Some things just make you shake your head in disgust, wondering how so many people could possibly be so stupid.  Rasmussen reports, “60% of Voters Say Supreme Court should Base Rulings on Constitution.”

During his acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota, John McCain told the audience, “We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench.” Most American voters (60%) agrees and says the Supreme Court should make decisions based on what is written in the constitution, while 30% say rulings should be guided on the judge’s sense of fairness and justice. The number who agree with McCain is up from 55% in August.

What the other 10% think should be used is a mystery - ouija boards maybe.  Don’t laugh, they couldn’t be worse than something as frightening as the “sense of fairness and justice” of a small group of judges.  If that’s how our law is to be decided, why even bother with a democracy?

At the recent Saddleback forum, where by almost all accounts McCain spanked Obama, the anointed one provided new fuel to critics regarding his complete and utter lack of qualifications.

Asked about judicial nominees, Obama stated that he would not have nominated Clarence Thomas because he didn’t have enough experience.  I kid you not.

“I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas. I don’t think that he, I don’t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time for that elevation. Setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretation of a lot of the Constitution.”

So what shows that Obama is a strong enough executive for elevation to the office of the Presidency?  Obama’s opinion of Thomas is laughable, especially coming from a man who was, by all accounts, an utterly undistinguished professor too scared to put his own opinions on paper.

In a 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court today affirmed the ruling of lower courts finding that Kentucky’s lethal injection procedure does not violate the Eighth Amendment. The decision was highly fractured and only achieved the majority that it did by ruling on extremely narrow, technical grounds. Kennedy and Alito joined Roberts’ majority opinion, while Stevens, Scalia, Thomas and Breyer each concurred in judgment, but offered their own, sometimes divergent, reasoning.

Stevens used his concurrence to pontificate on the unconstitutionality of the death penalty as a whole (which was not before the court):

When we granted certiorari in this case, I assumed that our decision would bring the debate about lethal injection as a method of execution to a close. It now seems clear that it will not. The question whether a similar three-drug protocol may be used in other States remains open, and may well be answered differently in a future case on the basis of a more complete record. Instead of ending the controversy, I am now convinced that this case will generate debate not only about the constitutionality of the three-drug protocol, and specifically about the justification for the use of the paralytic agent, pancuronium bromide, but also about the justification for the death penalty itself.

…The thoughtful opinions written by The Chief Justice and by Justice Ginsburg have persuaded me that current decisions by state legislatures, by the Congress of the United States, and by this Court to retain the death penalty as a part of our law are the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process that weighs the costs and risks of administering that penalty against its identifiable benefits, and rest in part on a faulty assumption about the retributive force of the death penalty.

In Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U. S. 153 (1976) , we explained that unless a criminal sanction serves a legitimate penological function, it constitutes “gratuitous infliction of suffering” in violation of the Eighth Amendment . We then identified three societal purposes for death as a sanction: incapacitation, deterrence, and retribution. See id., at 183, and n. 28 (joint opinion of Stewart, Powell, and Stevens, JJ.). In the past three decades, however, each of these rationales has been called into question.

In response, Scalia eviscerated Stevens’ various arguments:

[Justice Stevens’] conclusion is insupportable as an interpretation of the Constitution, which generally leaves it to democratically elected legislatures rather than courts to decide what makes significant contribution to social or public purposes. Besides that more general proposition, the very text of the document recognizes that the death penalty is a permissible legislative choice. The Fifth Amendment expressly requires a presentment or indictment of a grand jury to hold a person to answer for “a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,” and prohibits deprivation of “life” without due process of law.

…Justice Stevens concludes that the availability of alternatives, and what he describes as the unavailability of “reliable statistical evidence,” renders capital punishment unconstitutional. In his view, the benefits of capital punishment—as compared to other forms of punishment such as life imprisonment—are outweighed by the costs.

…Of course, it may well be that the empirical studies establishing that the death penalty has a powerful deterrent effect are incorrect, and some scholars have disputed its deterrent value. See ante, at 10, n. 13. But that is not the point. It is simply not our place to choose one set of responsible empirical studies over another in interpreting the Constitution. Nor is it our place to demand that state legislatures support their criminal sanctions with foolproof empirical studies, rather than commonsense predictions about human behavior.

