*Judge Roberts: The Starting Point Of Taking America Back*

[CheesyMuslim]

Sorry bout that,

1. But now we are seeing the fruits of President Bush's labor.
2. *The Honourable Chief Supreme Court Judge*, John G. Roberts Jr. is making his presence known in the American legal system.
3. And now is starting to pull back the heatherns control of the legal system.
4. Its only just begun.
5. And as we will see, Roe v Wade will disappear.
6. And the end of the nightmare is just around the corner.
7. Where safety in the womb will reign again in America.
8. Where babies won't be sacrificed to convince.
9. Where every life has value.
10. Long live Chief Supreme Court Judge, *The Honourable John G. Roberts Jr*.
11. Read it and weep heatherns:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041902675.html?hpid=sec-politics
"
Analysis
Roberts Court Moves Right, But With a Measured Step

By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 20, 2007; Page A03

The Supreme Court's decision signaling a significant reversal in the way it views government restrictions on abortion may also offer a glimpse of how the court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. will proceed on other controversial issues this term and in the future.

The five justices in the majority came up with an opinion that delighted abortion opponents and outraged abortion rights activists -- and yet, in the view of the court, did not overturn a single precedent or seemingly contradictory ruling.


Bench Conference
Andrew Cohen blogs multiple times daily about the latest legal developments and issues.
• The Right Also Sees Wrong in Attorney General
• Out of Touch, Out of Line, and Running Out of Time
• In Abortion Battle, the Tie Went to the Congress
• More Bench Conference
Sign Up for RSS Feed


Who's Blogging?
Read what bloggers are saying about this article.
SCOTUSblog
G-Spot Magazine
Election Law


Full List of Blogs (4 links) »


Most Blogged About Articles
On washingtonpost.com | On the web


Save & Share Article What's This?

DiggGoogle
del.icio.usYahoo!
RedditFacebook



"It's an interesting opinion, of course, because of what it says about abortion," said A. E. Dick Howard, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia. "But it also provides an interesting way of thinking about what the Roberts Court is going to look like."

What Howard sees in the decision is "an emerging conservative majority clearly willing to reconsider precedent and doctrine." But it also provided "an example of how the court is going to move to the right step by step," rather than by declaring bold breaks with the past.

That approach could figure into the court's coming decisions on school desegregation, campaign-finance laws and the ability of taxpayers to sue the Bush administration over giving funds to faith-based social service organizations.

Howard and others sorting through Wednesday's ruling upholding a federal ban on what opponents called "partial-birth" abortion found several common themes.

The impact of the retirement of the court's longtime swing vote, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and her replacement by the more conservative Samuel A. Alito Jr. was one. The often commented-upon but rarely overstated importance of the new justice in the middle, Anthony M. Kennedy, was another.

And many thought they saw the hand of Roberts in the decision, although it lacked his voice.

"I do think the opinion is the result of some very conscious decisions on the part of the chief justice" said Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University. He said he was referring to what the court indicated was the narrowness of its holding and the assignment of the decision to Kennedy, who has both voted to uphold the right to an abortion and expressed opposition to the procedure.

Eve C. Gartner , who argued the abortion case before the court, said the decision's impact is not narrow at all. She said the court for the first time agreed that a specific abortion procedure could be banned. She also said it "gutted" previous holdings that abortion restrictions must contain exceptions for preserving the health of the woman, and changed the balancing act between the government's interest in protecting fetal life and a woman's right to choose an abortion.

A finding by Kennedy that a ban on the abortion procedure would protect a woman who regretted having an abortion from "grief more anguished and sorrow more profound" came "literally out of the blue," said Gartner, deputy director of litigation and law at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Yet the majority said the decision complied with 1992's Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pa. v. Casey decision, which reaffirmed the right to abortion, with restrictions. And the majority upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 without overturning their 5 to 4 decision seven years ago -- with O'Connor a member of the majority -- that declared a similar Nebraska statue unconstitutional because of the lack of exception for protecting the woman's health.

