The bridge is yours.
-There is no place that Star Wars can’t penetrate, even Pintrest.
-Why is it so hard to get people to adopt new musical intstruments?
-Go inside John Waters’ house in Baltimore.
-NBC: still not taking my suggestions.
-I would totally watch a show where Justice Sonia Sotomayor solves fairy-tale disputes. Someone call the USA Network!
NEWS FLASH
Justice Sotomayor Appears on Sesame Street | Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently appeared on Sesame Street, where she decided the trespassing dispute of Baby Bear v. Goldilocks:
Sotomayor’s decision, which was reasonably lenient towards Goldilocks, will no doubt spur conservative legal activists into a frenzy about her activist decision that proves Sotomayor’s total disregard for property rights.
Politics
During a meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board on Friday, Rick Perry asserted there were eight justices on the Supreme Court and mispronounced Sonia Sotomayor’s name.
Perry defended his error on Fox News this morning, telling host Chris Wallace that he hasn’t “memorized” the names of all nine Supreme Court justices. He went on to claim that voters “are not looking for a robot that can spit out the name of every Supreme Court justice, someone that is going to be perfect in every way.” Watch the segment:
Perry also admitted that he misspoke about the number of justices, despite his campaign’s insistence yesterday that the use of eight was intentional. As the Des Moines Register reported, the campaign claimed that Perry was referencing “a 1962 case in known as Abington School District v. Schempp where the court ruled that school-sponsored Bible reading is unconstitutional. The vote was eight to one.”
NEWS FLASH
Oops: Perry Forgets Justice Sotomayor’s Name | Echoing his devastating “oops” moment in an earlier GOP debate, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) forgot the name of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in an interview today with the Des Moines Register editorial board. He had to be assisted by a reporter who offered the jurist’s name. Watch it:
Later, Perry attacked the “eight un-elected” judges on the Supreme Court. The court has nine justices. Watch it:
NEWS FLASH
Sotomayor Out, Palin In | Forbes magazine just released it’s annual review of the “World’s Most Powerful Women,” along with an apologia for why they kicked Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan off the list. Among the people deemed more powerful than a Supreme Court justice are former half-term governor Sarah Palin, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren, and Lady GaGa.
Ian’s annoyed that the women on the Supreme Court have been tossed off the Forbes influence list in favor of the likes of Sarah Palin, Gisele Bündchen, Greta Van Susteren, and Lady GaGa. I think there’s some justification to his annoyance: Bündchen and Van Susteren do have influence, but it’s not necessarily substantive or lasting and it’s limited to a couple of realms. Palin has influence in that she’s able to drive news cycles, but there’s no evidence that she will get votes, can influence the passage or failure of legislation, or that she is herself terribly convincing (all the television shows and media projects she’s been involved with have dramatically underperformed). Compared to these three women, the influence of the women on the Supreme Court is less immediately visible — we don’t, after all, see the conversations the justices have in chambers—but it’s certainly more important.
But I’m prepared to defend the idea that Lady Gaga may be more influential than a Supreme Court justice. She’s a major commercial and artistic force who has also managed to turn her fans into a political base when she wants to, and her influence is international as well as domestic. I tend to think the influence of celebrities is generally overstated, but in this case, I think Gaga isn’t a ridiculous choice.
Welcome to Justiceline, ThinkProgress Justice’s morning round-up of the latest legal news and developments. Remember to follow us on Twitter at @TPJustice.
Politics
One California inmate dies every eight days from inadequate medical care. In one case, a prisoner who experienced “recurrent severe abdominal pain and vomiting over a five week period” received no treatment until they eventually died. Moreover, lawsuits stretch back twenty years seeking to remedy these unconstitutional conditions — until a federal court finally ordered the state to reduce its prison population. That order is now before the Supreme Court.
Against this backdrop, Justice Sonia Sotomayor confronted California’s attorney with some of the more horrific stories from California’s unconstitutional prison system, and received a mocking response from fellow Justice Antonin Scalia:
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Well, the best interest of the State of California, isn’t it to deliver adequate constitutional care to the people that it incarcerates? That’s a constitutional obligation.
