Merrick Garland: Obama's New Supreme Court Justice

[Kaitzilla]

...from Jan 21 2009 through today the Republicans in Congress have done everything in their power to to make the Obama presidency a failure and they have done so because he is black.

I must contest this point.
I've seen no indication that it was because Obama was black.

From 4 years ago:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...c96c7c8-e31f-11e1-ae7f-d2a13e249eb2_blog.html

At first, we thought organized Republican recalcitrance against the president started in October 2010 after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) famously said, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Then came Robert Draper’s book, “Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives,” this spring. As the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein reported in April, the book reports on a dinner of leading Republicans held the night of Obama’s inauguration.

For several hours in the Caucus Room (a high-end D.C. establishment), the book says they plotted out ways to not just win back political power, but to also put the brakes on Obama’s legislative platform.

"If you act like you're the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” Draper quotes [Rep. Kevin] McCarthy [R-Calif.] as saying. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign.”

And Stein highlights this useful passage from Draper’s book:

The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward:

Go after Geithner. (And indeed Kyl did, the next day: ‘Would you answer my question rather than dancing around it — please?&#8217

Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)

Begin attacking vulnerable Democrats on the airwaves. (The first National Republican Congressional Committee attack ads would run in less than two months.)

Win the spear point of the House in 2010. Jab Obama relentlessly in 2011. Win the White House and the Senate in 2012.

Now Greg Sargent at The Plum Line is sounding the alarm over a revelation in “The New New Deal” by Grunwald. Vice President Joe Biden told the author that during the transition, “seven different Republican Senators” told him that “McConnell had demanded unified resistance.” This was after the 2008 election but before Obama and Biden took office.

“The way it was characterized to me was: `For the next two years, we can’t let you succeed in anything. That’s our ticket to coming back,’ ” Biden says.

It was more of a thirst for power than anything else.
McConnell's demand for unified resistance is still here 8 years later, only now it's for a Supreme Court Nominee.
He, all by himself, makes me wish we had term limits in Congress.

 

[Zkribbler]

The President has done a good enough job of failing all by himself.

Obama fails:
Avoided a second Republican-caused Great Depression.
Recovered from the Great Recession faster than any other Western country.
Maintained the strongest economy in the world.
Saved the U.S auto industry.
Provided millions of Americans with affordable health care.
Ended the era of double-digit inflation in health care costs.
Lessened the interest payment on student loans.
Reformed Wall Street and big banks.
Decreased the deficit in each of his budgets.
Decreased income taxes to the lowest level since Eisenhower.
Ended torture.
Prevented the loss of Afghanistan to the terrorists.
Broke the stalemate in the Iraq War, allowing coalition forces to withdraw.
Decapitated al Qaeda, including killing bin Laden.
Dethroned terrorist overlord Qaddafi, without the loss of an American life.
Convinced Syria to give up the nerve gas which is always claimed it didn't have.
Negotiated a deal by which Iran abandoned its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and will allow inspection to assure no cheating.
More than doubled the amount of solar and wind energy.
Increased petroleum production in the U.S., making the U.S. the No. 1 oil producer in the world, plummeting the cost of gasoline, and crushing the economy of Russia.
Deported more illegal aliens each year than any other President did.
Changed for focus of deportations from breaking up families to getting rid of felons.
Took steps to fight global warming, despite Congressional obstructionism.
Won the Nobel Peach Prize by setting a course for international cooperation, instead of cowboy actions, saber rattling and bullying.

And doing all this while being the most filibustered President in history.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Heh, I could argue about half of those Obama accomplishments (Oil production rose in spite of Obama by drilling on private land), but I'd rather quote someone who worked with him.

http://nypost.com/2014/06/27/hillary-called-obama-a-joke-at-lunch-with-pals-book/

“When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought — really thought — about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all,” Klein wrote.

Clinton ranted, “The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time. That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f–king tiller,” according to the book, which was excerpted exclusively in Sunday’s Post.

“Obama has turned into a joke,” she went on, according to Klein.

“The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and [Fox reporter] James Rosen’s e-mails — all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did,” she raged, the book says, adding that she called the president “incompetent and feckless.”

And former President Bill Clinton:

“I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived,” Bill told pals, according to the book.

