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Invisiblejohnm214
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: gluke bastid]
    #8372307 - 05/07/08 09:05 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

activist judge is a silly term applied generally to liberal justices who hold acts unconstitutional or issue overly broad decrees


It implies the judge ruled based on their personal beliefs rather than the law.

I don't think that's easily applied to any of the judge's on the supreme court exclusivly.

Of course a weaker argument can be made to the wing of the court that wants to overturn precedent.

Course these argument presuppose, as has been done universally, almost, that the unenumerated rights in the Ninth amendment don't exist.

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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: johnm214]
    #8372381 - 05/07/08 09:33 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

> activist judge is a silly term applied generally to liberal justices who ...

... try to change the meaning of a law or the constitution by coming up with creative interpretations of what is meant rather than following the word of what is actually said. (my opinion)


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Offlinegluke bastid
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: Seuss]
    #8372480 - 05/07/08 10:04 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

So an acitivist judge is simply one who goes with the "living document" interpretation of the Constitution?


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Society in every form is a blessing,
but government at its best is but a necessary evil
 
- Thomas Paine

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Invisibleafoaf
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: Phred]
    #8372571 - 05/07/08 10:34 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

I refuse to visit Malkin's site on principle alone.


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Invisiblejohnm214
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: gluke bastid]
    #8372601 - 05/07/08 10:44 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

yeah in some sense I think so

I mostly agree the constitution is dead, not living, however; when the language neccesarily implicates present conditions, than it, while not living, must be applied to those circumstances.

So "due process" means what those words meant when it was formulated, however; I believe that means the process due under the law, and if the law changes, then the process due changes. So if the law allows for a trial by jury, you must get that right or its a violation, irrespective of what the situation was in 1800. Certainly you can't go below what was available then, but if the states or such provide additional process, that must be available.

Likewsie equal protection of law. If the law changes, all must benifit equally.

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OfflineYossarian22
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: johnm214]
    #8377317 - 05/08/08 12:21 PM (15 years, 10 months ago)

Glenn Greenwald has a pretty good column I'll post at the bottom which sums up my feelings on the matter pretty well. I find it funny that conservatives often label left-leaning judges as "activist judges", especially since the most egregious example of such a decision was reached by the conservative majority on the court. Of course I'm talking about Bush v. Gore, where the 5 conservative justices betrayed the public trust by jettisoning every legal principle they had advocated in order to ensure their preferred candidate won the Presidency without an accurate vote count. Judges who had been tirelessly interpreting the 14th amendment in the narrowest possible sense suddenly decided to adopt the broadest, most liberal interpretation put forth by a major court. It was such a transparent power play that they even admitted they had no intention of holding their decision as precedent, presumably so that if in 2004, Bush was in Gore's previous position, they could rule in his favor again. Keep in mind that the kind of judges McCain's promising are the kinds of justices that don't believe in the right to privacy and think the state should be able to regulate private sexual conduct among consenting adults, who are hostile to the exclusionary rule(without which the 4th amendment would be almost meaningless), and (if they follow McCain's thinking) who think that the President has the right to abduct and torture people without even charging them with crimes as well as the right to disregard any law passed by Congress.

Anyway, on to the article:

John McCain yesterday delivered a speech in which he hailed the inspiring constitutional principles of Government on which our country was founded, including the central goal of avoiding excessive, unlimited power in any one branch, secured by checks and balances from the other two branches:

Quote:

In America, the constitutional restraint on power is as fundamental as the exercise of power, and often more so. Yet the framers knew that these restraints would not always be observed. They were idealists, but they were worldly men as well, and they knew that abuses of power would arise and need to be firmly checked. Their design for democracy was drawn from their experience with tyranny. A suspicion of power is ingrained in both the letter and spirit of the American Constitution. . . .

The executive, legislative, and judicial branches are often wary of one another's excesses, and they should be. They seek to keep each other within bounds, and they are supposed to. And though you wouldn't always know it from watching the day-to-day affairs of modern Washington, the framers knew exactly what they were doing, and the system of checks and balances rarely disappoints.




Sadly, though, McCain lamented that "there is one great exception in our day" to these principles. Surely "the exception" to which McCain refers must be the fact that we've lived for the last eight years under a President who literally has claimed powers greater than those possessed by the British King; whose underlings have promulgated radical and un-American theories literally vesting him with the power to rule outside of the law, who has exploited a political and media culture devoid of "suspicion of power" when exercised by the White House, and who has acted with no meaningful constraints or checks from Congress and virtually none from the judiciary? No, actually, that isn't the "exception" to which McCain was referring at all. Instead:

Quote:

[It] is the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power. For decades now, some federal judges have taken it upon themselves to pronounce and rule on matters that were never intended to be heard in courts or decided by judges. With a presumption that would have amazed the framers of our Constitution, and legal reasoning that would have mystified them, federal judges today issue rulings and opinions on policy questions that should be decided democratically. Assured of lifetime tenures, these judges show little regard for the authority of the president, the Congress, and the states. They display even less interest in the will of the people.




According to John McCain, then, executive power in the U.S. now is exactly what it should be, perfectly in line with what the Founders envisioned -- except that it is too constrained by a judiciary which "show[s] little regard for the authority of the president." To McCain, the only real problem with our system of checks and balances is that the judiciary has too much power, and the President not enough.

