I had a good time and I heard I didn’t miss anything with the very boring Sotomayor hearings. I caught a few minutes on C-SPAN and was bored to tears.
Everything looks like the Wise Latina will be confirmed so that sucks, but who expected anything else?
Get ready! Today is the day.
RSS feeds are an interesting thing. I have all my political news feeds dumped into one folder I periodiaclly browse through, and this morning I bumped into two different headlines from two different CNN stories.
The first headline read “Poll: Sotomayor confirmation favored.” This particular feed chooses to show the first line of the story only (for those not familiar with how RSS feeds work, whoever runs the feed can choose to show all of the post in the feed reader, or just an except – usually the first line or two – which means you have to open the site to read the read. The first line of this story is the follow:
Days before the start of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, a new national poll indicates that by a narrow margin, Americans would like the Senate to confirm her as the next Supreme Court justice.
Nothing unusual to me so I skipped over it. I figured that Sotomayor’s confirmation would be favored, especially a poll CNN decided to run.
But then I’m caught by surprise by the next CNN story I run into. It’s in a different part of CNN’s website, has the headline “Poll: Do Americans want Sotomayor confirmed?” This headline seemed mildly more interesting than the last, but it was the first line of the story that caught me by surprise:
In a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, 47 percent of those questioned said they’d like to see Judge Sotomayor confirmed to the Supreme Court.
Say what? Didn’t CNN just tell me that Sotomayor’s confirmatino was favored? 47% doesn’t seem favored to me. So I go back to that first story and click it, to pull it up on CNN’s website.
Suddenly the headline goes from “Poll: Sotomayor confirmation favored” to “Poll: Nearly half support Sotomayor’s confirmation.” Nearly half? So the actual headline of the story wasn’t, as you suggested, that Americans support her confirmation? It’s only nearly half? Well at least you kinda-sorta-tried to be honest.
This is just a minor example of the media malpractice that continues to persist, but it is absolutely ridiculous. Less than half of the country currently support Sotomayor’s nomination to the most important judicial office in the nation and CNN runs with a headline saying that Americans favor her confirmation.
Can you imagnie if this was a Bush appointee? The headline would read “Poll: Less than half support Sotomayor confirmation” with a lead-in like “Less than a week before her hearing, less than half of the country support Judge Sotomayor’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.”
Instead, CNN tries to pull the wool over our eyes and declare that we actually favor Sotomayor’s confirmation, despite the number in support being less than a majority.
The intent is clear. People are shaped by what they hear, if they hear it often enough. If you continually hear that most Americans favor Sotomayor’s confirmation, eventually it will sink in and many of the undecideds will hop on the bandwagon and get annoyed at those dirty Republicans who always seem to be on the opposite side of the issue from “most Americans.”
The problem with media bias these days isn’t MSNBC with its cast of Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann. Everyone watching those programs knows they are parrots for the DNC and watches them because of that.
No, the problem is groups like CNN, publishing stories like this that are seemingly objective and only slightly spin the story to make it positive or negative. Here’s an idea: why not just report the facts? 47% of people in this poll favor Sotomayor’s confirmation, 40% don’t, and 13% are undecided. Why not just report the facts and let people reading decide whether or not 47% should be taken as a positive or negative? Whether or not 47% means that Americans favor her confirmation.
Is that really too much to ask?
Al Franken wants us to know that he thinks Sotomayor is in the “mainstream of American judicial thought” – which is funny to hear coming from a comedian with no judicial expertise.
What makes Franken qualified to interview Sotomayor about her judicial philosophy, exactly? Is it because he once did a skit on SNL poking fun at the Clarence Thomas hearings?
I’m honestly dumbfounded that he has been assigned to the judicial committee where he will be part of the hearings to nominate a supreme court appointee after being a senator for a week with no legal experience at all. Has the fact that we elected a comedy to the United States Senate made us numb to whatever other idiocy comes from his tenure on the Hill?
James Taranto at the WSJ has a piece running today arguing that the Roberts Court might be excersizing a little too much judicial restraint. It’s unlikely that any clear-thinking conservative has ever thought the phrase “too much judicial restraint” would be applicable, but Taranto makes some interesting points:
With a liberal Democrat in the White House, the court’s current balance is almost certain to survive the retirement of Justice David Souter — or, for that matter, the replacement of the oldest justices, John Paul Stevens, 89, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 76. But if President Obama wins a second term, by the time he leaves office Justices Scalia and Kennedy will both be 80 — the age at which Chief Justice William Rehnquist died.
