kramerica.inc wrote: ↑Thu Mar 26, 2020 1:33 pm
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... 180962589/
What the Senate did to Merrick Garland in 2016, it did it to three other presidents’ nominees between 1844 and 1866, though the timelines and circumstances differed. Those decades of gridlock, crisis and meltdown in American politics left a trail of snubbed Supreme Court wannabes in their wake. And they produced justices who—as Neil Gorsuch might—ascended to Supreme Court seats set aside for them through political calculation.
There is this tendency to view history through rose-colored glasses from time to time, and to suggest we’ve never been this political,” says Charles Gardner Geyh, a law professor at Indiana University and author of the 2008 book When Courts and Congress Collide. “In reality, we have always had a highly politicized selection process.” Several times in the 1800s, Geyh says, “the Senate certainly appears to have delayed with an eye toward saving the nomination for the next president.”
Though Garland’s failed nomination was far from unprecedented, at least one aspect of the modern Republican Senate’s move was new. The mid-1800s seat-snatchings took place before hearings on Supreme Court nominees were standard protocol, and before nominations were the subject of much open debate. So the historical record of why the Senate ran out the clock on the early nominees is thin, leaving historians to interpret its political motives from news accounts and correspondence of the time. Past senators kept their political motives unspoken; today’s admit them with pride.
“On several of these failed nominations, there seem to have been ostensible merit-based objections,” says Geyh. “Even you if can look at it and raise your eyebrows, and say, ‘Well, that really doesn’t seem like the real reason,’ they at least felt they needed that fig leaf. There was no such fig leaf with Garland.”
Battles over a president’s late-term judicial nominations are nearly as old as the Constitution itself. Thomas Jefferson’s successful fight against John Adams’ “midnight judges,” appointees rushed through in Adams’ last days in office in 1801, led to the famed Supreme Court case Marbury vs. Madison.
While the case is well known for establishing the court’s power of judicial review, its facts are less remembered. Just before Adams left office, Congress created dozens of new judicial positions. Adams quickly appointed men to fill them. When Jefferson took office, he refused to acknowledge some of Adams’ judicial appointments. William Marbury, an Adams appointee for District of Columbia justice of the peace, sued to receive his commission anyway, but lost the case. Jefferson later convinced Congress to abolish the new judgeships.
As much as I advocate anyone defending the seat being with Kavanaugh (not a guy I have much in common with; he tends to be a pro-government, pro-DC establishment, anti-civil rights) and not with Merrick Garland (ironically somewhat similar to Kavanaugh in his pro-DC/government anti-civil rights stances, but happens to be more reflexively anti-business and more pro-DNC agenda), you are literally tearing a scab from Democrats that shall never be healed. This one issue is their forever cause.
The courts imo had gone way too far left over the last many decades. And when I say left, I do not mean the traditional sense where they upheld civil rights.
The FISA Court is such an exquisite example of how today's Lect could not care less about civil rights. Your rights as citizens will almost always be trampled upon by those who adore DC power; the left leaning courts ruled FISA, and as you likely know, basically never bothered to inquire the substance of any oversight by government agencies; they merely rubberstamped the approvals. Most lefties do not see the harm in the abuse of citizen's civil rights; only a very few are even horrified by government abuses anymore, unless of course there is some accompanying virtue signal such as 'kids in cages' (not even citizens, natch). The hypocrisy is overwhelming. The few jurists who constantly poke the government bear in the eye are almost always from the right (think Gorsuch, Scalia).
Quite pathetic imo. And why many of us fear the Left in power far more than the Right...the Left's tendency today is to embrace totalitarianism. I've done that again, pointing out the obvious.
Incoming 3-2-1