This was exactly the view of the world articulated by George Bush last November when he spoke to the Federalist Society. In that speech, Bush had the audacity to tout the central importance of "separation of powers" and warned that "tyranny" can be avoided only if all three branches "resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others." Bush then went on -- just like McCain yesterday -- to lament that our Constitutional framework was endangered not by a President who has seized the defining powers of an autocrat, but rather, by "activist" judges. Not only is McCain's view of presidential powers identical to Bush's, his speech yesterday -- in terms of structure, arguments and even some wording -- was almost an exact replica of the one Bush delivered to the Federalist Society.

Virtually every abuse of the last eight years has its roots in the Bush/Cheney view of the President as Monarch, and John McCain clearly endorses its fundamentals. Indeed, when responding to a questionnaire on executive power circulated to all the candidates by The Boston Globe's Charlie Savage earlier this year, McCain (while paying lip service to nice principles and even taking the extreme position that he would never issue a signing statement) refused to say that there was even a single aspect of Bush's use of executive power that he found unconstitutional or otherwise objectionable:

Quote:

    10. Is there any executive power the Bush administration has claimed or exercised that you think is unconstitutional? Anything you think is simply a bad idea?

McCain declined to answer this question.




By contrast, Obama answered the same question at length, and said:

Quote:

I also reject the view, suggested in memoranda by the Department of Justice, that the President may do whatever he deems necessary to protect national security, and that he may torture people in defiance of congressional enactments . . .

I believe the Administration's use of executive authority to over-classify information is a bad idea. We need to restore the balance between the necessarily secret and the necessity of openness in our democracy – which is why I have called for a National Declassification Center.




Obama then went on specifically to identify numerous issues -- torture, detention of Americans as "enemy combatants" without due process, warrantless surveillance, violations of international treaties, the lawless creation of military commissions -- which he said were unconstitutional or otherwise objectionable expressions of excessive Presidential power. By contrast, McCain refused to identify even a single Bush assertion of power he rejects.

Ultimately, these are the issues which are the most consequential in determining what type of country we will be, and what type of government we will have (and these issues, therefore, receive the least attention from most of our establishment journalists, for whom there is a perfectly inverse relationship between the significance of an issue and the interest they have in it). All of the other issues of significance flow from these differences.

In a superb new book, entitled The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, Gene Healy documents the multiple ways our political system has been corrupted by an out-of-control, unchecked Executive that could not be any more antithetical to the "presidency of limited powers and modest goals the Framers gave us in 1787." As Healy demonstrates, allowing the President to transmute into some central, omnipotent figure of authority -- as Bush/Cheney have done and as McCain seems to embrace -- "is the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties," and -- more significantly still -- this model (as the Founders recognized) virtually guarantees a state of ever-expanding militarism and endless war:

Quote:

Throughout American history, virtually every major advance in executive power has come during a war or a warlike crisis. Convince the public that we are at war, and constitutional barriers to action fall, as power flows to the commander in chief.

Little wonder, then, that confronted with impossible expectations, the modern president tends to recast social and economic problems in military terms . . . . Martial rhetoric often ushers in domestic militarism, as presidents push to employ standing armies at home, to fight drug trafficking, terrorism or natural disasters. And when the president raises the battle cry, he can usually count on substantial numbers of American opinion leaders to cheer him on.




As the amazing commenter Pow Wow repeatedly documents here (see here for one typically excellent example), Congress has "increasingly deferred, dangerously and slavishly, to the presidency, which today very much resembles a monarchy," a state of affairs which -- for the reasons Healy describes -- makes endless war and imperial behavior almost inevitable. As Pow Wow puts it: "The choice for Americans today . . . is between Empire and Republic. We cannot have both."

The central truth of the 2008 election is that, with the exception of a few relatively inconsequential and symbolic matters, John McCain enthusiastically embraces the Bush/Cheney worldview in every way that matters. His ludicrous speech yesterday -- actually complaining that it is the judiciary that wields too much power and is excessively limiting presidential powers -- simply leaves no doubt about that.

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OfflineSeussA
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: Yossarian22]
    #8377549 - 05/08/08 01:16 PM (15 years, 10 months ago)

Quote:

John McCain yesterday delivered a speech in which he hailed the inspiring constitutional principles of Government on which our country was founded, including the central goal of avoiding excessive, unlimited power in any one branch, secured by checks and balances from the other two branches:




A rather interesting summation given his support for the line item veto. I used to be a big supporter for this, but when you look into the potential for abuse, it becomes very scary. Basically, it allows the president to inappropriately influence members of congress with threat of veto on their amendments. In the hands of a good president, it is a very powerful tool to cut through the special interest BS. In the hands of a president that answers to God rather than the Constitution and the People, it completely breaks the system of checks and balances by placing members of congress into the palm of the president.


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OfflineYossarian22
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: Seuss]
    #8377960 - 05/08/08 02:57 PM (15 years, 10 months ago)

Personally, I find Bush's "signing statements" to be a Hell of a lot more insidious and threatening- at least Congress can override a line-item veto. Bush's signing statements allow him to say "I'm going to pretend this law says what I want it to say" and there's nothing short of impeachment Congress can do about it.

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InvisibleMistaUNGA
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Re: Excellent speech from McCain [Re: danknugz81]
    #8381402 - 05/09/08 11:22 AM (15 years, 10 months ago)

write in ron paul. that is what i'm doing.


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