My Distaste for Kagan.

There's such a buzzing noise in the "pro-life" community right now about the horrors of Obama's supreme court nominee, Elena Kagan. Surprise, surprise, she's being called a lefty pinko. The commotion would be twice as much fun to watch if there were any truth to the concerns for her "radical stance." You can read some of the recent commotion here and here and here.

She's clearly a moderate, in the pre-Clinton sense of the word. I fear that any of her reluctance to regulate social services for women and the elderly are probably a libertarian streak more so than a human rights one; you know, personal liberty and freedom and all that (read the Montana state constitution, written in the 70s for a fine example.) But opponents of this administration and of the Democratic party (of which I am often finding myself lately, though from another direction) have been running off into the crazy fields of "radical," "activist," "communist," "fascist" claims regarding anything left of, say, George W. It's some sort of conspiracy, paranoid delusion that's again taken hold of the country; unfortunately, not a novel phenomenon.

Kagan's positions on abortion and assisted suicide are what have the "pro-lifers" up in arms. Yet, little is mentioned about her hands-off stance regarding consumer safety and corporate regulation. And because she's been nominated by Obama and served in Clinton's administration, liberals and/or progressives have been reticent to vocalize their opposition.

I expect it will be a contentious nomination process, though if the Republicans are smart, they'll keep doing what they're doing: pretending that moderates look like radicals. The Dems cans seem to cope with all the confusion.

Orthodox Adherence to Religious Doctrine.

I don't agree with the conclusions in this post at the Catholic Mirror of Justice, about a new book on Catholic justices and the establishment clause, but it's short and I think a good reminder to all of us that church doctrine aren't always practiced/believed/adhered to by their denomination's members, irregardless of public role.

Do Judges Decide With Their Souls?

The Washington Post today writes about religion and the Supreme Court. John Paul Stevens, the lone Protestant on the bench, turns 90 next month.

The question of faith and the court has come up often lately and I too have pointed out that a majority of the justices are Catholic. Yet the justices seem to make decisions that are less predicated on their faith than on their political ideology.

Of course the most conservative justices on the court tend to think of themselves as "post-religious."

Clearly, the court thinks of itself as post-religious. Last fall, Alito said he was frustrated that discussions about the court's Catholic majority became "one of those questions that does not die." He complained of "respectable people who have seriously raised the questions in serious publications about whether these individuals could be trusted to do their jobs."

Scalia has said he would be "hard-pressed to tell you of a single opinion of mine that would have come out differently if I were not Catholic." Ginsburg has said that whereas her predecessors on the court have been known collectively as the "Jewish justices," she and Breyer are "justices who happen to be Jews."

The article also quotes the fantastic Marci Hamilton. Here's a clip:

Such diversity makse religious labels at best incomplete. "Just because there is a disproportionate number of Catholics on the court doesn't mean that you will know how the decisions will come down," said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at the Cardozo Law School in New York, who has written extensively about religion and the court.

Other scholars agree that even on questions of the separation of church and state, a justice's generally liberal or conservative philosophy is a far better indicator than religion. Sotomayor, for instance, seems likely to side more with colleagues appointed by Democratic presidents than with the court's conservative Catholics, appointed by Republicans.

But perceptions matter, too. Religion becomes a diversity consideration just like ethnicity and gender, especially with 51 percent of Americans identifying with one of the Protestant religions.

Clearly, Obama did not consider Sotomayor's Catholic upbringing to be disqualifying, despite the court's majority. "And the president has every right to ask [a potential nominee], 'What is your position on how you would separate your faith from the rule of law?' " Hamilton said.

Perceptions also matter, she said. As religions become more politically active, it is natural for the public to wonder about the influence on the court.

Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor surprised some last fall at a conference when asked about the need for geographic diversity on the court. "I don't think they should all be of one faith, and I don't think they should all be from one state," she said.

Public vs. Private and Americans United.

Daniel Henninger, of course at the super pro-business Wall Street Journal, gets a great couple of things wrong in his opinion column today about the struggle that is taking place in the country between faith in government and faith in the free market.