…Justice Stevens’ final refuge in his cost-benefit analysis is a familiar one: There is a risk that an innocent person might be convicted and sentenced to death—though not a risk that Justice Stevens can quantify, because he lacks a single example of a person executed for a crime he did not commit in the current American system. See ante, at 15–17. His analysis of this risk is thus a series of sweeping condemnations that, if taken seriously, would prevent any punishment under any criminal justice system.

…But of all Justice Stevens’ criticisms of the death penalty, the hardest to take is his bemoaning of “the enormous costs that death penalty litigation imposes on society,” including the “burden on the courts and the lack of finality for victim’s families.” Ante, at 12, and n. 17. Those costs, those burdens, and that lack of finality are in large measure the creation of Justice Stevens and other Justices opposed to the death penalty, who have “encumber[ed] [it] … with unwarranted restrictions neither contained in the text of the Constitution nor reflected in two centuries of practice under it”—the product of their policy views “not shared by the vast majority of the American people.” Kansas v. Marsh, 548 U. S. 163, 186 (2006) (Scalia, J., concurring).

This section, in describing Stevens’ apparent elitism, was particularly (and deliciously) snarky:

But actually none of this really matters. As Justice Stevens explains, “ ‘objective evidence, though of great importance, [does] not wholly determine the controversy, for the Constitution contemplates that in the end our own judgment will be brought to bear on the question of the acceptability of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment.’ ” Ante, at 14 (quoting Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U. S. 304, 312 (2002) ; emphasis added; some internal quotation marks omitted). “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty” is unconstitutional. Ante, at 17 (emphasis added).

Purer expression cannot be found of the principle of rule by judicial fiat. In the face of Justice Stevens’ experience, the experience of all others is, it appears, of little consequence. The experience of the state legislatures and the Congress—who retain the death penalty as a form of punishment—is dismissed as “the product of habit and inattention rather than an acceptable deliberative process.” Ante, at 8. The experience of social scientists whose studies indicate that the death penalty deters crime is relegated to a footnote. Ante, at 10, n. 13. The experience of fellow citizens who support the death penalty is described, with only the most thinly veiled condemnation, as stemming from a “thirst for vengeance.” Ante, at 11. It is Justice Stevens’ experience that reigns over all.

The left has collectively been diagnosed with a severe case of Bush Derangement Syndrome since immediately following the 2000 election. But there’s a new epidemic spreading amongst the liberal elites in response to Bush’s remaking of the Supreme Court. Court followers who recognize Robert’s style as judicially cautious and resistant to major changes must find the leftist outrage baffling, but that’s because they don’t understand how the liberal mind works. To them, John Roberts is evil not because of how he interprets law, but by who wins and loses in those choices. In typical liberal fashion, the legal merits of the cases Roberts’ has helped decide are irrelevant when compared to the advancement of the left wing agenda. As such, they have gone absolutely haywire following a recent rash of carefully considered and well founded Supreme Court decisions. I call this new form of leftist hysteria Roberts Derangement Syndrome.

Exhibit A: Helen Thomas cries that the Supreme Court is “meaner”. Not surprisingly, the basis for her attack is not sound judicial evidence or argument, but simply raw left-wing emotionalism.

Before closing down for the summer last month, the high court tossed out a flurry of decisions that overturned or reinterpreted long-standing liberal precedents.

The court under Chief Justice John Roberts seems intent on rolling back advances in race and gender relations that have helped America achieve a more equal and humane society.

The 5-4 decisions of the conservative court dealt with race, abortion, free speech, church-state relations and a host of other issues. They also showed a pro-business and anti-consumer slant.

The majority justices are running counter to the current trend against right-wing ideologues and a power-grabbing unilateral presidency.

On race, the court apparently has decided to return to the “good old days” when separate was considered equal when it came to racial segregation, a concept that the high court discarded in the 1954 landmark decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., which desegregated the nation’s schools.

Last week, the Supreme Court junked the Brown rule when it struck down the use of race in school admissions in Seattle and Louisville. Officials had used race as a factor in school assignments in order to build diversity.

The historic Brown ruling paved the way for the banning of segregated public facilities, hotels, restaurants and theaters.

The stupidity of Helen Thomas will never cease to amaze. Justice Thomas addressed just this sort of nonsensical demagoguery in his concurrence, previously highlighted here.

