Redstate

retirement at 70? I wouldn't let a 70 year old doctor take out my appendix, would you? (Not mine, yours)

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

Writing opinions isn't surgery; the wise brain can still guide the shaky hand. Scalia is still much in his judicial prime, for example, and even Stevens isn't really that different than he was 30 years ago. I actually think a 25-year term limit would encourage more judges who are closer to 60 to be appointed, as there is less need to find someone who can serve 30-40 years on the Court.

"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill

it is the deterioration in the brain that is brought on by aging. If Fortune 500 companies aren't run by people in their 70s and 80s, why should our Country be run by codgers?

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

We're not Court-packers, and it would be a House of Lords-like precedent to try.

Court packing is an attempt to add more justices to the Supreme Court in an attempt to "pack" the court with enough like-minded justices to tip the scales in your favor. FDR wanted to be able to appoint a new justice for every justice that was over the age of 70 1/2.

Amending the Constitution to force uniform retirement of all justices at a certain age - while I do not favor - wouldn't really be a form of "court-packing," in my humble estimation, since no additional seats would be added.

Also, replacing liberal justices who leave for whatever reason with a conservative justice is absolutely not court-packing.

and if it is done by conservatives for the sole purpose of introducing an originalist/textualist majority it is functionally the same thing. It sets a terrible precedent when the pendulum swings back the other way, as it may already be doing. It also makes belies our contention that the Court should be depoliticized.

As long as the Democrats keep picking Ideological judges we need to do the same. The GOP single greatest failure in recent times* has been to let the dems run roughshod over the court.

By trying to be apolitical towards the court we have created a politicized court. Originalism at least has the benefit of shifting legislative functions back to the legislature. Also note that originalism while embraced by conservatives does not embrace conservatives. It is a neutral philosophy promoting the correct separation of powers, not championing particular causes.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

been reading too much of "The Pelican Brief" lately. Although I do think that given the heated passions surrounding so many of the issues the Court decides, it is interesting that there haven't been more attempts on the Justices.

I think you've come out in support of Rudy, at least to some degree. If so, Bush getting a 3rd appointment would benefit Rudy the most, imho.

Bush would be under intense pressure to put a 3rd conservative up. Rudy would of course have to support his pick(unless he goes with another moderate or a Miers like pick, in which case Rudy could gain even more credit with the base by leading the opposition and pushing for a more conservative Alito/Roberts like pick).

If it's Ginsburg, Bush would have to go with a woman. I think Bush would get a woman/minority confirmed. There's enough Red State/Southern dems that a Janice Brown, Karen Williams, Priscilla Owen, etc... would get confirmed.

Once there's 5 conservatives on the bench, it really doesn't matter whether Rudy is pro choice or pro life or who he'd appoint. There'd already be the votes there to overturn Roe(and any other liberal disaster) and Rudy's psoitions would become far less of an issue.

Do we really know that the Courth has four anti-Roe votes? I'm hopeful, but want to leave as little to chance as possible.

But I suspect that they very well might be there - especially if what Greenberg reported in Supreme Conflict is true. Some DC Circuit judge said that Roberts was the most conservative justice that he ever served with - and he had served with Bork, Scalia, and Thomas. I would say that's a bit of hyperbole from what I've seen.

And Alito definitely wiggled the right way when he dissented in Casey.

At this point, there are no federal elections for him to worry about, and the Democratic party holds the majority to approve his nominees. Any pressure on him would be to present the least objectionable nominee he can find so that the Senate sails him or her through and he can worry about other stuff. You can look to the Miers nomination to see that Bush personally either doesn't much care about pleasing conservatives but simply chooses people he knows and trusts, or instinctively wants to pick someone the other side probably wouldn't bitch about too much.

It's different now than it was when both the President and majority in the Senate were in the same party, then Republicans could nominate who they wanted and then rail against filibuster threats, demand up or down votes, or threaten the "nuclear option." Now that Democrats are in the Senate majority, Republican senators and the Administration would have to swallow way too much crow to threaten a filibuster preventing an up or down vote to ensure a stout conservative nominee.

As for Ginsburg, maybe she twisted an ankle or has gout or something. I've been helped out of lots of places over the years. Granted, sometimes this was because I was really drunk, and I bet Ginsburg wasn't plastered on the bench, but sometimes I had a lower extremity hurt or other injury that kept me from being fully mobile. I'm guessing you are going to have to wheel her out of the courthouse, or have her mentally deteriorate to the point that she doesn't know where the courthouse is, before she resigns.

Dubya really, really, really thought he was giving us a solid conservative with Harriet Miers. He's known her for a very long time, and I honestly believe that Harriet Miers would have WANTED to be the "Scalia-in-a-skirt" justice that Edith Jones would be. She simply was not capable, though. Today, we need Supreme Court justices who have spent their lives immersed in the fine points of constitutional law and have developed a definite overarching philosophy on constitutional interpretation. Roberts and Alito both bring this to the court (I don't care WHAT Roberts says...he was just trying to avoid having to use the term "strict constructionist" in his hearing.)

Dubya doesn't have to "bow to pressure" from the right on judicial nomiations. Why? Because he is one of us. Harriet Miers was in favor of nominating Alito from the very beginning, and she was skeptical that Roberts wasn't conservative enough.

