“Obama May Seek Out Centrist To Replace Souter on Supreme Court.”
I’m still waiting for Obama to rip off the mask and reveal that Sooper-Seekrit Progressive Identity his fan club was promising all throughout the primaries. Or for the fan club to finally cotton on to the fact that there *is* no Sooper-Seekrit Progressive Identity; Obama is what he is and what he is has always been a conservative Democrat who’s in love with fake bipartisanship and who’s willing to sell out core Democratic principles, like women’s rights to control their bodies, for political expediency.
A girl could grow old waiting for that, though.
I dunno, I was pretty encouraged by his remarks:
I think now’s the time to make a bold move with a pick, as long as all the back door machinations to get Specter and Nelson in line are working.
That said, I know your feelings on Obama (past and present) so I’m good to agree to disagree.
I’m shocked, I tell you. Shocked!
Specter’s running around saying that it shouldn’t even have to be a lawyer. I’m cool with going outside the judiciary, but c’mon.
I guess I feel that regardless of what Obama is saying about empathy, when it comes right down to it, he’ll pick a corporate-friendly social moderate-to-liberal whose legal experience probably includes stints in corporate firms or prosecutor’s offices. Who’ll probably be pro-choice, but not really thinking outside the box on issues of social justice, fairness or what have you. Which will be nice and all for some issues, but won’t provide much of a counter to the hard-right justices that Bush put on the Court.
IOW, we can’t really hope for another Ginsburg or Marshall.
I take it you’re with Dahlia Lithwick in wishing for someone’s who’s a combination of Emma Goldman and Rachel Maddow?
Oh, and I’ll have to find out where I saw this, [something like here] but I read within the past few days that Specter’s party change may not be such a great thing, since any nominee needs the vote of at least one Republican to get out of committee. And with Specter gone, that leaves Orrin Hatch, who was responsible for blocking a huge number of Clinton’s judicial nominees, as the most likely vote. *Maybe* Grassley.
But the rest of them? Kyl, Sessions, Coburn, Cornyn, Graham. Every last one of them highly invested in putting on a show of blocking any pro-choice pick. Which means that whoever Obama picks is going to get painted as a babykiller, so why not pick a real firebreathing liberal?
I take it you’re with Dahlia Lithwick in wishing for someone’s who’s a combination of Emma Goldman and Rachel Maddow?
Hey, someone’s got to push the Overton Window left. Appointing another corporate/prosecution-friendly centrist when the Court is so larded with soulless right-wingers with long careers ahead of them isn’t really going to do the job.
Co-signed. Sigh.
Thank you for saying this. I don’t want another Schumer-approved judge who slid down the greased BigLaw/Prosecutor slide to a Federal bench and then the nomination. The Court has ossified into two resumes: academic, and that. Either perspective is kind of narrow. I would love to see Granholm for that reason. Earl Warren was a governor! Marshall was an activist! Douglas ran the SEC! Let’s have a different perspective. Also, an actual progressive to replace a member of the progressive wing, and not one who writes this Breyer shit about how suits against corporations should all be thrown out on the pleadings to protect our fragile giant companies from doing costly searches through documents. It’s like Marty Lipton wrote his opinion for him.