Exhibit B: E. J. Dionne has slammed down the liberal stave and declared “You shall not pass (another competent jurist)!”

Just say no.

The Senate’s Democratic majority — joined by all Republicans who purport to be moderate — must tell President Bush that this will be their answer to any controversial nominee to the Supreme Court or the appellate courts.

The Senate should refuse even to hold hearings on Bush’s next Supreme Court choice, should a vacancy occur, unless the president reaches agreement with the Senate majority on a mutually acceptable list of nominees.

. . .As for the Supreme Court, we now know that the president’s two nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, are exactly what many of us thought they were: activist conservatives intent on leading a judicial counterrevolution. Yesterday’s 5 to 4 ruling tossing out two school desegregation plans was another milestone on the court’s march to the right.

Even after he was confirmed, Roberts was talking about something other than the 5 to 4 conservative court we saw this year on case after case. In a speech at Georgetown University Law School in May 2006, Roberts rightly argued that “the rule of law is strengthened when there is greater coherence and agreement about what the law is.” It’s a shame this quest for broader majorities had so little bearing on the 2007 Roberts-led court.

As usual, we see another ignorant liberal. To call Roberts and Alito activists shows a laughable understanding of recent court decisions. In fact, Roberts has practiced self restraint (I would argue too much) and attempted to craft narrow decisions. The recent term has seen many unanimous decisions. Dionne blames Roberts for the few narrowly decided cases, but the reality is that the liberal minority simply refuses to follow the law, and is more concerned with outcomes than being good jurists. This is a typical fault of the left, who sees the court not as the arbiter of law that it is, but as a tool to promote leftist policies that cannot get passed by the Constitutionally prescribed means.

I propose that we “just say no” to moron liberals commenting on things they clearly don’t understand.

The Supreme Court has been on a roll lately. This time they’ve correctly ruled that west coast liberals assigning students to schools according to race do so unconstitutionally.

The school districts have not carried their heavy burden of showing that the interest they seek to achieve justifies the extreme means they have chosen?discriminating among individual students based on race by relying upon racial classifications in making school assignments.

. . .Although remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination is a compelling interest under the strict scrutiny test, see Freeman v. Pitts, 503 U. S. 467 , that interest is not involved here because the Seattle schools were never segregated by law nor subject to court-ordered desegregation, and the desegregation decree to which the Jefferson County schools were previously subject has been dissolved.

The left often justifies their institutionally condoned racism with the claim that they are just correcting for past racism. They now make this argument so reflexively, that they don’t even bother to determine if there is any history of past racism to which they can possibly be referring. Indeed, they instinctively refer to any racial imbalance as “segregation”, but in so doing they lose the meaning of the word. Even the supposedly intelligent liberals on the Supreme Court can’t understand this basic distinction. Justice Thomas, in his concurrence, sets them straight.

Disfavoring a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution, the dissent would give school boards a free hand to make decisions on the basis of race—, an approach reminiscent of that advocated by the segregationists in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U. S 483 (1954). This approach is just as wrong today as it was a half-century ago. The Constitution and our cases require us to be much more demanding before permitting local school boards to make decisions based on race.

. . .The dissent repeatedly claims that the school districts are threatened with resegregation and that they will succumb to that threat if these plans are declared unconstitutional. It also argues that these plans can be justified as part of the school boards’ attempts to “eradicate earlier school segregation.” . . Contrary to the dissent’s rhetoric, neither of these school districts is threatened with resegregation, and neither is constitutionally compelled or permitted to undertake race-based remediation. Racial imbalance is not segregation, and the mere incantation of terms like resegregation and remediation cannot make up the difference.

Because this Court has authorized and required race-based remedial measures to address de jure segregation, it
is important to define segregation clearly and to distinguish it from racial imbalance. In the context of public
schooling, segregation is the deliberate operation of a school system to “carry out a governmental policy to separate
pupils in schools solely on the basis of race.” . . In Brown, this Court declared that segregation was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Racial imbalance is the failure of a school district’s individual schools to match or approximate the demographic makeup of the student population at large. . . Racial imbalance is not segregation. Although presently observed racial imbalance might result from past de jure segregation, racial imbalance can also result from any number of innocent private decisions, including voluntary housing choices. Because racial imbalance is not inevitably linked to unconstitutional segregation, it is not unconstitutional in and of itself.

