Recent exposés have uncovered an emerging pattern of improper lobbying of right-wing Supreme Court justices by wealthy evangelicals. They reveal serious threats to the independence of the judiciary. But equally alarming is that the Supreme Court is unconstrained by a code of judicial ethics. From 1995 to 2018, the right-wing evangelical nonprofit Faith and Action… Read more »
After the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited opinion, upholding habeas corpus rights for the Guantánamo detainees, I was invited to appear on The O’Reilly Factor with guest host Laura Ingraham. Although she is a lawyer and former law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas, Ingraham has no use for our judicial branch of government, noting… Read more »
As the nation focused on whether Congress would exercise its constitutional duty to cut funding for the war, Bush quietly issued an unconstitutional bombshell that went virtually unnoticed by the corporate media. The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007, would place all governmental power in the hands of the… Read more »
The Bush administration has stopped the Supreme Court from giving the Guantánamo detainees their day in court – at least for now. In Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States, 45 men challenged the constitutionality of the habeas corpus-stripping provision of the Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year. On Monday Justices… Read more »
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee began its confirmation hearings on the nomination of Samuel Alito for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. Alito is no John Roberts. Whereas Roberts had barely been a judge for two years when Bush nominated him for the Supreme Court, Alito has authored 361 opinions during his 15-year tenure on… Read more »
In 1960, California Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown agonized about whether to grant clemency to death row inmate Caryl Chessman. Brown’s refusal to commute Chessman’s sentence haunted him for the rest of his life. He reversed 23 death judgments in the last 7 years of his term. Ronald Reagan, who defeated Brown in the 1966… Read more »
On the day we honored Rosa Parks, Mother of the Civil Rights Movement, George W. Bush appointed a white male to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Evidently unable to find a woman or Latino sufficiently “qualified” to sit on the high court, Bush reached deep into the trough of right-wing federal judges… Read more »
Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before… Read more »