Category Archives: General
Justice Stevens
Imagining America if George Bush Chose the Supreme Court
I’d guess that the justices most likely to retire in the next four years would be Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice O’Connor, and perhaps Justice Stevens.
Here are the general leanings of the current court members:
conservative — Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas
swing voters — O’Connor, Kennedy
liberal — Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer
Clearly, the biggest blow to social liberals would be the loss of Justice Stevens. A Rehnquist retirement wouldn’t change the court that much; an O’Connor retirement would. But the loss of Justice Stevens would be the biggest deal. You don’t hear much about him. He’s currently the oldest justice, at age 84 (he was appointed by Ford in 1975). However, I’ve read that he’s as mentally sharp as ever, and as one of the most liberal of the liberals, I’m sure he wouldn’t want Bush to name his replacement. He’d die on the bench first. (Which I sure hope doesn’t happen.)
If Bush wins, I fervently hope that the Democrats retake the Senate in 2006, if they don’t do so this year.
Can John Kerry Cure Cancer?
Great piece by Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Can John Kerry Cure Cancer?”
There will not be a great parting of the clouds.
There will not be brighter flowers and happier puppies. There will not be massive choruses of angels singing and birds chirping and dolphins finally standing upright and speaking fluent Latin and saying we knew it all along. …
But here’s the thing: Given how this is pretty much the most important election in your lifetime, given how much is at stake and how deeply BushCo has rammed us down the bleak hole of fear and war and environmental gluttony and abuse, a “regular” president is a blessing we can only dream of.
And the presidential debates have shown Kerry to be a formidable intellect, forthright and fluent and the absolute antithesis of Bush’s fast-blinking aww-shucks dumb-guy smarminess. You know, like a normal president should. And the bottom line is this: never has normal looked so good.
Because this is the point in history where we say, oh my freaking God we never knew how good we had it. Sure we all knew the Clinton era was something special and even Bush 1.0 was tolerable and relatively benign and gutless, but oh my God, we had to suffer the appalling, warmongering neofascism of Bush 2.0 to really appreciate what America was, and what we should try to be again.