The use of racial imbalance by liberals to justify their social engineering programs is no longer acceptable. It is time they accept that observing such an imbalance does not constitute evidence of racism.

The Supreme Court has today delivered a blow against the McCain-Fiengold assault on free speech. Not surprisingly, media is in full spin mode and proving incapable of uttering the words “free speech” in their reporting. Rather, the New York Times chooses to portray today’s court decision as “open[ing] a significant loophole” in campaign finance law. Talk about assuming the conclusion (otherwise known as BIAS).

Following yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling upholding a federal ban on partial birth abortion, many have weighed in on the decision. John McCain called the ruling a “victory for those who cherish the sanctity of life”. Mitt Romney said it “affirmed the value of life in America”. John Edwards dramatically moaned about “an ill-considered and sweeping prohibition,” while Barack Obama found that it “signals an alarming willingness on the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings”.

Every one of them missed the most fundamental point. While anti-abortion advocates no doubt consider this a victory, the bigger victory is for representative democracy. This ruling took an issue once decided by the public that was later usurped by an oligarchy and returned it to the realm of the people. If Democrats don’t like the law, they can repeal it through the legislative process. Why does this freedom scare them so?

Supreme Court precedent is not etched in stone, nor should it be. After all, decisions can be, and often are, based on faulty reasoning. It is the duty of the Supreme Court to apply the Constitution; that includes reconsidering prior rulings that are not constitutionally sound. The idea that Roe v. Wade must exist for all time simply because it is in force now is not a sound argument. Some court decisions have no constitutional basis and should be overturned. Dred Scott was one such decision. Roe v. Wade is another. This ruling should be applauded first and foremost for its affirmation of the peoples right to decide the laws of the land through elected representation.

Perhaps there is hope after all that basic freedoms of expression will be returned to the people.

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to revisit the landmark 2002 legislation overhauling the nation’s campaign finance laws, moving to settle the role of campaign spending by corporations, unions and special interest groups in time for the 2008 presidential primaries.

It would be the first time the court has reviewed the McCain-Feingold law of 2002 since justices ruled 5 to 4 three years ago that the act was constitutional. Since then, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was in the majority, has been replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.

At issue in the case is the question of whether so-called issue advocacy ads paid for by the general funds of special interest groups and broadcast in the period before a federal election may mention specific candidates. A three-judge panel in Washington last month overturned that prohibition, which is one of the key provisions of the law known formally as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act.

“The stakes are enormous,” said Michael E. Toner, a Federal Election Commission member who served on President Bush’s campaign in 2000. “We’re watching this case very closely.”

The entire law should be thrown out as unconstitutional. The question of whether or not an ad attempts to “influence” elections should be irrelevent, though that’s exactly the question the courts are addressing. In practice, expression of all opinions “influences” elections for the simple fact that votes are cast based on opinions, and though opinions are formed based on a great many factors, one of those certainly is the expression of free ideas made by fellow citizens.

You cannot make a logical differentiation between campaigning and freedom of expression; the two are inseverably linked. Rather, if the Constitution is to have any meaning, they should be so linked.

. . .Richard L. Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said the Supreme Court challenge is “going to be a prime opportunity for opponents of campaign regulations to make some headway in watering down the standards.”

. . .What could make the outcome different this time, he said, is “simply the replacement of Justice O’Connor with Justice Alito.”

Here’s hoping.

Hat tip: Club for Growth

From Abovethelaw.com:

“I see myself as a conservative, to tell you the truth.”

The quote itself is not what’s funny; it’s who said it. Any guesses?

Bet you didn’t guess Justice John Paul Stevens. One can’t help but wonder exactly what it is he thinks he is conserving.

OpinionJournal takes a look at how Alito and Roberts might rule on McCain-Feingold.

A federal court decision last week upheld the right of citizens to petition their government–a right taken for granted before the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law codified speech restrictions. The ruling is overly narrow but welcome all the same. And if it’s appealed, as expected, the Supreme Court will have another chance to weigh in on Congress’s efforts to chip away at First Amendment free-speech guarantees in the name of “reform.”

. . .

Check it out here.