MR. PHILLIPS: Absolutely. And California recognizes that.
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: So when are you going to get to that? When are you going to avoid the needless deaths that were reported in this record? When are you going to avoid or get around people sitting in their feces for days in a dazed state? When are you going to get to a point where you are going to deliver care that is going to be adequate?
JUSTICE SCALIA: Don’t be rhetorical.
Listen:
While Scalia’s remark was ostensibly directed at California’s attorney, it was clearly intended to slight Sotomayor. Earlier in the proceeding, Sotomayor had warned the attorney to “slow down from the rhetoric” when he repeatedly characterized the lower court’s action as “extraordinary.” So Scalia is suggesting that Sotomayor also crossed an inappropriate rhetorical line when she expressed concern for human beings left helpless in a pile of their own excrement.
One of the most disgusting displays of the last two years has been right-wing lawmakers demanding that all judges must purge themselves of the capacity to identify with and understand another’s situation. It is nothing less than terrifying that a member of the Supreme Court appears to meet their standard.
Politics
In an interview touting his plan to repeal the minimum wage, West Virginia GOP Senate candidate John Raese also slipped up by calling the man he wants to replace, Senator Carte Goodwin, by the wrong first name. And, as the Charleston Daily Mail reports, this does not appear to be an isolated incident:
Last month, he struggled over U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s name.
“Was it Sarah Manor, Sarah Manorgan, Sarah Morgan?” he was quoted as saying by a monthly publication based in Shepherdstown.
In an appearance several weeks ago in St. Mary’s, Raese called U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu by at least two different Asian-sounding last names.
Raese’s failure to remember a name that even vaguely resembles that of a recently confirmed Supreme Court justice calls into question whether Raese has paid attention to the kind of issues he would face as a senator. If he joins the Senate, Raese will be required to at least take the confirmation process seriously enough that he can tell the difference between “Sonia Sotomayor” and “Sarah Manorgan.”
The Roberts Court has pursued an almost single-mindedly pro-corporate agenda, immunizing powerful corporate interest groups from campaign finance law, from laws intended to protect the environment, and from laws intended to protect women and older Americans in the workplace. Unfortunately, however, a recent Gallup poll suggests that these actions are going largely unnoticed by Americans at large. According to the poll, an individual’s opinion of just one justice — Justice Sonia Sotomayor — appears to drive their opinion of the Court at large far more than the Court’s actual decisions.
Justice Sotomayor joined the Court in August of 2009, and Gallup’s data shows a dramatic shift in public approval of the Court among both Democratic and Republican voters at the time of her confirmation:
Apparently, Democrats love Justice Sotomayor, as their approval of the entire Court nearly doubled after she joined it. Likewise, Republicans must loathe Sotomayor, since their approval of the very conservative Court declined 16 points the minute Sotomayor became a justice.
Both of these shifts bear little resemblance to the actual impact of Sotomayor’s confirmation. Justice Sotomayor is a center-left moderate who replaced another center-left moderate, Justice David Souter. And while there are some early indications that Sotomayor may be slightly to Souter’s left on corporate immunity cases and slightly to Souter’s right on executive power, it is diffcult to identify a single case that would have come out differently if Souter were still on the Court.
The “Sotomayor Effect” may also explain why an increasing percentage of Americans perceive the Court as “too liberal” even as the Court marches further and further to the right:
Once again, the data shows an increasing belief that the Court is liberal at the same time that Sotomayor joined its ranks, and a decrease in the number of people who perceive the Court as conservative. Likewise, the data shows a spike in the number of people who perceived the Court as “too conservative” at about the same time that conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito joined the Court. In other words, many Americans appear to base their opinion of the overall Court largely on the political views of the last high-profile nominee to be confirmed (Justice Kagan appears to have had a minimal impact on public perceptions of the Court, but most of the nation was distracted from her confirmation by the Gulf oil disaster and other higher profile stories).
Most importantly, this data demonstates the challenges facing progressives trying to educate the public about the harm the Roberts Court has done to American law. Hopefully, however, the public’s almost universally negative reaction to the Court’s most high profile corporate immunity case will begin to bleed through to public perceptions of the Court as a whole.
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