Saturday, July 30, 2005
The Case Against the Federalist Society and John Roberts
Federalism is the distribution of power in an organization (as a government) between a central authority and the constituent units. (definition from Merriam Webster, www.m-w.com) In other words, a system of checks and balances.
Here's the first paragraph in the Federalist Society's definition of their purpose. "Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law."
OK, where is this "orthodox liberal ideology?" Is there some manifesto or liberal bible that states the ideology? Secondly, from the terminology of "centralized" and "uniform" they make it sound like liberals are advocating, oh I don't know, a communist state? Centralized planning, uniformity of thought and opinion were Soviet kinds of things. Can you say absurd bias?
Here's a clue. Part of being a liberal implies non-comformity. Non-comformity means questioning authority. The ability and right to question authority is one of the key freedoms any democratic society should harbor and nurture. Liberals give their consent to be governed in a free society so that they can pursue their individual path to happiness, but only if they maintain the right to petition the government, speak out against it, and if necessary abolish it through free and fair elections. (Even conservatives who agree with these fundamental rights, are in essence promoting a liberal ideology.)
As for centralization, that sounds more like a conservative ideology, not a liberal one. Conservatives advocate a black and white world view, with little deviation from the "acceptable" way people should live. They are traditionalists, and question any sort of change to the status quo. This is not always a bad position to take if a conservative is questioning a radical change that could/would destroy a democratic society, but it can be harmful if it gets in the way of promoting civil liberties for those who are discriminated against in a free and democratic society.
The Fed-Soc continues with their purpose, "It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."
OK, that part sounds federalist, but what is meant by the second part of that sentence? "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be." First by saying what the law is, they are, in essence, claiming what the law should be. For example, if a Supreme Court justice rules that segregation of schools is legal, they are fundamentally stating that segregation of public schools is legal, and that is the way it should be based on the majority opinion and judgement of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has made some real devastating boners in our history. The Dred Scott decision and Plessy v. Ferguson to name a couple, oh yeah and claiming that corporations are entitled to the same rights as individual citizens. Another good one.
By making judgements that favored slaves as property, stating that segregation was legal, and giving corporations superhuman legal powers, the Court has altered and changed the way things are/were done in America. As a result, the court dictates through interpretation and judgement what the law should be. We can see that the court eventually overturned segregation, and slavery, but to what effect. By ruling in favor of slaverowners rights, segregation, and in the divine right of corporations, they've created social chaos and disorder. We got things like the Civil War, a century of discrimination and institutionalized racism, and the creation of plutocratic capitalism. Big business can be just as oppresive as big government. (Any system that has too much centralized power or control, is anti-federalist, by the way.)
A "strict constitutionalist" would be one that interprets the constitution literally. Think about that in regard to slavery. In the 19th Century, slaves were not people they were property. As property, they had no rights under the law, therefore the Supreme Court was technically right in their ruling in the Dred Scott decision, if you strictly interpreted the law via the Constitution that is. Therefore, Dred Scott had the right to hunt for his lost slave Sanford in "free states," and the free states had to help capture and return any runaway slave. Anyone found harboring a slave, would be found guilty under the law and prosecuted. This ruling superceded the rights of states to ban or outlaw slavery. The Underground Railroad would have been an illegal institution under the Supreme Courts ruling.
Tell me, isn't that dictating the way things should be?
Here is the rest of the Fed-Soc's purpose, "This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, and law professors."
In other words, enforce a conservative ideology based on traditional values (whatever that means) and the rule of law. Call me nutty, but doesn't that contradict their claim of saying they won't interpret what the law should be? You want to focus on individual liberty (fine, I'm ok with that), traditional values and the rule of law. In other words, they've made their minds up how the law should work, and what it should be: conservative values not liberal values.
Exactly what do they mean by "traditional values." Whose values? At one point slavery was deemed acceptable, could that be a traditional value? It was ok for children to work in factories. That's a traditional value. It was okay for businesses to hire thugs to beat down laborers clamoring for fair wages and unionization. That's a traditional value.
That very phraseology of "traditional values" is well crafted. It implies an honest intention, but I suspect it holds a different concept than what appears on the surface.
Here's what I mean; The Federalist Society has argued for the abolition of the Securities and Exchange Commission, severely limiting the Environmental Protection Agency, and rolling back gender equity laws (Title IX) and voting rights law. Its publications have criticized teaching evolution and attacked the principle of separation of church and state.