"I assume they are trying to deflect charges that the only change is that the court is 'differently composed,' as Justice [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg said in the dissent," Gartner said.

Others found the decision restrained. Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia said in a short concurring opinion that they believed Roe v. Wade had "no basis in the constitution," but neither Roberts nor Alito joined, either because they do not agree or because the issue was not at hand.

The court's majority opinion Wednesday expressed a desire that challenges to laws be about specific applications rather than a claim that it is unconstitutional on its face.

Richard L. Hasen, a professor at Loyala Law School in Los Angeles, points out that it is what the court will hear next week in a case about the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act. Justices previously upheld the law -- again by 5 to 4, again with O'Connor in the majority -- but the Roberts Court indicated last year it was open to considering a challenge to how the law is applied.

"This court can weaken or even undermine precedent without overruling it, or at least overruling it explicitly," said Hasen, who has filed a brief supporting the government's defense of the campaign finance act.

A view of incremental change is more in tune with Roberts's stated goals of narrow decisions and more consensus. "It's less drastic and less alarming," Howard said, "especially given a court that's pretty sharply divided."

Regards,
SirJamesofTexas

[CheesyMuslim]

Sorry bout that,

1. But another story just arrived.
2. Read it and weep neolibs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/weekinreview/22liptak.html
"
Entrances And Exits
The New 5-to-4 Supreme Court
Post Typography

Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Reprints Share
DiggFacebookNewsvinePermalink

By ADAM LIPTAK
Published: April 22, 2007
AFTER the 5-to-4 decision last week in which the Supreme Court reversed course on abortion, upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, many court watchers were wondering what to expect next.

Skip to next paragraph
Enlarge This Image

Photographs by Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
EVERYTHING CHANGES? Law scholars are debating what the court may do next.
For guidance, law professors and Supreme Court specialists looked to lists of 5-to-4 cases in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired last year, had been the swing vote. One list, compiled by Martin S. Lederman at Georgetown University, had 31 entries, with cases on religion and race, elections and crime, medicine and free speech.

Last week’s abortion decision, Gonzales v. Carhart, demonstrated the court’s new math. With the justice who took the O’Connor seat, Samuel A. Alito, in the majority, and the new swing justice, Anthony M. Kennedy, writing the decision, the court upheld, by a single vote, the abortion act.

Just seven years ago, Justice O’Connor voted with the court’s liberals to strike down a similar Nebraska law banning the procedure, known medically as intact dilation and extraction. It involves removing an intact fetus rather than dismembering the fetus in the uterus. The decision recast the court’s approach to abortion, shifting its emphasis toward fetal life and away from deference to medical judgments about women’s health.

The decision last week brought into focus the greatest hopes of conservatives and the worst fears of liberals. Is the court about to make sweeping changes in important areas of constitutional law, including in decisions expected shortly on the role of money in political campaigns and of race in the schools?

“O’Connor was the swing vote in so many cases, especially in high-profile areas like affirmative action, campaign finance and separation of church and state,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at Duke. “Sam Alito is likely to bring about a change in all of those areas.”

In the coming months alone, the court is set to decide two important cases in areas where Justice O’Connor played a crucial role.

One case considers whether the school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., may take into account students’ race to make sure schools remain integrated. Students in both systems are offered a choice of schools, but they can be denied admission based on their race if enrolling in a given school would upset what local school boards had determined was a desirable racial balance.

That is not precisely the same question as the one considered in Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 decision in which Justice O’Connor, writing for a 5-to-4 majority, upheld a racially conscious admissions plan at the University of Michigan’s law school. That case involved not integration, but affirmative action, with the court allowing the government to give some groups a boost.

But the two cases are in the same doctrinal neighborhood, and the integration cases will almost certainly give a powerful hint about where the court is headed, not only on affirmative action but also on the use of race by the government more generally.

In Grutter, Justice O’Connor said that society may need affirmative action for another 25 years. Some legal scholars are betting that Grutter will be modified or overruled before that expiration date.