If anyone wants to buy Blood Feud, it has almost 1800 reviews on Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00WPRBM1C/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Does the limits of an RD thread allow for quoting the latest book by a gossip columnist who has been savaged for the total lack of credibility in all of his previous hatchet job books?

 

[Commodore]

Broke the stalemate in the Iraq War, allowing coalition forces to withdraw.
Decapitated al Qaeda, including killing bin Laden.
Dethroned terrorist overlord Qaddafi, without the loss of an American life.

Whoah, whoah, whoah, there hoss. It was the soldiers that accomplished those tasks, not Obama. I'm not too keen on giving any president credit for any military actions unless they personally command the war effort. If the generals are the ones carrying out the president's orders, then it is they, and the soldiers who fight under them, that get to take the credit or blame for a successful/failed military action.

 

[JollyRoger]

I think it is implied by the Constitution that the President nominates and the NRA advises and consents.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Whoah, whoah, whoah, there hoss. It was the soldiers that accomplished those tasks, not Obama. I'm not too keen on giving any president credit for any military actions unless they personally command the war effort. If the generals are the ones carrying out the president's orders, then it is they, and the soldiers who fight under them, that get to take the credit or blame for a successful/failed military action.

The president is the commander in chief. By every standard of chain of command he gets the credit.

I can resent the fact that the captain of my ship received a commendation for "performing repairs while underway that had previously only been undertaken in a shipyard" and that the star of Bedtime for Bonzo gets more credit for ending the cold war than I do, but military tradition is what it is.

 

[Commodore]

The president is the commander in chief. By every standard of chain of command he gets the credit.

I can resent the fact that the captain of my ship received a commendation for "performing repairs while underway that had previously only been undertaken in a shipyard" and that the star of Bedtime for Bonzo gets more credit for ending the cold war than I do, but military tradition is what it is.

Would you be saying this though, if those military successes had happened under Bush instead of Obama though?

My point being that just because you like the president doesn't mean you get to give him credit for things he didn't accomplish. I mean, I hated it when Bush tried to act like some conquering hero after the initial invasion of Iraq and that was before I was even in the Army. He contributed absolutely nothing to that military operation. That's also why I don't have a problem with superior officers taking credit for what their subordinates do, because the commanding officer still probably made some sort of contribution to the effort. The president does not, so he doesn't get to claim the glory.

Also, military tradition doesn't really apply to the president despite him being the Commander-in-Chief on account of him being a civilian. Civilians don't get to claim any military glory, only soldiers do.

 

[Archbob]

Yeah, I would say that.

But they didn't. Bush was a disaster.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Would you be saying this though, if those military successes had happened under Bush instead of Obama though?

My point being that just because you like the president doesn't mean you get to give him credit for things he didn't accomplish. I mean, I hated it when Bush tried to act like some conquering hero after the initial invasion of Iraq and that was before I was even in the Army. He contributed absolutely nothing to that military operation. That's also why I don't have a problem with superior officers taking credit for what their subordinates do, because the commanding officer still probably made some sort of contribution to the effort. The president does not, so he doesn't get to claim the glory.

Also, military tradition doesn't really apply to the president despite him being the Commander-in-Chief on account of him being a civilian. Civilians don't get to claim any military glory, only soldiers do.

Liking them or not makes no difference at all. Military commanders, of all levels (including the civilian commander in chief), are given the acknowledgement for the actions of those under their command. Always have been, always will be. You don't get to change that just because you don't like Obama.

 

[Commodore]

Liking them or not makes no difference at all. Military commanders, of all levels (including the civilian commander in chief), are given the acknowledgement for the actions of those under their command. Always have been, always will be. You don't get to change that just because you don't like Obama.

Who said I don't like Obama?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Who said I don't like Obama?

Nobody. But most of the people who grouse about Obama getting credit for military actions that took place during his tenure as CinC don't. Despite the fact that those same people will usually credit Reagan with the fall of the USSR.

At the end of the day, military tradition is not going to change.

 

[Commodore]

Nobody. But most of the people who grouse about Obama getting credit for military actions that took place during his tenure as CinC don't. Despite the fact that those same people will usually credit Reagan with the fall of the USSR.