Again, whose traditions are they advocating. Last time I checked, the SEC was a good thing. The reason for its existence is that it keeps the stock market from becoming a scam and scandal mongering institution as it was before the SEC's existence. The very scamming was one of the main reasons for the Great Depression in 1930, but oh boy did people get rich off of the ignorance and naivety of others investing in the stock market before then. The SEC isn't some evil institution, its there to protect the investments of people wishing to prosper from putting money into stocks, futures, and other means of trade, investors who want an honest system and a fair system at any rate. (As fair as a capitalist system can be, that is.) It's a benefit to investors. If the market goes back to a pre-SEC system, how many people are going to want to invest in the American stock market system that isn't regulated and watched over by legal authorities? We can return to the good old days of boom and bust economics and laissez-faire capitalism. Greed is good, if you can afford it. Great virtue to teach and have in democracy.
I wouldn't put my money into it, and I've been involved in investing and was a former member of an investment club. Investing is a "buyer beware" type thing, but you take the risks to make money. That's capitalism. You put your money into an unregulated market, and you are lucky if you get any return on your investment, that's gambling, not investing. (At least Ponzi schemes would be legal again.)
Who benefits from a limited EPA? Big businesses and polluters get a big benefit from a weakened EPA. Citizens, endangered species, and ecosystems however, get screwed. Think the EPA is a terrible thing. Keep in mind why it exists. Things were becoming so toxic and polluted that the government had to step in and regulate what could be put into the environment, and in how much quantity. The free market didn't solve that problem. Left to its own devices, the free market would pollute at will.
I'm from Ohio. Ohio was so bad you had the Cuyahoga river catching on fire from all the pollutants in it, Lake Erie was called a dead lake, and the Ohio River was so polluted from Kodak's chemicals it displayed an array of rainbow colored toxins. And that's just one state. Something had to be done, and might I remind any conservatives, it was a Republican that created the EPA and signed into law the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, a Republican that was a conservative by the way.
I could go on about the rest, but you get the point. Laws were passed for a reason. Laws that promote liberties were passed to prevent violence, social unrest, and to further the advancement of democracy.
Eliminating teaching evolution and removing the separation of church and state are clearly the objective of the religious right. Americans like the freedom of religion, and I doubt most Americans want to live in a Christian Soviet-Taliban like state. Start eliminating the teaching of evolution, then what else do you eliminate in the teaching of science? Cosmology, astronomy, geology, and anything else that contradicts the Bible. Sorry, I know evolution pretty much tossed Genesis on its head, but that's science. It'll do that. It's pretty good at eliminating superstition and replacing it with reasonable ration explanation. Stop the teaching of sound science in the name of God and Country, and we become a Soviet Taliban. This also shows the Federalist Society to be a group that is advocating a "centralized" and "uniform" society.
Americans will all be Christians that deny the theory of evolution, and conform to "traditional" values, which will be enforced by the rule of law.
I bring this stuff up because of Bush's nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court Justice spot to fill in for Sandra Day O'Connor. It appears that Mr. Roberts, the seemingly wholesome boyscout who only has a couple scant years as a lower court justice, is good looking, friendly, and quite young for a justice, was also a member of the Federalist Society. In his hearings he will follow the Bush party line of denying any knowledge of ever being in that group. He was in the society's 1997-98 "Leadership Directory" as a member of its steering committee in Washington.
This furthers the Bush agenda, control the media, give PR spin to everything, obfuscate, inveigle, and deny. Attack potential opponents before they even get a chance to evaluate or respond. (From the Karl Rove political playbook.)
I'm certain Roberts will be whisked away to the Supreme Court with some dissent from the spineless Democrats. If you wish to stop Roberts ascension to the Supreme Court, write your senators and congresspersons and ask them to tell Bush to put a more equitable and moderate candidate for the Court.
It might do some good, at least you can tell your children and grandchildren you did something to keep America democratic and free.
George Washington, our first president, was a Federalist. Federalists, by definition are advocates of a government that seperates powers into seperate branches, and does not advocate the concentration of power into any groups hands.
The Federalist Society is a group advocating the neo-con objective, to shrink the federal government down to the size where they could drown it in a bathtub. A small and weak federal government cannot intervene in the affairs of powerful mulitinational corporations. The erosion and decline of our federal system and a strong central government will only serve to empower the rich and elite at the expense of the greater common good.
In other words, it concentrates political and economic power into the hands of the few, something no true federalist would advocate.
Again, all I can say is write your senator and congressperson to just say no to Roberts.
---
Incidentally, the preamble of the constitution establishes the governments primary duties: "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..." In other words, things like the EPA, SEC, laws promoting civil liberties, outlawing segregation, and separating church and state are all part of the governments duties.
Additionally, this is the first line in the first amendment of the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" Seems to me, that our Founding Fathers were pretty determined to keep church and state separate. It's a wall that should remain in place if we wish to continue to live in a free society, where people can worship (or not) as they choose.
(You can check out the Federalist Society on your own if you like, here, and you can look over the Constitution here.)