Say what you will about Miers, but while I'm glad we were able to tank her nomination because she simply would have been an incompetant justice - she at least knew what she was looking for.

The president still has 49 Republicans, Ben Nelson, probably Joe Lieberman now, and a multitutde of Red State Democrats up for election in 2008. Just like Justice Thomas was confirmed in a Democrat-controlled Senate, so too do I believe that a well-credentialed, even-tempered conservative rock star justice would make it through the Supreme Court confirmation process and get on the bench.

Its painful to think of how she was the second choice to the absolutely awful Souter. I wonder if the first President Bush loses sleep over that disaster?

He should.

Honestly, Dan, I don't know exactly where you came up with that idea and while I usually take what you propose seriously, this seems to be one of the sillier things that I've read.

Given that the average tenure of a Supreme Court justice is about 15 years, I don't see how a single 25-year term would actually have much effect - if any at all. I mean, you can't really guarantee that a 60-year-old will last until he/she is 85 quite the way Justice Stevens has. A 55-year-old like Justice Alito would still have to make it to 80. That would still most likely leave him serving on the court practically until the end of his life. Sure, more people are living to be 100 these days, but most people still don't make it that far.

If Justice Ginsburg were forced off the court this summer due to health concerns, she would have served right at 15 years - and I think few expect her to spend another decade on the court.

I will say this though, Justice Ginsburg is our most dedicated left wing partisan on the court. She would sooner die in office trying to make it to 2008 than willingly allow Dubya to replace her.

Also, since you are a Giuliani supporter, I thought I'd throw in that, while I simply cannot support a socially liberal Republican in the primary, an upside could be that a northeastern Republican president like Giuliani might actually be able to coax Stevens and Souter off of the court. They may feel comfortable that they would be replaced by a justice like them and then they could leave looking like loyal Republicans much like Justice Byroan White played the role of the loyal Democrat retiring under President Clinton. Then, if Giuliani really did deliver with a Roberts and Alito to replace them, he would actually have done MORE to change the direction of the court than even Dubya has. I'd even settle for Maureen Mahoney for one of those slots if he delivered a Scalia-ish justice for the other seat. I'd settle for a Mahoney/Estrada combo - preferrably with Estrada going first.

I note that this esteemed author states (in a blog post further down), that if Bush gets another appointment:

The most likely contenders if Bush gets another nomination are Judges Priscilla Owen or Janice Rogers Brown. Maura Corrigan of the Michigan Supreme Court was a favorite, but she’s got a mess on her hands with her court now. Diane Sykes of the 7th Circuit also is highly regarded, but not a frontrunner yet. Owen and Brown would be a battle in a Democratic-controlled Senate, but that’s a fight Bush doesn’t mind having. Change the subject! Rally supporters! The Supreme Court is the only thing that’s gone right for Bush, as I argued in this Washington Post piece last week. And if they lose, Maureen Mahoney (aka the “female John Roberts”) is always waiting in the wings.

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Social Security Choice - Club For Growth

that which needs to be said to advance oneself, however unbelievable in many, many cases, is being said.

that the ultimate bogeyman jurist, Bork, has said flatly that he does not believe that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms as the right perceives it.

Bork also said that the Equal Protection Amendment only applies to blacks. Don't get me wrong...Bork would have been an amazing and interesting justice. And oh how I wish we'd had him on the court all these years instead of Stevens. But, sometimes, it seems to me that Bork neglects the possibility that a statute or legal plank, while possibly drafted to address a particular issue, might also have been drafted broadly enough to ensure that OTHER similar injustices that they don't yet forsee could be addressed by the same law, by likewise strictly interpreting the letter of the law and assigning the common meaning and understanding of the verbiage used in the day the law was written.

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Social Security Choice - Club For Growth

I believe that Bork was considered as far back as the Stevens seat (kind of like Edith Jones lost out to David Souter.) Bork was only nominated for the Kennedy seat.

under the Slaughterhouse Cases that WAS the original interpretation of the 14th Amendment, and that opinion was written at a time when its architects were alive and well, in fact most of whom were still legislating.

Interesting is not a good word when applied to supreme court, it becomes much like the Chinese curse.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777

A Justice Bork's occassional oddball opinions would have been kind of "cute" and interesting artifacts because he would have ruled with the conservative majority on almost all of our important cases. And even when he didn't, his vote wouldn't go for the liberal solution, even if he concurred in the judgment. So, there would end up being no precedent, really, No harm, no foul.

The Second Amendment is an INDIVIDUAL right. What part of "the rights of the people" don't you and Bork understand? It doesn't say the rights of the government. It doesn't say the rights of the militia even though at the time, the milita WAS the people.

This issue was resolved when the Bill of Rights was writen. What Bork or anyone else says to the contrary is irrevelant.

Unlike Roberts and Alito, he wasn't prepared to handle his confirmation process and he doesn't possess the charm to overcome his basic boorishness or explain his positions in a non-confrontational manner regardless of the validity of those positions.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

...and then all of the sudden you'll see these liberals begging and pleading with her husband to leave her on life support with the tubes in until a Democrat is elected president - even if that's in a few decades! LOL

the minority could filibuster to get a nominee CONFIRMED. heh.

no, for all the problems that lifetime appointment can cause with a bad nominee, the cures are all worse than the disease.