At the end of the day, military tradition is not going to change.

Nah, I'm cool with Obama. I'm not all gaga over him, but I have no problem giving him credit for the stuff Zkribbler listed except the military stuff because all the non-military stuff are things he actually had a personal hand in.

And I don't think Reagan ended the Cold War. I think the unsustainability of the Soviet economic system is what ended the Cold War. But that's a discussion for another time.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Nah, I'm cool with Obama. I'm not all gaga over him, but I have no problem giving him credit for the stuff Zkribbler listed except the military stuff because all the non-military stuff are things he actually had a personal hand in.

And I don't think Reagan ended the Cold War. I think the unsustainability of the Soviet economic system is what ended the Cold War. But that's a discussion for another time.

While it is a discussion for another time, consider that their economic system may have been a lot more sustainable had they not been in an arms race with another military industrial state that was also willing to push themselves to the edge of bankruptcy in order to "win."

 

[onejayhawk]

Obama fails:
Avoided a second Republican-caused Great Depression. - Not.
Recovered from the Great Recession faster than any other Western country. - Meh.
Maintained the strongest economy in the world. Meh.
Saved the U.S auto industry. - Not.
Provided millions of Americans with affordable health care. - Emphatically Not.
Ended the era of double-digit inflation in health care costs. - Emphatically Not.
Lessened the interest payment on student loans. - Not.
Reformed Wall Street and big banks. - Not. Got in bed with them.
Decreased the deficit in each of his budgets. - It's not much, but I'll give it to you.
Decreased income taxes to the lowest level since Eisenhower. - Explain.
Ended torture. - Not.
Prevented the loss of Afghanistan to the terrorists.- Not.
Broke the stalemate in the Iraq War, allowing coalition forces to withdraw. WTH?
Decapitated al Qaeda, including killing bin Laden. - Half right. he got bin Laden
Dethroned terrorist overlord Qaddafi, without the loss of an American life. -Is this supposed to be good?
Convinced Syria to give up the nerve gas which is always claimed it didn't have. - Maybe.
Negotiated a deal by which Iran abandoned its efforts to gain nuclear weapons and will allow inspection to assure no cheating. - Emphatically Not.
More than doubled the amount of solar and wind energy. Meh. Also oversaw an explosion in fracking.
Increased petroleum production in the U.S., making the U.S. the No. 1 oil producer in the world, plummeting the cost of gasoline, and crushing the economy of Russia. - See fracking.
Deported more illegal aliens each year than any other President did. - Emphatically Not. Cooked the numnbers.
Changed for focus of deportations from breaking up families to getting rid of felons. - Wierd spin and inaccurate.
Took steps to fight global warming, despite Congressional obstructionism. - Meh.
Won the Nobel Peach Prize by setting a course for international cooperation, instead of cowboy actions, saber rattling and bullying. - Bull hockeys. He received the prize almost before taking office

And doing all this while being the most filibustered President in history.

Your report has three long noses.

J

 

[Arakhor]

Funnily enough, Onejay, the site who uses that system actually provides reasons for their awards.

 

[Zkribbler]

Funnily enough, Onejay, the site who uses that system actually provides reasons for their awards.

In fairness to onejayhawk, he did add a one-two-or-three word appendage to each of my points. They're factually incorrect, of course, but they are there.

BTW: My "lowest taxes since Ike" point comes from news stories like this one from USA Today. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/perfi/taxes/2011-05-05-tax-cut-record-low_n.htm

Republicans consistently forget that 1/3 of Obama's stimulus was a massive middle-class tax cut. It's still in place today.

 

[Arakhor]

I do recall that Obama received the Peace Prize almost before he entered the job, but is a whole bunch of 'Not' and 'Meh' actually supposed to convince anyone?

 

[Leoreth]

Yes, because J is an independent so we can trust his judgment as impartial and objective.

 

[Cutlass]

Mitch McConnell To Fox News: NRA Must Approve Of New Supreme Court Justice

Mitch McConnell refuses to give up. Despite President Obama moving forward and nominating Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, the Kentucky Senator is sticking to his guns, literally in this case, and insisting on blocking Garland as the nominee. In an interview with Fox News Sunday this morning, McConnell told host Chris Wallace that a new Supreme Court justice must have the approval of the National Rifle Association (NRA).