Federalism is the distribution of power in an organization (as a government) between a central authority and the constituent units. (definition from Merriam Webster, www.m-w.com) In other words, a system of checks and balances.
Here's the first paragraph in the Federalist Society's definition of their purpose. "Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law."
OK, where is this "orthodox liberal ideology?" Is there some manifesto or liberal bible that states the ideology? Secondly, from the terminology of "centralized" and "uniform" they make it sound like liberals are advocating, oh I don't know, a communist state? Centralized planning, uniformity of thought and opinion were Soviet kinds of things. Can you say absurd bias?
Here's a clue. Part of being a liberal implies non-comformity. Non-comformity means questioning authority. The ability and right to question authority is one of the key freedoms any democratic society should harbor and nurture. Liberals give their consent to be governed in a free society so that they can pursue their individual path to happiness, but only if they maintain the right to petition the government, speak out against it, and if necessary abolish it through free and fair elections. (Even conservatives who agree with these fundamental rights, are in essence promoting a liberal ideology.)
As for centralization, that sounds more like a conservative ideology, not a liberal one. Conservatives advocate a black and white world view, with little deviation from the "acceptable" way people should live. They are traditionalists, and question any sort of change to the status quo. This is not always a bad position to take if a conservative is questioning a radical change that could/would destroy a democratic society, but it can be harmful if it gets in the way of promoting civil liberties for those who are discriminated against in a free and democratic society.
The Fed-Soc continues with their purpose, "It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."
OK, that part sounds federalist, but what is meant by the second part of that sentence? "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be." First by saying what the law is, they are, in essence, claiming what the law should be. For example, if a Supreme Court justice rules that segregation of schools is legal, they are fundamentally stating that segregation of public schools is legal, and that is the way it should be based on the majority opinion and judgement of the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court has made some real devastating boners in our history. The Dred Scott decision and Plessy v. Ferguson to name a couple, oh yeah and claiming that corporations are entitled to the same rights as individual citizens. Another good one.
By making judgements that favored slaves as property, stating that segregation was legal, and giving corporations superhuman legal powers, the Court has altered and changed the way things are/were done in America. As a result, the court dictates through interpretation and judgement what the law should be. We can see that the court eventually overturned segregation, and slavery, but to what effect. By ruling in favor of slaverowners rights, segregation, and in the divine right of corporations, they've created social chaos and disorder. We got things like the Civil War, a century of discrimination and institutionalized racism, and the creation of plutocratic capitalism. Big business can be just as oppresive as big government. (Any system that has too much centralized power or control, is anti-federalist, by the way.)
A "strict constitutionalist" would be one that interprets the constitution literally. Think about that in regard to slavery. In the 19th Century, slaves were not people they were property. As property, they had no rights under the law, therefore the Supreme Court was technically right in their ruling in the Dred Scott decision, if you strictly interpreted the law via the Constitution that is. Therefore, Dred Scott had the right to hunt for his lost slave Sanford in "free states," and the free states had to help capture and return any runaway slave. Anyone found harboring a slave, would be found guilty under the law and prosecuted. This ruling superceded the rights of states to ban or outlaw slavery. The Underground Railroad would have been an illegal institution under the Supreme Courts ruling.
Tell me, isn't that dictating the way things should be?
Here is the rest of the Fed-Soc's purpose, "This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, and law professors."
In other words, enforce a conservative ideology based on traditional values (whatever that means) and the rule of law. Call me nutty, but doesn't that contradict their claim of saying they won't interpret what the law should be? You want to focus on individual liberty (fine, I'm ok with that), traditional values and the rule of law. In other words, they've made their minds up how the law should work, and what it should be: conservative values not liberal values.
Exactly what do they mean by "traditional values." Whose values? At one point slavery was deemed acceptable, could that be a traditional value? It was ok for children to work in factories. That's a traditional value. It was okay for businesses to hire thugs to beat down laborers clamoring for fair wages and unionization. That's a traditional value.
That very phraseology of "traditional values" is well crafted. It implies an honest intention, but I suspect it holds a different concept than what appears on the surface.
Here's what I mean; The Federalist Society has argued for the abolition of the Securities and Exchange Commission, severely limiting the Environmental Protection Agency, and rolling back gender equity laws (Title IX) and voting rights law. Its publications have criticized teaching evolution and attacked the principle of separation of church and state.