Scoff at "the public good" all he wants, like the notion is some quaint nicety afforded "the help" by the country's true plantation owners, the noble, superior corporations, government's role is not to protect the public for corporations' use but from corporations' abuse. We've got three branches of government; we don't need a corporate branch.

Yet, that's exactly what we have. To the tune of paid-for politicians, a decimated middle class, an unworkable health care system, a barely-surviving minimum-wage class, and a warped social mythology that our businesses are what have made us great. To some extent, the rise of America's global corporations have aided American global dominance but for the most part I'm not sure that's something to brag about. Not when you consider what it's cost us.

Too many decades of letting these selfish, powerful entities run rough-shod over the world market should have taught us a lesson in the eighties. And the nineties. And the oughts. Yet, Republicans, Democrats and the courts have aided and abetted corporate gutting of citizen's pockets, standard of living, and rights.

It's a sad myth that market-running, unregulated corporations are our best national asset, a romantic myth akin to that of America's "greatest schools on earth" and "greatest health care system on earth" and "greatest God-fearing nation on earth."

As our economy sits in ruins and the good public suffer yet again with this recession at the hands of unchecked corporations, it's laughable that the myth still holds weight. If I could, I'd send Henninger and his fellow believers to work in a sweat shop in south east asia or a coal mine in Pennsylvania. Because what they fail to acknowledge is that the public is not just made up of corporate CEOs with private jets and multiple (un-foreclosed) houses. The public is not even made up of folks like me who have a college education and tap away at a "desk" job.

It's the hundreds of millions of forgotten Americans who have no ability to chose their way because they are slaves to the very same corporations who have just been given their vote. Bootstraps be damned; until we break the myth that corporations actually care about the public good - or are even above responsibility for it - we'll be using social program after social program to repair the damage they continue to do.

From the article:

America's Democrats and Republicans, crudely defined, are with this presidency and this Congress living today on opposite sides of a moon that they both call the United States.

In the universe inhabited by Justice Stevens and President Obama, corporations—the private sector—are a suspect abstraction, ever tending toward "the worst urges" which have to be "comprehensively regulated." The saints regulate the sinners.

If you think this way, what one does to the private sector, such as the proposed $90 billion bank tax, can never be wrong in any serious way, so long as the rationale offered is the "public good." Private-sector players are seen as barely more than paid galley slaves on the ship of state. So it is with the health-care bill's mammoth, comprehensive regulation of American medicine and insurance.

Mr. Obama seems genuinely perplexed that the opposition can't just, you know, sign onto it. What's their problem?

Evidently, the voters of Massachusetts have a problem with that and more.

In the past year, Mr. Obama and the Democratic Congress passed a $787 billion stimulus, seized banks and the auto industry, embarked on a $1 trillion reorganization of the private health-care system, and passed a fiscal 2010 budget that put spending as a percentage of GDP at 24.1%. These are very large claims for the public good.

This public-private tension is an ancient and never-ending debate in the U.S. But what we are seeing this year, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, is American voters arriving at a tipping point over the scale and role of government. Most Americans still go to work each day inside a private economy organized around tens of thousands of corporations. Their basic view of the world and that found inside Justice Stevens's dissent and this White House are out of sync.

Impeach Supreme Court Justice John Roberts.

Bill Berry at Madison's Cap Times calls for the impeachment of Justice John Roberts:

If you’ve been around long enough, you can remember the highway billboards of the 1960s demanding “Impeach Earl Warren.”

Appointed chief justice of the United States by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, Warren went on to anger conservatives for high court rulings, especially in the areas of police arrest procedures, separation of church and state, and civil rights.

The John Birch Society paid for those billboard messages, and while Warren was never impeached, he served as a convenient whipping boy for those who claimed to want a constructionist, not an activist, Supreme Court. My, how times have changed. Current Chief Justice John “Screw the Little Guy” Roberts and his four black-robed sycophants have proven every bit as activist as the Warren court.

The Roberts court’s frightening 5-4 ruling that corporations and unions may spend freely from their treasuries to influence elections is a monumental decision, as in monumentally wrong. Those scrambling to defend it note that the decision might lead to full disclosure of who or, in this case, what is spending money to buy political office. Sure, as if we didn’t know the names of the robber barons that Robert La Follette and Wisconsin’s early 20th century progressives fought.