Wallace specifically asked McConnell if, should Hillary Clinton become president, he would consider the nomination of Merrick Garland. McConnell told Wallace:

‘I can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association and the National Federation of Independent Businesses [NFIB].’

He continued, saying that he doesn’t think the Senate “would want to confirm a judge that would move the court dramatically to the left. That’s not gonna happen.”

Ian Millhiser of ThinkProgress points out the flaws in McConnell’s reasoning. First, Millhiser points out that McConnell’s primary reason for blocking the nominee, that the vacancy should not be filled until a new President is elected, is undermined by this new reason because “it’s unlikely that the NRA or the NFIB will change their position on a nominee just because Hillary Clinton is president and not Barack Obama.”

Millhiser also explains the two right-wing organizations that McConnell thinks should have control over approving the Supreme Court nominees. The NFIB has fought hard against both the Affordable Care Act and raising the minimum wage. The NRA is well-known for its opposition to gun safety laws. The group, and therefore McConnell, oppose Garland’s nomination because of two cases, Parker v. District of Columbia and National Rifle Association v. Reno, in which Garland’s decisions did not fall strongly in favor of the NRA.

Despite these two cases, Garland’s gun record is still too small to make a truly informed opinion. Millhiser describes it as follows: “It consists of Garland’s single vote to rehear a case that one of his court’s most conservative members also voted to rehear, along with a decision to allow the FBI to continue to perform audits on the background check system after lawmakers sympathetic to the NRA tried and failed to shut those audits down.”

It seems McConnell is grasping at straws trying to back up his position. He wants people to believe he is justified, but, in reality, he’s just acting like a child, offering flawed logic and tantrums in the hopes of getting his way. And people are starting to see through his childish behavior.

Watch McConnell’s response to Wallace below, courtesy of Igor Volsky via YouTube.



Link to video.

http://bipartisanreport.com/2016/03...ra-must-approve-of-new-supreme-court-justice/


So according to McConnell, it's all about crony capitalism in the first place. All he's after is a Supreme Court justice who will put special interest profits ahead of the rights of the American people.







Opinions
The Supreme Court fight is about democracy
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer March 20 at 7:20 PM

There’s a reason beyond garden-variety partisanship that Senate Republicans resist even holding hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Their gambit evades a full and open debate over the conservative judicial agenda, which is to use the high court in an aggressive and political way to reverse decades of progressive legislation.

The central irony here: The very conservatives who use “judicial activism” as a battering ram against liberals are now the aggressive judicial activists. It’s precisely because Garland’s record reveals him to be a devout practitioner of judicial restraint that an intellectually frank dialogue over his nomination would be so dangerous to the right. It would expose the radicalism of their jurisprudence.

Some conservatives are quite open about this, and few have been more candid than George F. Will, my Post colleague. To begin with, he deserves credit for making clear in his most recent column that Garland really is a stout advocate of judicial “deference” and for pointing out the absurdity of the Republicans’ refusal to take up his nomination. And in the past, Will has been unusually direct in defining the stakes in our battles over the role of the courts.

In a 2014 column aptly headlined “Judicial activism isn’t a bad thing,” he wrote: “Conservatives clamoring for judicial restraint, meaning deference to legislatures, are waving a banner unfurled a century ago by progressives eager to emancipate government, freeing it to pursue whatever collective endeavors it fancies, sacrificing individual rights to a spurious majoritarian ethic.”

Will’s attack on “a spurious majoritarian ethic,” of course, is another way of criticizing the workings of democracy. Where does this lead?



Accessibility for screenreader
Home Page
Politics
Opinions
Sports
Local
National
World
Business
Tech
Lifestyle
Entertainment
Crosswords
Video
Photography
Washington Post Live
Live Chats
Real Estate
Cars
Jobs
WP BrandConnect
Classifieds
Partners

washingtonpost.com
1996-2016 The Washington Post
Terms of Service
Privacy Policy
Submissions and Discussion Policy
RSS Terms of Service
Ad Choices

Opinions
The Supreme Court fight is about democracy
Resize Text
Print Article
Comments 989
Book mark article
Read later list
Saved to Reading List

The U.S. Supreme Court building. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer March 20 at 7:20 PM

There’s a reason beyond garden-variety partisanship that Senate Republicans resist even holding hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Their gambit evades a full and open debate over the conservative judicial agenda, which is to use the high court in an aggressive and political way to reverse decades of progressive legislation.

