The SCOTUS and our rights

Clarice Feldman writes in the Pajamas Media:

SCOTUS Decision Attacks ‘Honest Services’ Law
The Supreme Court has upheld the principle that a law be well-defined, not simply established when a jury decision is made on it.
 
The right is often so concerned with maintaining scrupulous standards of probity that during criminal proceedings involving friends and allies they vanish, fearful of getting their own spotless white togas spattered with mud. Further, too often the right ignores the seamier side of criminal law.
I am not suggesting that the proper course in such cases is to join in a chorus attacking and smearing those who’ve made the accusations, or to bespatter prosecutors as Ken Starr was. But I do suggest that they maintain a vigilant eye on the proceedings, and maintain their loyalty until the facts are fully known.

Also, that they pay more attention and offer more resistance to the growing problem of prosecutorial overreach than they have, rather than simply assuming the propriety of the proceedings.

With few joining me, I have written repeatedly of the outrageous behavior of Patrick Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald succeeded in so poisoning the jury and public opinion with his extrajudicial statements and so manipulated evidence before the trial court that he got the innocent Lewis Libby convicted. Libby was a man targeted, I believe, by opponents of the prior administration who considered him a proxy in their bureaucratic wars against Bush and Cheney.

That behavior continued in Fitzgerald’s treatment of Conrad Black and his hapless Hollinger general counsel, Mark Kipnis. Now, it continues against former Illinois Governor Blagojevich, who was removed from office on the basis of the prosecutor’s conduct before he was found guilty of anything. This is a prosecutor who, having seen the likely direction the Court was heading on the question of “honest services,” was forced to add other charges against the governor to account for the likelihood that the honest services charges would be thrown out.

What is the “honest services” provision? It’s a simple, less than 30-word addition to the federal mail fraud statute:

§ 1346. For the purposes of this chapter, the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” includes a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.

Last week, the “honest services” arrow in the prosecution’s quiver was severely blunted by the Suprme Court when it reversed three convictions based on that law.

Read the rest of this here.

We are fighting the battles in Congress with our hands tied behind our backs

Until conservatives take some seats in the house and senate we are fighting the battle to change our country from a Democartic Republic to a socialist republic. Some of our Senators and Representatives are doing all they can, but without enough of them they are constrained by the numbers.

From Yahoo/AP:

Senator: No Kagan hearings without Clinton files

By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS,

        The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee warned Monday that he would seek to slow Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's path to confirmation unless senators get full access to her files as a Clinton administration aide.

       Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary Committee chairman, last week set hearings to begin on June 28. Sessions said Republicans would ask for a delay unless senators get access to the tens of thousands of pages of Clinton-era records by then.

"We're heading to what could be a train wreck," Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama said. "I don't believe that this committee can go forward with an adequate hearing" without all records from Kagan's tenure as a White House counsel and then domestic policy adviser to President Bill Clinton.

       Sessions doesn't have a veto over the hearing schedule, but his threat set the stage for a potential partisan showdown over the documents and the pace of Kagan's confirmation process.

There is no bi-partisanship in this Congress, not on the Democratic side, and most of the Republicans. The RINOs of course blow with the prevailing winds.

Read it all.

Would Empathy by any other name smell as sweet?

PowerLine has a go at the answer.

Dressing up left-liberal jurisprudence once again

by Paul Mirengoff

A year ago, in connection with his decision to choose a successor to Justice Souter, President Obama said that the quality of "empathy" was important in a Supreme Court Justice. The notion that one should decide cases based on empathy, rather than the dictates of the law, must not have polled well because, as the Washington Post reports, this time around "reporters could not bait White House press secretary Robert Gibbs into even saying the word."

So what is the White House saying? According to the Post, Obama now says he wants a justice with a keen understanding of how the law affects the lives of "ordinary citizens." Thus, says the Post in its front-page blurb, the search is on for someone who, like Justice Stevens, can relate to ordinary citizens.

The Post's story raises several questions. First, what is the difference between an empathetic justice and one who is sensitive to how the law affects people's lives? Stated differently, why does Team Obama believe that, having been unimpressed by empathy as a judicial quality, the public will rally around the same concept described in other words?

Actually, it does sound better to me. Have they been reading Frank Luntz? Read it all here.

Links for a busy Wednesday

From Human Events:
All the President's Goldman Sachs Men
by Michelle Malkin
From Human Events
Democrats and Liberal Media Smear Tea Parties
by Lynn Woolley
Democrats haunted by corporate ties
From American Thinker
Leaving Liberalism
By Chuck Rogér
From CNSNews.com
Supreme Court Splits Sharply on Campus Christian Argument
By Jesse J. Holland, Associated Press
From American Spectator Blog
Big Implications for Wind Energy
By Paul Chesser
links via Lucianne.com

This is a Scary Thought - Justice Obama

By Jeffrey Rosen in the Washington Post:
Supreme Court Justice Barack Obama?

He's too detached and cerebral . Too deferential to Congress. Too willing to compromise . And he's too much of a law professor and not enough of a commander in chief, as Sarah Palin recently admonished.

These are some of the qualities for which the president, rightly or wrongly, is criticized. They are also the qualities that make him well suited for another steady job on the federal payroll: Barack Obama, Supreme Court justice.

Think about it. Though Obama has struggled to find his footing in the White House, his education, temperament and experience make him ideally suited to lead the liberal wing of the court, especially at a time when a narrow conservative majority seems increasingly intent on challenging progressive economic reforms for the first time since the New Deal. Obama is clearly eager to take on the four truly conservative justices -- Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas -- as his State of the Union smackdown suggests. But as president, he's constrained by that pesky separation of powers. So what better way to engage the fight than to join the bench? ...

.....Obama's academic credentials for the court -- including serving as president of the Harvard Law Review and teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago -- are obvious. But it's his even temperament and low boiling point that seem tailor-made for the court at this polarized moment.

Rosen just rambles on and on about Obama's credentials, personality traits, etc. etc. It is a scary scenario, but not one I think will ever happen. Read it all if you must.

Lamar Alexander to vote for Sotomayor

According to the blog Right Truth. Click the link to read it.
http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml click this to contact him.