Where is it not doing its Job?
1) Creating new laws about gay marriage and refusing to allow the people to actually bring such laws to a vote. Courts are there to interpret what the laws were supposed to mean -- to understand the lawmakers intent -- and to determine whether or not a law is constitutionally valid. The "gay marriage" interpretation clearly was NOT the lawmakers intent. The Mass. Supreme court could find that the written law is unconstitutional, or they could uphold it, but it's not their job to change what it means without the consent of the people. You claim the judges are "just doing their job", but you're just plain wrong. If they were "just doing their job" they'd evaluate the current law and let the legislature or the people create a replacement law.
2) Failure to do a
de novo review in the Schiavo case, when the legislature passed a law that called for one. (A
de novo review means evaluating the whole case from scratch -- re-evaluating all of the evidence, as a whole.) Instead, the court decided only to review whether or not the prior courts broke any laws in making their ruling. They
ignored the law that said they had to do a
de novo review, because they didn't like the way the law was written. They did exactly what you're accusing me and the Republican party of!
What a horrid mark of bigtry.
Thanks for being so kind and understanding that you would call me and those on my side "bigots" over our disagreement with judges intentionally misinterpreting laws in order to enact their own agendas. That really helps your credibility. (As for the stuff you tried to argue specifically about gay "rights", that's not what this thread is about. But perhaps you can argue with
Jane Galt about it. At the very least, read what
James R. Rummell has to say about your loaded rhetoric.)
The whole purpose of the fillibuster is to protect the rights of the minority and promote compromise.
It's to protect the rights of the minority and promote compromise in legislation.
If there is anything that deserves compromise its judicial nominees.
Judicial nominees are not legislation. You can't send a judge back for a partial rewrite.
When you're holding up legislation, that's perfectly reasonable. But when you're holding up an individual judge's life because you don't want him to get his 53% of the vote, that's just plain wrong. There's a reason why it's
never been done before. As a recent
WSJ editorial said,
"[f]or more than 200 years, however, [Senate] has interpreted the Founders' injunction [of "advise and consent"] to mean that a simple majority of Senators--51 in our age--must vote to confirm."
Federial Judges serve lifetime terms; how could you argue that a 3/5 ratio is unreasonable?
Because the Senate, for 200 years, has given every judicial nominee a vote until the 10 nominees the Dems filibustered last term. It might not be unreasonable, but if people want the ability to filibuster nominees, they should do as Will suggested and introduce a nominee-filibuster law. Don't just change the process because you feel like it; if you want filibusters to be used this way, put it to a vote and establish that it can be done in every future administration, or else let the vote fail and establish that it shouldn't be done.
Judges are suppose to be free of partisanship
Judges are supposed to uphold the law. I see nothing that says they should or shouldn't be partisan.
[Bush] nominated a guy to the U.N who is on record as saying
"If the U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference...."
Yes, I know. And he's right (but don't give me that "invoking images of 9/11" crap people try to pull on that quote.) If you got rid of 10 stories worth of the UN, you wouldn't be missing much. But, again, this isn't a thread on the UN, it's a thread on judicial nominees.
You do a good job of muddying the waters... let's talk about judicial filibusters! OK, here's a couple paragraphs on gay marriage. But wait, we're talking about judicial filibusters! OK, here's an anti-UN quote from a nominee to the UN! In a thread you started, even, so you can't claim to have misread the title.
Please... make up your mind what we're talking about. Changing topics all willy-nilly is the oldest trick in the book. All it really does it makes it impossible to complete the discussion of any one topic. Are we talking about judicial filibusters and judicial reform, or are we talking about Schiavo, or gay rights, or the UN?