The central irony here: The very conservatives who use “judicial activism” as a battering ram against liberals are now the aggressive judicial activists. It’s precisely because Garland’s record reveals him to be a devout practitioner of judicial restraint that an intellectually frank dialogue over his nomination would be so dangerous to the right. It would expose the radicalism of their jurisprudence.
E.J. Dionne writes about politics in a twice-weekly column and on the PostPartisan blog. He is a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a government professor at Georgetown University and a commentator on politics for National Public Radio, ABC’s “This Week” and MSNBC. He is the author of “Why the Right Went Wrong." View Archive

Some conservatives are quite open about this, and few have been more candid than George F. Will, my Post colleague. To begin with, he deserves credit for making clear in his most recent column that Garland really is a stout advocate of judicial “deference” and for pointing out the absurdity of the Republicans’ refusal to take up his nomination. And in the past, Will has been unusually direct in defining the stakes in our battles over the role of the courts.

In a 2014 column aptly headlined “Judicial activism isn’t a bad thing,” he wrote: “Conservatives clamoring for judicial restraint, meaning deference to legislatures, are waving a banner unfurled a century ago by progressives eager to emancipate government, freeing it to pursue whatever collective endeavors it fancies, sacrificing individual rights to a spurious majoritarian ethic.”

Will’s attack on “a spurious majoritarian ethic,” of course, is another way of criticizing the workings of democracy. Where does this lead?

It leads to the Citizens United decision (which Will supports as emphatically as I oppose it) that overthrew decades of precedent and a century of practice involving limits on the power of big money in politics; to the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act; and to the scrapping of all manner of legislation aimed at protecting workers’ rights, the environment and consumers. Historically, it’s an approach that, more often than not, leans toward employers over employees, creditors over debtors, property owners over less affluent citizens, and corporations over individuals.

We know what this approach looks like because it’s the one the court pursued for decades before the New Deal. It is this pre-New Deal jurisprudence that conservatives want to bring back. Some conservatives have talked openly about the “Constitution in Exile,” referring to the way our founding document was once read to overturn many New Deal and Progressive Era laws. Starting in the late 1930s, the court moved to a different approach that gave Congress broad latitude to legislate on matters related to social justice and economics and saw its task as intervening primarily on behalf of individual rights.

Will’s outright embrace of “judicial activism” has brought him some critics on the right. One of them is Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a leading defender of the Senate Republicans’ current strategy. “Most contemporary conservative proponents of judicial restraint,” Whelan has written, “are also proponents of originalism and see judicial restraint merely as supplementing originalist methodology when that methodology fails to yield a sufficiently clear answer to a constitutional question.”

Whelan added that his approach would, like Will’s, allow judges to “enforce the rights, and limits on power, that the Constitution, fairly construed, sets forth.” But it would also “prevent judges from inventing rights and powers that are not in the Constitution.”

Here’s my translation of Whelan: He’s instructing Will to notice how originalism — the conservative theory that insists we can apply the original meaning of the Constitution’s words and the Founders’ intentions with some ease — leaves judges with plenty of power to toss out progressive laws. At the same time, it gives conservatives grounds to oppose liberals on such issues as abortion and gay marriage.

I’ll stipulate that there are some legitimate conservative arguments against liberals on their own forms of social-issue activism. But I’d insist that we will understand this court battle better if we pay attention to Will’s straightforward language: Through originalism and other doctrines, conservatives have embraced an astonishingly aggressive approach to judging. It allows them to reach outcomes through the courts that they cannot achieve through the democratic process.

At heart, this is a debate over how we define democracy. It’s also a struggle over whether government will be able to serve as a countervailing force to concentrated economic power.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...b2bb56-ed47-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html


But this is what it's really about. It's about using judicial activism to get a result that they cannot get through politics. Just as they accuse liberals of doing. It is, at its heart, about not letting the American people be free.