blog, commentaries can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
What's scary about this whole situation is that our rights that we've always felt made us American might be thrown away by this court. I'm not sure I believe that this will actually happen, but it's certainly possible if you have the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches wholly owned by the right wing. It would have been hard to not say that the court has recently been quite conservative but the O'Connor swing vote definitely kept the court was slipping down the crazy right wing slope. If she's replaced with a right wing idealogue then you might be saying goodbye to your rights.
Can an American citizen be held in jail without a lawyer and without all of those rights that we thought we had? Yup, the current thinking is that as long as the Executive branch says that he's a terrorist suspect then the Bill of Rights don't apply. The question is: How exactly do you define 'terrorist suspect'? What happens when Pinko-Commie-Liberals™ are about to win the presidential election and you believe that they will remove the Ten Commandments from the Court Square. Can you consider them terrorists? It's scary.
What have we been finally learning?
The first thing to note is that Roberts is a very articulate speaker. It's hard not to like the guy because he sounds like he not only knows what he's talking about, but his ideas are complex and sometimes very subtle. It's a huge contrast from the Bush administration's Black and White beliefs.
A good place to get information about the hearings is from SCOTUS Blog, commentaries can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
What's scary about this whole situation is that our rights that we've always felt made us American might be thrown away by this court. I'm not sure I believe that this will actually happen, but it's certainly possible if you have the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches wholly owned by the right wing. It would have been hard to not say that the court has recently been quite conservative but the O'Connor swing vote definitely kept the court was slipping down the crazy right wing slope. If she's replaced with a right wing idealogue then you might be saying goodbye to your rights.
Can an American citizen be held in jail without a lawyer and without all of those rights that we thought we had? Yup, the current thinking is that as long as the Executive branch says that he's a terrorist suspect then the Bill of Rights don't apply. The question is: How exactly do you define 'terrorist suspect'? What happens when Pinko-Commie-Liberals™ are about to win the presidential election and you believe that they will remove the Ten Commandments from the Court Square. Can you consider them terrorists? It's scary.
What have we been finally learning?
Elections Matter!!!Anyone who thinks otherwise is a retard. The last election will probably have made this country's laws much more conservative for decades. One tiny election.