From the Boston Globe:
Sen. John Kerry said Sunday he will vote against Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. because he fears Alito would take the country “backwards.”
Kerry, the failed Democratic nominee for president in 2004, also voted against now-Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. But Alito, Kerry said Sunday, goes even farther than Roberts in undermining established legal precedents.
A flash point during Alito’s confirmation hearings was a 1985 memo he wrote saying that the “Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion” despite the Supreme Court’s 1973 Row v. Wade decision.
“I think he will shut the door of court access to the average person in America … ,” Kerry said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “I will vote against him because I think he will take the court backwards.”
Notes Matt Margolis at Blogs for Bush, “I guess that means Kerry thinks that slavery and segregation should still be legal because they were “established legal precedents.”
“Of course, I never expected Kerry to ever vote for a Bush nominee, but it is still sad he has to make up bogus reasons to cover up the fact he’s a sore loser.”
For my part, I will continue to point out that I believe the strategy of calling qualified conservative judicial nominees (ABA’s highest ranking, blah blah blah) “out of the mainstream” at a time when conservatives control the House, the Senate, and the White House, is a rather strange one. Similarly, I will continue to point out the disgust in which I hold those like Kerry, Kennedy, Schumer, Durbin, et al who, while mouthing phony righteous-sounded admonitions to justify their misuse of the advice and a consent system, cryptically assert that the actual failings of the candidates they oppose are a barely concealed (and craftily coded) racism and misogyny.
Such opportunistic, base-pleasing character assassination against a highly-qualified, highly educated legal conservative, is precisely the kind of ad hominem nonsense that is poisoning our political system almost beyond repair.
That the charges come from the particulars in question—whose combined ethics extend the span of a Mary Jo Kopechne air bubble—simply means that God is an ironist.
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(h/t Stop the ACLU; see also, Hub Politics.
See also, Ed Whelan, Patterico, and the NYT’s stunningly tendentious op-ed, which seems, in increasing lockstop with its elected ideological brethren, honestly to believe that assertions alone, when maintained consistently, repeatedly, and without care to redress any objections that these are but mere assertions (rather than established fact), are enough to settle any ideological dispute.
Perception is reality. And controlling perception is the birthright of the established media. So, then.
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In keeping with the previous update, Brian Timmer sends me a link to this informative piece from one of my favorites, Cathy Young, on media bias and how it plays out.
Importantly, we’ve heard repeatedly during the Alito hearings from certain judicial empaths that SCOTUS needs representation from a “moderate” type who will look out for the interests of the “little guy” (read: group selected for special dispensation in the current era of government-protected identity politics maneuvering); to confirm Alito would move the Court away from such a desired social justice dynamic, the argument goes—an argument that appeals to a country primed for such decentered notions of fairness by the ever-present social attempts to remind us of the centrality of context to meaning. And when part of the attendant context is the contingency of being born poor, or gay, or female, etc., then the law becomes a sliding scale that is enforced by benevolent philosopher kings.
Justice Roberts, in his confirmation hearings, answered this precisely correctly: if the little guy deserves to win under the law, he will; if he deserves to lose, he will.
The law must remain, to the best possible, stable and “objective”; if SCOTUS is turned into a “representative emotional body” meant to mirror the spectrum of social mores, it will have ceased to function as it was designed, and it will become another de facto legislative body—albeit one with the trappings of legalistic authority.
Isn’t everything because of Vietnam? For Kerry? Didn’t he invent Vietnam?
Alito is so out of the mainstream of opinion, if by “mainstream” one means the people who happen to be found in the check-out line at Zabars on your average Tuesday morning.
Didn’t one of the Senators demand to know how Alito could find freedom of speech in the Constitution, but not the right to an abortion?
Did anyone notice that the Globe article misspelled “Roe” v. Wade as “Row” v. Wade? It’s like that old joke.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Is Alito against due process now or something? Or will we just have to go through the window to get in the courthouse?
People like Kerry are getting so lazy they cannot even come up with something to replace the shopworn, trite crap like “shut the door of court access…” For God’s sake folks, come up with something new!
Jeff, you’re out of the mainstream! The whole system is out of the mainstream!
Is there anyone in the country that takes Kerry seriously?
I mean besides himself.
I do. That dude’s badder than Shaft, Superfly, Kung Fu and James Bond all put together!
Jeff, it’s been a really, really, really dry couple years for the Dems. The mainstream has apparantly dried up and they seem to have lost track of it.
Shhhh! Let’s keep its location to ourselves.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE MAINSTREAM!
That was very good.
“Out of the mainstream”? That meme is so often proffered and so often wrong,it makes for a perfect Inigo Montoya moment.
Wasn’t Alito the mercenary gunrunner fronting the Khmer Rouge Kerry smuggled guns to in Cambodia?
If Ted Kennedy had only stayed in the mainstream, no one would ever have found the car…
Alito don’t surf!
“Didn’t Kerry vote for Alito, before he voted against him?”
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~Ha! Great minds think alike (at the same time!)
You quoted The Boston Globe:
Sen. John Kerry said Sunday he will vote against Supreme Court nominee Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. because he fears Alito would take the country “backwards.â€Â
I give Mr Kerry a point (or maybe ½ point) for honesty. By describing Judge Alito as someone who would take the country “backward,” he is saying that he believes the function of the Court is to move the country in a particular direction (to the left, of course) in law, culture, and politics. He believes that Mr. Alito would move the Court in a different direction than he wishes to see things go.
At least that’s a lot more honest than the “out of the mainstream” bovine feces the left has been using.
I love this thread. Several LOL moments.
I’m amazed he remembers how to vote.