Quote:
Originally Posted by RIROCKHOUND
Saw this elsewhere, the speculation has begun...
"My mole in the White House tells me Obama will nominate 46-year-old Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Indian-American jurist who Obama nominated in 2013 to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- and the Senate confirmed unanimously. Having confirmed him unanimously just three years ago, it would be difficult (but hardly impossible) for Republicans to oppose him now. (Twelve former Solicitors General, including Republican notables as Paul Clement and Kenneth Starr had endorsed his confirmation. Moreover, the D.C. Circuit has long been a Supreme Court farm team – Scalia himself, along with John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were judges there before ascending to the Supreme Court.)
But is Srinivasan progressive? He had been Obama’s principal Deputy Solicitor General before the nomination, arguing Supreme Court cases in support of affirmative action and against Indiana’s restrictive voter ID law, for example. But this record doesn’t prove much. (Having once worked as an assistant Solicitor General, I know the inhabitants of that office will argue whatever halfway respectable arguments the Justice Department and, indirectly, the President, wants made.)
Before the Obama administration, Srinivasan worked for five years in George W. Bush’s Justice Department. Prior to that, as an attorney in the private firm of O'Melveny & Myers, he defended Exxon Mobil in a lawsuit brought by Indonesians who accused the company’s security forces of torture, murder, and other violations against their people; successfully represented a newspaper that fired its employees for unionizing; and defended Enron’s former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, later convicted for financial fraud. But in these instances, too, it could be argued he was just representing clients. Another clue: After graduating Stanford Law School in 1995, Srinivasan clerked for two Republican-appointed jurists – Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor – both of whom were considered moderate. "
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I was half-joking, but it wouldn't shock me at all.
I don' think Obama gets any appointee confirmed, who isn't as conservative as Scalia. And I would urge every Republican Senator to do whatever they had to do, to prevent Obama from dragging the court one zillimeter to the left of where it is now.
God, I hate that this happened.
"If the Constitution means whatever the present society wants it to mean, then sometimes it will evolve in the direction of greater freedom, and sometimes it will evolve in the direction of less freedom, as it has often done throughout our history." -Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died today at the age of 79.
In the words of Shakespeare, "He should have died hereafter."
This was Scalia's defense of his view that it's not healthy for each generation to decide what the Constitution really means, in light of the view of the times. If we were to do that, then the rights spelled out in the Constitution are not guaranteed, but rather subject to the whim of whoever is in office at the time. I don't want Obama getting to decide what the Bill Of Rights really says, nor do I want Trump doing it. The only way to guarantee those rights, is to implement the Constitution the way it's written. If we want to change it, there is a mechanism to do that.
How does anyone disagree with what Scalia said here?