Again, whose traditions are they advocating. Last time I checked, the SEC was a good thing. The reason for its existence is that it keeps the stock market from becoming a scam and scandal mongering institution as it was before the SEC's existence. The very scamming was one of the main reasons for the Great Depression in 1930, but oh boy did people get rich off of the ignorance and naivety of others investing in the stock market before then. The SEC isn't some evil institution, its there to protect the investments of people wishing to prosper from putting money into stocks, futures, and other means of trade, investors who want an honest system and a fair system at any rate. (As fair as a capitalist system can be, that is.) It's a benefit to investors. If the market goes back to a pre-SEC system, how many people are going to want to invest in the American stock market system that isn't regulated and watched over by legal authorities? We can return to the good old days of boom and bust economics and laissez-faire capitalism. Greed is good, if you can afford it. Great virtue to teach and have in democracy.
I wouldn't put my money into it, and I've been involved in investing and was a former member of an investment club. Investing is a "buyer beware" type thing, but you take the risks to make money. That's capitalism. You put your money into an unregulated market, and you are lucky if you get any return on your investment, that's gambling, not investing. (At least Ponzi schemes would be legal again.)
Who benefits from a limited EPA? Big businesses and polluters get a big benefit from a weakened EPA. Citizens, endangered species, and ecosystems however, get screwed. Think the EPA is a terrible thing. Keep in mind why it exists. Things were becoming so toxic and polluted that the government had to step in and regulate what could be put into the environment, and in how much quantity. The free market didn't solve that problem. Left to its own devices, the free market would pollute at will.
I'm from Ohio. Ohio was so bad you had the Cuyahoga river catching on fire from all the pollutants in it, Lake Erie was called a dead lake, and the Ohio River was so polluted from Kodak's chemicals it displayed an array of rainbow colored toxins. And that's just one state. Something had to be done, and might I remind any conservatives, it was a Republican that created the EPA and signed into law the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, a Republican that was a conservative by the way.
I could go on about the rest, but you get the point. Laws were passed for a reason. Laws that promote liberties were passed to prevent violence, social unrest, and to further the advancement of democracy.
Eliminating teaching evolution and removing the separation of church and state are clearly the objective of the religious right. Americans like the freedom of religion, and I doubt most Americans want to live in a Christian Soviet-Taliban like state. Start eliminating the teaching of evolution, then what else do you eliminate in the teaching of science? Cosmology, astronomy, geology, and anything else that contradicts the Bible. Sorry, I know evolution pretty much tossed Genesis on its head, but that's science. It'll do that. It's pretty good at eliminating superstition and replacing it with reasonable ration explanation. Stop the teaching of sound science in the name of God and Country, and we become a Soviet Taliban. This also shows the Federalist Society to be a group that is advocating a "centralized" and "uniform" society.
Americans will all be Christians that deny the theory of evolution, and conform to "traditional" values, which will be enforced by the rule of law.
I bring this stuff up because of Bush's nomination of John Roberts for the Supreme Court Justice spot to fill in for Sandra Day O'Connor. It appears that Mr. Roberts, the seemingly wholesome boyscout who only has a couple scant years as a lower court justice, is good looking, friendly, and quite young for a justice, was also a member of the Federalist Society. In his hearings he will follow the Bush party line of denying any knowledge of ever being in that group. He was in the society's 1997-98 "Leadership Directory" as a member of its steering committee in Washington.
This furthers the Bush agenda, control the media, give PR spin to everything, obfuscate, inveigle, and deny. Attack potential opponents before they even get a chance to evaluate or respond. (From the Karl Rove political playbook.)
I'm certain Roberts will be whisked away to the Supreme Court with some dissent from the spineless Democrats. If you wish to stop Roberts ascension to the Supreme Court, write your senators and congresspersons and ask them to tell Bush to put a more equitable and moderate candidate for the Court.
It might do some good, at least you can tell your children and grandchildren you did something to keep America democratic and free.
George Washington, our first president, was a Federalist. Federalists, by definition are advocates of a government that seperates powers into seperate branches, and does not advocate the concentration of power into any groups hands.
The Federalist Society is a group advocating the neo-con objective, to shrink the federal government down to the size where they could drown it in a bathtub. A small and weak federal government cannot intervene in the affairs of powerful mulitinational corporations. The erosion and decline of our federal system and a strong central government will only serve to empower the rich and elite at the expense of the greater common good.
In other words, it concentrates political and economic power into the hands of the few, something no true federalist would advocate.
Again, all I can say is write your senator and congressperson to just say no to Roberts.
---
Incidentally, the preamble of the constitution establishes the governments primary duties: "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity..." In other words, things like the EPA, SEC, laws promoting civil liberties, outlawing segregation, and separating church and state are all part of the governments duties.
Additionally, this is the first line in the first amendment of the Constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" Seems to me, that our Founding Fathers were pretty determined to keep church and state separate. It's a wall that should remain in place if we wish to continue to live in a free society, where people can worship (or not) as they choose.
(You can check out the Federalist Society on your own if you like, here, and you can look over the Constitution here.)
