October 13, 2007 • 3:41 am
C-SPAN last week broadcast an interesting panel discussion, available on the C-Span website through this link (its the October 6, 2007 program) on the Roberts Court last week on its “America and the Courts” program, in which a distinguished panel, including Erwin Chemerinsky, John Yoo, Kathleen Sullivan and Linda Greenhouse discuss the current Supreme Court, the term concluded in June, and the term just started. There was a bit of disagreement about whether or, more accurately, how far to the right the Roberts Court has swung in comparison to the Court over which the late Chief Justiced William Rehnquist presided. Chemerinsky sees the sky falling. I suppose time will tell. In any event, the discussion is interesting, and I highly recommend it.
Filed under: America and the Courts, The Supreme Court
This is the title of what is, I think, a rather silly and superficial article that ran in this week’s issue of Time magazine. Of course the Supreme Court, as the final arbiter of federal Constitutional and statutory questions, still matters. Just not, perhaps, in the way that the author of the article, and many others who might pine for a return to the Court’s activist past, might hope.
Filed under: The Supreme Court
The Legal Intelligencer reported today that President Bush is set to nominate Judge Gene E.K. Pratter of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennnsylvania to a vacant seat on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. The Legal suggests that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter’s preferred candidate for the Third Circuit appointment, Reed Smith partner Carolyn Short, was passed over due to her husband’s status as a prominent Democrat with close ties to, among others, Governor Ed Rendell. Whatever the inside baseball political games involved, I will offer my opnion that Judge Pratter is immensely qualified for a seat on the Third Circuit and will be an outstanding addition to the court. I had the pleasure of working with Judge Pratter while she was at Duane Morris. While she almost certainly does not remember our interaction, I most certainly do. I am now, as I was then, impressed with her intellect and her commitment to the law. It is my hope that the Senate will act promptly on Judge Pratter’s anticipated nomination and confirm her with all due speed.
Filed under: Judicial Nominations, Third Circuit
October 1, 2007 • 10:43 am
While reading Linda Greenhouse’s piece in The New York Times this morning discussing today’s opening of the Supreme Court’s 2007 term (which is NOT the subject of this post), there was a little bit in the section about the Guantanamo Bay detainees case. That case, as you likely already know, involves the question of whether the Military Commissions Act, which Congress passed and the President signed into law last year, impermissibly prohibits the federal courts from considering habeas corpus petitions brought by Guantanamo detainees. So far so good. In the course of describing the case, she notes that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, who was the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had voted in favor of the Act, but has now “filed a brief telling the justices he believes it is unconstitutional.” It is curious – to me at least – that Senator Specter would vote in favor of a law that he believes to be unconstitutional.
As a voting member of a coequal branch of the federal government, Senator Specter has a duty to protect and uphold the Constitution, just as the President does, and just as the Supreme Court does. It seems to me to be an abrogation of that duty to vote in favor of a bill that one believes violates the Constitution. If Senator Specter REALLY believes that the Act is unconstitutional, in my view he had a duty to vote against it. Hos vote in favor of the Act was no less an instance of dereliction of duty than was the President’s signing into law of McCain-Feingold, which, the President opined at the time, he believed was, at least in substantial part, unconstitutional.
Of course we are talking about the Senator who famously voted “not proven” at the conclusion of the Clinton impeachment trial. But still, if Senator Specter had concerns about the constitutionality of the Act grave enough to justify his filing of an amicus brief, ought he not have voted against it in the first place?
Filed under: Congress, Constitutional Law, The Supreme Court
September 22, 2007 • 1:39 am
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Filed under: Uncategorized