By declining to resolve major constitutional questions now, the justices leave open the possibility that a future majority, more liberal and less scrupulous about constraining its power, will decide them. Such is the hazard of judicial restraint.
At issue here is the Court’s recent moves to decide case on very narrow grounds, thus leaving the bigger questions to be answered down the road.
For instance, the recent Ricci case overturned the appellate court decision based on a statutory claim about the Civil Rights Act – the ruling ignores any constitutional questions that might be raised by reverse discrimination. Another example Taranto points to is the case involving pre-clearance laws in a Texas district, where the court ruled that the particular act in question does not violate pre-clearance laws, but ignored whether or not pre-clearance laws are even constitutional.
The problem with this is that we’re essentially kicking hot issues down the curb – which means giving a later court the opportunity to decide what the answers will be. Right now we have a 5-4 majority on the issues where conservatives and liberals disagree – at least, we do most of the time. Sotoymayor replacing Souter won’t be a big deal, and Taranto points out that the next justices in line to step down will likely all be liberal: Ginsburg, Stevens, and Breyer.
But all three of those justices could theoretically leave in Obama’s first term, and both Kennedy and Scalia will be 80 by the end of his potential second term. That means that Obama might have the chance to appoint six very fresh faces to the court – giving liberals the opportunity to rule the law for a long time uninterrupted.
So maybe Taranto has a point here. If we continue to sidestep the bigger issues in favor of narrow opinions, we’re setting ourselves up for an Obama-stacked court to start handing down radical rulings – reshaping the culture of our country in the same way Roe did. But we’re conservatives, right? We object to the type of judicial activism that Taranto is asking for!
Well, no, actually. As conservatives, we should object to judges attempting to “legislate from the bench” – but that kind of activism is a whole lot different than doing what a judge is supposed to do, which is decide the constitutionality of what congress does. It’s one thing for a judge to bend the law or apply broad interpretations to very specific lines of text in our constitution in order to satisfy some sort of “empathy” requirement in their ruling. It’s a whole different thing for a judge to strike down acts of congress which step over the line.
Keeping congress in check, especially in a day and age where our legislative branch seems to have forgotten exactly what its duties are, is a necessity to our separation of powers. If the Supreme Court doesn’t do it now when we have a conservative tilt, you know they will when the powers swing back to the left.
And that is something we can’t let happen.
h/t HotAir
Rasmussen is reporting that a plurality of voters no longer want Sotomayor confirmed now that the Supreme Court ruled she was incompetent earlier this week:
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, conducted on the two nights following the Supreme Court decision, finds that 37% now believe Sotomayor should be confirmed while 39% disagree.
Two weeks ago, the numbers were much brighter for the nominee. At that time, 42% favored confirmation, and 34% were opposed.
This is a surprise to those in the White House who are convinced that being overturned by the Supreme Court is a good thing when trying to be confirmed.
I’m sure someone with his intellectual prowess will come up with lots of good questions to ask her. I mean – going to law school probably shouldn’t be a requirement for the guy helping to determine whether or not a nominee has the legal mind necessary to serve on the nation’s highest court, right?
The Clintons really are the gift that keeps on giving:
The case in question,Citizens United v. FEC, deals with whether federal election laws should have applied to a 90-minute film released during last year’s presidential election lambasting then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. …
If the court reverses prior decisions upholding the legal foundations of the provision, corporations and unions would be able to spend millions of dollars on ads attacking or boosting candidates right up until Election Day without many restrictions.
McCain-Feingold is horribly unconstitutional, and so any chink in its armor is fine by me. Oral arguments for the case are set for Sept. 9 – guess which nominee to the Supreme Court has a history of supporting campaign finance regulations?
Good ol’ Gibbs. Always ready to turn an absurdly idiotic point into pure incoherent rambling.
“There’s little political significance to whatever the court decided today in terms of Judge Sotomayor except to render a fairly definitive opinion that she follows judicial precedent and that she doesn’t legislate from the bench,” Gibbs said.
Uh, yeah. Overturning her ruling is pretty much the same thing as saying she follows legal precedent, right?
He’s leaving the Court on the wrong side of a highly publicized case and is likely going to be replaced by the judge the court overturned today. Good-bye Justice Souter:
Retiring Justice David Souter said goodbye to his U.S. Supreme Court colleagues Monday in a brief statement he read from the bench, saying they had “touched me more than I can say.”
Conservatives don’t want him around, and what could make a liberal happier than replacing a left-wing white male with a left-wing Latina woman? Everyone wins today.