On Wednesday, the court will hear arguments in another case that could start to undo a part of Justice O’Connor’s legacy. In 2003, she was in the majority in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld the major provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, including restrictions on some campaign-season television advertising paid for by corporations and labor unions.

The new case considers that same ban in a particular context, in what lawyers call an “as applied” challenge. An anti-abortion group, Wisconsin Right to Life Inc., had sought to run television commercials criticizing a Senate filibuster against President Bush’s judicial nominees and urging viewers to ask the state’s two senators, one of whom was up for re-election, to permit the nominations to come to a vote.

The Federal Election Commission says that the advertisements were thinly veiled campaign commercials, while the group says they are just the sort of speech at the core of what the First Amendment protects.

“If Alito takes the position of the dissenters” in the 2003 case, said Richard H. Pildes, a law professor at New York University, “that would represent a profound transformation in the power of Congress to reach campaign finance practices. The betting line is that he’s likely to go that way.”

After the McConnell decision, Congressional power to drive money from politics, even at the expense of free speech, had seemed settled. Only four years later, the issue is back on the table.

Justice O’Connor also played a central role in religion cases, and in recent years she had shown increasing skepticism in capital cases. It will not be long, legal scholars said, before Justice Alito’s impact is felt in those cases as well.

In 2005, Justice O’Connor was in the five-justice majority in a decision invalidating the display of the Ten Commandments in a Kentucky courthouse. When the issue next comes up, Professor Chemerinsky said, “there is every reason to believe that Alito will join Scalia and Thomas” in allowing displays of religious symbols on government property.

There is more to judicial decision-making than math, of course, and Justice Alito and his colleagues on the court will rule based on the facts and arguments presented to them. The court is, moreover, reluctant to overturn decisions in any event under the doctrine of stare decisis, a Latin phrase meaning “to stand by the thing decided.”

Indeed, in last week’s abortion decision, the majority did not overrule the 2000 decision and maintained that the Nebraska law was distinguishable from the federal one. It is similarly unlikely that the court will overrule many of the cases of the professors’ lists outright.

Nonetheless, there is probably no better guide to where the court is headed than in a careful inventory of where Justice O’Connor has been.

"
Regards,
SirJamesofTexas

[ECW]

Once the 2008 elections put a Democrat into the WH, you will see that advantage disappear. STRIKE QUICKLY while the iron is hot. You do not have much more time imposing your minority values on the majority. If you want religion back in your life and to be a vital part of your government, move to Vatican City.

[CheesyMuslim]

Sorry bout that,

1. I know the media is pumping into the mix just how the Democratics are going to get into the White House next time.
2. Yeah I hear it.
3. But, I also heard it last time, and the time before, and the time before that as well.
4. The only thing the neolib media is positive about is winning elections.
5. Otherwise we hear doom and gloom on just about everything.
6. With no resolve and or way to address the problem.
7. And I don't think that it will change any time in the future.
8. They say, *Hold on we are the party that will save you from this terrible thing we created" and, " We are the ones who are without a moral compass, just like you, join together with us, and we will supply you all your needs".
9. Free public assistance, on demand, buys a hell of a lot of votes from immoral voters.
10. Blind eye to killing babies in the womb buys a helluva lot of votes as well.
11. Vote whores will all be brought to perdition.

Regards,
SirJamesofTexas

[Saigio]

Yeah, chess only doom and gloom from the left, right?

Because we're the ones saying how terrorists are everywhere, and that we are doomed if we don't mix religion and state (violating our own laws and treaties. again)

[NortheastCynic]

I'm witholding my judgement of Roberts and Alito right now. They're 1/1 in my view of serious issues, they ruled correctly on the Ban which is perfectly Constitutional. But now that they've ruled in favor of the Federal government when it was the right thing to do, I'm anxious to see whether they rule in favor of the Individual/civil rights when it is the right thing to do. If they don't, then we've just got two more Scalias on our hands instead of two more Thomas-es [Thomasi?]. In my opinion, every SCOTUS justice should be a Clarence Thomas [libertarian/Constitutionalist] clone.

-NC